Philip Gulley was 15 when the United States turned 200. His parents threw a big block party at their home in central Indiana, and Republican and Democratic neighbors alike celebrated the occasion.

Everyone seemed exuberant, he remembers, with the festivities lasting well into the night. Now, as the US turns 250, Gulley, a 65-year-old Quaker pastor and writer, no longer wants to party.

He’s so disillusioned by the nation’s current state of affairs that he won’t even participate in his usual July 4 family tradition of watching fireworks at the local school. When asked what he plans to do for the semiquincentennial, his reply is terse: “Nothing.” A majority of Americans seem to share Gulley’s discontent.

National pride and satisfaction with the country’s direction have been on the decline for decades, and the mood heading into the 250th anniversary is particularly grim. Nearly 70% of Americans say that they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the US, while about 60% say that the country’s best years are behind it, according to the Pew Research Center.

Gallup polling shows that only about half of the nation’s inhabitants say they are “extremely proud” or “very proud” to be an American, a 25-year record low. And another survey from the firm finds that more than three in four Americans say that the Founding Fathers would be disappointed in how the country has turned out.

President Donald Trump, who has taken over 250th anniversary commemorations in DC, is historically unpopular, after dragging the US into a war that sent gas prices soaring and further exacerbated a stubborn cost-of-living crisis. Americans everywhere are feeling the squeeze: No state is improving on measures such as income inequality, long-term unemployment and hourly earnings growth, according to The State of the Nation project’s latest report.

If the “American Dream” isn’t quite dead, it certainly isn’t thriving. This is the backdrop against which America is celebrating 250 years of existence.

And where the bicentennial in 1976 was an all-encompassing national spectacle that commanded attention through months of buildup, the events around July 4, 2026, have been fragmented and comparatively low-energy. By the looks of it, the nation’s big birthday party is shaping up to be a big blah.

Rival party planners It didn’t start this way. Preparations for the semiquincentennial began a decade ago, when Congress created a bipartisan commission to oversee the milestone celebration.

The commission, dubbed America 250, was charged with developing nationwide programming around the anniversary, coordinating with cities and states on their own commemorations, and improving infrastructure. The preparations went on for eight years without much fanfare, with a student essay contest, a national oral history project, and a traveling tech expo among the celebratory initiatives.

Then Trump, who had shared his desire on the campaign trail to see a grandiose 250th celebration, was re-elected. Within his first few weeks in office, the president signed an executive order for his administration to take the lead on planning the celebrations in Washington.

Initially, it seemed that Trump and the America 250 commission would work together. But tensions over competing visions, personnel and congressional funding eventually resulted in Trump creating a new organization, Freedom 250, which has since upended long-anticipated plans in the nation’s capital and redirected funding meant for the bipartisan America 250 to its own operations.

The result has been a confusing slate of dueling 250th anniversary celebrations, with the distinctions between America 250 and Freedom 250 unclear to those not following the ins and outs of the dispute. And by putting his personal stamp on one portion of the festivities, Trump has conveyed that the focus is on something smaller than the nation. “How I feel right now is that this is a celebration for a political party,” says Edie, a 66-year-old woman in Las Vegas who asked to go by only her first name. “And if you’re not a member, it’s not that you’re not invited, you don’t want to go to the party.” To Gulley, the 250th anniversary celebrations emphasize current divisions rather than evoking shared history. “I wouldn’t want to invite a bunch of MAGA people to celebrate the Fourth with me.

I think our attitudes about the country right now would be radically different,” he says. “And I’m not in the mood for insincere gestures that don’t take into account what our nation has become under the leadership of Donald Trump.” The Freedom 250 banner has been used to organize a UFC fight night on the White House lawn and a traveling exhibition of “Freedom Trucks” that presents a sanitized version of US history. The initiative is also behind the Great American State Fair, which saw artists including the Commodores, Martina McBride and Young MC drop out when they realized the event was a Trump-backed effort and not a bipartisan celebration.

