American Democracy Looks Bad Every Fifty Years Or So
American democracy does not look great on its 250th birthday. That is consistent with a recurring, weirdly hopeful pattern.
Happy 250th birthday, America! How is the most awesome country in the world feeling right now?!
Unfortunately, according to Pew, my fellow Americans are feeling rather shitty.1
Pew’s data also shows that Americans are particularly disturbed about the state of American democracy:
Around seven-in-ten U.S. adults (69%) say they are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in their country. This share is higher than in most other high-income countries surveyed by Pew Research Center this spring.
A large majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (86%) are dissatisfied with how American democracy is working. Around half of Republicans and GOP leaners (51%) say the same….
In the U.S., satisfaction with democracy has declined somewhat, from 37% in 2025 to 30% in 2026. This decrease is largely driven by Republicans. Six-in-ten Republicans were satisfied in 2025, compared with 48% today. Satisfaction with democracy among Democrats has not changed significantly.
Majorities of Americans in both parties also say that democracy in the U.S. used to be a good example for other countries to follow but has not been in recent years. In total, 68% of Americans hold this view.
The source of the discontent is no great mystery. An awful lot of Americans are disillusioned with the Trump administration’s — and the Trump family’s — massive corruption, lawlessness, and incompetence.2 This has happened at the same time that a feckless Congress and revisionist Supreme Court have empowered Trump at the expense of every other check and balance in the American system of government.3
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has demonstrated considerable restraint in not commenting yet on Trump’s ugly, haphazard, and — hey, here’s that word again — corrupt efforts to remake the architecture of our nation’s capital — but the symbolism on this July 4th is just way too on point. Turning the nation’s capital into a Six Flags shut down from hurricane damage does not improve the political optics during the nation’s semiquincentennial.4 The president has been obsessing about beautifying the nation’s capital in general and the Reflecting Pool in particular. This actually could have been an appealing idea in theory, but with this administration the effort has collapsed into corruption, incompetence, lackluster attendance, and a failure to distinguish between American and Nazi iconography.
Trump, “does not seem to mind that some of the nation’s most enduring symbols of liberty and expression are closed off and militarized,” the New York Times’ Katie Rogers concluded: “in his drive to ‘beautify’ the nation’s capital, Mr. Trump seems to have turned portions of the city into either a construction zone or an armed camp as he seeks to prove that he alone can improve a city he interacts with primarily from his armored limousine or presidential helicopter.”
So… yeah, things suck right now.
Little wonder that folks like PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson are writing about “a country in a sour mood. Inflation and gasoline prices soaring. A culture war raging. A president with sagging approval ratings.”
The thing is, Jacobsen was describing the country’s mood in 1976, during America’s bicentennial:
America at 250? Actually, America at 200 and 250.
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, a look back five decades to 1976 — the year of the nation’s bicentennial — reveals notable similarities with today.
Substitute Richard Nixon for Donald Trump, Vietnam for Iran and Watergate for using the Justice Department to reward friends and punish enemies and you can see a pretty fair resemblance between 1976 and 2026.
“The parallels are eerie: international conflict, domestic strife, political turmoil, partisan division and economic instability,” said Marc Stein, a San Francisco State University historian.
There were valid reasons to be concerned about the state of American democracy in 1976. Watergate, along with Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation following a bribery scandal, created a situation in which Gerald Ford was president despite never having run for national office. One can debate the wisdom of Ford’s pardon of Nixon, but the act left a bad taste in the mouth of folks interested in accountability. I was a small child during the bicentennial, but the future political scientist in me was vaguely aware that beneath the fireworks, the red, white, and blue bunting, and the catchy commercial jingles, Americans were not exactly feeling great about America at the time.
Here’s the thing, though: if you look back at America’s sesquicentennial, centennial, and semicentennial, you find the same recurring pattern about the fragile state of the American democracy.
