When we say someone doesn’t take pride in his appearance or home, we mean he doesn’t take care of it. Is it any different when a person doesn’t take pride in being American?
This is an important question to ponder given a recent poll’s finding that only 36 percent of millennials — and a mere 16 percent of Gen Z adults (18-25) — are “proud to live in the United States.”
National pride has, in fact, been declining with each succeeding generation in a phenomenon that, as commentator Steve McCann puts it, means “America’s future is bleak.” If you’re a globalist aiming to breed “citizens of the world,” however, you’ll think our future is bright.
Reporting on the national-pride factor Thursday at American Thinker, McCann opened by speaking of the “unabashed pride” he felt in being American when he arrived on our shores as a child in 1951. Yet while this was once the norm, it has changed markedly in recent decades. As McCann writes:
As recently as 2004, 91% of Americans were extremely or very proud to be American and the United States ranked first in the world in national pride. However, in less than twenty years there has been a stunning reversal that portends a dire future for the United States as a precipitous erosion in national pride has undermined societal confidence, self-reliance, optimism, and cohesion.
A recent poll revealed that a record low of just [65]% of the citizenry are extremely or very proud to be American. However, underlying that overall dismal outcome is the reality that among the two youngest generations only [36]% of Millennials and 16% of Gen Z are proud to be American despite being the beneficiaries of living in [an] unfathomably prosperous nation that has not known any profound national adversity since the Great Depression.
What we are seeing play out is the reality of demographic change in America as the younger mal-educated generations account for over half of the populace and are increasingly becoming culturally and politically influential. Within these generations an overwhelming majority have been indoctrinated by socialist/Marxist ideologues to believe that a capitalist United States as founded is irredeemable and must be transformed.
To be precise, McCann is citing a couple of different surveys above. The one finding only a 16-percent national pride level among Gen Z is from Morning Consult, dated January 9 (below).
But the other, a Gallup poll from last June, paints a somewhat rosier picture. It found that among adults 18-34, 48 percent were either “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. Nonetheless, the general pattern is the same.
Gallup writes of a “record-low level of extreme national pride,” with 38 percent of U.S. adults saying they’re “extremely proud” to be American, that being “the lowest in Gallup’s trend, which began in 2001.”
“Before 2015, no less than 55% of U.S. adults said they were extremely proud,” Gallup later added. “However, extreme national pride in the U.S. has been trending downward since 2015, falling below the majority level in 2018; it is nearly 20 points lower now than it was a decade ago.”
Moreover, conservatives are part of this, too. For while “Republicans’ pride in being American has consistently outpaced Democrats’ and independents’ since 2001 and does so today,” informs Gallup, “Republicans’ extreme national pride (58%) is now at its lowest point in the trend. Independents’ extreme pride, at 34%, is likewise the lowest on record for the group.”
As for Democrats, after hitting a 22-percent low point in 2019, their “extreme pride rose to 31% in 2021 at the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, but it is down this year to 26%,” Gallup continues.
It’s not hard figuring out why conservatives’ national pride is also diminishing. Whether or not communist activist Willi Munzenberg actually said, “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks” (some dispute his authorship), this has become a reality — and people are reacting.
The process: Leftists hated America and sought to transform it — “fundamental change,” as Barack Obama put it. They increasingly succeeded in this with the help of the media, academia, entertainment, and Big Tech, and transformed the country into a place conservatives couldn’t be proud of.
This reality was reflected in comments under McCann’s article. For example, “bill53” wrote:
I am 65 years old and have no pride in a country that EXECUTES unborn children, promotes and enables homosexuality, promotes and enables euthanasia (Culture of Death)
I have no pride in a country that has NO borders and interferes in every other nation on earth.
I have NO pride in a country that has abandoned the Judeo-Christian God.
I have NO pride in a multi-race, multi-ethnic society that demonizes and pits one race against another race.
I have NO pride in a country that elects men like Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barry Soetoro, [and] Creepy Joe Xiden to be president.
So, ironically, many liberals and conservatives now agree: There’s no reason to be proud of our country. Does this bode well for our nation?
Another commenter, who said he began grade school in the ’40s, diagnosed our problem well, writing that the “abandonment of Christianity by American families is the root of the problem.” For sure, we’re no longer the “moral and religious people” for whom, John Adams stated, “our Constitution was made.”
So, actually, Obama is right. We do need fundamental change — just not the kind he imagines. We need to get back to the real fundamentals:
- Belief in God.
- Belief in His gift of Truth (objective by definition) — a land awash in relativism, which really is moral anarchism, cannot long enjoy liberty.
- Rejection of lies peddled in the name of various isms.
- Embrace of divinity’s “values” — the virtues, the cultivation of which the Founders labeled a prerequisite for a healthy republic.
As with the Prodigal Son after his repentance and return home, the way to increase national pride is to remember that we can’t MAGA unless we MAMA. That is, “Make America Moral Again” — a place we can truly be proud of.