The president ended up headlining the opening ceremony for the event, which has so far seen underwhelming attendance while some states decline to send delegations over concerns about costs and partisanship. And as the president’s attempt to redo the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial with an “American flag blue” lining instead turned the water a murky green, with crumbling bits of lining bobbing in it, the debacle has become a metaphor for the country writ large.

With the capital’s monumental core under the sway of Trump’s aesthetic and political preferences, the original, bipartisan America 250 commission’s event lineup for July 4 includes a star-studded benefit concert in Los Angeles and official block parties in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. And cities and states have their own events planned, separate from either commission.

But outside of the major historic centers of DC, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, depending on one’s political orientation and algorithm, it’s possible to forget that America is celebrating a milestone birthday at all. “It just feels like another Thursday,” says Sofia Ong’ele, director of strategy at the progressive nonprofit Gen-Z For Change. “Is it Thursday this year? I have no idea.

I couldn’t even tell you.” An uptick in interest, not a bicentennial frenzy Still, there are at least some indications of patriotic fervor. Tickets for the July 3 and 4 fireworks displays at Mount Vernon, the historic home of George Washington, sold out in May, and advance ticket sales to visit the estate on July 4 are also breaking typical records, says Julie Almacy, the site’s vice president of media and communications.

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia reports a 17% increase in visitors this year, with June numbers up nearly 25% compared to last June, says communications director Beth Ann Downey. Amanda Lahikainen, executive director of the Concord Museum in Massachusetts reports “tremendous enthusiasm” around the 250th anniversary, with visitation “well above pre-commemoration levels.” Business is also booming for flag retailers.

Kerry McCoy, owner of the Arkansas-based company Flag and Banner, says that sales for commemorative America 250 flags, standard American flags, bunting and flagpoles started to pick up in April and have remained strong, to her surprise — though it’s largely corporations and businesses, not private individuals, driving those purchases. “It’s a great opportunity to advertise,” she says. But the enthusiasm for visits to historical sites may not be entirely driven by the country’s birthday.

Mount Vernon reopened portions of George Washington’s mansion last December that were previously closed for multiyear renovations, which Almacy says provided renewed incentive to visit the estate. Downey attributed the influx of visitors at the Museum of the American Revolution to a combination of semiquincentennial excitement with increased awareness about the museum and major events such as the World Cup bringing in new visitors to Philadelphia.

The nation’s 200th anniversary in 1976, by comparison, was a singular and inescapable force. Planning for the occasion began in 1965, and the bicentennial pervaded popular culture well before July 4, 1976.

CBS started broadcasting the short educational segment “Bicentennial Minutes” nightly in 1974, and a bicentennial spin-off of “Schoolhouse Rock!” called “America Rock” began airing in 1975. The milestone also brought major investments in civic and cultural infrastructure, including the openings of the National Air and Space Museum and of Liberty State Park in New Jersey.

Bicentennial-themed merch was ubiquitous: There were bicentennial stamps and coins, and mugs and plates emblazoned with renderings of bald eagles and the Declaration of Independence. There were red, white and blue yo-yos and egg timers, commemorative toilet paper and litter bags stamped with Betsy Ross’ flag.

The market was so saturated with America-themed products in the fall of 1975, Time declared that “from now until July 4, 1976, and no doubt beyond, the American consumer will be assailed by an army of business mercenaries out to make money from patriotic fervor.” Edie, who was 16 at the time, remembers that her sister went to see the parade of tall ships in the New York Harbor, while she attended a Fourth of July house party with friends on Lake Michigan. The whole summer felt heightened that year, she says: More fireworks, more fervor, more fun.

But the semiquincentennial, she says, will be a non-event for her. She’ll be traveling most of the day, and while she says she might join a low-key celebration with friends, she doesn’t plan to do anything special to commemorate the 250th anniversary. “I’m not interested in plugging in in any way to what’s going on in DC in this next two-week period or whatever,” she says. “I’m going to put my fingers in my ears and go ‘la la la.’” Was 1976 truly a good time?

The bicentennial was hardly a time of political harmony. The Vietnam War had severely damaged the sense that America occupied a moral high ground abroad, while the Watergate scandal at home eroded trust in US leaders and institutions.

