Think what you will about Donald Trump; no one can deny his flair. Take, for example, a segment of his State of the Union speech earlier this year. “I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle,” Trump said. “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
Unsurprisingly, every Republican in the chamber rose, while every Democrat remained sullenly seated. The ensuing applause went on for several minutes. Trump then lambasted Democrats: “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
What was interesting about the moment was not so much that Trump tried the ploy, but how Democrats responded to it. After all, it’s hard to disagree with the premise: “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens” is the sort of proposition that gets supermajority support in polls. But standing in response to them would have also meant capitulating to Trump—a sin for Democrats more mortal than disagreeing with the idea that the American government is for Americans.
There was a time in American history when the calculus would have been different. If Ronald Reagan or George Bush (at least the elder, maybe the younger) had asked everyone in Congress to recognize that the American government’s duty is to citizens over illegal immigrants, the Democrats present would have feared appearing unpatriotic more than they would have feared supporting a Republican president. Today, it’s the reverse.
That is attributable, in part, to Trump’s unique relish in provoking division. But it is also the result of the fervor with which Democrats seem to hate not only Trump but everything he touches. Representative Rashida Tlaib’s decision to wear to the State of the Union not only a keffiyeh but also a button reading “F—K ICE” is typical of the aggressiveness demanded of a party some of whose voters literally want them to “get shot” opposing Trump.
This matters not just because it makes political life unpleasant. There’s a deeper and darker truth revealed: It’s axiomatic that if you hate America’s representative government long enough, you will start to feel pretty badly about America itself. Americans regard Trump and the Republican Party as more patriotic than Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, according to YouGov pollinglast year. If Trump owns the patriotism brand, and everything associated with Trump is bad, the logic that follows is straightforward. You end up refusing to stand not in spite of your belief that America is good, but because you no longer really believe America is good and that Americans deserve defending.
That attitude has spread from Democratic politicians to voters (maybe vice versa). A plurality of Democrats told YouGov that they thought America’s best days were behind us, and that America’s prospects for the future were worse than most other countries; a third said they are less patriotic now than they were in childhood.
America has seen moments like this before. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic Party took on an increasingly anti-American stance. The Democrats became the party of “blame America first,” from our domestic problems to our foreign entanglements. But back then, this posture resulted in epic defeats, as workaday voters repudiated anti-Americanism over and over again at the ballot box.
Today, the question is whether such a posture is still the same kind of electoral poison it once was. Democratic voters seem eager to reward their representatives for growing ever more vicious in their criticism of Amerikkka. On the right, too, there are early warning signs of a surging skepticism of America, coming even as it does wrapped in the cloak of nostalgic “nationalism.” The revolutionary politics ushered in by Trump and Bernie Sanders is, inevitably, a politics openly hostile to the current order—an order that is, at root, tied up in affection for America. So it’s perhaps not so surprising that affection for America is on the decline.
Is a root level of genuine patriotism a precondition for participation in our politics in 2026? The answer is unclear. But the fact that it is even in question is a poor sign for the health of a republic—which depends first and foremost on a pre-rational commitment to love of our shared political project.
Since January 2001, Gallup has intermittently polled its interview subjects on how proud they are to be Americans. In their first survey, 87 percent called themselves “very” or “extremely” proud. That figure peaked at 91 percent in 2004, perhaps thanks to the spike in patriotism following September 11. Rates ticked down slightly through the Bush and Obama years but only really began to fall in 2017, when just 3 in 4 Americans were very or extremely proud. In 2025, that number hit just 58 percent, with only 41 percent saying they were “extremely” proud.
Even more remarkable than the decline is the trend by partisan identification. In 2001, Democrats were only three percentage points less likely than Republicans to be proud of their American identity. The gap widened over the next 15 years, but it was not until 2016 that a real difference emerged. That year, Democrats were 21 points less America-loving. In Gallup’s most recent survey, the distance has grown even wider: 92 percent of Republicans call themselves very or extremely proud to be an American, versus just 36 percent of Democrats.
