The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. It’s a program that’s been hacked. It’s so many things—horrific and magnificent, good and evil, full of promise and cursed—as it nears its 250th birthday. I talk about it as if it’s one thing, but it’s really a thousand things.
It’s the masked ICE agent who shot Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it’s also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis with their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past—and present and future. Before 1865, the US was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, anti-abortion terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It’s Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental groups, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate organizations active today. It’s its contradictions, its conflicts.
It’s 340 million people, including nearly 2 million prisoners—a population bigger than 12 US states. That’s always made me think of prison as a kind of 51st state, one with almost no representation.
It’s a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that gave us nonviolent resistance’s most poetic voice, Martin Luther King Jr., who was shot on a motel balcony in Memphis. They say King stepped onto that balcony to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose version of the song Precious Lord King loved. It’s the country that brought the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill. It’s its best and worst people and products.
At its core, the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers. That means it never was and never will be just one thing—even if it has one federal government that’s currently a catastrophic crime scene. It’s tempting to turn the current White House into a symbol for the whole country.
Right now, one-third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and hauled away, leaving an open wound you can see in aerial photos. The rose garden Jacqueline Kennedy planted has been paved over. The lawn was recently covered with a flashy Thunderdome-style arena where toxic masculinity could fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote. It’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners, and former prisoners who aren’t part of that voting population.
It’s the land itself—from the maple and birch forests of the northeast to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with plenty of prairie, swamp, and desert in between. That land existed in various forms not just for millions but for billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US is gone—because it has to end someday, and so does the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises that have been wandering through versions of the Mojave deserts in what’s now California, Nevada, and Arizona for 60 million years, and the people who fought to create protected lands where they might survive a little longer.
But the question now is the US at 250 and what futures it might have. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: in a couple of decades, it will become a majority non-white country, and there’s nothing Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the brave, idealistic, dedicated young people who stepped into the spotlight one after another. We only learned about Renee Good, 37, shot on January 7, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on January 24, through their deaths.Their willingness to face death for what—and who—they believed in mattered deeply.
But on New Year’s Day 2026, while they were still alive, another young person came into power: Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds, the status quo, and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who has been accused of sexual assault) to become mayor of the country’s biggest city—and its first Muslim mayor. He spoke up for all the marginalized and minority communities that make New York City what it is.
On February 8, despite outcry from the right, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage. His halftime show was a celebration—in Spanish—of his beloved Puerto Rico and the musical traditions that come together in his songs. The huge spectacle was striking for the range of its performers and for his insistence on his version of America: a generous, joyful, multilingual one, where anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu—daughter of a refugee from China—won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics. Her performance, full of freedom and joy, cast a shadow over almost all other figure skating before her victory on February 19. She had left the sport, refusing to be another young woman managed and controlled, and then returned on her own terms. After a stunning performance, she skated out of the arena laughing joyously and shouted, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about.”
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on March 28, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in its sheer size and in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I’ve said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I don’t believe Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it. What comes after must include consequences for the criminals and a massive cleanup operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must move forward by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
In the end, I come back to Abraham Lincoln at the battlefield and burial grounds of Gettysburg: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
That is, in one sense, an ideal never yet realized; in another, it’s a moral north that this country, at its best, has been pointing toward for those 250 years.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about Rebecca Solnits essay What is the United States of America nowcovering the essays core ideas its context and its practical takeaways
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What is Rebecca Solnits essay What is the United States of America now about
Its about how the US is not just one single thing Solnit argues that the country is a battleground between two opposing visions a topdown authoritarian whitesupremacist power structure and a grassroots democratic communitydriven movement for justice
2 Why did she write this essay
She wrote it in 2017 right after Donald Trumps election She wanted to offer a more hopeful and accurate way to understand the country than the simple good guys vs bad guys story She argues that the resistance to Trump is just as real and powerful as Trumps rise
3 What is the main difference between empire and nation in the essay
Empire The official topdown system of powercorporations the military the president and laws that protect the wealthy and powerful
Nation The people communities and movements from the ground upprotesters volunteers local organizers and everyday acts of kindness and solidarity
4 Does Solnit think America is hopeless or doomed
No the opposite She argues that the nation is actually stronger and more creative than the empire She believes the real story of America is the ongoing resilient work of ordinary people building a better world not just the failures of its leaders
Intermediate Questions
5 What are some examples of the nation she gives in the essay
She points to the massive Womens March the Standing Rock water protectors Black Lives Matter climate activists and the everyday work of mutual aid networks These are all examples of people acting outside of official government channels
6 How does this essay differ from typical resistance or antiTrump writing
Most antiTrump writing focuses on criticizing the president Solnit shifts the focus from the top to the bottom