Gas prices were rebounding from the 1973 oil crisis, and the combination of high inflation, stagnant economic growth and high unemployment had resulted in the decade-defining portmanteau “stagflation.” And in some parts of the country, the hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement were again meeting resistance. Regardless, the bicentennial seemed divorced from whatever man occupied the White House at the time.

McCoy, the owner of Flag and Banner, couldn’t immediately recall who was president during that year. Edie recalls that it was Gerald Ford, though she notes that Ford — who had replaced and then pardoned the disgraced Richard Nixon in 1974 — wasn’t exactly popular, either. “It didn’t matter that a not-beloved president happened to be president at the time of these celebrations,” she says. “That’s how far above politics all of this was.” Politics didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm around the bicentennial, as Gulley remembers it. “Even then I remember this sense of optimism that we were learning and growing,” the Quaker pastor says. “That we were getting better as time went on and that we had made a collective and definitive decision to be better.” Tony Heriza, a 74-year-old filmmaker in Philadelphia, remembers the period a little differently.

The loud fanfare around America’s 200th birthday came with its fair share of skeptics. The barrage of bicentennial-themed products earned it the nickname “buy-centennial,” and the People’s Bicentennial Commission formed in 1971 to counter the official celebrations.

Heriza, who was 24 at the time, was part of a leftist contingent that traveled from Dayton, Ohio, to Philadelphia to join a group known as the July 4th Coalition. An initiative launched by the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the July 4th Coalition aimed to challenge the idea that a nation premised on freedom from colonization should, 200 years later, end up with colonies of its own, the historian Alyssa Ribeiro explains.

On July 4, 1976, as President Ford presided over an official bicentennial ceremony at Independence Hall to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, tens of thousands of people marched in North Philadelphia to draw attention to Puerto Rican self-determination as well as civil rights and economic justice issues stateside. Anniversaries can offer a chance for reflection, for leaders and citizens to consider the nation’s founding principles and how the country has or hasn’t measured up.

Even as the July 4th Coalition and other groups challenged the official narrative around the bicentennial, Heriza says their activism was rooted in a sense of pride and belief in American ideals. “For all its limitations, the bicentennial really encouraged people to think about who were we then and who are we now and who do we want to be?” he says. “I don’t feel that in the same way.” Better luck in 2076? Despite efforts by the America 250 commission and other institutions to treat the semiquincentennial as an opportunity for dialogue, some Americans don’t feel the anniversary is meeting the moment. “I’m in any given moment incredibly embarrassed to be an American, just given the absolute barbarity that we have unleashed not only upon other people in the world but also domestically,” says Ong’ele of Gen-Z for Change.

Josh Lavra, a 37-year-old in Brooklyn and a designer at the mental health organization HopeLab, sees glimmers of hope in the ways that younger generations are reckoning with the country’s shortcomings. But he isn’t all that interested in marking the 250th milestone. “It feels kind of tone-deaf, honestly,” he says.

Heriza and other activists, as part of the July 4th Sin Colonias Coalition, plan to commemorate the 1976 march this year with a series of events and exhibits. Still, even in Philadelphia where he lives, he says the energy around America’s 250th anniversary seems muted.

There are some visible signs of it being a significant moment: Every house on his block, including his, is decorated with red, white and blue bunting — though he says he also added an Earth Day flag and a Pride Flag. “I believe in the principles of the American Revolution, but I also didn’t want it to be confused with either empathy for the current government or an apathy toward the problems,” he clarifies. Americans might not be in the mood to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation, but the summer thus far has presented other avenues for unity and camaraderie: The World Cup, with international tourists embracing such American touchstones as Buc-ee’s and ranch dressing and fans across borders rallying around underdog athletes and teams, stands as a more joyous alternative.

And if the semiquincentennial is a bust? There’s always the tricentennial. “I just hope that the country is in a better place for the 300th in 2076,” Edie says, “And that the celebrations can be more like they were in 1976 than they were in 2026.”