Yuval Levin outlines concerns about vague descriptions of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
On December 31, The Washington Post carried the headline “Washington Monument illuminated on New Year’s Eve to mark country’s 250th.” The article described an installation that projected patriotic images onto the monument and noted that the display “kicks off a year of events on the National Mall to mark the nation’s 250th.”
Such peculiarly vague locutions, an adjective without a noun, are everywhere in this year’s civic festivities. We say “America’s 250th” or “America at 250.” In 1976, people did something similar by calling that year’s celebrations simply “the bicentennial.” Some call this year “the semiquincentennial,” which is just as indeterminate as “the 250th” but harder to pronounce.
This vagueness is not a coincidence. It points to our uncertainty about how to approach what ought to be a year of patriotic celebration. When you mark a wedding anniversary, you don’t just call it “the 25th.” When you wish someone a happy 40th, they know perfectly well you mean a birthday. But as we approach this civic milestone, we are oddly at a loss for words—because we are unsure quite what kind of occasion we are marking, and therefore how we should mark it.
So let’s ask plainly: What kind of occasion is “America’s 250th”?
The natural answer is that we are celebrating a birthday. America is turning 250 years old, and that calls for a national birthday party.
This is almost instinctively how a lot of our plans are taking shape. The first image projected onto the Washington Monument on New Year’s Eve was a 250-foot birthday candle. Many of the grandest public events being planned aim to feel like a birthday party.
And it makes sense. Abraham Lincoln thought about the founding this way. In 1863, he opened the Gettysburg Address with words so familiar that we can forget what image they were meant to convey: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” What happened in 1776, Lincoln said, was that a new nation was conceived and brought forth.
