The Left Gears up for US 250th Anniversary by Dialing up the America Hating

Rolling into the 250th anniversary of the United States, liberals, leftists, Democrats, and democratic socialists are united behind one message: America stinks.

At the counterprogramming to the White House UFC match over the weekend, a bunch of miserable looking, aging celebrities held a “#resistance” rally or something like that.

Robert De Niro, an aging Hollywood gazillionaire last seen trying and failing to play a young tough guy in “The Irishman,” took to the stage and announced that “loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser.”

He further said that America is “not so lovable right now.”

Two Democratic politicians running against each other in a New York House district were asked on a local television show Monday who they wanted to “win it all” in the World Cup.

Now, if I as many an American were asked this soccer question, my response—without having any knowledge of soccer or what teams were even in the World Cup—would simply be to say, “the United States.” I’d rather answer that and be informed that the U.S. had been eliminated or wasn’t even in the tournament than to answer differently.

But the two Democrats, without the slightest hesitation, answered “Mexico” and “Senegal.”

These are politicians who assumedly make a living kissing babies and pretending to like things they don’t like to win elections. That they confidently said they support any other national team besides Team USA says as much about their constituents as it does them.

It runs right in line with what we saw last month on Memorial Day when Democratic leaders spent their time protesting at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, taking cheap partisan shots at the president, and grumbling about military spending on flyovers.

Their party leaders, “thought leaders,” and celebrity influencers see no point in making even token appeals to patriotism because their base of supporters simply don’t care. They even have a certain loathing for any display of patriotism.

While there is no question in my mind that there’s been an enduring and significant patriotism gap between the Left and Right in America, that reality is becoming an indelible mark of our politics and a difficult one to transcend in a country that has little else to bind it together besides civic nationalism.

A recent series of polls show a large and widening chasm between Americans who say they are proud and or “very proud” of America, and those who say they don’t.

The numbers are stark.

NBC News ran a headline on Sunday announcing a new poll showing that America at 250 “is riven with doubt and pessimism.” Some of the evidence is not surprising. There’s historically low trust in institutions, the federal government, and the media.

No big surprises there. The institutions earned their current deplorable level of trust.

But buried a little further in NBC’s report is another sign of the patriotism gap problem.

“While 62% of 2024 Trump voters say they are extremely proud to be Americans, 12% who picked Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024 said the same,” the report said.

That reality is backed up by other sources too.

Gallup released a poll a year ago that showed just how much the country has bifurcated on national pride in the last two decades.

In 2001, 87% of Americans said they felt “very proud” to be Americans.

By 2025 that number had dropped to 56%. But the drop was hardly uniform. The number for Republicans was 90% in 2001 and 92% in 2025 and hardly shifted at all, even in the years of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden when Democrats were politically ascendent.

The chart of mostly sagging American pride is unmistakable for Democrats.

The numbers climbed to their highest point in the Obama years, plummeted after the first election of President Donald Trump, climbed back up again slightly after Biden entered office, then totally disintegrated after Trump’s return.

Now, none of this surprises me. It’s been clear for more than a decade that the Left’s love of America was only conditional on their own power, their diminishment of those they see as the “bitter clingers,” the “basket of deplorables” who are on the “wrong side of history.”

But it poses a significant dilemma for the nation going forward.

Elections now seem to have existential stakes. A small but growing number of people, particularly on the Left, would rather do violence to those who oppose them rather than convince others of the righteousness of their ideas.

Their righteousness is assumed to be self-evident, their enemies’ wickedness unquestionable.

Unfortunately, the answer to the challenge of our time is not immediate and seems unsatisfactory.

For now, we’ll muddle through for now as a nation divided. For those who love America, the foundation of ideas it was built on, the great people who formed it, the many generations who fought for it, and the culture that nourished it, we can only plant our flag and never let go.

We must do our best in our own time to reestablish and grow that love and devotion to country that was once nearly universal, teach the next generation right from wrong and how to be an informed patriot in a sea of broken institutions that would rather teach them to be uninformed America haters.

Let the angry Left rage at the memorials and statues going up in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Then build more. Let them show their true, miserable colors. Let them know that the flag is still there and not going anywhere. Be resolute and don’t give in to doomerism.

Reject decline. Embrace America.