At the tail end of the Clinton era, in other words, Democrats and Republicans were all but equal in their self-professed patriotism. But since then, and particularly since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, patriotism has, like everything else, become polarized. The base of one of the two major parties simply no longer sees identification as an American as a source of pride. Indeed, the way in which Democrats’ pride shifted over time—falling with Trump’s election, spiking during Joe Biden’s presidency, then dropping once again upon Trump’s return to office—indicates that many experience affection for their country as contingent rather than essential, conditional on who happens to be in the White House at any given time.
This is part of why Democrats could not rise to their feet at the State of the Union. They know that, for their voters, being pro-America is no longer intrinsically good, especially when it can be perceived as a surrender to the Bad Orange Man. Democrats in power have adapted to this reality by adopting one of three positions on America. The first is open hostility. The second is a kind of situational patriotism that synonymizes patriotism with liberalism. The third is a quasi-patriotism composed entirely of symbol rather than substance.
The first is by far the easiest to identify, and it most closely resembles the left-wing anti-Americanism of the 1960s and 1970s. It takes the view that the United States, far from being something worth loving, is a depraved, criminal society. Consider, for example, Bernie Sanders’s allegations that our economy is “rigged,” Ilhan Omar’s accusing the United States of “unthinkable atrocities,” or Hakeem Jeffries’s assertion that “systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years.” In many cases these views are indistinguishable from the propaganda issued by America’s enemies. In spite of this, these politicians are able to command voting majorities in some of the bluest jurisdictions.
The second is what we might think of as aspirational or conditional patriotism—a love of America as it will someday be, rather than as it is or was. If you view America as conceived in bondage and dedicated to inequality, but you still want to say something nice about the country, you can point to our overcoming of past injustices as characteristic of why you love America—because it’s not as bad as it used to be! Recall, for a classic example, the Michelle Obama line about her husband’s nomination to the presidency: “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.” Pride here is only about the change—I will love you if you become someone else.
The third posture can be captured only by the 2024 Democratic Convention, which Ross Douthat ably summarized as “abortions for some, little American flags for others.” The thinking here is that Americans do like patriotism, and therefore Democrats should appear patriotic, without necessarily making any substantial changes to their values that might be required by actually being patriotic. As a result, in this posture Democrats look to embrace visible symbols of patriotism—veterans, patriotic songs, and especially the flag itself. (As now–Senator Elissa Slotkin enjoined on the campaign trail, Democrats should “f—ing retake the flag.”)
Each of these approaches serves its own function, and politicians can and do move between them depending on their audience or purpose. The third works well if you want to deny charges of disloyalty—look, I have a big flag behind me, I must like America! The second is useful for audiences who feel that patriotism still deserves some lip service but who want something they think of as more highbrow, more reflective of the “harsh realities” of American history. And the first, of course, works for audiences who just hate America.
What all three postures share, though, is a lack of patriotism as a presumption that informs thought and deed, rather than a conclusion of one’s worldview. Even when (as in the second and third approaches) patriotism is something the speaker nominally embraces, he or she is defending the idea that America is good insofar as it aligns with the speaker’s values, or that America is good because it’s a useful brand.
In other words, there is nowhere to be found the basic premise that America is good simply because it is good—because it is, despite its flaws, a shining city on a hill and, as such, is a place for which we feel a natural affection that grounds our other political commitments. Love for America is something that is functional or transactional; it is never something the speaker feels in the way we feel love for our friends or families.
The question, politically speaking, is whether all of this posturing actually falls flat with the voting public. Can Americans see through the false embrace of the flag? Or have they lost the ability to discern real patriotism from America-bashing dressed up as the real item?
