The Republic Needs More Than a Birthday Party
Building Civic Infrastructure for America’s 250th Birthday
A year-long journey of democratic renewal—starting with the hardest conversation of the year
On July 4, 2026, America turns 250 years old.
There will be fireworks. Parades. Commemorative merchandise. Politicians giving speeches about our founding ideals. The usual patriotic pageantry.
But here’s what won’t happen automatically: renewal.
We’ll celebrate what the founders started without asking whether we’re keeping it alive. We’ll toast their courage without examining our own. We’ll wave flags while our capacity to actually be citizens—to practice democracy, not just consume it—continues to atrophy.
Project 2026 exists to change that.
This is a year-long initiative to build civic infrastructure disguised as tradition. Not just for the 250th anniversary, but for the next 250 years. We’re creating rituals, practices, and tools that help ordinary citizens do the hardest work democracy requires: staying in relationship across profound difference.
Starting with Thanksgiving dinner.
Why a Psychiatrist Started This
I need to be honest about why this exists.
For over a decade—long before Trump, long before things got this bad—I’ve watched our democracy fray. Thread by thread. Conversation by conversation. Thanksgiving by Thanksgiving.
I’m a psychiatrist by training. For decades, I’ve sat across from couples who love each other but can barely speak to each other. I’ve watched relationships fracture over misunderstanding, rigidity, contempt. I know intimately what it looks like when the center cannot hold.
And I know what it takes to repair what’s broken: structure, patience, practice. The willingness to stay in the room when every instinct screams to leave.
But knowing how to help two people across a therapy couch doesn’t automatically scale to helping a nation across a chasm.
So I started learning. I studied political history and democratic theory. I talked with friends and family about what ordinary citizens—not politicians, not activists, just regular people—could actually do. I tried things. Some worked. Most didn’t.
Then came 2020. Then 2024.
The toxicity wasn’t just exposed—it was amplified, weaponized, normalized. Family dinners became minefields. Lifelong friendships fractured. People who love each other stopped talking entirely.
And I kept thinking: We’re losing something we might never get back.
Not just political civility. Something deeper. The capacity to be in relationship with people who see the world differently. The muscle memory of democracy itself.
As I watched this unfold, a question haunted me: What will we actually celebrate in 2026? A birthday? Or a funeral?
Project 2026 is my answer to that question.
The Diagnosis: Democratic Atrophy
Here’s what I learned studying societies that survived and ones that didn’t:
Healthy democracies need three things that we’ve lost:
1. A shared national story that honestly integrates all our people—not a sanitized myth, but the full, complex tale of “We the People” striving toward the vision that all are created equal.
2. Meaningful national rituals that bring people together across difference, creating shared meaning through purposeful gathering rather than passive consumption.
3. The empowerment of young people to actively confront injustice and pursue a better world, transforming them from anxious recipients into agents of change.
Our national holidays, once designed to transmit civic ideals and unite us in common purpose, have become mere days off—times for shopping and football, devoid of the content that could serve as unifying ground.
Thanksgiving itself, our most universal gathering, passes each year as an opportunity missed.
Without these elements, democracy becomes an abstract concept we vote on occasionally rather than a living practice we perform together.
And practices atrophy when we stop practicing.
A Light in Dark Times: The Inspiration
Before his untimely death in 2020, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks appeared on the Tim Ferriss Podcast to discuss his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. In that conversation, he offered a prescription for healing fractured democracies—a remedy drawn from one of history’s most enduring survival stories.
For over three millennia, the Jewish people have gathered each spring for Passover, sitting down to enact the Seder—a ritual meal that transforms a family dinner into an act of collective memory, identity formation, and intergenerational transmission.
Through structured storytelling, symbolic foods, and purposeful questions, each generation relives the journey from slavery to freedom. They argue. They disagree. They hold contradictions. But they stay at the table.
And it works. Not because it’s comfortable. Because it’s structured. Because it gives people something to do with their hands when conversation gets difficult. Because it reminds them they’re part of something larger than any individual perspective.
Rabbi Sacks asked: What if democratic societies created something similar?
That question lodged in my mind. As America’s 250th birthday approached and our fractures deepened, I kept thinking: We need this. We need civic rituals that help us practice being citizens before the republic demands it of us.
Project 2026 is my attempt to answer Rabbi Sacks’ call—building toward America’s semiquincentennial with a year of civic renewal, starting this Thanksgiving.
