America at 250 presents one of the strangest paradoxes in modern history. No democracy has accumulated greater economic, military, technological, and cultural power. Few are less content. The anniversary — in marked contrast even to the Bicentennial, despite troubles in those times as well — is being celebrated amid a hurricane of angst and anger.
It can seem perplexing, because the United States remains the world’s largest economy, the dominant military power, home to an astonishing disproportion of the world’s most valuable companies and highest-ranked universities, and the principal exporter of global popular culture. American music, films, software, financial markets, and scientific research influence billions of people far beyond its borders. By almost every conventional measure of national success, America rocks.
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Yet the other side of the ledger is equally striking. Among advanced democracies, America combines immense wealth with unusually high inequality. It spends more on healthcare than any country in the world while achieving life expectancy below many of its peers — and is the only advanced economy without a guaranteed healthcare baseline. It experiences levels of gun violence unmatched elsewhere in the developed world. It refuses to seriously regulate guns and allows states to ban abortion — both also uniquely bad. Large numbers of Americans reject scientific consensus on issues ranging from climate change to vaccination. Because of polarization, its Constitution has become a blockage on critically needed electoral reforms — or any reforms.
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The contradiction — the chasm between these two narratives — is unlike anything I have seen in three decades of traveling the world’s highways and byways as a foreign correspondent. And it reflects in the surly public sentiment.
Although Americans have long viewed their country as the world’s indispensable shining city upon a hill, they now seem weirdly uncertain about its future. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 38% don’t believe the U.S. will still exist as a single country in another 250 years. Nearly two-thirds believe American democracy is in danger of failing. And Gallup found that fewer than half believe everyone has an equal shot at the American dream.
How can all of these things be true at once? How can a nation so convinced of its own exceptionalism simultaneously doubt its own survival? To understand, we need to think of America as history’s largest political experiment.
Throughout its existence, the United States has been doing nothing less than testing the central propositions of the Enlightenment: that liberty is superior to coercion; that constitutional government is superior to arbitrary rule; that free markets produce greater prosperity than central planning; that citizenship can replace ancestry as the basis of national identity; and that free people, governing themselves, can build a society that is prosperous, innovative and just.
Experiments are judged by what they reveal. And after two and a half centuries, the American experiment has produced enough evidence to take stock.
The first question was whether liberty could sustain democracy on a continental scale. On this point, the experiment exceeded expectations.
When the Constitution was written, many political thinkers believed republics could survive only in relatively small societies. Large states, they assumed, inevitably drifted toward monarchy, empire, or military rule.
The United States disproved that assumption. It survived civil war, economic depression, world wars, mass immigration, industrialization, and the Cold War while preserving constitutional government. Sure, American democracy has repeatedly fallen short of its own ideals, and the Trump administration’s outrages have demonstrated how dependent constitutional systems remain on unwritten norms as well as written laws. Yet the larger lesson remains: democracy proved far more durable than imagined.
The second question was whether freedom produces creativity. Again, the American experiment delivered an emphatic positive answer.
America created an environment in which science, capitalism, and innovation reinforced one another. Universities, private enterprise, venture capital, open markets, and a tolerance for risk produced extraordinary advances in medicine, communications, computing, and countless other fields. It showed that human creativity flourishes when individuals are given room to experiment, fail, and begin again.
The third question was whether a nation could be built on ideas rather than ancestry. This may be America’s most original contribution.
Most nations emerged from common ethnicity, language, or religion. America proposed something radically different: that citizenship and constitutional principles could become the foundation of national identity. The process has never been smooth — obviously. Nearly every wave of immigrants was first regarded as incompatible with American society before eventually becoming part of it. Racism and bigotry remain, but the historical pattern is unmistakable: Civic identity can, to a remarkable degree, overcome differences of origin. So much so, that much of the Western world, even ethnic nation states, are emulating bits of it.
Indeed, it’s striking that Gallup continues to find immigrants more optimistic about the American dream than Americans born in the country. Those who chose the experiment often retain greater faith in it than those who inherited it.
The fourth question was whether democracies possess the ability to correct themselves. Here, too, America deserves considerable credit for the past — but the present is abysmal.
Its greatest reform movements rarely sought to overthrow the American system. Instead, they appealed to its own principles. Abolition, women’s suffrage, labor reform, and the civil rights movement all argued that the country had failed to live up to promises it had already made. Martin Luther King Jr.’s description of the Constitution as a promissory note captured this perfectly. One of democracy’s greatest strengths is that criticism need not weaken the system. Properly understood, it can strengthen it.
The scorecard becomes considerably less favorable, when we consider the politics of the present day. The Constitution demonstrated extraordinary durability. It has also demonstrated extraordinary rigidity.
The amendment process has become effectively unworkable, not because the Constitution’s requirements have changed, but because the country has become so politically polarized that broad consensus on even basic principles is increasingly out of reach. In an era when nearly every issue divides the public along partisan lines, assembling the supermajorities required for constitutional change is nearly impossible — as seen in the disgraceful failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
The main needed reform is with the electoral system, whereby equal representation in the Senate gives sparsely populated states influence far beyond their share of the national population. The Electoral College has repeatedly produced presidents who lost the popular vote while concentrating presidential campaigns in a handful of swing states. Candidates can largely ignore New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago because their states are effectively predetermined. A constitutional design intended to protect democracy increasingly distorts democratic representation, creating a tyranny of the minority.
This is the main failing, and it’s a big one. When American say they’re not sure the country can survive, they’re talking about a Blue-Red breakup. And the Constitution offers no path to legal secession, so if this happens, it could be ugly.
The economic scorecard is similarly mixed.
America demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that markets create wealth. It became the richest large society in history. Yet it also demonstrated that markets do not naturally produce equality. Extraordinary innovation has been accompanied by extraordinary concentrations of wealth — and it is, obviously, getting more extreme all the time. Economic growth solved the problem of production far more effectively than that of distribution.
The same pattern appears in the realm of information.
Free expression remains one of America’s greatest achievements. Yet free expression alone does not guarantee shared truth. The American information environment increasingly rewards outrage over accuracy, identity over evidence, and certainty over skepticism. Conspiracy theories, climate denial, vaccine skepticism, and growing distrust of institutions all suggest that open debate requires more than freedom. It also requires citizens willing to value truth above all.
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of the American experiment. The Enlightenment was substantially right: liberty, constitutional government. market, science, and pluralism all work. But they cannot abolish human nature. People remain tribal, seek status, fear even needed change, unhelpfully form factions, and believe comforting falsehoods.
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The United States did not discover a formula for permanent contentment because no political system can. The Founders may have understood this from the beginning: perhaps the wisest ambition in the Declaration of Independence is “the pursuit of happiness.” It does not actually promise this happiness; happiness is something to strive for.
After 250 years, that may be the lesson of the American experiment. It has demonstrated the extraordinary possibilities of freedom while reminding us that freedom does not relieve humanity of its oldest burdens. You get what you pay for; you deserve who you vote for; you reap what you sow.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