There was a time, of course, when they could have told the difference. The years following World War II were something of a second “era of good feelings” in American life. The bipartisan consensus—opposed to Communism but comfortable with some degree of command and control in the economy, socially conservative in some ways and liberal in others, relentlessly patriotic—was best typified by Dwight Eisenhower, the war hero who was elected as a Republican only after he was courted to run as a Democrat. Affection for government—a sort of index of patriotism—was high: When first asked in 1958, roughly 3 in 4 Americans said they trusted Washington to do the right thing always or most of the time.
Obviously, this was not to last. Trust in government peaked in 1964, then began a steady 15-year decline. The succession of social conflicts and crises is familiar: the civil rights struggle, nationwide rioting, Vietnam, Watergate. Patriotic consensus was assailed by a new youth movement on the left, backed by sympathizers in the establishment who saw in young radicals the kind of moral fervor they themselves wished they had.
The result was a Democratic elite that felt increasingly comfortable criticizing America in increasingly vicious ways. In 1968, a federal commission alleged of the ghetto that “white institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” That same year, Bobby Kennedy on the campaign trail offered a bleak picture of a violent, dehumanized America, identifying a “poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all.” Criticizing the Vietnam War, Senator George McGovern would in 1970 accuse his colleagues of “sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave,” adding, “This chamber reeks of blood.” Two years later, his party nominated him for the presidency.
Democrats sometimes made bedfellows, too, with an increasingly violent and radical left. New York elites, memorably skewered by Tom Wolfe, eagerly fundraised for the Black Panthers charged with and later convicted of torturing and executing 19-year-old Alex Rackley. The eminently respectable Ford Foundation poured moneyinto the coffers of black extremists. Sometimes-violent student protests—against the war, but also against the Man—received the support of faculty and administrators as often as not.
What unified this tendency was a stance toward America that was not merely critical but reflexively antagonistic. The view of many Democrats seemed to be that America was not merely imperfect but defined by its sins—that there was no America beyond violence, racism, and death, and often that America was the actor driving these horrors in the rest of the world. This is perhaps why many on the left made such easy allies with revolutionaries—they basically agreed with the revolutionary worldview and could only sort of quibble when it came to methods. That all made the idea of being patriotic incoherent: If you think America is the great force for evil in the world, how can you possibly claim to love it?
This rhetoric does not sound out of place today, does it? What’s so strange about Democrats saying that white institutions created the ghetto, or that Congress is killing young men? What Manhattan cosmopolite, university professor, or foundation head wouldn’t be sympathetic to left-leaning terrorists?
But at the time, these utterances and associations were profoundly shocking to the American conscience. The “silent majority” of everyday Americans may not have been happy about the trajectory of American society in the 1960s. But they had no time for America-hating, recognizing as they did the difference between criticizing America’s faults and identifying her with them.
And Democrats—the party of this tendency—paid an electoral price. The silent majority gave Richard Nixon a 49-state victory in 1972. In 1980, fresh off Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech and the crippling inadequacy of his response to the Iran hostage crisis, the nation favored Ronald Reagan by 10 points before handing him his own 49-state victory in 1984. Over and over again, the public rejected Democratic nominees too closely aligned with the party’s anti-America wing. Conspicuously, only two Democrats took the White House between Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama. Both were Southern governors, presented as outsiders to their party who were more moderate than their peers (however false that might actually have been).
This is not to say that all of Democrats’ electoral woes were attributable to the party’s mid-century anti-Americanism. Indeed, that anti-Americanism was downstream of a more general radicalism that alienated them from the median voter. But the caustic words and callous actions of the party’s leadership were the most visible symbol of that alienation. And voters repeatedly punished leaders who they felt disdained the American political project in which they were participating.
What that suggests is that, at least as of 1980, patriotism was still what a patriotic public expected of its leaders. It was a shared assumption: that America is worth loving, independent of its flaws, and that this love is not conditional on how much we like what is happening at any given moment. Indeed, the reason that Democrats could have been expected to stand for the sort of line they heard from Trump if delivered by one of the Bushes is that Democrats of the 1990s and 2000s understood that not standing would be politically suicidal.
