commentary
The country is fractured. Can we really celebrate its birthday?
Published
January 3, 2026 6:45AM (EST)
(Getty Images)
Ceremonies honoring next Fourth of July’s Semiquincentennial are already gearing up. Earlier this month, a traveling Stars and Stripes banner — the U.S. “Flag Sojourn 250” — was raised over Mississippi, having already covered 40,000 miles of its ongoing international tour of cemeteries, landmarks, governor’s mansions and courthouses. “For nearly 250 years,” Mississippi’s First Lady Elee Reeves announced, “the American flag has been a source of comfort in times of grief, unity in times of uncertainty, and pride during moments of great national joy.”
Wronger things have been uttered with less self-awareness. In fact, the American flag was not taken all that seriously as a national symbol until 1814. Congress didn’t even bother settling on its modern template until four years later. Until then, all kinds of designs were patched together from silk, linen, wool or “anything at hand.” During and after the Civil War, of course, the ensign was as much a symbol of tyranny to many Southerners as it was a source of unity. Sympathizers from Mississippi to Kentucky burned the flag, tore it down, ripped it and spit on it.
America’s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country’s mood.
Conceits aren’t facts: “Heritage is not history,” to borrow the scholar David Lowenthal’s distinction, but instead “what people make of their history to make themselves feel good.” America’s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country’s mood.
Republican and Democratic patriotism are worlds apart. The sense of pride that once bound the right and left is so threadbare that pundits have openly despaired of America’s “identity crisis” and called for a fresh national story to “rally people to a new trajectory.”
The pleas argue, in effect, for negotiating a new heritage. We shouldn’t.
There is no “single unifying narrative linking past and present in America” that can serve an inclusive, patriotic identity. The country’s fragile birth in 1776 was as contested as its 100th birthday. The conciliatory narrative that emerged from 1876 painted veterans, North and South, as noble, valorous brothers. The “emancipationist vision of Civil War memory” faded, as Yale University historian David Blight detailed in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” and “romance triumphed over reality.” Reconstruction ended, the Lost Cause myth thrived and Americans curbed civil rights for Black Americans, people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups for some 90 years.
The 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, which followed “a decade of racial tensions, assassinations, scandal, rising inflation, embattled campuses and eroding public trust,” also privileged heritage over history. Federal event planners were clueless enough to ask Native Americans to commemorate what was for many a day of mourning.