Thanks for this Derek. Learning about our history helps place our modern challenges in perspective. I find it easy to think about the discouraging state of American society as unique, because it seems unique in my lifetime. But if I widen the aperture to think about other eras and other geographies, much of what we are experiencing now as unprecedented is, in fact, common to societies undergoing rapid change. This is ever so slightly encouraging at a time when the daily news is incredibly discouraging, except for the stock market of course, which is what means the most apparently!
Great read. I hope to live long enough to see a similar reflection on 2026 (maybe if I make it to 2076?). Hopefully someone is compiling a boring report for us to forget right now!
I find it amazing to think how much effort must have gone into making those graphs which were (I believe?) hand drawn.
Personal hobbyhorse, not sure if it isn't mentioned in recent social trends, first I heard of it in this article, but no mention of the global pandemic under a decade old a common life event by both average Americans 100 years apart.
Thank you Derek. What strikes me about your essay is how familiar 1926 feels: technological acceleration, immigration panic, shifting gender roles, anxiety about work, and the sense that modern life was remaking the nervous system before anyone had language for it.
I became an American by choice, not inheritance, and that has made me especially aware of how the country travels before one ever belongs to it. Before it was my country, America reached me as power, promise, market, myth, music, intervention, and ideal.
I love the United States, but I have never needed it to be innocent in order to love it. The 1926 comparison is useful because it reminds us that America has always been rupture and reinvention at once. The question is not whether the country was ever clean. It was not. The question is whether it can remain answerable to what it claims to be.
I wrote more about this in an essay called “America Has No Dirt. The promise is real. So is the dirt”
Derek, you say "In some ways, the Americas of 2026 and 1926 are eerily similar? Life is much better in 2026?"
Really? We are in the midst of a runaway President (with no immunity from the SCOTUS) and a Republican congress sitting idle while collecting their paychecks from this administration.
In 2025-26...
> Millions of low-income and working-class communities have experienced significant losses in federal assistance, healthcare coverage, and overall household resources due to massive social program cuts and tariff-driven inflation.
> The Trump administration has upended public education and health by terminating billions of dollars in federal grants, significantly reducing department staff, and passing massive cuts to Medicaid.
> Since taking office, the Trump administration has frozen or cut billions in scientific grants from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, resulting in terminated clinical trials, staffing exoduses, and significantly reduced grant awards.
> Since Donald Trump took office, Indigenous communities have had administrative actions threatened their tribal lands, erased Indigenous histories on public lands, and disrupted core health and educational services.
> Since taking office, the Trump administration has rescinded or redirected billions in allocated federal infrastructure funding, particularly targeting multimodal, equity, and climate-focused transportation grants. These clawbacks and policy changes have created significant disruptions for state and local infrastructure programs across the country
> Our President doesn't believe in Climate Change, so the abundance of jobs that the Green Energy movement was to start in 2025, with rebuilding from a Fossil Fuel' infrastructure into an Electrification infrastructure, was canceled. Dr Julio Friedmann had written that 'The Work' would be hard, but all types of workers could look forward to employment.
>Since June 2025, sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing lost thousands of positions, and high-paying industries shrank while growth remained concentrated in below-average wage fields.
>We have Data Centers being aggressively overbuilt in the U.S and because of NDA's -across the country homeowner communities had no transparency that their future was to be polluted with toxic noise, water and air...
To compound this Data Center overreach - Lee Zeldin allowed Big Tech the green light to build data centers that will consume massive amounts of power and water without ANY enforcement by the EPA.
> Our public-owned Parks and Forests are under a revised Bureau of Land Management (BLM) who has aggressively fast-tracked commercial energy and mineral development on public lands through executive actions and emergency declarations. This approach PRIORITIZES resource extraction OVER conservation, affecting millions of acres across the American West and Alaska.
> Even after the Civil Rights - our nation, in June 2026, had Congress pass and President Trump signed a bill directing roughly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection to conduct mass deportations and expand detention operations through 2029. With these multi-year legislative infusions and baseline annual appropriations, ICE has reached a total funding level of approximately $85 billion. This tripling of its budget makes ICE the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement organization.
> The Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2026 provided $839.2 billion in discretionary base funding, making the total defense spending authorizations proposed during this term include record levels exceeding $1 trillion, combining annual baseline allocations with mandatory funds.
