Americans have grown less proud of their country’s history or the way its democracy works over the past decade, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
Americans’ pride in the U.S. on several key attributes has dropped since 2017 — including the nation’s military and its political influence around the globe — according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. This poll was conducted in April, as the United States and Iran fought over the Strait of Hormuz in a prolonged war that started with the U.S. and Israel launching strikes on Iran.
New Gallup polling also finds that only 53% of U.S. adults are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, the lowest reading in the trend dating back to 2001.
America: Asians discovered it, Africans built it, White people destroyed it.
I think US history is fucking brutal, sad and shameful. Any white american, especially those who were here from the start, should not be proud of their heritage, I certainly am not. That said, I do embrace my country. It has the potential to not be shitty. We have kind people. We have generous people. We have so much that we could be proud of.
I think we need to reject the make america great again idea and charge it to make america decent for once. It could be great. But it never has been.
When you want to be pumped to celebrate America’s 250th birthday but remember all the history you weren’t taught in school.
Can’t say that I ever felt pride as an American. What IS an American anyway? I don’t feel kinship with much of the land and its peoples.
I don’t understand how you don’t feel a kinship with the land. If you mean that it’s fucked up how America came to “own” it then yeah, that’s fucked up, but the land didn’t do that, fucked up people did. I love the beautiful land of America so much and that’s honestly the biggest/only thing I’m proud to be American for right now, and I spend as much time enjoying it as I can.
I would probably feel more pride and connection if it weren’t for the fact that it’s only mine to enjoy because of theft and genocide.
It would also help if so much of it weren’t covered in parking lots, strip malls, and car dealerships.
I haven’t ever had enough money to travel beyond my city, nor to afford third places. My PC is the world to me, because it is the closest I can get to wandering off to somewhere else.
For people who lack wealth, it is difficult to develop a connection with many places, let alone a deep one. The Lincoln Memorial, Yellow Stone Park, Florida, Hawaii, all are just places in a picture. No different from Cuba, Switzerland, or Japan. All these places are even more fictional than those in my videogames, because I can’t even visit.
Let’s be clear. The primary reason people have lost pride in America and democracy is Donald Trump and his administration. You can say other administrations have had their faults, certainly, but what’s happening now is far, far worse. And let’s not forget the constant drumbeat of propaganda from Fox News and other right wing outlets telling us our country is a shit hole. And again, we have our problems, but this is how propaganda works. You mix in some truth about something while wildly exaggerating or making up other things about it.
Idk Trump is without a doubt the worst (so far) and doesn’t bother to even dress it up as anything else but when I read this:
New Gallup polling also finds that only 53% of U.S. adults are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, the lowest reading in the trend dating back to 2001.
My first thought was “Ruh Roh…”
Every authoritarian overreach, breach of civil rights and liberties in the name of safety, invasion of privacy, and abuse of executive power, was made possible by the Patriot Act and the Bush administration’s response to 9/11.
The creation of ICE and homeland security (once again for our own safety).
Information control and the idea of a post truth society vs a reality based community that seems to be getting smaller and smaller by the year.
Propaganda and fear meant to box people into black and white thinking is an echo of McCarthyism but was most famously stated as “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
That frame of mind/tribalistic thinking was normalized in the 50s, signed into law in the early aughts, and the same day Charlie Kirk was assassinated and Trump signed NSPM-7, allowed the already overly vague and easily abused definition of terrorist/terrorism to be expanded to include political opposition and basically anybody for anything, because the king says so.
Not long after NSPM-7, the king and his administration began targeting fishing boats in Venezuela with drone strikes and breaking into homes in the United States without search warrants due to similar vague claims about threats of terrorism and safety. And even though they’ve mainly focused on immigrants so far, they’ve quietly continued to test the waters and see how far they can expand that definition by linking groups of protestors to gangs and possession and distribution of drugs to foreign drug cartels (while also literally making closed door deals with wealthy drug cartels and their families, bc they do whatever TF they want. Organized crime is still organized crime, but it’s legal for certain people).
https://www.commondreams.org/news/minnesota-indictments
https://www.commondreams.org/news/left-wing-extremist-groups
"Here’s what concerns me—Trump is saying, ‘I can define who’s a terrorist, and that means I can kill him.’ At the same time, we’re seeing executive orders defining whole parts of Democratic Party as domestic terrorists,” said Chakrabarti. “Here we’re seeing NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech, is extremist speech.”
While claiming to protect the US from drug traffickers, he added, the administration has created “a task force of 4,000 agents who are being taken off of drug trafficking and human trafficking, and the actual crime, and being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist things.”
“Do you think that’s okay?” he asked the other panelists. “Can you put two and two together about what’s going on here?”
They really ramped things up with Renee Good and seemed to back down a bit after Alex Pretti, but they’re definitely not done. People should not be letting their guard down, because without a doubt they’re going to get more brazen just before and especially after the midterms, and as the king keeps reminding us, he wants to normalize the idea that there are no limits to his executive power. (And SCOTUS has continued to quietly ensure that’s true).
