The Fourth of July We Didn't Get

The most damning thing about America 250 is not what happened. It is what didn’t.

For ten years, a bipartisan committee chartered and funded by Congress planned the nation’s 250th birthday. It was supposed to belong to all of us.

Then the current administration sidestepped the whole project, stood up the White House’s “Freedom 250” initiative in its place, and turned a national milestone into a partisan rally.

Musical artists withdrew. States refused to staff their booths. The crowds never came.

What was left was a fenced-off Mall, a warping vinyl arch, and a reflecting pool drained and lined in cheap plastic until the algae bloomed.

That pool is the whole story in miniature.

Take something authentic and functioning, spray a veneer over it, watch it warp in the heat, then blame someone else when it fails.

It is a Home Depot (or maybe Hobby Lobby as a listener suggested) version of the Gilded Age: plenty of people getting rich, plenty of people getting hurt, and a tawdriness underneath it all.

The tragedy is that any barely competent leader could have thrown a party that drew this country together.

The bar was that low, and it was still missed. We only get one 250th. And this administration squandered the once-in-a-generation anniversary for unity that we will never get to relive.

So what do we do with a country that keeps breaking our hearts?

We do not cede it. We demand the nation live up to its ideals.

Come with your despair. Stay for the truth. Grow in community.

Catch the full episode, including a lengthy stretch where the four of us take your questions live from the Q&A box, on the Convocation Unscripted.

• Why America 250 landed as a partisan Trump event instead of a national celebration: the sidestepped bipartisan committee, the withdrawn artists, and the empty booths on the Mall.

• The real tragedy of the 250th: not what happened, but the once-in-a-generation chance for unity that was missed and will not come again.

• Gerald Ford in 1976 versus Trump in 2026: two Republican presidents, two opposing theologies of history, and the ongoing whitewashing of America’s story.

• The green, plastic-lined reflecting pool as a metaphor for the administration: authentic things cheapened, then blame deflected onto someone else.

• Reclaiming the flag: why Dr. Tisby argues progressives shouldn’t cede it to the far right, and what Black patriotism has always understood about contested symbols.

• Diana Butler Bass on “second naïveté”: how you can hold clear-eyed grief and stubborn love for your country at the same time.

• Fresh PRRI data on American pride, democratic malaise, and the two-thirds consensus for a pluralistic, good-neighbor nation the party in power refuses to celebrate.

• Masks off: the birthright-citizenship backlash, the attacks on Amy Coney Barrett’s family, and what a fully realized white Christian nationalist vision actually intends.

If this gave you language for what you have been feeling, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it this weekend; someone you love may need a truer way to spend the Fourth of July.

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