Ten long years ago, an act of Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan group in charge of overseeing the nation’s two-hundred-fiftieth-birthday celebrations. Things have not gone smoothly for the commission, which has been characterized largely by ideological conflict, defamation lawsuits, and allegations of employment discrimination. Compounding the commission’s problems last year were President Trump’s creation of his own rival commemorative groups: Task Force 250 and Freedom 250, the latter of which recently spearheaded the UFC fights on the White House lawn. America250, as the commission’s nonprofit arm is known, has been reduced to a sad series of initiatives: a commercial partnership with the automaker Stellantis; a contest awarding a handful of ambitious undergraduates with modest amounts of venture capital; a custom playlist featuring a remastered version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” to be played at official celebration zones in major cities; and a plush cartoon star mascot named George. 

Earlier this spring, Christopher Hooks, feeling a palpable lack of patriotic pride himself, traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Rosa Rios, the head of America250, in an attempt to determine what went wrong. But this turns out to be only the first step on a much longer journey, as Hooks sets out on a road trip in search of his long-lost America-loving self, and wonders whether it’s worth recovering to begin with. I spoke with Hooks recently about the commission’s thankless task, his plans for celebrating 250 years of the United States, and why he can never again listen to “Celebration.” 

Matthew Sherrill: Your piece is motivated by a sincere desire to reclaim an “old faith”: the sense of patriotism that you developed as a kid growing up in Texas. Can you say a little more about that patriotism, and how you came to lose it? 

Christopher Hooks: I was born in 1990, which means that as a little kid my sense of the country and the world came out of a stew of wildly contradictory propositions circulating at the so-called end of history. I was listening to Rush Limbaugh in my dad’s car coming home from school and then watching reruns of Captain Planet. The world was shrinking, we were drinking Fruitopia, the military was bringing order to Kosovo and Somalia—or trying to—and there was a moment of synthesis of left- and right-wing ideas from previous generations. America was this sort of broadly conservative force that, often through war, upheld a largely liberal international order and a set of unambiguously good values. Kind of like Starfleet in Star Trek. The feeling I miss the most, most approximately, is not having to think through the contradictions.

But then 9/11 came. Growing up in “Dubya’s Texas,” I was just old enough to feel the thrill, along with most American adults, of taking a couple “crappy little countr[ies] and throw[ing them] against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” as Jonah Goldberg once memorably summarized Michael Ledeen’s “doctrine.” This thrill proved pretty hollow, and the door opened to ask more searching questions about what America is and had done in the past. These questions weren’t new to anybody except me, but they have perhaps become easier to ask and more accessible to a wider population thanks to Donald Trump.

Sherrill: When we first talked about this idea, we were imagining a kind of comic history of America250’s struggles, one that might illustrate the impossibility of achieving any form of political consensus in this country, even when it comes to celebrating something like the country’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday. But what you wound up writing was something considerably more ambitious. At what point did you decide to take this piece well beyond America250? 

Hooks: There was a push factor and a pull factor. America250 proved more difficult to report on than I was hoping. There had already been a few critical stories and two sets of lawsuits earlier this decade, and people were reluctant to talk to me. Internal critics, or, skeptics, had already been purged or silenced or settled their suits—or just gave up. And while I could get limited, supervised access to commissioners through America250’s PR contractor, I was hoping to have more freewheeling conversations.

The fact that America250—a national party-planning committee that should have had a pretty easy job—was so buttoned-up was interesting in itself, but it wasn’t enough for the piece. I ran through a couple of different ideas about what to do instead. I was really hoping, at one point, to reach one of the two conservative historians on the commission—each of whom is well-regarded and a serious person—to try to draw them out on the shape of the last decade in America and try to get them to convince me, a soy liberal, to feel a little better, and maybe get some useful tension out of the debate. But I hit the wall there, too.

I went in with the intention of writing a lighter, comic piece. But I had to go looking for other things to hold my interest. And the wider I looked, the heavier I felt—the harder it became not to let all of the internal tension I’ve felt about the country over the past decade intrude. I’ve rarely felt more bummed out on a reporting trip than when the representatives of the semiquincentennial commission in Washington started talking about Kool & the Gang and teen venture-capital funding. I wondered: Is this what’s left?

