Poll Reveals Democrat Pride in America Contingent on When They Have Power

For this year’s Independence Day it seems fewer Democrats will be celebrating.

A recently released Gallup poll revealed a disturbing trend. The percentage of Americans who say they are proud of their country has dropped to a historic low.

“A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are ‘extremely’ (41%) or ‘very’ (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020,” Gallup said of the poll.

Some liberal journalists tried to spin this as an indictment of President Donald Trump.

However, as we shall see when digging into the poll numbers, the dip in American pride is more an indictment of Trump’s critics.

The 41% of respondents who said they were “extremely proud” to be American was roughly the same as a previous low point for American pride in 2022. This suggests that those who were extremely proud to be Americans haven’t wavered much from their previous position.

It’s a sharp contrast to 20 years ago.

“In January 2001, when Gallup first asked Americans how proud they were, 87% said they were extremely or very proud,” Gallup said. “After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the figure increased to 90%, and it held at that level or higher between 2002 and 2004.”

Most noteworthy of all is the sharp partisan divide of the poll response.

“Democrats are mostly responsible for the drop in U.S. pride this year, with 36% saying they are extremely or very proud, down from 62% a year ago,” Gallup said. “This is only the second time Democrats’ pride has fallen below the majority level, along with a 42% reading in 2020, the last year of the first Trump administration.”

Republican responses about being very or extremely proud to be American, by contrast, have dipped only slightly since 2001. The lowest the Republican combined pride number dipped to was 84% in 2022. That number is only one percentage point lower than the Democrat highest point of pride in 2013 of 85%, just after the second term reelection of President Barack Obama.

The poll highlights a wide values difference between the Right and Left in America, if it wasn’t already obvious.

For the Right, pride in country is a core idea. It’s less malleable and less contingent on the party in power or the policies of the government. Republican numbers were not only steady with different Democrat presidents but with dramatically different Republican ones in Trump and President George W. Bush.

For Democrats, pride is increasingly more conditional on whether or not they are in power. Now that the elite institutions they captured and controlled are waning in influence they’ve abandoned pride in country en masse.

Like how former first lady Michelle Obama announced after her husband was elected president that it was the first time in her adult life she was “proud” of her country, it seems many modern liberals connect their love of America to the winds of political change.

This quote by influential liberal Baby Boomer playwright Eve Ensler, who now goes by “V,” luridly described the non-existent dystopian America that she and many Democrats can’t stand.

“In this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good,” she wrote in the Guardian.

No surprise that she was profoundly inspired by the profoundly ridiculous “No Kings” protests. The irony that she was writing this in a British publication was clearly lost on “V.”

Every generation of Democrats has successively less pride in America than the previous ones.

“As might be expected given the partisan trends, Democrats are largely responsible for declining U.S. pride within each generation,” Gallup said. “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.”

Younger independents and Republicans have less pride in America, but the numbers are far less pronounced than with Democrats.

This reality is having a profound impact on U.S. politics.

It should be no surprise, given these attitudes, that we are seeing the rise of socialist, post-national Democrats like Zohran Mamdani in New York.

The Democrat base isn’t interested in moderation or reconciliation. They want resistance and sanctimony. They want to let out a primal scream of rage at the wicked country that rejected them. They take pride in Pride, not in the United States. They won’t be happy until America is wholly transformed, and their movement has seen itself through, wherever it may take us.

Truth be told, this is a terrible trend in American life. For some Americans, every day is Independence Day. For others, every day is a time to feel shame about this country’s past.

The answer to this divide is not in moderation. If your patriotism is contingent on who is in the White House, the problem is with you. Our answer is in reaffirming and planting a flag in a culture of deeper, informed patriotism based on gratitude and rejecting the politics of narcissism and grievance.

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