This insight—that Democrats’ return to patriotism was the result of political pressure—helps explain their re-embrace of America-bashing. Democratic voters are upset not only about the particulars of policy but about the state of the republic itself. They see Donald Trump as an unprecedented, historic threat and his election therefore as an indictment of the system that installed him. What’s needed—and on offer—in this view is a revolutionary politics, which promises a total overhaul of the republic. That, too, was what Democrats offered in the 1970s. Americans rejected it then, because they saw revolution as unappetizing. But is that still the case today?
Perhaps not. We see alarming signs not only on the left but on the young right as well.
The Gallup polling shows a sharp disjuncture by age. Among older Republicans—those born prior to 1996—over 90 percent label themselves as extremely or very proud to be an American. But among Gen Z Republicans (born after 1997), the equivalent figure is 65 percent, slightly below that of Baby Boomer Democrats (born between 1946 and 1964) and just ahead of Millennial (born between 1981 and 1996) independents. In pollingpublished by my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, Republicans under 50 were twice as likely (10 percent versus 5 percent) to say they wanted to “burn down” America’s economic and social system compared with older respondents.
Such results, like other anomalous findings about young Republicans, should be taken with a grain of salt. Young people are essentially twice as likely to be Democrats as they are Republicans, according to Pew. “Young Republican” is practically an oxymoron, and anyone who self-selects into that category is likely to be unusual in other ways that will show up in polls. Young people, moreover, are in general more liberal than older ones, even within the party; a lesser degree of patriotism may just be downstream of this difference in political attitude.
At the same time, it is hard not to see in this and other trends a real phenomenon: that the alienation from America so common on the left is creeping in on the right. This tendency is reflected in the more extreme manifestations of the new right, eager to cultivate in a minority of Gen Zers what they see as the future. The self-pity and anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing that characterize 27-year-old Nick Fuentes’s view of America, for example, are hard to distinguish from the self-pity and anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing that characterize much of the American left. Or consider the preference in certain corners for other nations’ mode of government entirely, especially the extremely peculiar affection for the tiny nation of Hungary under the heavy hand of Viktor OrbΓ‘n, who led his homogeneous land of 11 million. (We’ll see how much that transferred patriotic fervor for Hungary lasts now that OrbΓ‘n’s party has been ousted.)
Many of the most America-negative new righters characterize themselves as the country’s most ardent nationalists. Yet much as progressives claim to criticize the nation because they love it, some on the right use their claimed affection for America as a shield from behind which they issue nothing but criticisms—about our nation’s environment, or the status of workers, or the decay of our culture—that would not sound out of place in a Democratic politician’s speech in the 1960s. Similarly, much as some progressives seem able to love America only as it could be, some on the darker corners of the online right seem able to love America only as they imagine it once to have been—an idyll once sparsely populated by “heritage Americans,” now despoiled by the hordes of brown men ruled over by their Jewish masters.
What joins this right-wing movement with the newly anti-America left is a basically revolutionary tendency. Affection for rulers outside our borders, a fixation on the “Zionist-occupied government,” a belief in the need for some kind of dramatic restructuring of American society: All are examples of the conviction that the governing regime here is fundamentally illegitimate and should be replaced. I choose the word “regime” advisedly. A regime is not just who is in power but the fundamental system or mode of government; in a republic, it is the order under which the people rule themselves.
If your goal is to bring about a change to the regime, at some point you have to be so disaffected that you develop a certain instinctual dislike for the society in which you currently live. The revolutionary always dreams about an ideal future (or, in the case of the reactionary, dreams about returning to an ideal past). But that glorious vision inevitably collides with the messy reality in which we actually live and can, in turn, breed resentment and outright hatred. It is not possible to be both a revolutionary and a patriot; you have to choose one or the other.
