It was July 4, 1976, nearly 50 years ago, when ABC News correspondent Matt Pressman covered America’s Bicentennial Celebration in the Big Apple as legions of celebrants sang classics like “America the Beautiful,” applauded countless paraders dressed like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and cheered the Tall Ships passing in review by the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

As the newsman strolled among the crowds that bright and sunny Sunday thrusting his microphone in front of a seemingly endless stream of beaming faces on the city’s streets and piers, he heard expressions of gratitude and joy, over and over. Similar scenes were being repeated in parks, stadiums, and town squares for fireworks, parades, speeches, concerts, and civic ceremonies in every major city in the nation, as well as many not-so-major towns and villages.

“Everybody is in the spirit of the birthday mood,” a glowing middle-aged African American woman told Pressman. “Yesterday morning on the train, one lady got on and said, ‘Happy Birthday everybody!’ and everybody chimed in and was singing ‘Happy Birthday, America.’ It was a beautiful spirit.”

A bespectacled and grinning Hispanic man leaned into Pressman, exclaiming, “I am feeling this is a wonderful country, a lot of freedom, there is no other place like here. People should thank God that they are free and can do what they want.”

Another woman, a blonde sporting dark sunglasses and a huge smile, declared, “I think people are closer together today than they have ever been in a long time. I saw us pulling apart 10 years ago, and people becoming antagonistic. I think this weekend shows us what we are really like, we are one.”

As Pressman strolled along the harbor where thousands of New York City natives and visitors sang and danced, talked and laughed, with the majestic masts of docked Tall Ships in the immediate background, every third person seemed to be holding a Kodak Instamatic camera with both hands in front of their faces as they snapped away.

That evening, as the spectacular New York City Bicentennial fireworks display explosively painted the night sky in red, white, and blue, millions of American men, women, and children lining all sides of the harbor began singing the National Anthem, tentatively at first, according to ABC News, but then quickly with passion and reaching a proud crescendo.

What made the celebration especially poignant, according to many of those interviewed by Pressman, was the fact the unity and patriotic fervor so vividly displayed that day and evening came on the heels of the final years of America’s costly involvement in the war in Vietnam that our politicians would not let our soldiers, sailors, and airmen win, with it culminating in the humiliating video of the last U.S. helicopter lifting off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. Left behind were millions of South Vietnamese to face the horrors of occupation and enslavement by the North Vietnamese communists. Legions of the newly oppressed would become the “Boat People,” the several generations of South Vietnamese who somehow escaped to America in the years after.

That same period also featured the triumphant 1972 re-election of President Richard M. Nixon, which was shortly thereafter followed by the Watergate scandal, and the first American Chief Executive to be faced with a choice — resign or be impeached and convicted. Nixon was succeeded by his appointed vice president, former House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford. It was Ford, who would oversee much of the Bicentennial Celebration, working with two congressional commissions, the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC) and later the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA).

Those years, from 1972 through the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, were unlike any previously experienced by Americans, yet they retained much of the strength and spirit that had built the freest, most prosperous nation on Earth, so when it came time to celebrate the nation’s 200th birthday, people of virtually every political stripe, economic class, and social status sang together as one as the fireworks ignited in the Bicentennial’s night sky.

There were dissenters from this American consensus, consisting mainly of an estimated 5,000 or so leftists who showed up on the National Mall for what organizers billed as “The Peoples’ Bicentennial.” There was no violence and only a handful of people were arrested, but the event was a failure because organizers had predicted at least a quarter of a million demonstrators would participate.

The Violent Spirit of 2026

Fast forward to 2026 as the nation begins its 250th birthday celebration. So much is different in so many ways — many obvious, some not so much, that it hardly seems like the same nation. For one thing, in all of the reams of videotape shot that day 50 years ago during Pressman’s reporting, one thing was all but invisible. As Pressman did his many “Man-on-the-Street” interviews, a lone uniformed New York policeman is seen off in the corner of one quick frame.

The reality is that in 1976, international terrorism had not yet metastasized to anything approaching what it became with the September 11, 2001 attacks, attack drones were unknown, there was no internet from which cyberattacks could be launched, and the Secret Service’s primary focus was on assuring security of the president and visiting foreign dignitaries. As seen in Pressman’s reporting, security screening at public events 50 years ago was such that Americans could approach, observe, and participate in major events like the Bicentennial with little visual law enforcement presence.

The differences between then and today are so great that, were a “Back to the Future”-esque time machine available, transporting somebody standing on the National Mall during the Bicentennial Celebrations of 1976 to the same spot for the July 4, 2026, festivities nearing, that person would likely be amazed by the multiple layers of security, including multiple screening entry, exit, and checkpoints, restricted zones, counter-sniper teams, legions of uniformed law enforcement from numerous federal, state, and local agencies, the presence of National Guardsmen, and hovering seeing-eye drones operated remotely observing everybody. 

