America turns 250. Not everyone is celebrating

What does it mean to love a country that does not love you back? This is a question that Black and brown Americans, and members of other marginalized groups, have been asking themselves for centuries.

With Donald Trump’s return to power, many other Americans are having to ask themselves that question for the first time. And they are now being forced to confront painful answers.

The tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis illustrate this. For white liberals and other white people of conscience, this means understanding that your skin color provides no guarantee of absolute protection against state violence in the Age of Trump.

Immigrants who have been in the United States for decades are living in fear of being deported. The Trump administration has rendered their “Americanness” and sense of belonging precarious and suspect.

To see Trump elected again ­constituted a moral injury for those who believed the American people were fundamentally good and decent. 

America feels profoundly broken right now. For many Americans, this Fourth of July, which marks the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, feels less like a celebration than mourning.

I asked Brynn Tannehill — a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator, trans activist and author who is now a resident of Canada — about what she is feeling as the holiday approaches. “I’m not sure I can say I love the U.S. anymore,” she said. “What is happening goes beyond ‘doesn’t love you back”: The U.S. voted for a man, and a party, that promised to eradicate transgender people, everyone like me, from public life.”

For Tannehill, who spent 30 years as a service member, what is happening under the Trump administration feels intensely personal. “Now, I’m essentially a person without a country: It no longer says I’m worthy of being American, and I don’t particularly feel like claiming to be an American given what the country collectively decided to do [in electing Trump].” 

Tannehill’s disappointment and loss echoes across tens of millions of other Americans. A majority now believes the country is heading in the wrong direction. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, nearly 60% of Americans say that the country’s best years are behind it, and almost 70% are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today. Other surveys are showing similar results, with a Gallup poll finding that most Americans believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed in what America has become. This number has increased substantially from a quarter of a century ago. 

With Americans increasingly believing that democracy is imperiled and that Trump is a dictator, one-third of respondents declared in a March 2024 Monmouth University poll that they would, like Tannehill, move to another country if they had the opportunity because of the unhealthy state of America’s politics.

Historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, as well as philosopher Jason Stanley, left their jobs at Yale University to take positions at the University of Toronto. Snyder and Stanley are leading experts on fascism and authoritarianism, and among the earliest public voices to sound the alarm about the existential threat Trump and MAGA pose to American democracy and society.

In an essay published in the Yale Daily News, Snyder explained he was not fleeing the country to escape Trump. But he still offered a qualifier: “I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump, or because of Columbia, or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do and that is a decision that people will make.”

For all of Snyder’s careful language, some heard an alarm being sounded about the rising fascist danger. Stanley was more direct. He left the U.S., he said, “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.”

If these scholars of fascism felt so compelled to leave, maybe it was time for other Americans to start thinking about leaving while they still can.

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I asked Tannehill about her decision to move to Canada, and if she had any advice for others. “Can the country be saved? Is it survivable? If you answer yes to either one, you’re probably better off not leaving,” she said. “I keep coming back to the quote that for most people living in an authoritarian state, life is ‘boring and tolerable,’ so it’s survivable for most. If you think it can be fixed from the inside, even if it’s not survivable if you fail, you probably have a moral obligation to try.” 

But Tannehill concluded something different.

“If things go the way I expect with the 2028 election [and] Trump and the Republicans will not surrender power, a lot more people will wish they [had] left,” she warned.

Decisions like this inevitably lead to questions about patriotism, and what it means to be an American patriot in this time of great crisis. There is a deep tension between an immature allegiance of “love it or leave it,” where America is almost perfect, if not divinely inspired, and loyalty is absolute. The other patriotism is more mature and aspirational. Grounded in critical love and thinking, it allows the country’s flaws and failures to be confronted honestly so that the nation can be made into the best version of itself. 

Trump and MAGA, with their nostalgic yearning to “Make America Great Again,” are the antithesis of this type of patriotism. At its core, the president’s patriotic project is Orwellian, an exercise in historical erasure and the annihilation of truth.

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding is a reminder of a hard truth: Democracy is a skill and way of life that must be taught and learned. Civic life must be nurtured and renewed each generation.

American neofascism under Trump offers a “tough lesson” about the atrophy of the country’s democracy and institutions. Too many Americans thought our democracy was forever — and perhaps even worse, they wanted it on the cheap. They assumed that others would do the work of protecting our institutions, norms and values, which left our democracy exposed. 

The American people must accept we have lost something and may not get it back. That is what happens with broken things.

This Fourth of July, I will be thinking about the iconic photograph of Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson watching President Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral procession, tears streaming down his face as he plays the accordion. Jackson is many of us right now on both sides of the color line.

But the sadness we are feeling as we mourn our broken democracy and society does not have to be paralyzing. It can be a healthy form of grief that can become the foundation for change, a call to action for democratic renewal.