The United States is turning 250. As I write this, sprawled out in a shallow inflatable pool in my yard, a gull-winged WWII-era Corsair has just thundered low over the trees. The rumble of warbirds has been rolling across the sky all day. It stirs a feeling deep inside me, not of sentiment but of a potent mix of dopamine and adrenaline and gunpowder. A feeling of danger and excitement verging on psychosis. My head is swimming from the heat, and I feel like I am going insane. I love it. 

The chattering classes have spent the last year writing the obituary of our celebration in advance: the commemoration is muted, or hijacked, or politicized, or underfunded, or all four at once. People just aren’t patriotic anymore. “It’s April already, so why does it feel like we aren’t celebrating the Fourth of July?” There are just too many unwelcome squatters to believe in the country anymore. Congress chartered an America 250 commission a decade ago, staffed with the sort of people you would expect to bump into at a Biden-Harris fundraiser, and with predictable results. The White House stood up a rival task force to rescue the celebration, and while it took a bit to get into high gear, boy did it ever. And then the complaint became “they put a UFC cage on the South Lawn. Surely a serious country would manage something more dignified for its semiquincentennial” 

I keep trying to picture the celebration these people wanted, and all I can see is a bloodless procession of the inoffensive and unremarkable. Something sober (unlike the Founders). The progressives would get their version: the founding tied up in context and asterisks, every Founder overshadowed by the enslaved persons of his estate, the Declaration prefaced with a land acknowledgment, celebration permitted only after the reason for celebration has been rendered sufficiently joyless. And the conservatives would get theirs, the Founding not cremated but embalmed all the same, the Founders rendered as unsmiling marble saints, stripped of their whiskey breath and fire. That is the safe and polite way. The way you celebrate a nation that is already dead.

The progressive version, at least, is not hypothetical. On the eve of the anniversary, the mayor of New York went before the cameras, visibly seething, to press the founding into the third-worldist catechism: 1776 as an anti-colonial rebellion, the opening act of a liberation struggle running from Lexington to Rafah. Which is absurd on its face. The men of 1776 were not anti-colonialists; they were colonists, and proud of it, and their cause began as the most conservative one imaginable: the restoration of their rights as Englishmen, not under the British constitution of their time, but of the one before that. It would be as if Puerto Rico rose up today to demand its rights under the Articles of Confederation.

But it was not a legal grievance that sent our founders against the greatest empire on earth. And the British yoke was light as a feather anyway. Britain spent far more on subsidizing the colonies than they received in tax revenue. The founders rebelled because they were wonderfully spirited men, a war-loving breed of Normans and Scotsmen and other great lineages of horsemen descended from the ancient steppe warriors who swept into Europe in the Yamnaya expansion. These were men who had crossed an ocean and cleared a wilderness. Freed from the crowded pens of Europe, they blossomed into something spectacular and ultimately ungovernable. 

A national celebration is not a history lecture or a civics lesson. A great celebration is one in which the planning and execution of the anniversary is itself a beautiful, terrifying microcosm of the national character. And a true festival has never been about sober reflection. From the Roman Saturnalia to the roaring carnivals of the old frontier, a festival functions as primal release. A necessary, Dionysian rupture, a time to slaughter the fatted calf, drain the kegs, set fire to the night sky, and let the sheer, raw energy of being a people descended from the wildest of the wild blow the roof off the civilized world. The calendar keeps days of sober reflection; that is what Memorial Day is for. The Fourth was assigned the gunpowder from the start. John Adams, writing to Abigail in July 1776, prescribed the whole summer program in a single breath: solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty, and then pomp and parade, shows and games, guns, bells, and bonfires, “from one end of this continent to the other,” which is roughly the spirit in which this magazine spent last night with the DC Young Republicans and the Delphica Society, doing our small part for the national disorder. The devotion and the gunfire were both in the original instructions. Our modern critics would have us secularize the solemnity and lose the nerve. 

And Adams got one more thing right: he assumed the celebration would be everywhere and owned by no central planning committee, because he understood the country doing the celebrating. 

U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and U.S. Navy Blue Angels aircraft fly over Washington, D.C., June 14, 2026. (Courtesy of UFC)

Consider Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial International Exposition of 1926. There were pavilions and a big fairground and a big illuminated Liberty Bell spanning a whole street. It rained for weeks, attendance collapsed, the exposition went deep into debt, and the whole thing vanished so fully from national memory that most Americans have never heard of America’s 150th birthday. The big landmark from that summer happened almost by accident, when 120,000 people jammed the stadium to watch Gene Tunney take the heavyweight title off Jack Dempsey in the rain. The official pageant was a bust, but the prizefight lived. And a century later it happened on the White House lawn. 

Or consider 1976, the year everyone now holds up as the standard. The Bicentennial’s own central commission collapsed and was dissolved amid accusations of politicization and drift. It was replaced by an agency that gave up on running a top-down program. It licensed and encouraged celebration and got out of the way. What followed was an eruption of Americans doing what they do best: taking matters into their own hands. New York City’s municipal government brought the iconic tall ships into New York harbor. Pennsylvania established a commission, and wagon trains rolled backward across the country, retracing the westward migration until reaching Valley Forge. Someone got the bright idea to paint a fire hydrant like a minuteman. Before long, in towns all across the country, the fire hydrants all started turning into minutemen.  

This year, by a stroke of providence that the commission could not have engineered, the whole world got invited to our party. The World Cup has spent a month scattering forty-eight national teams into unexpected corners of America. The reigning European champions, Spain, set up camp in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it became a love story. The Scots reminded Boston of what Boston is at its best. Norwegians and Germans getting to shoot guns and drive pickup trucks. Argentinians welcomed by Texas pitmasters to see how we do Asado. The world came for football and found the best of our country who received them with open arms. It has been a reminder of what is best about our country and people.

On the National Mall, the Great American State Fair has produced a scene for the ages: a rodeo in sight of the Washington Monument, a baptism tank doing steady business a few hundred yards from the FIFA fan zone, which went electric the other night when the USMNT put away Bosnia. It is, to use the technical term, a chud-out. The sacred and sentimental superpositioned against the vulgar and commercial, which is to say, exactly American. 

The critics observe the absence of a single coherent spectacle and see decline. But disorder is our doctrine. There is an old Soviet lament, probably apocryphal but true anyway, that planning against the Americans is hopeless because the Americans do not read their own manuals and feel no obligation to follow their own doctrine. A German officer is supposed to have put it more admiringly: the American Army does so well in wartime because war is chaos, and the Americans practice it daily. The American version of the joke is the best one: if we don’t know what we’re doing, the enemy can’t anticipate it. The single coherent mass spectacle is an alien form to us. We are thankfully not China. Ours is the opposite condition. American celebration, like American life, is organized from below.

Even our founding document, which we are celebrating the signing of, was improvised. Jefferson drafted it in about two weeks in a rented room; it was then carved up by committee in the Continental Congress (they cut a quarter of it) and rushed out the door to meet events already in motion. The most consequential political document in human history was a deadline job, and it has endured. 

Ezra Pound called America an insane asylum. He was right. Better an insane asylum than a morgue. The madhouse lives. Happy Birthday, America. Here’s to the next 250.

Ben Braddock is the Editor-in-Chief at IM—1776. He can be followed @GraduatedBen.