As if to punctuate the deterioration in the law enforcement and security atmosphere, it was announced on June 16 that FBI officials had stopped a conspiracy numbering dozens of participants who planned to mount multiple attacks on UFC 250, the first-ever professional fighting event held on the South Lawn of the White House as the opening event in President Donald Trump’s signature entertainment and commemorative happenings in Freedom 250. The conspirators planned to wound, maim, and murder with drones, explosive devices, and snipers in an assault that would have turned the event into an epochal bloodbath had it occurred.

But the most significant fact about that foiled conspiracy is that hardly anyone today would reasonably be surprised that it was being planned and didn’t happen only because of the fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement officials across the nation are and have for months been on high alert regarding violence against Freedom 250. Beginning with the George Floyd riots in 2020, incessant big city street violence and terrorist attacks have become all-too-familiar topics in the constant 24-hour news cycle of 2026.

Rising Anti-Americanism

And it’s not just radical leftists like those in Antifa who have conducted repeated riots in California, Washington, and Oregon. Multiple surveys in recent years have exposed growing anti-American views of great intensity, especially among Democrats.

In 1976, neighbors and strangers together celebrated 200 years of independence while recovering from Watergate and Vietnam. Fifty years later, their children and grandchildren are preparing to celebrate 250 years of independence while arguing over whether the nation itself is worthy of celebration.

Gallup’s report of its most recent surveys in this arena was headlined “American Pride Slips to New Low,” and the subtitle declared that “pride among Democrats tumbles, while independents also hit new low, more than offsetting increase among Republicans.” The specific numbers included 36% of Democrats saying they are extremely or mostly proud of being Americans. As recently as 2002, 92% of Democrats said they were extremely or mostly proud of being Americans.

The results among Independents were much closer to the Democrats, with the Independent high-point since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 coming in 2004 at 86% and the low point being 53% in the most recent survey. Similar trends are seen when the data is broken out by generations from Boomers to Gen Zers.

Virtually the exact opposite result was found by Gallup among Republicans, with 92% being extremely or mostly proud of being Americans. Even at their lowest point thus far in the 21st century, in 2022, fully 84% of Republicans expressed their pride in America.

“As might be expected given the partisan trends, Democrats are largely responsible for declining U.S. pride within each generation. Comparing data from the past 10 years with the prior 15 years, pride among Democrats in each birth cohort has declined by at least 10 points, with larger drops of 21 points for Gen X Democrats and 32 points for millennial Democrats,” the Gallup report said.

Not all Democrats endorse violence to achieve political ends, to be sure, but the bottom-line fact here is that three assassination attempts have been mounted against Trump since 2024, and Turning Point USA Founder and Chief Charlie Kirk, a conservative political activist who was also becoming a prominent voice among evangelical Christians, was assassinated last year.

Paralleling those sad events has been a progressively more bluntly threatening rhetorical culture marked by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-N.Y.) recent declaration that Democrats are “in an era of maximum warfare,” as well as revelations that multiple violent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demonstrations in Minnesota, California, and New Jersey were funded by wealthy domestic and foreign donors associated with far-Left progressive Democratic Socialists causes.

Vast Expansion of Government Programs and Debt

Sustained political violence shakes the foundations of individual liberty in a democratic republic, but a multitude of more subtle threats to traditional American constitutional values and guarantees exploded in the five decades between 1976 and 2026. The two likely most significant are the number of federal programs and total federal spending and debt, plus the deepening intrusion of government regulations in every virtually every aspect of every American’s daily existence.

On the spending and debt side of the ledger, the annual federal budget total in 1976 was $366 billion, while the Gross Domestic Product was valued at $1.9 trillion (thus putting the government’s share of the GDP at 21%), and the national debt was just under $630 billion. Compare those numbers with today’s annual federal spending total of $7.1 trillion, a national economy valued at $30 trillion, with the government GDP share now at 24%, and the national debt pushing almost $40 trillion.

In other words, the annual federal spending and national debt totals have exploded to staggering heights, at 1,840% and 6,150%, respectively! To put those numbers in context, the U.S. population was 218 million in 1976, and it is today more than 340 million. That represents a 57% increase in population.

The same pattern is found in the federal regulatory arena. When Americans celebrated the Bicentennial in 1976, the major economic sectors subject to the most federal intervention included banking, transportation, farming, fossil fuel-based energy, and the beginnings of environmental protection. Today, as the country approaches its 250th birthday, all of the preceding sectors remain subject to deeply intrusive federal supervision, but that regulation has been expanded to include health care, higher education, housing and mortgages, retirement savings, telecommunications, the internet infrastructure, data privacy, artificial intelligence (AI), carbon emissions, wetlands, and land use in general.

