THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY; THEY SELL COLA DIFFERENTLY THERE:

It was a different country. Despite the trauma of the 1960s and early 1970s, people were glad, even relieved to be able to celebrate being American.

Whoever does that now will be seen as divisive. https://t.co/lpXVJnVMKC

— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) May 22, 2026

This was the last gasp of a shared culture and a mass media, which only two years earlier had gone all-in on removing Richard Nixon from power. As I wrote on July 4th, 2020, in-between Walter Cronkite droning on about the impending eco-disasters of a new ice age and overpopulation to viewers of the CBS Evening News, and episodes of M*A*S*H as a thinly-disguised Vietnam War commentary full of moral equivalence between the US, North Korea and Communist China, CBS could still muster up some of its biggest stars to host “Bicentennial Minutes” on the important events that led up to the nation’s founding. Today, the network would likely draft Stephen Colbert and Colin Kaepernick [hey, remember them, 2026 readers?] to opine on how the nation was born in Original Sin. Perhaps it was the lack of a 24-hour cable news cycle, or the increasingly left-leaning network remembering that it still needed to serve a wide swatch of viewers. In any case, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Bicentennial proved that as late as 1976, the Democratic Party-dominated overculture still offered room for all, decades before today’s “no escapism” mentality on the elite left.

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