What happened? By every measure, life in 2026 is far better than life in 1976. In 1976 lead had not been banned in paint, and we were only one model year into cars with catalytic converters that required unleaded gasoline. Real (constant dollar) median family income is up 55% over the last 50 years. Real personal (individual) median income is up 60% over the last 50 years. The median new home in 2019 was 2,500 square feet, compared to 1,500 square feet in 1970. In 1975, 13.9% of adults in the U.S. had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2024 38.7% of U.S. adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, a 2.78X improvement. For Black Americans, the numbers are 4.8% in 1975 and 27.7% in 2024, a 5.77X improvement.
Some things have collapsed in price. A $500, 25-inch television in fall of 1975 cost the equivalent of $3,000 today.
When a 25-inch television was "big"
But today a 55-inch, 4K, QLED TV can be found for less than $300.
We have all the information in the world available at our fingertips. We have advanced an advanced GPS navigation system in our pocket. We can literally video call someone anywhere in the world for free from a smartphone app or from a laptop web browser in Facebook or in Google Contacts. Back in 1976, a ten-minute phone call from Los Angeles to New York would have cost $3.75, or $22.60 in today’s dollars.
Back in 1976, to find a book in the library you used a card catalogue. By the time I was in college in the mid-1980s, you could search for a book on a mainframe terminal, but most students still used the card catalogue, because that is what they were used to. Looking up financial information on a business required poring over encyclopedia sized volumes of financial data, published quarterly, by organizations like Moody’s Analytics. Today, people day trade using smartphone apps with real-time financial data.
Before the Apple "Stocks" app, there was Moody's
We can answer our door from the other side of the world via a video doorbell and smart phone app. If we forget to adjust our thermostat before we leave on vacation, we can do that from an app. We can start our car in the airport parking lot to get it warming up or cooling down while we are getting our luggage at the baggage carousel.
Despite all this advancement, more is to come. We are on the cusp of a technological revolution. You can take a Waymo robotaxi in Midtown Atlanta. Delivery robots meander on the sidewalks in Midtown. Commuters in Teslas relax as their car drives itself to their office. We lived through the Internet “dot-com” boom, and now we are in the AI boom. AI is still and infant, and but it will grow up fast. Early adopters like software developers are seeing significant productivity improvements.
We have a lot to celebrate this year. But for many, the 250th anniversary of America does not seem to be a cause to celebrate. We must ask, why?
I was born in 1966, a month to the day after America’s 190th birthday. As a result, I experienced the wide-eyed awe of an elementary school aged child in the 1970s. And perhaps the biggest event I remember from the 1970s was America’s Bicentennial celebration. For those not around back then, a little background. First, they called it “America’s Bicentennial Year”, and the celebration started not on July 4th, 1976, but a year earlier, on July 4th, 1975, and culminated on July 4th, 1976. The “Bicentennial” (as most called it) became a pop-culture phenomena. On a handful of airplanes Delta Air Lines changed its red, white, and blue “widget” by the boarding door so that the red base had alternating red and white stripes, and the large blue portion had white stars. The modified airplanes were featured in all the print materials back then, such as postcards and timetables. Braniff Airways went a step further and had artist Alexander Calder, who had previously developed a special scheme for one of their aircraft, design one for the Bicentennial.
Bicentennial airplanes
In the 1970s, restaurants and gas stations often had promotions that included collectables such as drinking glasses. The Bicentennial opened that up significantly. Glassware commemorating each state.
Congress authorized the U.S. Mint to produce Bicentennial quarter, half-dollar, and dollar coins featuring “1776-1976” instead of the minting year. As a result, there are no quarter, half-dollar, and dollar coins with “1975” or only “1976” embossed on them. Over 1.6 billion Bicentennial quarters were minted.
The answer to the “why?” question of the lack of interest in the 250th anniversary of the USA comes down to one, simple answer: Some people have poisoned it. It did not happen yesterday. It has happened over the last 20 plus years. The last time the country was united was September 12th, 2001. Just ten months earlier, the country was divided over the 2000 election. An election between southern Democrat, the sitting vice president, and a Republican southern governor, the son of the immediately previous Republican President, became a divisive election. Bill Clinton and Al Gore defeated George H. W. Bush in 1992. 2000 would relitigate the 1992 election, but additionally, Democrats sought to avenge the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. Presidential elections were sometimes close, and sometimes not prior to 2000. But starting in 2000, most presidential elections were much closer, and repeatedly litigated. Close elections bring claims of voter impropriety. Claims voter suppression on one side and claims of vote fraud on the other. And the story flip-flops depending on which side won. Each side seeks to motivate its most extreme elements to turn out to vote, and each side claims every election is a existential event. And each side claims life is horrible and this upcoming election represents salvation. In 1984, Ronald Reagan ran for reelection on the slogan “Morning in America.” I know of no presidential reelection campaign since where an incumbent has run on a positive promotion of their record. Every reelection campaign since has run on demonizing the opponent, which was the norm of a challenger’s campaign.
But it is more. In 1976 the second Monday of October was Columbus Day. Today, the statue of the namesake of Columbus, Ohio, a gift from the people of Genoa, Italy, is sitting in storage, removed from public display for fear of vandals. Every person, every event, now must be deconstructed through a lens of oppressor and oppressed. Nothing done by the United States can be considered “good” because the United States inherently bad. This is not new. At one time some progressives felt the German rocket scientists brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip meant we could not be proud of beating the Soviets to the Moon. Some were disappointed and wished the Soviets had beaten the U.S. Never mind the Soviets had Operation Osoaviakhim and did the same thing as the U.S., brining German scientists to the Soviet Union. Like I said, this is not new, but it is much bigger now. A fringe philosophy found only in the most hard-core leftists in the 1960s is now the mainstream position of the majority of the political left. Even “center-left” politicians modify their speech to not trigger the majority of the political left.
