From Presidents Franklin Roosevelt through John F. Kennedy, the Democratic Party projected patriotic confidence, fully comfortable celebrating America’s greatness alongside Republicans. But around 2014, coinciding with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, that began to change. Democrats now routinely tell pollsters they are not proud of their country and that other nations are better than ours. They don’t give thanks for being American. They are, many of them, needlessly and ideologically ashamed of being American.
It was not always this way.
As recently as 2001, 87% of Democrats told Gallup they were proud to be American, a number that, despite some fluctuation during the second Iraq War, remained at 85% as late as 2013. But then BLM happened. Then, President Donald Trump. And now only 36% of Democrats say they are proud to be an American, compared to 92% of Republicans. Recent polls from YouGov and the Pew Research Center show similar results.
Democrats argue it is Republicans who are blind to reality and refuse to acknowledge America’s troubled past. But polling does not bear this out. Clear majorities of Republican and Democratic voters say it is important to discuss both the positive and negative aspects of the nation’s history, and two-thirds of both parties agree that an American can criticize past U.S. actions and still be patriotic.
Where the parties differ is in how they see America’s place in the world. Democrats are far more likely to see themselves as “citizens of the world” and less likely to identify as citizens of the country of which they are, in fact, citizens, the United States. They are less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world and far more likely to say other countries are better. The younger and more progressive a person is, the more likely they are to hold this view. According to Pew’s Political Typology analysis, no group believes other countries surpass the U.S. more than the progressive Left.
That the youngest voters are the least grateful for America’s contributions to the world is hardly shocking once you consider what Democrats have done to public school curricula. The New York Times’s celebrated 1619 Project, adopted by many blue-state districts, recast the U.S. as an inherently oppressive nation founded not on liberty but on slavery, even though America’s founding ideals ultimately fueled slavery’s abolition. Combined with the rise of critical race theory, students now absorb a cartoonishly bleak narrative in which America is the villain: a country supposedly born in racism, defined by the arrival of the first slave, and dedicated ever since to the repression of people with dark skin.
Much of the Black Lives Matter movement rests on claims that simply are not true. The seminal moment of the BLM mythology, that an unarmed Michael Brown peacefully approached police in Ferguson, Missouri, crying “Hands up, don’t shoot,” was found to be a fabrication by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Democrats routinely estimate that hundreds of unarmed black men are shot by police every year, when the reality is closer to a dozen. Data scientist Zac Kriegman learned this firsthand at Reuters, where he was fired after presenting evidence that police shootings show no racial bias once crime rates are taken into account, despite no one being able to show he was wrong.
THE DEMOCRATS’ RECKLESS CALL FOR MILITARY DISOBEDIENCE
The Democratic Party, particularly its youngest and most politically active members, increasingly embraces a globalist rather than a national identity, seeing themselves as citizens of the world rather than stewards of a unique nation. Their worldview is shaped by lazy egalitarianism that places concern for supposedly marginalized groups over national pride, encouraging moral judgment of America while granting moral leniency to everyone else. This produces a false understanding of history that magnifies America’s crimes while minimizing the evil committed by others throughout the world, leaving young Democrats convinced the U.S. is uniquely guilty rather than an unparalleled force for good.
If Democrats hope to build a durable governing coalition, they must abandon the distorted history and globalist detachment that now define their worldview. They must arrive at Thanksgiving capable of actually giving thanks. America is not perfect, but it remains exceptional. A nation that lifted billions of people, defended freedom, and expanded justice deserves thanks — not the shame too many young Democrats have been taught to feel.