Sherrill: In the piece, you meet with Rosa Rios, the chair of America250. You make clear that her job has been a “thankless,” almost impossible task. Does it seem to you that a bipartisan commission tasked with uniting the country was doomed from the start? Or was there a missed opportunity here? 

Hooks: Mostly doomed. Things could surely have been done a little better, I think. A lot of folks in 1976 thought the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, which planned two years of events, was a flop, but in hindsight it looks like a testament to Cold War–era American state capacity. Freedom 250 is a freak show and America250 comes out of the juiceless neoliberal Washington where money flows to contractors and it’s hard to say what it did.

The only milestone commemoration I’m aware of that had any juice was the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and it succeeded precisely because it represented only half the country. It was a triumph in the Roman sense, put on by the liberal, industrial North and presided over by President Grant and General Sherman. Only two Southern states participated. Unity of this kind, hard-won, was not possible in 1826 or 1976 or today, and it probably won’t be possible anytime soon.

Sherrill: One of my favorite sections of the piece is your sojourn to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. You’re ostensibly there to visit one of Freedom 250’s Freedom Trucks, a mobile museum, but you wind up discovering that the town’s mayor, Jondavid Longo, is the perfect symbol for the political mania that’s gripped much of the country. What did you find so compelling about Longo? 

Hooks: Longo had a perfect faith in his country that I could no longer access. But he also expressed the sense—at least on social media—that he was embroiled in a war with the other half of the country, and the other half of his own community. These two things might seem to be in tension, but I think he may be right, in an important sense, about being at war. It’s an open question whether the things that I most love about America and the things others love about America can coexist. At any rate, he was a much more relatable figure, to me, than the folks I met in Washington.

There is also the fact that Longo is a Marine and a combat veteran. One of the things that ties the commemorations of 1876, 1926, 1976, and 2026 together is that they coincide with the nation’s  entrance into  a period of warfare, with returning veterans climbing to positions of political power. In each case, in varying measure, veterans have either experienced disillusionment or a renewed commitment to their (partial, perhaps) understanding of the nation. In 1976 as now, the disillusionment was strengthened by the fact that we lost the war(s). Ruben Gallego and Graham Platner were disillusioned; Pete Hegseth and Jondavid Longo had their faith strengthened—maybe excessively so. This will be a factor in American politics for a long time to come.

Sherrill: Since we finished up work on the piece, we’ve seen the rollout of a few events helmed by Trump’s Freedom 250, most notably the UFC fights on the South Lawn of the White House. Is it safe to say that none of this has filled you with the inspiring brand of patriotic sentiment that you spend much of the piece searching for? 

Hooks: The UFC fights on the South Lawn, and a lot of what the White House is up to these days, is humiliating if you have, or had, a certain idea of American national symbols meaning something. Part of the humiliation is that you have to acknowledge the symbols meant something to you in the first place, an idea that now, perhaps, seems silly. If you had an idea of the United States as a country that would never threaten a war of territorial acquisition against Denmark, you will likely have felt a little foolish when it did. But making eggheads out there feel bad is one of the few campaign promises the Trump Administration can make good on. In my case, at least, they can declare: Mission Accomplished!

One of the questions I had hoped to answer while reporting the piece is how likely it might be, as happened in 1976, that a wave of values-neutral patriotism might emerge and shape the country over the next few years. Not very likely, it seems. The competition between a meaningless bipartisan commemoration effort and a right-wing commemoration effort has blocked a certain portion of the country from participating, not to mention the dismal state of the country in other respects. But I do wonder whether the next Democratic presidential campaign will be able to tap into the anger—and repressed patriotism—of the center and center-left, which is sleeping right now and which Biden did not really try to tap. People want to feel good about their country.

Sherrill: Can I ask if you have any plans to celebrate the two-hundred-fiftieth yourself?  

Hooks: A strong counterpoint to my piece, in which an aging millennial fumbles around looking for someone to agree with him about the meaning of the country, is the argument that the country has no coherent meaning, that meaning can be found only through voluntary efforts, and that any effort at cohering the thing is pointless at best and does damage at worst. 

There’s some merit in that, I think. So I’ll probably be having two to three beers with a couple friends far away from a sanctioned celebration zone. To them I promise not to talk about the Civil War. But because we live in a country where the First Amendment guarantees freedom of association, please, do not play Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” near me if you wish to share my company. It was stuck in my head for about six weeks.