By Noah Rothman
Monday, June 15, 2026
According to NBC News, “America at 250 is riven with doubt and
pessimism.” The assessment is fueled by the outlet’s latest poll, which found that a “record-low number” of
respondents “are extremely proud to be Americans.”
The NBC-sponsored survey found that just one-third of
poll takers said they were “extremely proud” to be American. Another 23 percent
are “very proud,” while an additional 22 percent say they’re merely “moderately
proud.” By contrast, just 11 percent said they were “only a little proud.” One
in ten respondents said they were “not proud at all.”
While being “extremely” or “very proud” to be an American
is a majority proposition, NBC’s Steve Kornacki noted that the outlook is
increasingly exclusive to registered Republicans and senior citizens:
Not all seniors, of course. As the actor Robert De
Niro ranted in his appearance at a depressing,
Boomer-dominated attempt to counterprogram Donald Trump’s UFC fight on the
White House lawn, his love for the country of his birth is conditional.
“I hate to say it, but loving our country is starting to
sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser,” he
told a crowd of true believers. “I can’t love a country that’s led by a
racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant. And let me just say it, I can’t love the
country that’s led by Donald Trump. And a sycophant Congress.”
The fact that patriotism among Democrats is contingent on
the party in power is nothing new. “As might be expected given the partisan
trends,” the pollster Gallup
reported last year, “Democrats are largely responsible for declining U.S. pride
within each generation.”
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. . . .
Republicans in the
older generations have essentially the same high degree of pride today as they
did in the earlier part of this century. Gen Z Republicans are far less proud
than their older fellow Republicans; however, they are still much more likely to
be proud than Gen Z Democrats and independents.
Some on the right see an exploitable
political advantage in the Democratic Party’s desire to cater to
constituents whose patriotism, such as it is, is both provisional and
parochial. And perhaps the president agrees. Trump has been forced to scale
back his ambitious “Tribute to America” events slated to coincide with
America’s 250th birthday to such a degree that he has now been reduced to
celebrating the Fourth of July with another forgettable “Trump rally.”
It’s hard to imagine a Trump-hosted event celebrating the
nation that his critics wouldn’t scold for being excessively partisan, but the
president is abandoning all pretense here.
If we regard the decline of patriotic sentiments as a
problem rather than just another social phenomenon to be leveraged in the
political arena, Republicans should do their utmost to make celebrating America
an inviting prospect.
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