Many Americans are going through the motions, pretending all is well. On Saturday, they will again celebrate Independence Day with “Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other,” as John Adams predicted would happen 250 years ago upon the new country’s declaration of freedom from British rule.

And much is still going right on the 250th anniversary of what the nation’s first president, George Washington, called the “great experiment” of the United States of America. The country is still the dominant power on Earth. It enjoys a world-beating economy led by tech and financial sectors that continue to eclipse the rest of the planet, though they have also contributed mightily to the worst income inequality since the Gilded Age and a polarized population fed by social media-driven misinformation.

But there are much grimmer overtones to this year’s semiquincentennial. The United States feels less united than it has for many decades, perhaps since the Civil War. Some Americans wonder whether the nation’s cultural and civilizational ties are so strained—and its constitutional restraints so broken—that it won’t see many more big birthdays, at least not as a functioning constitutional republic.

It’s not just that the current U.S. president has, predictably enough, turned what should be a grand national display of unity into the Donald Trump show. In a Truth Social post, the president has promised “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” on July 4.

Nor is the problem only that Trump is attempting to reduce one of the world’s oldest constitutional democracies to a totalitarian-style personality cult, ignoring legal constraints in nearly everything he does—including launching wars. Among many other abuses, the president is seeking to prosecute his political opponents, and he is openly enriching his family with the sort of corruption that the Founders would have considered impeachable many times over.

The more disturbing question is whether the U.S. body politic is seriously ill in a way that far exceeds anything Trump has yet done or might still do. Washington is wracked by mistrust and contempt across party lines, and confidence in public institutions is at or near all-time lows. Neither political party seems capable of addressing that problem—and the gulf between them only grows, as evidenced by recent primary-race results that suggest Democrats are as much in the grip of the far left as Republicans remain enthralled to the MAGA far right.

As legal analyst Sarah Isgur points out in her new book, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court, the Supreme Court may be the only branch of government left that the Founders would even recognize as their handiwork—yet even the high court has lost the faith of the public as so many of its decisions appear ideologically driven.

The drop-off in public confidence has been precipitous. In January 2000, Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country was a near-record 69 percent, according to Gallup. This January, just 36 percent of Americans were satisfied with national conditions—the lowest number since Gallup began tracking its “Mood of the Nation” statistics in 2001. Another steep decline: Only 33 percent of U.S. adults say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, compared with 55 percent 25 years ago.

“Less than half of Americans say they have confidence in the police, the medical system, or schools,” Isgur writes in Last Branch Standing. “Less than a quarter trust labor unions, businesses, or the media. And less than 10 percent trust Congress.”

Thus, for many Americans, this year’s birthday celebration may be akin to the sort of fake hopefulness one displays at the hospital bedside of a loved one with an advanced disease. Everyone puts on forced smiles and false bonhomie, all the while wondering: Is it terminal?

And it’s fair to ask: Is the American disease terminal? Perhaps. No one seems to have a good solution to today’s ailments.

But it’s important to note that it has seemed that way many times before. This goes all the way back to Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion in the early years of the republic, the Civil War and the hundred years of Jim Crow segregation that followed, the Great Depression, McCarthyism, and a plague of political assassinations through the 1960s. As alarming as today’s political violence has been, at least it has not yet cost the life of a president or presidential candidate.

Larry Diamond, an expert on democracy at Stanford University, told me that the country’s “current very serious democratic dysfunction” is still a long way from a “terminal illness.”

“It is true that we have never, since the launch of our constitutional system in 1789, had a president so corrupt, authoritarian, and abusive of democratic and constitutional norms as Trump,” Diamond said. “But we have also seen considerable resilience in our democratic system, in the mobilization of civil society, the frequent pushback from the federal courts, and the refusal of the otherwise servile Republican majority in the Senate to end the filibuster so that Trump can impose unfair rules across all of the elections in the United States.”

Other experts say history’s jury is very much out. “This is not 1861, and it’s probably not 1933, but it’s not great,” said Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.

“The illness metaphor is pretty good because while we don’t face the problems of a very severe crisis—like the Civil War or Great Depression—as a country we are struggling with the sort of things that come along with old age. There is a real question about the ability of the U.S. body politic to cope with the new strains.”

Populist insurgencies on both the right and left have deranged traditional U.S. politics, but they haven’t yet reached the levels that toppled republics of the past, historian Thomas Madden writes in his new book, The Fall of Republics: A History From Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution.

Trump “played the part of a populist, but lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020. In 2024 he attracted just under 50 percent of the vote. This is not a serious strain on the republic. It is simply loud politics,” Madden writes. Beyond that, “January 6 was a destructive riot, but it had no substantive effect on the functioning of the American Republic.”

Based on his analysis of failed republics going back to Carthage and Rome, Madden notes that as bad as things are, the United States has not yet suffered some of the most consequential signs of a republic about to fall: suspension of elections, actual violence between government officials, an agenda of arresting and killing political opponents, involvement of the military in politics, and military occupation of the Capitol followed by expulsion of the elected government.

