In the WSJ’s “Free Expressions,” Kyle Smith warns that nostalgia is a vice, a drug, a disease. Don’t fall for it, Smith cautions. Almost nothing was better in the old days. Things tend to get better over time.

It is nonsense to think America was staggering out from underneath Vietnam and Watergate. The average person was not bedeviled by those things. How quickly Richard Nixon transgressed from most-loathed person to being the #1 punchline. After all, didn’t Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, both of whom were running for president in the summer of 1976, represent a new page: a renewal, if you will.

At the end of 1974, which also ended Nixon’s nightmare, America yearned to talk about something positive. That’s a sign of a healthy culture, writes Mr. Smith – a yearning for something positive.

Right around the time we abandoned Saigon to the Communists, the bicentennial took over the American imagination. The spring and summer of 1975 bopped along to the tune of Elton John’s chart-topper “Philadelphia Freedom” which (though it turned out to be about a tennis team) became a sort of unofficial new pop anthem and continued to earn major radio attention throughout 1976.

Will the 2026 celebration turn out better than expected due to a last-minute surge of competence, wonders Mr. Smith. Smith continues:

Regardless of who the political leaders are at any given moment, we’re the best nation that ever was. We should be shouting our appreciation from Hyannis Port to Honolulu.