The city of Buffalo, New York had a large celebration of Somalia’s independence day on July 1st, and the next day cancelled the planned July 4th fireworks. While progressives wring their hands about the United States independence day, there is no hand-wringing about the disturbing history of Somalia, its oppression of the northern territory (the former British protectorate), which included the Isaaq genocide of perhaps as many as 200,000 civilians in the Northern Territory.
Several years ago, an HOA in California banned the flying of the American flag. Progressives looking to buy homes are turned off when they see the U.S. flag displayed on houses in a prospective neighborhood. It blew up this month as people started putting up flags and the HOA started fining them. Progressive Texas state representative James Talarico, now running for the U.S. Senate, calls the U.S. Flag “a complicated symbol.” Talarico’s denomination, the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA), fresh off of a 433 to 44 vote against a resolution that would have banned ministers from practicing polyamory, then voted against commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States and alternatively passed a resolution “Standing Against White Christian Nationalism,” which conflated the semiquincentennial with [checks notes] “White Christian Nationalism”? Pastors in polycules is totally normal but celebrating the 4th of July is “White Christian Nationalism.” Got it.
How on Earth did it get to this? One might say: “Yes, but we have been through a lot recently. COVID. The failure in Afghanistan. Political infighting. Significant inflation. People are feeling beaten down. Defeated. You can’t expect us to celebrate.” Except, if you recall, the Bicentennial celebration started on July 4th 1975, sixty-five days after the Fall of Saigon. So don’t give me the failure in Afghanistan as an excuse. “But the political environment”, one might reemphasize. Do you remember something called “Watergate”? How about the resignation of President Richard Nixon, which happened less than one year before the start of the Bicentennial year? The Watergate Hearings consumed 1973, and impeachment hearings consumed much of May and June of 1974. “Fair points but look at how expensive life is in America today with all of the inflation over the last several years.” I suggest you Google “Arab Oil Embargo.” In October 1973, OPEC proclaimed an oil embargo on the United States after we started Operation Nickel Grass to resupply the Israeli Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. Gasoline shortages caused long lines to buy gas. President Nixon asked stations to voluntarily not sell gas on the weekends. 1974 saw some states implement gasoline rationing using the “Odd/Even system” where you could only buy gasoline on certain days based on the last digit of your car’s license plate.
Brother, can you spare a gallon?
It triggered a lengthy recession that lasted from November, 1973 to March 1975. And while recessions usually do not cause inflation, that was not the case this time. In 1973, inflation was 8.7%, in 1974 it was 12.3%, in 1975 it was 6.9% and in 1976 it was 4.9%. So gas prices and inflation in the years leading up to 2026 are not that significantly different from the years leading up to 1976. So, what changed?
Mindset is what changed. Too many people think things are currently bad. The number of people on mood altering medications and the number of people in counseling have exploded. I think a lot of this is driven by the very technological advances that have made life easier. We saw news go from a few events a day phenomenon, a morning paper, an evening national television news broadcast, followed by a local television news broadcast, to 24/7 cable news in the 1980s, news websites in the 1990s, to social media in the 2000s, to smartphone apps and alerts today. No wonder anxiety is up. But this is not recent. A decade ago, my wife and I were on a European river cruise. All the passengers on the cruise were Americans. The Brexit vote happened the day before, and in almost no time everyone knew the outcome because of their smartphones. The demographics of European river cruise customers is narrow: High earning, politically active, over age 65 Americans. There was a pall over these people, combined with uncertainty and anxiety. They thought the U.K. staying in the EU was a given. How would Brexit affect an upper middle-class retired American? It wouldn’t. But these people found cause to worry.
Hope, and Caution.
In April 2024 at UNC-Chapel Hill, when pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to lower the American flag so they could raise the Palestinian, a large group of fraternity members, fearing the protesters were intending to vandalize and destroy the American flag after they removed it, grabbed the flag to prevent it from touching the ground, then surrounded and protected the flag and the flagpole as the protesters pelted them with water bottles and other debris.
The future belongs to bold.
The positive about this is there is an entire cohort of Gen Z, mostly young men, who are increasingly patriotic and increasingly religious. Christianity is rebounding in Gen Z men. At the same time, we see a virulently anti-American cohort of Gen Z Democratic Socialist politicians being elected by a large number of Gen Z supporters, Starbucks socialists and MacBook Marxists sitting in coffee shops posting on their iPhones about how bad they have it. These same Democratic Socialists who on July 4th think America is some kind of crime against humanity are always silent on November 7th which is the Victims of Communism Day. Of course, they will say real communism has never been tried. This likely means the “Culture Wars” will continue, as will political fracturing. But the hope is political fracturing is usually temporary, and births a new cycle of more normal politics. FDR had to purge the communists and socialists from his administration, the 1970s were more politically normal than the radical 1960s, and we will get through this too.
In 1975, a beaten down country, licking its wounds from an unwinnable war, suffering from hostility due to its support of Israel, coming out of the worst presidential political scandal in the country’s history, economically coming out of a long, 17-month recession, politically deeply divided, decided it was time to celebrate. And we did it big. That we can’t today is not an indictment of America. It is an indictment of all those malcontents who poisoned the well.
