This article was first published in the Mail on Sunday
HOW DO YOU CELEBRATE two hundred and fifty years of a country? If you’re Donald Trump, for whom 2026 means both two and a half centuries of the United States and his own eightieth birthday, the answer is UFC Freedom 250. As you surely know, UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Championship. Its adherents enjoy mixed martial arts, a fierce spectacle combining wrestling, boxing, jiu jitsu and other disciplines, and the results can be brutal.
Though perhaps a near-perfect expression of Trumpian MAGA culture, the event – featuring a series of fights with a military flypast, thousands of roaring fans, garish hats and plenty of beer – was not to everyone’s taste. But in the US today, it’s hard think of anything that would be. In fact, Americans are divided over whether there is much to celebrate at all.
In my polling only half of them say they are very proud of the US, and only one in five say the country has lived up to its founding ideals of liberty and opportunity for all. Republicans are much more likely to agree to both propositions than Democrats, half of whom believe the country has fallen short or that those ideals were flawed from the beginning. Minorities often told us they had mixed feelings about the occasion. “It hits a little differently for African Americans, especially how we’ve been treated in the past,” a man in Missouri told us. “At the same time, I believe this is the greatest country. So it’s bittersweet.”
Most Americans believe the US is unique. But fewer than half think their country is a force for good in the world, and more than one in five young adults believe it never has been.
For some, this disillusionment is political. They lament the polarised population, misconceived military adventures and the policies and personality of their 47th president. Others believe America’s history precludes any celebration: “How can you discover a land that has indigenous people on it?” asked one young man in New Mexico. “You didn’t discover it, you took it over”. Some even told us they were embarrassed to be marking such an anniversary with the country in its current state, or to be recognised as an American while travelling abroad.
More often, people’s ambivalence towards this year’s Fourth of July festivities comes from dissatisfaction with their own lives or uncertainty about the future, especially for their children. Symbolically, this shows up in their waning faith in the American Dream – the idea that with effort, enterprise and persistence, anyone in the US can achieve prosperity and the kind of life they want.
Fewer than a quarter say the American Dream is still alive and achievable for people like them, though again Republicans are more than twice as likely as Democrats to think so. More than a third say it only exists for certain groups of people, is no longer relevant, or never really existed in the first place. The biggest chunk overall says the dream is still there, but is harder to achieve than it used to be.
This is because life in the old days was simpler and, above all, cheaper. Many speak of parents or grandparents who bought houses and raised families on a single salary, or enjoyed a long career in the same firm with a comfortable pension to look forward to. Now, three in ten younger Americans expect never to be able to afford their own home, despite good incomes. The albatross of student debt – often stretching to six figures – combined with a jobs market being transformed by AI as they watch in horror, makes the future seem uncertain at best. One of the American Dream’s most important tenets – that each generation will do better than the one before – no longer reflects the reality they see.
Strikingly, those who had come to the US from other countries, or whose parents had done so, were often more upbeat about their own prospects and what America stands for than their more established compatriots. “As an immigrant who had to give up my citizenship elsewhere and choose this country, I tend to appreciate the freedoms that I have,” a man in Kansas City told us. “There’s a sense of appreciation for what this country affords us”.
Despite their famously can-do approach to life, Americans are given to philosophising like this in a way that would feel completely alien to most Brits. Their talk of freedom might sound eccentric to jaded Europeans, but it is deeply felt, not least because their families so often came from places that were not free. “The First and Second Amendments,” answered one man straight off the bat when asked what made the US different. “You have the right to criticise your government and defend yourself.”
Despite their natural suspicion of the state many Americans look enviously at more generous social provision, especially healthcare, in Canada and Europe (though others point out the unAmerican tax rates that pay for these “free” services). Though they might wish life was easier, self-reliance remains a crucial part of American life. “You want to be able to say that you did it,” a working-class woman in the southwest told us. At the same time, while the upside of success is greater than anywhere else, the downsides of falling short feel more extreme, especially if there is no family memory of a country where conditions were fundamentally worse. The appetite for risk is greater among those who feel they have less to lose. This also helps explain the recent appeal of Trump among classes and minorities who would traditionally have aligned with the Democrats.
Some who were around for the bicentennial in 1976 recalled that celebration as less complicatedly patriotic. But it came at the end of a period of turmoil: clashes over civil rights, assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. Americans feared an era of national decline fuelled by energy prices, inflation, domestic division, diminishing international respect and declining faith in leaders and institutions. How things change.
Meanwhile, there is plenty that Americans agree on: they cherish personal freedom, they believe opportunity comes from hard work and determination, and they know that whatever their dreams, they are more likely to make them come true in the US than anywhere else. Even if the president allows fighting on the White House lawn.
