I was playing cards with a group of Black men who all had served 20 or more years in the military. I asked, “What does America’s 250th Anniversary mean to you?” Their answers could be summed up as, “Not a damn thing.”
It wasn’t always the case that America’s anniversary was so lightly regarded, if not regarded negatively. I think back to 1976 when America celebrated its 200th Anniversary, the Bicentennial, and patriotism ran high. Flags and red, white, and blue decorations were everywhere. Some entrepreneurs went so far as to paint rocks in those colors and sell them as “Bicentennial Rocks,” sometimes attaching a small flag to make them more official.
The Bicentennial arrived just one year after the Fall of Saigon and in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, when the country was hungry for a sense of renewal. Historian David Ryan notes that the Ford administration framed the Bicentennial as a moment of “renewal and rebirth” rooted in traditional American values. This framing worked. Patriotism became a kind of national therapy.
The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration reported that over 90% of Americans participated in at least one Bicentennial event or activity. This included parades, festivals, historical reenactments, museum openings, and local heritage projects. That level of participation is unmatched by any other civic celebration in modern U.S. history. Americans in 2026 are more likely to have participated in No Kings rallies, Anti-ICE protests, or protests about not releasing the Epstein files than participating in a 250th anniversary event. Americans generally loved America in 1976. In 2026, half the nation believes the other half are enemies of the state.
I decided to write about the times over the last 250 years we almost lost our Republic. Benjamin Franklin was right to be concerned as to whether we could maintain it. When asked while leaving the 1776 Constitutional Convention whether America had a Republic or a Monarchy, he replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
America has faced the loss of its republic more than once, sometimes from foreign enemies, sometimes from internal conspirators, and sometimes from its own elected leaders. The first great rupture came in 1806, when former Vice President Aaron Burr raised a private army in the West and attempted to carve out an independent nation from U.S. territory. Whether Burr intended to seize New Orleans, detach western states, or invade Mexico, the effect was the same: a sitting vice president assembled troops to break the Union. President Jefferson treated it as an existential threat, ordering Burr arrested for treason. The republic survived, but only because the conspiracy collapsed before Burr could act.
Just a few years later, the United States nearly lost itself again in the War of 1812, when British forces burned Washington, D.C., and the government fled the capital. The young republic was militarily weak, politically divided, and economically fragile. New England states openly discussed secession at the Hartford Convention, arguing that the war was illegitimate and ruinous. Had the British held the Chesapeake or severed New England from the Union, the United States might have fractured permanently. Victory at New Orleans and a negotiated peace saved the republic, but the war exposed how close the nation was to dissolution.
The greatest internal collapse came in 1861, when eleven Southern states seceded and formed a rival government. This was not a political dispute but the destruction of the constitutional order itself. The Confederacy raised armies, seized federal property, and waged a four‑year war to replace the republic with a slaveholding empire. The Civil War was the moment the United States truly ceased to function as a single nation. Only through unimaginable bloodshed was the Union restored — and even then, the republic was lost again during Reconstruction’s overthrow, when white supremacist militias and complicit state governments violently dismantled multiracial democracy between 1873 and 1877. The federal government literally looked away for almost a century as Jim Crow infected first the South, later the rest of America.
Foreign threats returned in the 20th century, when the United States entered World War I under the shadow of global autocracy. The German Empire’s unrestricted submarine warfare and sabotage campaigns on U.S. soil pushed America into a conflict that threatened democratic governments worldwide. At home, the Espionage and Sedition Acts criminalized dissent, and mass surveillance targeted immigrants, labor organizers, and political radicals. The republic survived, but civil liberties did not.
The danger was even greater in World War II, when fascism conquered most of Europe and the Pacific. Had the Axis powers succeeded, the United States would have faced a world dominated by totalitarian empires with the resources and ideology to challenge American democracy directly. The attack on Pearl Harbor demonstrated how vulnerable the nation was, and the fall of the Philippines showed how quickly American territory could be seized. Victory was not guaranteed; defeat would have meant the end of the republic as a free, self‑governing nation.
Across these episodes — Burr’s private army, the burning of Washington, the secession crisis, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the global wars against autocracy — the United States repeatedly approached the edge of losing its republic. Each moment revealed the same truth: the greatest threats come not only from foreign enemies but from internal fractures, political extremism, and leaders willing to place personal ambition above constitutional order. The republic has survived, but never without cost, and never without reminding Americans how fragile it truly is.
America has reached another critical point in history, where the Republic could be at risk. Can anyone say for sure what will happen after the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential elections? Will the results be contested? Will the military be ordered into the streets?
There has always been a hopefulness about America that things will somehow work out, the moral arc bends toward justice, and that our elected officials generally have the interests of the people at the forefront of their minds. That wasn’t the sense of the men at my card table today. I think a large percentage of Americans aren’t sure either.
America has been close to losing its republic before, but rarely has the danger come from so many directions at once. The threats today are not as dramatic as British troops burning the capital or fascist armies overrunning continents, but they are quieter, more procedural, and in some ways more corrosive. A republic can be lost not only through invasion or secession, but through the steady normalization of exceptions, when agencies stop enforcing the law, when courts narrow the meaning of rights, when elected officials treat whole communities as expendable, and when the machinery of government bends toward the interests of the powerful rather than the protection of the people.
That is the moment we are living in now. The danger is not a single cataclysm but a slow unthreading, a willingness to accept that some Americans can breathe polluted air, lose their vote, or live without equal protection because it is politically convenient to look away.
If the United States hopes to reach the Tricentennial as a functioning republic, it will require more than nostalgia or ceremonial patriotism. It will require a recommitment to the basic work of self‑government: enforcing laws evenly, protecting vulnerable communities, strengthening democratic institutions, and refusing to let fear or partisanship justify the erosion of rights. It will require citizens who insist on accountability, public servants who remember their oath, and leaders who understand that power is not a trophy but a trust. The republic has survived conspiracies, invasions, civil war, and global conflict — but only because enough people chose to defend it when it mattered. That choice is before us again. The Tricentennial is not guaranteed; it must be earned, protected, and kept.