As even Vox.com was honest enough to note, America in 1976 was in a far worse place than today, and yet Americans felt better about the country and the future.
Before the results of the 2024 election were known on the evening of November 5, I encouraged everyone to remember their Billy Joel. At the time, I was referring to his 1976 classic, “Angry Young Man,” when the legendary singer-songwriter described an individual that elevated politics above everything else in his life. The man in question wears “working class ties” and is armed with “radical plans.” “He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl, And he’s always at home with his back to the wall. And he’s proud of his scars and the battles he’s lost, And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on his cross And he likes to be known as the angry young man.” In contrast, the speaker has chosen a different path. As he grew older, he “passed the age Of consciousness and righteous rage” and “found that just surviving was a noble fight.” Though he “once believed in causes too,” “had [his] pointless point of view,” “life went on no matter who was wrong or right.” While the speaker acknowledges there’s a “place for the angry young man,” he cautions that those who don’t grow up and recognize the truth that there are limits to activism become “boring as hell” and will go to their graves “as an angry old man.” To me at least, the underlying meaning is simple: While politics is important, there are things in life that are far more so, like family, friends, faith, country, community, and more, and whatever may happen politically, you need to find a way to live your life, immersing yourself in the things you can control, rising above those you can’t, and to update the old biblical quote, have the wisdom to know the difference.
Unfortunately, if the recent freak out over algae in the Reflecting Pool is any indication, a solid percentage of the country, if not half, failed to heed that advice over the past 18 months and perhaps, even more unfortunately, things appear to be getting worse instead of better. Hating the occupant of the Oval Office is one thing, but projecting that hate onto the country itself is quite another. Sadly, it appears that’s precisely what animosity towards President Donald Trump has been metastasizing into as we approach America’s 250th birthday. While it’s no secret that pride in America among Democrats has increasingly been correlated with whether a Democrat was President – Gallup found that the percentage of Democrats who were proud of their country plunged from over 60% to 36% after President Trump returned to office – a comparison between the state of the country and the feelings that it endangered in 1976, our bicentennial, and today, might be even more disturbing. In that regard, the progressive “explainer” website Vox.com, of all places, recently did the comparison. As they noted, the conditions facing the country in 1976 were far less than ideal. “The president who presided over the country’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American servicemembers. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.” Somehow, however, everyone found time to throw “themselves one hell of a party” and surveys at the time found a level of pride and optimism unseen today. When “pollsters asked people how they felt about the country’s future that year, the mood was, improbably, sunny. A Roper survey found more Americans were optimistic than pessimistic about the future by a nearly three to one ratio. More than three-quarters told Gallup the nation had already achieved at least a fair amount of its founding ideals. Somehow, a nation that was in the middle of a genuinely miserable decade looked in the mirror and liked what it saw.”
“Compared to today,” however, “you’ll find the vibes flipped. Roughly 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters the nation is on the wrong track. A majority say its best years are behind it. About three-quarters think today’s children will end up worse off than their parents. Asked a version of that same founding-ideals question from 1976, 77 percent now say the founders would be disappointed in what we’ve become. But just as they were in 1976, the vibes don’t match reality. Set the mood aside and look only at the numbers, and the country that felt so good in 1976 was, by the most important measures, a worse place to be alive than the country that now feels so terrible on its 250th birthday.” From there, Vox proceeded to detail the many ways in which life has measurably and objectively improved in the United States over the last fifty years. This includes life expectancy itself, which has increased from 72.6 years to 79, infant deaths, reduction in cancer deaths, heart disease, even automobile accidents among other things. The crime rate, and the risk of death from violent crime, has also plummeted with 2026 possibly going on to be the lowest year on record. Elsewhere, there have also been major gains in the equality of the sexes and the races. “Women now earn the majority of college degrees. The Black poverty rate sits near a record low. Support for same-sex marriage is now the norm — maybe the single biggest social change from 1976, when homosexuality was criminalized in most states.” There’s also an argument that our personal lives have the potential to be much more fulfilling. We take for granted having access to all of the world’s information in our hands, a personal assistant in the form of the computer to help answer any questions or take us anywhere we want to go, watch or listen to whatever we want, whenever we want, keep us connected with one another more easily. Freedom of mobility has also increased. We can travel the world like never before, enjoying the sights, sounds, and experiences that most could only imagine in 1976.
Beyond our personal lives, the air is much cleaner, free from poisons such as lead, as is the rest of the environment. In 1976, “Rivers literally caught fire: The Cuyahoga in Cleveland had burned so many times it became a national joke, and Lake Erie was widely written off as dead. And things were bad outside Ohio, too. In Los Angeles, the smog got thick enough to keep kids inside at recess and erase the nearby mountains from view. Since 1970, however, the combined emissions of the six main air pollutants the EPA tracks have fallen 78 percent — even as the economy nearly quadrupled in real terms, the population grew by tens of millions, and Americans drove far more miles. That split, with growth going one way and pollution the other, is one of the least celebrated but most consequential triumphs of the past half-century, the product of legislative efforts and technological response. And lead? It’s essentially disappeared from the air. Pick a metric more or less at random, and the line usually runs the right way. This is not a matter of cherry-picking a few flattering numbers. It is the overwhelming direction of the evidence, across health, wealth, safety, rights, even the basic cleanliness of the physical world an American walks through every day. Measured against its own recent past, the US is in some of the best shape it has ever been.”
