There’s a split-screen moment happening in America this July that I don’t think we’re talking about honestly enough. On one side: official America250 celebrations, taken over by the current administration from a bipartisan congressional commission, drawing comparatively thin crowds and getting swallowed by political controversy before they even happened. On the other side: World Cup stadiums packed wall to wall, a diverse, loud, genuinely joyful country showing up for something together, at the same moment, in the same country.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s really about soccer.
I’ve spent my career covering the gap between the America political leadership performs for cameras and the America people actually live in and build with each other. This July gave us maybe the cleanest example of that gap I’ve seen in years. When politics tries to manufacture unity around a national milestone, it increasingly can’t get out of its own way — the event becomes about who’s in charge of the narrative rather than the thing being celebrated. When people organically show up for something they actually love, with no permission needed from anyone in Washington, the unity shows up on its own.
There’s a real cultural undercurrent worth naming here too. Soccer’s global culture — its internationalism, its multiracial fan base, the way it doesn’t map neatly onto America’s usual sports tribalism — has been described by some commentators as clashing with “America’s values,” which is a revealing framing in itself. What it actually clashes with is a narrower, older idea of what American identity is supposed to look like and sound like. A World Cup crowd in an American stadium this summer looks like the actual demographic future of this country: multiracial, multigenerational, multilingual, and not particularly interested in litigating who’s “really” American based on how they’re celebrating.
I want to be careful here, because I know how this reads to some of my readers who are rightly skeptical of anything that smells like it’s dunking on patriotism. That’s not what this is. I love this country enough to have put on its uniform. What I’m pointing at is the difference between patriotism as a performance handed down from the top and patriotism as something people build from the ground up when they’re given the room to do it. The World Cup didn’t need a congressional commission or a political fight over who gets credit. It needed a ball, a stadium, and people who wanted to be there. That’s a kind of national unity you can’t legislate into existence, and it’s worth asking why our official institutions keep failing to produce anything close to it.
For Black and urban communities specifically, there’s something worth sitting with in this moment too. Global sports culture — soccer especially — has never asked Black Americans to prove their belonging the way some domestic institutions still do. The crowd at a World Cup match isn’t sorting itself by who’s “authentically” American. It’s just showing up. There’s a lesson in that for how we build community and civic life back home, long after this tournament ends: the events and institutions that actually unify people tend to be the ones that ask the least of you to belong, not the most.
My challenge to readers this week is simple. Notice which spaces in your own life function like the World Cup crowd — open, organic, unifying without asking permission — and which function like the sparsely attended official event, all top-down messaging and low actual buy-in. Invest your time and energy in the former. That’s where the real America250 is actually happening, four years early and without anyone’s permission.
Marcus Hart is the founder of Urban News Journal and host of the Transform U! Live Show.