The Treatment Plan: A Year of Civic Ritual
Project 2026 is a twelve-month journey from Thanksgiving 2025 to July 4, 2026, developing civic rituals for key moments in the American calendar.
Thanksgiving 2025: The Opening Ritual
We launch with the Civic Ritual for Thanksgiving—Gratitude in the Age of Contempt for a fractured republic. Thanksgiving is our most universal gathering, the one day when Americans across every political, religious, and cultural divide sit down together. It’s the perfect moment to practice democracy at its hardest, most intimate level: the dinner table.
This ritual provides structure for telling the full American story—the beautiful and the brutal. For asking hard questions. For staying in relationship when every instinct says leave. For practicing gratitude in the age of contempt.
The Year Ahead: Building the Calendar
Over the following months, we’ll develop additional rituals for:
New Year’s / Looking Forward — Setting civic intentions, making commitments to democratic participation
Presidents’ Day — Reflecting on leadership, accountability, and what we demand from those who govern
Memorial Day — Honoring sacrifice while examining what we’re willing to sacrifice for democracy
Juneteenth — Confronting the gap between promise and reality, celebrating ongoing liberation
Independence Day 2026 — The culmination: America’s 250th birthday as a moment of civic recommitment, not just celebration
Each ritual will be:
Structured — Providing psychological safety through predictable form
Adaptable — Allowing families and communities to personalize while maintaining common elements
Action-oriented — Moving from reflection to commitment to actual civic engagement
Crowdsourced — Built with input from thousands of tables, continuously refined based on what actually works
Beyond Ritual: Civic Infrastructure
Project 2026 includes more than rituals. Through Moonshot Press, we’re developing:
Guides and resources for facilitating difficult civic conversations
Tools for democratic practice — how to organize, petition, hold representatives accountable
Stories from tables across America — learning what works, what fails, what surprises us
A growing community of citizens committed to practicing democracy as a daily discipline
The First Test: Thanksgiving 2025
The Civic Ritual for Thanksgiving is where it all begins. And it’s the hardest test.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin warned. His words echo across 249 years to this Thanksgiving, as American families prepare to gather around tables heavy with food—and heavier still with unspoken dread.
The election has passed. The fractures remain.
We sit across from relatives who feel like strangers, citizens of the same nation who can barely speak the same language. We plan escape routes from our own dining rooms. We rehearse neutral topics. We brace for impact.
And I keep thinking: This is not how democracies die—with a bang. They die with a thousand silent dinners where people who love each other can no longer talk.
What if this year could be different?
The Ritual: A Framework for Staying at the Table
Drawing from the Passover Haggadah, the Civic Ritual for Thanksgiving transforms your gathering into an act of civic renewal. It uses our own texts to tell our own story. The full story.
We read from the Iroquois Constitution that influenced our founders—reminding us that democracy wasn’t invented in Philadelphia but learned from peoples who were here first.
We read the Declaration of Independence with all its soaring promises and devastating hypocrisies. Written by men who enslaved others while writing about freedom. Who excluded women while declaring all men equal. Who took land while talking about rights.
We read the Seneca Falls Declaration where women rewrote those same words to demand inclusion.
We read the Gettysburg Address trying to hold a fractured nation together.
We read Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. weaponizing the founders’ own words against their hypocrisy, demanding America become what it claimed to be.
These aren’t just historical documents. They’re our inheritance.
The through-line of people refusing to accept the world as it is and insisting on the world as it should be. Generation after generation taking the broken promise and trying to make it real.
The Structure
Before You Gather: You prepare internally—searching for rigid beliefs, places where passion has hardened into contempt. You set your intention—deciding who you want to be at this table before the moment demands it.
Establishing the Space: You light candles marking the transition from ordinary to sacred time. From contempt to gratitude. From scattered individuals to gathered citizens.
The Four Questions: Why is this gathering different? What are we really hungry for? What do we hope for? What are we willing to give?
The Four Cups: You toast Equality, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—reflecting on how we embody or fail to embody these ideals.
The National Story: You engage with founding documents, imagining yourself present at the Constitutional Convention, actively participating in your own governance.
The Modern Plagues: You name challenges threatening our republic—contempt, tribalism, misinformation, injustice. Recognition is the first step toward remedy.
The Four Citizens: You explore different types of civic engagement, understanding the diversity within our body politic.
The Broken and Narrow Places: You acknowledge where we’re fractured, creating space for lament and hope.