Rarely do I find myself agreeing with whatever Vox chooses to write, but in this case, it’s almost impossible to disagree, and yet, as they put it, “what’s with the bad vibes?” Sadly, even armed with all of these facts and figures, they are unable to answer this question accurately in my opinion. After pointing out that the country still has challenges – bizarrely singling out climate change, increased costs of housing, and a lack of faith in government, which is a vibe more than anything else – they conclude by noting, essentially, that things aren’t always what they seem, ending with a platitude among platitudes, the equivalent of sometimes, it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. “Which brings us back to a tale of two birthdays. In 1976, Americans had less of nearly everything you can count, and, yet, they reported feeling good about the future anyway. In 2026, we have more, and we don’t. Just as it can be for a person, a country’s mood is a poor instrument; it measures the story we are telling ourselves more than the lives we are actually living. For all our pessimism about the state of the nation, more than three-quarters of Americans say they are satisfied with their own lives. The Americans crowding New York Harbor in 1976 were cheering a country that was sicker, dirtier, more dangerous, and less free than the one we live in now. But they were right to cheer; the line was already bending the right way, and it kept bending. It turns out a nation can travel a long way, even while it is convinced it is going nowhere.”
While this might be true to a point, for whatever reason Vox refuses to consider that the bad vibes they describe are driven almost entirely the product of their own progressive readers, who by almost every metric are less patriotic, less proud, and indeed, in many cases, less happy if not outright admitting to mental health problems. What is it about this cohort that makes them so uniquely dissatisfied and miserable? Though it might be easy to attribute the majority of this to President Trump, who for whatever reason drives them uniquely crazy, that doesn’t seem to be the full story. Even his most ardent detractors must know that presidents come and go, and in barely two years the Trump Era, whether you love him or hate him, will come to close. This suggests a deeper, more fundamental reason, something lurking beneath the surface of what many jokingly (or not so jokingly) refer to as Trump Derangement Syndrome. Though I can’t say for sure, it strikes me that a lack of control could be the root cause. In study after study, a perceived lack of control over events has been found to be a primary driver of unhappiness, anxiety, and depression. While no one appears to have studied the topic specific to politics, elsewhere – at work, in parenting, during the pandemic, and more – people who feel they are in control, are happier and have a more positive outlook than otherwise. At the work place, “This study’s findings have implications for public health and occupational policies, as they underscore the importance of reducing prolonged exposure to low job control to protect against the risk of major depression in the working population.” On parenting, “Consistent with a cognitive theory of emotional problems, results demonstrated that a sense of control served a protective function for mental health outcomes. A higher sense of enduring control predicted lower levels of psychological distress for new parents, and increases in control over time predicted decreases in depression and anxiety.” During the pandemic, “These findings emphasize that external factors are important to the sense of control and the importance of preserving the sense of control in situations where the removal of personal freedoms is necessary, such as public health emergencies.”
Therefore it certainly stands to reason, that progressives – who were firmly convinced that President Trump would be defeated not once, but twice, and who have not been remotely shy about expressing their ire at their own citizens – are suffering as a result of the belief that they’ve lost control over politics, and at least temporarily, the direction of the country. After all, it was less than twenty years ago they were assured they were the ones the world had been waiting for – or more accurately, as President Barack Obama put it “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek” – and that demographics was destiny, that is the progressive way of running the country was permanently entrenched, never to be undone. President Trump, however, has completely shattered that illusion, undoing almost everything any recent Democrat President has ever done and even ushering in fundamental change such as overturning Roe vs. Wade. As a result, progressives feel they are powerless, adrift, unable to take control over events as they were promised, but this is just another reason that everyone should remember their Billy Joel. Aside from being temporary by design, political control in the United States has always been largely an illusion for most of us. Certainly, we have some influence, we cast our votes, we have our debates, and if we are active, we organize and engage, but ultimately the vast majority of us are not in a position of power and never will be. We are not the governors, but the governed, not the decision makers, but those subject to the decisions. This means that we’re never in charge, that our way of running things was never the only way to do so, whatever we may have believed. Instead, the only thing we are in charge of to any extent is our own lives, how we spend our time, who we associate with, and what we enjoy.
If we accept that – I certainly have my moments to be sure, but it’s the reality of being a largely unread blog publisher – we can focus on what truly matters, as I believe the majority of my fellow conservatives and Trump supporters have done. As I mentioned recently on X, whether it was Biden or Trump in office, Obama or Trump, or George W. Bush for that matter, I didn’t change a thing in my personal life, or how I chose to celebrate the Fourth of July. If we can add to that the acknowledgement that the United States remains the best place on Earth to do so and that the present – with all the wonders of modern life at our disposable – is the best time, we can celebrate America’s 250th birthday regardless of who’s in power today or tomorrow. I sincerely urge all of my progressive friends to do the same, and let’s throw ourselves one hell of a party.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 