Consider:
The Sesquicentennial (1926): The decade prior to 1926 constituted an absolute shitshow for American democracy. Adam Hochschild’s American Midnight does a solid job of chronicling the myriad illiberal actions taken by the Wilson administration during the First World War. This was followed by the disastrous handling of an influenza pandemic, followed by a counterproductive increase in tariff rates, followed by a surge of inflation, followed by anarchist violence and the Palmer raids, followed by a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria that culminated in the extremely restrictionist Immigration Act of 1924. This political climate encouraged a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, one large enough for tens of thousands of members to march down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1925. The sour isolationism of that era echoes the Trump administration’s rhetoric today.
The Centennial (1876): Historical revisionism has bolstered Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation in recent years, perhaps deservedly so. Such efforts, however, cannot erase the myriad corruption scandals that bedeviled Grant’s term in office. As the Wikipedia entry notes — and see if this sounds familiar — Grant was able to impede many of these corruption investigations by, “having the ability to pardon, accept resignations, and even vouch for an associate in a deposition, created an environment difficult, though not impossible, for reformers in and outside of the Grant Administration.” The bribery of Secretary of War William Belknap was so blatant that in 1876 the House of Representatives impeached him, forcing his resignation. This was just a run-up to the corrupt bargain that would be the Compromise of 1877. As Jill Lepore characterized it in These Truths, “Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights.” Good times.
The Semicentennial (1826): The nascent United States was facing an unsteady transition from the Founding Fathers’ generation to its successor generation; both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826. The original nepo baby president, John Quincy Adams, carried a whiff of illegitimacy about him. In 1824 he had lost both the popular and Electoral College votes but won in the House of Representatives due to a deal with Henry Clay. America’s first populist, Andrew Jackson, infuriated by what he saw as a corrupt bargain between Clay and Adams, was already plotting his 1828 campaign.
The state of American democracy in 2026 does not seem strong — but this was the case in 1976, 1926, 1876, and 1826 as well. And the genius of the United States is that its founding document is so damn inspiring that it inspires successive generations of Americans to work hard for that more perfect union:
Ossoff is right. Between 1826 and 1876 the United States fought a war to eliminate slavery.
Between 1876 and 1926 the United States expanded the voting franchise to include women.
Between 1926 and 1976 the United States made good on its Civil War-era promise for African-Americans to be able to cast ballots in the former Confederate states. Subsequently, the voting franchise was extended to individuals over the age of 18.
Between 1976 and today the ability to vote early and by mail was greatly facilitated, thereby making it that much easier for more Americans to cast their ballot if they choose to do so.5
There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the current moment. But I have enough faith in my country to predict two truths about what the United States will look like in 2076. First, Americans will be grumpy about the state of American democracy. Second, it will nonetheless be in better shape than it is in 2026.
Happy 250th everyone!
It’s not just Pew, it’s pretty much any survey one can find on this question.
A much smaller fraction of that disillusionment likely comes from hardcore Trump supporters who believe that he has not leaned into blood-and-soil nationalism enough.
Yeah, I know that occasionally Congress has pushed back and the Supreme Court has not always gone along with administration actions. Given this administration’s multidimensional drive to expand executive power, however, these meager efforts seem like weak tea.
Yes that’s a real word.
A fact that even Republicans not named “Trump” like.
As a non-American I do hope you're right.
Hard for me to judge, as someone who isn't familiar in any great depth with much of US history, even if I know the highlights, but it does look to me as though there have been periods previously where presidents have attempted to subvert the good-functioning of the country's democracy for corrupt reasons... but Trump is brazenly attempting to end democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. And he's not really even pretending.
I was 15 in 1976 so I remember the bicentennial, and the months of build-up, very well. The contrast to 250 is striking. Yes, the general mood in the country was downbeat. But the feeling about the bicentennial was upbeat. It was a mood-lifter. I don’t feel that now. 250 is kind of meh. What explains that? Maybe because 1976 was post-Watergate. We were coming out of something. The celebration was a tonic. Now we’re in something, and not sure how, or whether we’re getting out.