> Personal gain from his Public office: Federal financial disclosures released in June 2026 revealed that Donald Trump’s personal businesses generated over $2 billion during his FIRST year back in office. Combined with cryptocurrency ventures, real estate licensing, and merchandise, watchdog agencies and media investigations estimate that the Trump family has benefitted from billions in private earnings since he originally took office.
MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports about Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman issuing an urgent warning on Trump’s fraud scheme involving our ‘America 250’ commission. Trump’s ‘Freedom 250’ banking information committed wire fraud to take over our unifying July 4th ‘America 250’ event yesterday.
Too many people, like you, only focus on today's problems. In the totality of human existence those problems are not even noticeable. Our grandparents lived in abject poverty, losing among them 4 children at early ages. And another one who had no brain because of a botched delivery. Bankrupted during the Depression. A grandmother who died of TB. Outhouses until after the war. Water from a well. Their "refrigerator" being lowering food into the well. Working dawn until dusk doing HARD labor. Serious food shortages. And raising 12 children. No healthcare. OUR GRANDPARENTS. Life and this country is so much better in only 100 years! A miracle.
Now things are so much better for women, for minorities, for gay people, for handicapped people, for people with illnesses, for food for people , for shelter for people, for everybody. For you! NOBODY lives like our grandparents did. We've come so far. If our grandparents in their later years could be transported to now they would think they just arrived in heaven.
I hear what you say but the article POV was comparing year 1926 to year 2026. We had a horrible 2025, and 2026 is only 190-ish days into the year. Your comment is referencing “the totality of human existence”.
I am surprised no on has mentioned our increasing fascination with money- as a primary value- as interest in building community and families diminishes. In my opinion, we are chasing the wrong things. Shifting further away from what brings real joy. And that’s a tragedy.
Breakfast took twice as long this morning as I had to finish this insightful article. I’m glad I subscribed.
Thanks for this Derek. Learning about our history helps place our modern challenges in perspective. I find it easy to think about the discouraging state of American society as unique, because it seems unique in my lifetime. But if I widen the aperture to think about other eras and other geographies, much of what we are experiencing now as unprecedented is, in fact, common to societies undergoing rapid change. This is ever so slightly encouraging at a time when the daily news is incredibly discouraging, except for the stock market of course, which is what means the most apparently!
Great read. I hope to live long enough to see a similar reflection on 2026 (maybe if I make it to 2076?). Hopefully someone is compiling a boring report for us to forget right now!
I find it amazing to think how much effort must have gone into making those graphs which were (I believe?) hand drawn.
Personal hobbyhorse, not sure if it isn't mentioned in recent social trends, first I heard of it in this article, but no mention of the global pandemic under a decade old a common life event by both average Americans 100 years apart.
Thank you Derek. What strikes me about your essay is how familiar 1926 feels: technological acceleration, immigration panic, shifting gender roles, anxiety about work, and the sense that modern life was remaking the nervous system before anyone had language for it.
I became an American by choice, not inheritance, and that has made me especially aware of how the country travels before one ever belongs to it. Before it was my country, America reached me as power, promise, market, myth, music, intervention, and ideal.
I love the United States, but I have never needed it to be innocent in order to love it. The 1926 comparison is useful because it reminds us that America has always been rupture and reinvention at once. The question is not whether the country was ever clean. It was not. The question is whether it can remain answerable to what it claims to be.
I wrote more about this in an essay called “America Has No Dirt. The promise is real. So is the dirt”
https://yauguru.substack.com/p/america-has-no-dirt?r=217mr3&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Entertaining and a good reminder on how history can help with our perspective on today. A great read.
Thanks for such a great article that gives us an opportunity to reflect on 2026! Very instructive for a prohibition project I’m working on.
Thinking of ways that the future can be encouraged to be a bit rosier. This was very inspiring.
agreed. Historical optimism is underrated, and Derek is among the best at keeping that in frame.
Derek, you say "In some ways, the Americas of 2026 and 1926 are eerily similar? Life is much better in 2026?"
Really? We are in the midst of a runaway President (with no immunity from the SCOTUS) and a Republican congress sitting idle while collecting their paychecks from this administration.
In 2025-26...
> Millions of low-income and working-class communities have experienced significant losses in federal assistance, healthcare coverage, and overall household resources due to massive social program cuts and tariff-driven inflation.
> The Trump administration has upended public education and health by terminating billions of dollars in federal grants, significantly reducing department staff, and passing massive cuts to Medicaid.
> Since taking office, the Trump administration has frozen or cut billions in scientific grants from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, resulting in terminated clinical trials, staffing exoduses, and significantly reduced grant awards.