Tldr: I question if it’s really a coincidence Trump makes W.'s legacy look so much better by comparison, because W. and his administration enabled all of this. (And tbf to “both sides,” I do honestly feel that the Dems that came after W. in Congress and the White House deserve a middle finger for not making any real effort to undo any of it when they had the chance.)
Edit: Also, if you’re interested in understanding the legal path of exactly where we’re headed and why you should be very angry every time Trump or JD Vance slips in some bullshit normalizing the idea of unchecked executive authority (aside from the obvious), I recommend more people familiarize themselves with the legal theory of Common Good Constitutionalism.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25141335
the constitution is not meant to uphold liberty, but to be interpreted by a modern authority in order to promote the greater good.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/4/common-good-constitutionalism/
Yeah. Know what? I think that’s the narrative they’re trying to bully us into. The “proud patriots” being their right-wing gooshtepperz and everyone else just whining and hating the country and saying it sucks all the time.
Nonsense! We should take pride in our country, because that spurs us to fight for it and make it better. You’re much less inclined to kick miscreants and ruffians out of a space you don’t consider yours.
They practically already hijacked the flag, the flag that’s supposed to represent all of us. They’ve hijacked the narrative of the Christian faith as well, which actually used to be a HUGE leftist thorn in the side of capitalists, when it was actually centered about loving thy neighbor.
We’ve seen in our lifetimes how easy it is for symbols to change. We need to take back our country and its heritage. The “red state” faction is even trying to claim the narrative over the revolution, instead of the more accurate history their ideology represents: The Shameful South of the Civil War. (They’ll hatefully decry all the “blue states” that actually won this land from the grip of the crown, of course.)
Like we should just let them have all of that, while they give us a little corner to complain in? While they march a private army through our cities and abduct and murder our neighbors?!
Hell no! This country can be a great country, when it’s a country for everyone. We just need to take it back from those who think they can make it “great again.”
Have a safe July 4th, take pride in being an American by pissing off fascists and enjoying what’s good about your country and fighting loudly for what can be BETTER. They HATE that.
America is not my country. It is my prison.
Bit embarrassed to live on earth these days let alone the US.
Same. Looking forward to the aliens putting us all on time out.
I really hope like the galactic equivalent of the USS enterprise shows up and is just like “what in the fuck are you morons doing?”
Being proud of something you had no part in creating always seemed weird to me.
Write a novel. Perform a song. Win a race. Makes sense to be proud.
Happen to be born someplace? Big fucking deal. Most of the people who go on about being proud of the US are going out of their way to make it worse
I think the idea is if we had a functional democracy we would have a part in creating it.
The lack of patriotism is just more people waking up to the fact that neither Republican nor Democratic politicians give two shits about the American people.
Sports team fans have always been a weird thing to me. Love the sport? Sure, but caring how a team does that you have no influence over is weird.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve given far less fucks about professional sports. The fact of the matter is those people playing on the field are the furthest from a representation of you as an individual as you can find. They are literally millionaires and multi-millionaires from random fucking places all across the country. They have no connection to your city, other than being drafted, traded, or maybe signing and choosing to play there. Additionally, a lot of people who make it in sports are big into faith, and don’t shut the fuck up about it like those douches on the San Francisco Giants recently did on the team’s pride night - offending a shitload of lifetime fans in the process. I guess when you play / coach sports, and everything goes your way in life and you make millions, it’s easier to drink the religious kool aid.
Additionally the number of pro fascist pro athletes lately is too damn high, and it is annoying. Hell, my (former) favorite player on the Raiders - Maxx Crosby outed himself as a chud a couple of years ago after Butler, and it makes it hard to root for the guy. Having said that, I love sports and am competitive by nature, so I continue to watch, but my level of fandom has definitely fallen off a cliff.
The emotional buy-in makes it more exhilarating. And it’s really easy to do, the human mind loves to give things an identity and a story. And it satisfies the primal urge to belong to a community. Team sports basically hack your brain in some very satisfying ways.
It gets messy when people with poor emotional regulation rely on the sports feelings.
“WE WON!!”
You didn’t win anything. You watched highly-trained and compensated professionals win. You got literally nothing out of it.
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Because being a citizen of that country/city means you are inherently responsible for and add to the culture of said country/city. There’s no song, novel, or individual that is created without outside influence and in the vast majority of cases that influence comes from a village/city/country. You literally wouldn’t exist as the person you know if you were born somewhere else.
There’s nothing wrong with being proud of where you come from. It only becomes problematic when it becomes nationalism
There’s no song, novel, or individual that is created without outside influence and in the vast majority of cases that influence comes from a village/city/country. You literally wouldn’t exist as the person you know if you were born somewhere else.
This is true but seems irrelevant to the point. You wouldn’t exist without the sun, but no one’s out being proud of the sun.
Because being a citizen of that country/city means you are inherently responsible for and add to the culture of said country/city.
A lot of the flag waving types I’m thinking of, the maga hats et al, are making the country worse. If only they were responsible (as in, accountable).
You wouldn’t exist without the sun, but no one’s out being proud of the sun.
Either my point flew over your head like a 737 or you’re just bad at arguing…
If you were born one town, city, or state away from where you were born you’d essentially be a completely different person. Its perfectly reasonable for someone to be proud of where they come from because the overall experience there shaped them as a person in what they consider a net positive.