Empowerment Through Action: You commit to specific actions beyond this meal—ways to practice citizenship as a daily discipline.
The ritual holds America’s contradictions with both gratitude and accountability. We celebrate the Constitution’s revolutionary architecture. We honor the Declaration’s vision. And we simultaneously reckon with the injustice and contradictions that marked our origins.
We don’t paper over anything. We hold it all. Both the promise and the betrayal. Both pride and shame, often in the same breath.
Because that’s the truth. And democracy requires truth-telling, even when—especially when—it’s uncomfortable.
What This Moment Demands
The Declaration of Independence contains a radical claim:
“Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
Read that again. The Right of the People.
Not politicians. Not parties. Not institutions. The people—you and me—have the right and responsibility to build the government we need.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1776.
The same is true today.
This Thanksgiving, many will gather for the first time since an election that splintered families. Anxiety about democracy’s future permeates our national consciousness. The challenges feel insurmountable.
Yet we are not condemned to be prisoners of this moment.
The founders didn’t leave us a user’s guide for keeping the republic Franklin warned us about. They left us something better: the architecture and the invitation to continuous creation.
We don’t need revolution. We need renewal.
We need to practice being citizens again. Not just consumers of politics, not just spectators yelling at screens, but actual participants in the work of democracy.
And that work starts small. At a table. With people we love. Practicing the skills democracy desperately needs: listening, holding complexity, staying in relationship, refusing contempt.
An Invitation: Build This With Us
Project 2026 can’t be built by one person. It belongs to all of us. It will only become what it needs to be if we create it together—crowdsourcing not just content but wisdom about what actually helps people connect across difference.
If you’re concerned about where we are as a nation...
If you believe America can still live up to its founding promise...
If you’re exhausted by contempt and ready to practice something better...
Here’s how to join:
1. Use the Thanksgiving ritual. Host it at your table. Try it with family, friends, neighbors. Adapt it to your story. See what works and what doesn’t.
Access our participant and leader guides
A Civic Ritual for Thanksgiving: Gratitude in the Age of Contempt- Participant’s Guide
A Civic Ritual for Thanksgiving: Gratitude in the Age of Contempt- Leader’s Facilitation Guide
2. Share your experience. Tell us what happened. What worked? What failed? What made you uncomfortable? What surprised you? Your wisdom shapes what comes next.
3. Help develop future rituals. Contribute ideas, texts, songs, stories for other moments in the civic calendar. What does a New Year’s civic ritual look like? Memorial Day? Independence Day 2026?
4. Spread the word. The more people who practice, the more we learn. Share with people who care about democracy, who are worried, who are willing to try something hard.
5. Stay engaged. This is a twelve-month journey. More rituals, more practices, more opportunities to participate are coming monthly. Sign up. Show up. Help shape what we’re building.
What I’m Really Asking
I’m asking you to try something uncomfortable that might fail.
To sit at a table with people who see the world completely differently and choose to stay in relationship anyway.
To tell a story about America honest enough to include all of us—the triumphs and the failures, the promise and the betrayal.
To practice gratitude in the age of contempt—not naive positivity, but revolutionary discipline.
To believe that ordinary citizens practicing democracy at dinner tables might actually change something when everything suggests it won’t.
I don’t know if this will work.
I don’t know if ritual can heal what’s broken. I don’t know if we can find our way back to each other. I don’t know if democracy can survive what we’re putting it through.
But I know we have to try.
As a psychiatrist, I’ve learned this: Relationships don’t heal through grand gestures. They heal through small, repeated practices. Through showing up even when it’s hard. Through choosing connection over comfort, again and again and again.
Maybe democracy works the same way.
Maybe the most patriotic thing you can do this Thanksgiving isn’t to win an argument or change someone’s mind. Maybe it’s simply to practice staying at the table.
Maybe the best way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday isn’t with fireworks and speeches. Maybe it’s by building the civic infrastructure—the rituals, practices, and habits—that help us actually be citizens together.
The republic doesn’t need us to have all the answers. It needs us to stay in the room. To keep trying. To refuse to give up on each other.
That’s what Project 2026 asks of you.
Because if not now, when?
And if not us, who?
Learn more and join the journey: Moonshot.Press.
Share your Thanksgiving experience: #CivicRitual
Follow the year-long journey: #Project2026
Together, we’re building something worthy of America’s next 250 years.
—Shimon Waldfogel, MD
Founder, Project 2026
Psychiatrist, Citizen, Concerned American