Jesus Rodriguez in The Washington Post:
In the course of human events, America has come to agree on one thing: that any modern birthday celebration of itself will involve sizzling hunks of meat, Springsteen in the ears, smoke in the eyes, sulfur in the nostrils, rockets’ red glare.
What’s less self-evident is how to appropriately mark a big birthday — like America’s 250th, two short years away — at a time when the country is so politically split that many Americans may be ready to declare the Great Experiment kaput after November. A survey this year by Gallup found that 67 percent of adults feel either “very proud” or “extremely proud” to be American — down from 85 percent in 2013 and 90 percent in 2003. A much lower percentage say they are satisfied with the way things are going: 21 percent, in June. Two-thirds of the people who responded to a January Quinnipiac poll said they believed American democracy was in danger of collapsing. Historians have been sounding alarm bells, and this week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and two of her colleagues, dissenting against the court’s ruling that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, said the court’s conservative majority had just made the president into “a king above the law,” upending “the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”
More here.