Humans measure the results of our lives according to the calendar, in decades. Each one has their own, with expectations met or unmet at 30, 40, or 60 years old. States measure them in centuries. What is the evaluation and what is the destiny of the United States on the 250th anniversary of its independence?
Read more Do we need presidents?
By a special peculiarity, the American experiment has celebrated its anniversaries at symbolic moments. The first fifty years, which were completed in 1826, corresponded to the end of the generation of the founding fathers. In that year, James Monroe, the last of the “founding father” presidents, had just left power, and in 1829, the first “people’s president,” Andrew Jackson, would arrive, inaugurating popular politics. On July 4, 1826, movingly, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died. Adams’ final words, dying at 90, were: “Thomas Jefferson survives,” unaware that he had already died at midday.
The first century was in 1876. This year was so significant that the novelist Gore Vidal titled his third volume of his series Narratives of Empire, 1876, about key moments in his country’s history from independence to the end of the 20th century. In this year, the U.S. abandoned the attempt to repair the black population for the scourges of slavery (the so-called “Reconstruction” established by Lincoln), initiating the period of Jim Crow racial laws, and Republican candidate Hayes triumphed by a single vote in the Electoral College against Democrat Tilden (there has never been a closer result), inaugurating the “Gilded Age” (Mark Twain’s Gilded Age) of rampant capitalism and announcing the extracontinental imperialism of McKinley and Roosevelt.
The 150 years of 1926 perhaps had the lowest-profile celebration, marked by the Philadelphia Fair and the presence of President Coolidge, a swan song of the Laissez Faire inherited from the 19th century and a prelude to the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The splendid fireworks of the 1976 Bicentennial, which I had the pleasure of witnessing from a Washington terrace that July 4th, illuminated another hinge of history. The country had just emerged from the failed Vietnam War and the scandalous resignation of President Nixon and was again seeking its moral center. That role fell to Jimmy Carter, elected president that year, although the future would belong to his successor Ronald Reagan and his followers. Although it didn’t seem so in 1976, the best days of the United States were yet to come, with less than 15 years remaining until the defeat of Soviet communism, with which it had been competing for over 30 years.
The 2026 celebration, the semiquincentennial of the United States’ Independence, coincides with already evident changes. President Trump and the nationalist and sometimes xenophobic orientation of that country’s politics was not an accident of the 2017-2021 period, but a new reality. The abandonment of the institutional framework created by that country in the post-World War II era to avoid a new global conflict seems irreversible. Unilateralism and raison d’état, sometimes contaminated with personal interests, are the new measure of good and bad. How will Americans, and the world, view this new era when the tricentennial is celebrated in 2076? It is worth recalling other anniversaries that may illustrate the future.
Read more AI proves a veteran Marxist right
In April 248 AD, the Romans celebrated the tenth centennial games and the first millennium of their mythical founding by Romulus, in the midst of the worst crisis in their history, barely emerging from the Antonine Plague and entering the Plague of Cyprian, amidst barbarian invasions, civil wars, and barracks emperors. These were indeed the last centennial games celebrated in Rome, but the empire, led by great emperors such as Claudius II, Aurelian, and Diocletian, recovered, to survive in Rome for more than 200 years and in the East to exceed another additional millennium. For this, it was necessary to change finances, the army, the capital of the empire, and eventually religion and language. These were harrowing changes, one of whose consequences is us, as a province of an empire that in turn was the trace of that, the greatest of all.
Starting in February 1913, the Russians celebrated 300 years of the establishment of the Romanov dynasty. The crises of 1905 and the bad omens of Nicholas II’s coronation then seemed overcome. Apparently, the entire great empire was crowned with flags and flowers, and all throats overflowed with “God Save the Tsar.” Just over 5 years later, the tsar and his entire immediate family were assassinated by the Bolsheviks, who, after winning a bloody civil war, would establish a fierce dictatorship that would last almost 75 years. In this case, the anniversary celebration disguised the fractures and wounds that marked the social body, but the tribulations of the war that was to come opened them until it bled dry. However, the end of the three-century-old dynasty did not end the empire, but revitalized it as a power with global aspirations.
In October 1989, the leadership of the German Democratic Republic celebrated 40 years of its founding amidst the rubble of the hot war and the dawn of the Cold War. A gerontocracy disconnected from reality pretended it could continue to exist without the support of Soviet tanks. Abandoned to their fate by Premier Gorbachev, Honecker and his associates saw the Berlin Wall fall just over a month later.
It seems clear that the United States is not the country we knew during the Cold War or in the brief and fleeting dawn after the collapse of the Wall. The country is different, and the world is different. But, as it celebrates its 250 years, what awaits it? A laborious regeneration? A regime change? A collapse? Or something entirely different?
Read more The lost hours to solve the crime of Edith Guadalupe