“There’s a kind of exhaustion and resentment — maybe sometimes feeling a little foolish about still feeling attached to some idea of this country that seems like it’s maybe not holding that strong or that healthy anymore.” — Christopher Hooks
Happy fucking birthday, America. Rather than my kind words, they actually adorn the cover of the July 2026 issue of the 175-year-old Harper’s, America’s oldest monthly publication. From one alter kocker to another. It’s no fun getting old.
The Harper’s piece, written by the Texas-based journalist Christopher Hooks, is a funereal essay about his travels around an exhausted America. It began as a reported account of America250 — the bipartisan commission set up in 2015–2016, at the end of the Obama era, to organise the semiquincentennial celebrations. Bipartisan? Internal bureaucratic dysfunction. Disagreements about purpose. Trumpian lawsuits. NDAs. Blah, blah, blah. Hooks found it demoralising. The landscape of Washington DC, he writes mournfully, is didactic and insistent. Some alter kocker is always trying to teach you something.
But some people do, indeed, have something to teach us. Hooks’ piece ends with Thaddeus Stevens — the club-footed, cranky, ugly radical Republican congressman who was born a few years after the Constitution was ratified. Stevens spent most of his long life believing in perfect racial and ethnic equality, helped frame the 14th Amendment as a second founding father, and died deeply disappointed. And, of course, that disappointment would only be compounded if he could see what Christopher Hooks saw in his recent trip around the contemporary United States.
Dear America — happy fucking birthday. Lots of love, uncle Thaddeus.