As for the hyper-partisanship of the day, Madden argues that it’s a kind of luxury which springs from a “long period of peace, prosperity, and no serious, existential enemy.” Still, he said in an interview, the danger is that “without existential external enemies, the enemies become internal. A great deal of damage can be done to a republic when partisans cast their opponents as enemies of the state.”

That may already be happening, with Trump describing leading Democrats in just such terms. Other experts warn that republics can also slowly fade away with few people taking notice—which is what may be happening now.

Political scientist Barbara F. Walter of the University of California, San Diego, a leading expert on civil war, violent extremism, and domestic terrorism, believes the United States has already entered what she calls the “anocracy zone.” An anocracy is a blend of democracy and autocracy—one in which leaders slowly accumulate power while dispensing with checks and balances.

And that is plainly the Trump formula. “The world of a strong executive is one that is now the dominant fact of our political life, and it will be a real struggle to reverse that,” Schlozman said.

That may be a threat to the future survival of the republic as well. “It is possible for a powerful state to retain the illusion of democracy or republican values long after those values have become nonfunctional,” said Edward Watts, the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny.

Starting with Augustus, he notes, Roman emperors styled themselves principes civitatis, or “first citizens”—not kings—thus pretending to uphold the republic even as they became dictators.

“I view the survival of the republic as an open question,” said Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown University, a leading constitutional scholar and the author of another new book, The Constitution Cannot Save Us: Why We Can No Longer Rely on Our Founding Document.

“A lot turns on what happens in the midterms and in 2028,” Seidman said. “If Trump prevents fair elections from occurring, then the slide into authoritarianism will be much quicker than most people believe. I think that it is almost certain that Trump will try to overturn the elections (if he loses, that is), but it’s an open question whether he will succeed.”

The Founding Fathers would no doubt be delighted and amazed that their creation has lasted so long. But they were also acutely aware of how it might come to an end. As Alexander Hamilton presciently wrote to Washington in 1792, “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy.”

Still, the Trump administration has not yet realized the worst fears of some of its detractors—despite such abuses as sending the National Guard into U.S. cities and the horrific killing of two citizens by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis. In his first term, after the police murder of George Floyd, a Black American, triggered protests nationwide, Trump openly considered using firepower on demonstrators, saying, “Can’t you just shoot them?” his former defense secretary, Mark Esper, wrote in his 2022 memoir, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.

This has not happened—yet.

Moreover, the Trump administration has tended to respect the Supreme Court’s decisions on some issues. The high court, while dominated by conservatives, has occasionally defied the president—as it did this week by upholding birthright citizenship.

Even so, the court has ruled with Trump on other key issues, such as giving him sweeping authority over federal agencies that Congress intended to be at least quasi-independent. “The headline might be ‘Court checks Trump,’ but the through line is a concentration of power towards the presidency, towards the court itself and away from Congress, federal agencies and voters,” the New York Timesquoted one lawyer, Deepak Gupta, as saying.

The biggest question is whether the politics of correction are also irretrievably broken. In the past, moved by social unrest, powerful progressive presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the vast inequality of the Gilded Age and the devastation of the Great Depression with antitrust policy, fairer taxation, the New Deal, and other major reforms.

Today, it’s fair to wonder whether the divide between the two parties is so great, and the system so dysfunctional, that it is no longer bridgeable. Certainly, the recent Democratic primary results suggest not. In a sign of the times, the party’s most recent standard-bearer, former Vice President Kamala Harris, is paying obeisance to the far left, possibly readying herself for another run in 2028.

Most political analysts say the only hope is for some kind of political savior to rise from the center. One of the sad ironies of former President Joe Biden’s single term was that, responding to both Trump on the right and rivals on his left such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden sought to bridge the gaps between populist yearnings on the two sides. And he partly succeeded, adopting what came to be known as “Bidenomics”—a blend of industrial policy, green policy, and an inward-looking trade policy that continued many of the Trump tariffs.

But Biden’s disastrous decision to seek another term at age 81 effectively discredited his agenda as well. And like Biden himself, Schlozman said, the U.S. political system is suffering from “old political arrangements that are under very great strain but haven’t been updated.”

One example is the political parties themselves and a primary system that tends to favor extremist views because typically only the most ideological voters come out to vote in primaries. In 2016, Trump won just under 45 percent of the Republican primary vote. But since there was such a small turnout, that meant Trump was “picked to be the candidate by just 6 percent of the overall American electorate”—or about 14 million primary votes out of about 230 million eligible voters, said Ian Shapiro, a political scientist at Yale University and co-author of the 2018 book Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself.

The endurance of Trumpism is, most agree, the biggest cause for alarm. Trump is not only the first true demagogue in U.S. history to be elected president. He was also the rare politician to remain kingmaker of his party even after losing a presidential election—and then to be elected again.

But Trump just turned 80, and the republic he is trying to dismantle is much older.

“I think we will begin to see in the coming midterm elections a significant electoral reversal of this authoritarian trend,” Diamond said. “And it is at least as possible to argue that we are on the cusp of a new age of democratic reform as it is to wallow in democratic despair.”