> Since Donald Trump took office, Indigenous communities have had administrative actions threatened their tribal lands, erased Indigenous histories on public lands, and disrupted core health and educational services.
> Since taking office, the Trump administration has rescinded or redirected billions in allocated federal infrastructure funding, particularly targeting multimodal, equity, and climate-focused transportation grants. These clawbacks and policy changes have created significant disruptions for state and local infrastructure programs across the country
> Our President doesn't believe in Climate Change, so the abundance of jobs that the Green Energy movement was to start in 2025, with rebuilding from a Fossil Fuel' infrastructure into an Electrification infrastructure, was canceled. Dr Julio Friedmann had written that 'The Work' would be hard, but all types of workers could look forward to employment.
>Since June 2025, sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing lost thousands of positions, and high-paying industries shrank while growth remained concentrated in below-average wage fields.
>We have Data Centers being aggressively overbuilt in the U.S and because of NDA's -across the country homeowner communities had no transparency that their future was to be polluted with toxic noise, water and air...
To compound this Data Center overreach - Lee Zeldin allowed Big Tech the green light to build data centers that will consume massive amounts of power and water without ANY enforcement by the EPA.
> Our public-owned Parks and Forests are under a revised Bureau of Land Management (BLM) who has aggressively fast-tracked commercial energy and mineral development on public lands through executive actions and emergency declarations. This approach PRIORITIZES resource extraction OVER conservation, affecting millions of acres across the American West and Alaska.
> Even after the Civil Rights - our nation, in June 2026, had Congress pass and President Trump signed a bill directing roughly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection to conduct mass deportations and expand detention operations through 2029. With these multi-year legislative infusions and baseline annual appropriations, ICE has reached a total funding level of approximately $85 billion. This tripling of its budget makes ICE the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement organization.
> The Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2026 provided $839.2 billion in discretionary base funding, making the total defense spending authorizations proposed during this term include record levels exceeding $1 trillion, combining annual baseline allocations with mandatory funds.
> Personal gain from his Public office: Federal financial disclosures released in June 2026 revealed that Donald Trump’s personal businesses generated over $2 billion during his FIRST year back in office. Combined with cryptocurrency ventures, real estate licensing, and merchandise, watchdog agencies and media investigations estimate that the Trump family has benefitted from billions in private earnings since he originally took office.
YESTERDAY > Our July 4th Anniversary - Trump’s WIRE FRAUD SCHEME - #MeidasTouch (7/2/26)
https://youtu.be/g_ZC8YL8yqM?is=wKvYuOOIvnHQ4Zmc
MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports about Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman issuing an urgent warning on Trump’s fraud scheme involving our ‘America 250’ commission. Trump’s ‘Freedom 250’ banking information committed wire fraud to take over our unifying July 4th ‘America 250’ event yesterday.
.
Too many people, like you, only focus on today's problems. In the totality of human existence those problems are not even noticeable. Our grandparents lived in abject poverty, losing among them 4 children at early ages. And another one who had no brain because of a botched delivery. Bankrupted during the Depression. A grandmother who died of TB. Outhouses until after the war. Water from a well. Their "refrigerator" being lowering food into the well. Working dawn until dusk doing HARD labor. Serious food shortages. And raising 12 children. No healthcare. OUR GRANDPARENTS. Life and this country is so much better in only 100 years! A miracle.
Now things are so much better for women, for minorities, for gay people, for handicapped people, for people with illnesses, for food for people , for shelter for people, for everybody. For you! NOBODY lives like our grandparents did. We've come so far. If our grandparents in their later years could be transported to now they would think they just arrived in heaven.
I hear what you say but the article POV was comparing year 1926 to year 2026. We had a horrible 2025, and 2026 is only 190-ish days into the year. Your comment is referencing “the totality of human existence”.
History will show the truth.
Who had a "horrible" 2025? We didn't. Nobody we know did.
You must be talking about you. What was so horrible about it?
My comment to Derek did list what you are now asking me to repeat.
a list of progressive complaints. Yawn. What about YOUR life? What was so horrible about it? Did you lose your job? Not enough food?
Progressives aren't happy unless they are unhappy, so they look for problems instead of things to be grateful for.
I am surprised no on has mentioned our increasing fascination with money- as a primary value- as interest in building community and families diminishes. In my opinion, we are chasing the wrong things. Shifting further away from what brings real joy. And that’s a tragedy.