Which is not to say that most young conservatives today are revolutionaries—the large majority, who don’t live their lives on X, mostly are not. But the young right now seems to be less and less instinctually affectionate about America as it is. The sense of pride in their nation is demonstrably declining. They might assert that this is rational—but that only reinforces their alienation from the kind of instinctual affection already out of fashion on the left, and it therefore makes them susceptible to revolutionary politics.
There is something bizarrely consumerist about the anti-American posture: America is good (charitably) insofar as it conforms to my ideas of the kind of society in which I want to live or (less charitably) insofar as I get stuff out of it. To the extent that people use America’s current or historic errors to indict the nation as such, they are indirectly implying that America is only as good as its deliverables and that they identify with it only and insofar as they happen to feel it’s a good brand at the moment.
That such a posture would grow more common among those earliest and most comprehensively exposed to our current moment—when relations are fleeting, borders are dematerializing, and every product is sold as an item of identity—is hardly a surprise. But it reveals how the loss of patriotism can be deeply destabilizing for a country, especially one like the United States.
In Politics, Aristotle argues that a polity cannot be properly understood as merely an alliance for some material end, like wealth or safety. A group of men who work together on a job site is not a polity; nor are nations that join together for mutual military defense (otherwise, NATO would be a single state). Rather, “any polity that is truly so called and is not a polity merely in name must pay attention to virtue; for otherwise the community becomes merely an alliance, differing only in locality from the other alliances, those of allies that live apart.” That is to say, a polity is not just something that provides us with things; it is a shared project that works towards its citizens living the good life, as made possible by the practice of virtue.
If Aristotle’s account is right—and his book is still read with profit after 2,500 years—a functional polity requires more than just citizens who regard themselves as living in an alliance of convenience. Rather, those citizens need to understand themselves as part of a shared project, one whose members are striving to achieve a good life together, because (again to cite Aristotle) men are political animals, and the good life is possible outside of a polity only for wild beasts or gods.
Functioning republics do not simply operate on their own steam. They require a delicate infrastructure of institutions, norms, and civic virtues—you can have a republic only “if you can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin famously put it. One of those predicates is a sense of the aforementioned shared project—of America’s errors being our errors, its triumphs being our triumphs, of, yes, my country right or wrong. We have to see ourselves as inextricably within the polity before we start to reason about it in order for the polity to be successful. And we have to, specifically, feel an affection for that polity that is prior to everything else we think about it—we have to feel patriotism.
Which is what makes the apparent return of anti-Americanism so alarming. Voters once punished Democrats for adopting the aforementioned stance. Now, it’s de rigueur in the Democratic Party, and beginning to infect the Republicans. It’s hard to discern whether this behavior still incurs the electoral penalty it once undeniably did. The rise of polarization means that neither party is likely to achieve the kind of landslides Nixon and Reagan did. But the mere presence of the tendency, and its acceptability in American life, augurs ill.
Indeed, the experience of the 1970s and 1980s implies that—contrary to the views of some on the left and right—it is the common man who disciplines the elite into participation in the patriotic project. When the Democratic Party took its hard-left turn, it was the everyday voter who reacted with horror and dismay. “Elite” became a dirty word, because the elite had opted out of the shared American political project. The common man, by contrast, was the enforcer of patriotism as a necessary virtue.
If we cannot still rely on that popular check today, it might be because the elites of the 1960s and 1970s got to set the agenda for the children of the average American of that era. When “blame America first” becomes the curricular and cultural North Star, our institutions and norms no longer work to inculcate patriotism in the public. The remarkable thing is not that the average man has become less patriotic, but that he still remains patriotic in spite of the propaganda with which he is constantly blasted. But we have every reason to worry that the process of steady erosion will continue, until not just the elites but everyone forgets the importance of loving America.
It is almost saccharine to insist that patriotism matters, that people should love their country whether or not they agree with it. But we should, because that is what sustains a republic for 250 years—and what, one hopes, will sustain it for 250 more.
Illustration: Mark Smith