Its perfectly reasonable for someone to be proud of where they come from because the overall experience there shaped them as a person in what they consider a net positive.
It’s not “perfectly reasonable” to be proud of that. It’s common, but the whole dispute here is people saying that it is unreasonable.
Many people consider a personal accomplishment of some sort a prerequisite for feeling proud. Being born somewhere is not that. You can see other people in this thread rejecting being proud of a sports team they don’t play for.
(There’s also pride like LGBT pride, but that’s more of an explicit rejection of being told to be ashamed. And surviving while queer is something of an accomplishment.)
Weird!
The rise of the surveillance state that none of us wanted. Roaming death squads putting kids into concentration camps. Threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, Venezuela. A system of checks and balances that turned out to be a complete fiction. We spend billions on bombs and missiles so that we can get involved with Israeli genocide/rape/torture and other war crimes. AN INSANE NARCISSIST FLEECING US ALL AND NOONE SEEMS ABLE TO STOP HIM.
What’s not to love?
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
Americans have grown less proud of their country’s history or the way its democracy works over the past decade
That’s because we’ve watched the veil of democracy fall and the Epstein class can do as they will with no recourse.
I have no pride in this shit hole country, only shame.
I am very much ashamed to be american right now.
“…but at least I know I’m not free”
See “Merican - Descendents”
I’ve never been proud to be a US citizen. Pride is something that should only be towards something that you achieved. I think the USA has missed a lot of opportunities to become more powerful because of individualistic greed and lowering taxes on corporations.
Republicans are out of touch on virtually everything. What a surprise.
I still have pride in what The United States aspired to be between the two times the billionaires took over.
Truth, justice, compassionate for most (not Nazis, for example) and a vision for a future that lifts up all cultures and takes responsibility for our mistakes.
I am definitely not proud of who we are right now.
America has always been owned by the capitalist class, since Jamestown. White supremacy has always been prevalent, even during the short period of social Democracy under FDR.
The United States has never aspired for any of those things. It was founded on Slavery and Ethnic Cleansing, values still institutionalized today in for form of penal slavery and chauvinism. Even the modern nazi movement of MAGA echos back to the supremacist practices the Nazi’s got from the US.
The values you like have never come from The United States, they’ve come from the history of resistance of American workers, from abolishionists to suffragettes to sewer socialists
You mean some of the 12 years when FDR was president? That may be the only time that somewhat matches your description, but still not full 12.
And there was a literal apartheid in place while he was president.
And that took a country in literal starvation.
Wow…never seen such an ignorance of modern American history. Are you forgetting all the “interventions” the US did since the end of WW2, especially in South America where despite the supposed “war on drugs” the CIA teamed up with drug cartels, arming them, funding them, even allowing them to smuggle drugs into the USA to fund rebel fighters to overthrow governments? How it massively increased it’s prison population and then allowed them to be used as slave labour by corporations, actively got minorities hooked on drugs, used it’s own National Guard to kill protesting university students at Kent State?
CIA stands for Criminals International America
Look up CIA involvement in Indonesia.
Right, i’m totally unaware of any of those things because otherwise I could not possibly have any aspirations or good feelings about the higher goals of many people in this nation have. Martin Luther King Jr. was just a fool if he even existed because this country is so horrible.
Truly, the fact that I still live in this country means that I am as bad as every one of those things that you described, because I haven’t killed myself or left in disgust before now.
LMFAO
Would that be before or after they drove all the Native Americans out in order to try to establish this?
I did say aspired for a reason. The actions of the leadership does not necessarily mean the ideals are bullshit. Ask the abolishionists who were fighting against slavery in 1800.
Emma Goldman on Patriotism (July 9, 1917)
The Anarchist Emma Goldman was tried for conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act. The following is an excerpt from her speech to the court, in which she explains her views on patriotism.“Who is the real patriot, or rather what is the kind of patriotism that we represent? The kind of patriotism we represent is the kind of patriotism which loves America with open eyes. Our relation towards America is the same as the relation of a man who loves a woman, who is enchanted by her beauty and yet who cannot be blind to her defects. And so I wish to state here, in my own behalf and in behalf of hundreds of thousands whom you decry and state to be antipatriotic, that we love America, we love her beauty, we love her riches, we love her mountains and her forests, and above all we love the people who have produced her wealth and riches, who have created all her beauty, we love the dreamers and the philosophers and the thinkers who are giving America liberty. But that must not make us blind to the social faults of America. That cannot make us deaf to the discords of America. That cannot compel us to be inarticulate to the terrible wrongs committed in the name of patriotism and in the name of the country. We simply insist, regardless of all protests to the contrary, that this war is not a war for democracy. If it were a war for the purpose of making democracy safe for the world, we would say that democracy must first be safe for America before it can be safe for the world.”
For her ideas to flourish, organized hierarchical government – which she saw as an enemy of her concept of democracy – must first be dissolved in favor of anarchy.
What articulate and insightful writing, someone should make a book club studying her work, I’m sure the state wouldn’t do anything horrible to them /s (arc)