The veritable flood of new regulations followed the expansion by the government into additional sectors. To illustrate, consider that the Federal Register in 1976 contained 47,000 pages. Recent editions are double that size. Similarly, the Code of Federal Regulations contained about 70,000 pages in 1976, compared to today with more than 180,000 pages. It is almost no exaggeration to say no area of daily American life is exempt from costly and intrusive bureaucratic interference.

Abortion, Identity Wars, and Foreign Threats

To those economic sector observations, our focus should also include the increasingly decisive role of federal courts in defining and redefining the nation’s moral fabric. In 1976, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide was barely three years old, and about 1.4 million unborn babies had been killed. Today, in 2026, more than 60 million unborn babies have been killed through abortion as a result of the Roe decision.

Despite the repeal of Roe with the court’s landmark 2022 Dobbs decision, however, the abortion industry has shifted its focus to the virtually unrestricted use of mifepristone-based chemical abortion pills that can be ordered on the internet and used at home without medical supervision. An estimated 3.3 million abortions have been carried out since Dobbs, and as many as 63% of those involved the use of chemical agents. Given the mail-order and black market availability of such pills, it is presently all but impossible to know the actual total number of chemical abortions.

In addition, were that time machine switched back on, virtually none of the happy people at any of the hundreds of Bicentennial events across the nation in 1976 would have a clue if they were asked their view of allowing transgendering surgeries on children, or the historical reliability of the critical race theory of white racism as the key to understanding the founding of America, or whether government authorities at any level should have the power to close church assemblies while allowing bars, strip joints, and casinos to remain open for months on end.

Visitors from 1976 would also be amazed to discover that Election Day in America now has been stretched into weeks and months, with mail-in ballots enabling massive voter fraud. Similarly, they knew nothing during the Bicentennial era of terms like MAGA, The Squad, or LGBTTQQIAAP2S+, and odds are great they would be totally mystified by the thought that a freshmen senator named Biden would some day be in the Oval Office and would open the U.S. border to an estimated 22 million illegal immigrants, including thousands of hardened criminals, mental patients, spies, pedophiles, con artists, and bums.

Something else those from 1976 would find incomprehensible today is the rise of the China they knew under Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution, and the underground church becoming America’s number one superpower nuclear-armed rival on the world stage.

Decline of Christianity

Perhaps the change that would most perplex Americans of 1976 would be the startling decline in the influence of Christianity on the nation’s culture and politics. Gallup data over the five decades clearly demonstrate the decline, with 70% or more of Americans belonging to a church, synagogue, or other house of worship, and 30-40% of them regularly attending services from 1937 through 1976. Today, despite some evidence of a reversal in progress, only about 45% of Americans belong to a church or synagogue — and barely 30% attend services weekly or otherwise regularly.

Many of those transported from 1976 to today would recall an impromptu six-minute speech delivered by former California Governor Ronald Reagan in his concession remarks at the Republican National Convention just 46 days after the Bicentennial Celebration. In an echo from Reagan’s then-famous 1964 nationally televised address on behalf of GOP Presidential Nominee Barry Goldwarer, Reagan reminded the convention delegates that “we are told that we must choose between a Left or Right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a Left or Right. There is only an up or down — up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

Reagan concluded his remarks by challenging his audience that “whatever else history may say about us, let it never be said that we failed to keep faith with those dreams of freedom and a special kind of individualism that has always been the genius of America.”

Reagan so electrified the convention hall that many reportedly were asking themselves afterward if they should have nominated the Californian instead of Ford, who went on to lose in November to Democrat Jimmy Carter. Much of the groundwork for the explosion of government spending and regulation would be laid by the former Georgia governor. And it would be under Carter that Iranian Islamist radicals would take as hostages 52 American diplomatic personnel working in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. The hostages would linger there for 444 days, until January 20, 1981, when Reagan was inaugurated as Carter’s successor and brought them home. It was the start of a respite that would only last eight years before the decline would resume.

Judging by the troubling trends enunciated above and the consequent loss of individual freedom, moral confidence, and clarity, economic opportunities, and peaceful daily living, Americans today must ask themselves if they are keeping that faith, with either their Lord or their colonial ancestors. 

Despite the troubling signs of our age, Americans have many reasons to be grateful, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins underscored on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Look, I’m first and foremost a citizen of the Kingdom of God, but He’s blessed me by putting me in this country. I’m proud to be an American,” he insisted. “I’m not always proud of what my country does and the policies that they embrace, but … I’ve traveled the world,” Perkins said, explaining that it had made him overwhelmingly thankful for the opportunities and blessings we have here at home. “I’m glad I’m an American, and … as I did when I was willing to put on the uniform as a Marine — I’ll fight for this country. And today, I’m fighting in the political and the cultural arena because I think this country is worth fighting for.”