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As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America is in a pretty foul mood, and I understand why. For starters, Washington is broken, prices are high and rising and AI is scaring the stuffing out of people.
Understanding, however, is not synonymous with agreement. In other words, some complaints about America in 2026 have more empirical weight than others. Crime may be too high, but it’s been going down for a while.
Actually, let’s start there because crime is a good example of how perceptions don’t necessarily reflect reality.
Since 2000, writes Gallup’s polling guru Frank Newport, “Americans’ views of the seriousness of crime nationwide … have averaged 43 percentage points higher than their views of local crime.” People tend to think crime is much worse wherever they don’t live. Although nearly half of Americans think crime is a very serious issue in America, only about 1 in 10 think it’s a big deal in their cities and towns.
But the “where” is often less of an issue than the “when.” I was a little kid in New York City a half-century ago during the celebration of the bicentennial. Crime there and then, was much worse than today. The homicide rate was five times higher. In 1976, the Big Apple, with a million fewer people, saw 1,622 murders (slightly down from 1,645 in 1975). In 2025, NYC saw 309 murders. So far, in 2026, murders are down about 25% from the same point in 2025.
But it’s not just crime. Surveys routinely find that Americans think the country is in much worse shape than they are personally. Even when large majorities of Americans say the nation is in a bad way, equally large majorities say they’re personally doing OK. Last year, a Federal Reserve survey found that only about a quarter of Americans thought the economy was doing well. But about three-quarters said they were personally doing OK. Education in America routinely gets a failing grade, while the same graders often say education in their community is pretty good.
There are understandable reasons for this disconnect. What we think about the country is often filtered through the media (mainstream, partisan and social — all of which have a bad news bias). Also, our perceptions are shaded by ideological commitments. Meanwhile, what we think about our own life is experienced firsthand.
And then there’s nostalgia, which literally means homesickness, but homesickness for the past.
Fifty years ago, America was in many respects much more of a mess than it is today. Inflation, gas lines, crime, unemployment, political violence, race relations, geopolitical tensions — including the just concluded Vietnam War — were not the stuff of a golden age.
And yet, many Americans tell pollsters we were better off 50 years ago. But here’s the thing, lots of people always think things were better 50 years ago. It has been that way since the dawn of polling. What makes people think the past was better isn’t a careful study of statistics, but a lazy inventory of feelings and a lazier outsourcing to media vibes. This tendency didn’t begin with polling, the polling just made it easier to quantify the pull of nostalgia.
Ironically, the “system” so many people — on the left, right and in the middle — heap scorn on for failing the current generation fuels this malaise. Political demagogues, activists, journalists and big corporations seek to exploit or monetize the natural human tendency to pine for simpler, happier times. The Roman poet Horace had a term for such people nearly 2,000 years ago: laudator temporis acti — “a praiser of times past when he was a boy.”
None of this is to say that Americans don’t have real problems. We obviously do (starting with the fact we have a laudator temporis acti in the White House). The problem comes when we think that the easy solutions to those problems can be found by looking in the rearview mirror.
Pick any era and you can find things worthy of nostalgia. But you can also find plenty of things almost no one wants restored. For instance, the infant mortality rate was three times higher in 1976 and 13 times higher in 1926.
I’m a conservative, so I’m the first to concede that the past is worth remembering and studying. But if all you do is cherry-pick the good — real or alleged — while blinding yourself to the bad, you’re not studying the past. You’re grading the present against a past that never was.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The column argues that although public mood is sour ahead of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, many complaints about contemporary America are rooted more in perception than in data, and that the country was in many ways “more of a mess” around the 1976 bicentennial than it is today.
It contends that crime is a prime example of this perception gap: national crime is widely viewed as a crisis, yet people tend to say crime is not a major problem where they actually live, and historically, violent crime — especially homicides in places such as New York City — was dramatically higher in the mid‑1970s than it is now.
The piece notes a consistent pattern in polling in which Americans say the nation is doing badly while simultaneously reporting that they, personally, are doing reasonably well, citing surveys in which respondents pan the national economy or education system but rate their own finances and local schools much more favorably.
It argues that this disconnect is explained in part by how people encounter information: views of the country are filtered through media and partisan narratives that emphasize bad news, whereas views of one’s own life are grounded in direct, everyday experience.
The column maintains that nostalgia plays a powerful role in shaping attitudes, suggesting that many Americans believe the country was better off 50 years ago even though objective measures — such as higher average wealth today and far lower infant mortality compared with 1976 or 1926 — point to substantial improvements over time.
It emphasizes that nostalgia is not a data-driven assessment but a “lazy inventory of feelings” amplified by media and political rhetoric, and that longing for a supposedly simpler past has been measurable in polling for as long as polling has existed.
The piece further argues that political figures, activists, journalists and corporations actively exploit this tendency, turning people into “praisers of times past” and selling the idea that solutions lie in going back to an idealized earlier era, including, in the column’s view, at the highest levels of government.
While acknowledging that the United States faces serious problems today, the column contends that reflexively looking backward for easy answers leads to misdiagnosing those problems; it concludes that responsible conservatism should study the past in full, rather than cherry-picking its virtues and ignoring its flaws, and should resist grading the present against a past that never truly existed.
Different views on the topic
In contrast, some historians of the 1970s describe a phenomenon of “new nostalgia” that emerged precisely because Americans were grappling with Vietnam, Watergate, economic strain and civil rights conflicts, arguing that looking back to an earlier America was not merely lazy sentimentality but a way for people to process rapid change and seek continuity and meaning in their national story.[1]
Accounts of the 1976 bicentennial frequently portray it as a “major cultural phenomenon” that unfolded over several years and culminated in extensive national celebrations, suggesting that many Americans experienced the period as a moment of civic pride and cultural energy rather than primarily as a time of dysfunction and malaise.[2]
Personal reminiscences about the bicentennial often emphasize a powerful sense of unity and participation: writers recall towns festooned in red, white and blue, widespread use of colonial motifs, and broad community involvement in parades and historical pageants, offering a nostalgic vision that implicitly contrasts with what is seen as a more fragmented and less collectively engaged political culture today.
At the same time, historians note that bicentennial nostalgia coexisted with activism that used the founding era as a springboard for reform; the People’s Bicentennial Commission, for example, organized protests and dramatic reenactments to call for environmental protection, racial justice and curbs on corporate profiteering, framing the Revolutionary legacy as a living resource for contemporary movements rather than a distraction from present problems.[1]
Official bicentennial planners and congressional witnesses in the 1970s framed the anniversary as an “era” of rededication to founding principles, envisioning programs that would spur public reflection, volunteerism and local initiative; this perspective treats structured engagement with the past as a constructive response to national turmoil, not as evidence that the country was simply in worse shape than it is now.[4]
Museum and archival initiatives that revisit the 1976 celebrations highlight how bicentennial projects — from “freedom trains” and tall-ship visits to local exhibits and commemorations — invited ordinary Americans to grapple with the complexities of their history, reinforcing the view that nostalgia and historical commemoration, when channeled into hands-on civic and educational efforts, can deepen engagement with current challenges rather than merely distort perceptions of the present.[1][2][3][4]
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