Just in time for the Fourth of July, Gallup released the results of its latest survey of patriotism. Its primary finding?
For the first time in Gallup's 18-year history asking U.S. adults how proud they are to be Americans, fewer than a majority say they are "extremely proud." Currently, 47% describe themselves this way, down from 51% in 2017 and well below the peak of 70% in 2003.
That revelation produced two predictable reactions among press and pundits. The first was to highlight the taint of Trump. CNBC’s John Harwood warned that the numbers “reflect the unique challenge Donald Trump’s presidency poses to modern America,” including “his brand of ‘America First’ populism [which] threatens institutions built and sustained by every other president since World War II, for the benefit of America and other nations alike.” In the Washington Post, Emily Guskin lamented the Gallup and other polling which present “an image that is largely negative or deteriorating. Americans are less proud of their country and the way its democracy works, and they show persistently weak trust in government and many major institutions.”
But among the right-wing blogosphere and conservative commentariat, the details behind the top line number provided yet another opportunity for tired tropes with titles like “Why Do Democrats Hate America?” Powerline’s John Hinderaker declared, “It is common knowledge that patriotic Americans tend to be Republicans, while unpatriotic Americans tend to be Democrats,” adding, “According to the latest Gallup poll, the gulf between the parties is widening.” His colleague Paul Mirengoff agreed, explaining:
Democrats, liberals, college graduates, and people ages 18 to 29 are the least proud to be American. Only 32 percent of Democrats are extremely proud. That’s down from 42 percent in 2016, when Barack Obama was still president. But note that the 42 percent figure from back then is well below the national average even today, when it’s at a low-point.
Democrats just aren’t that into America.
Self-described liberals are even less so. Only 23 percent of them are extremely proud to be American. At the end of the Obama-era, the number was 36 percent.
Republicans, by contrast, are extremely proud of America regardless of which party is in control. 71 percent of us were extremely proud to be American in 2013, when Obama was president and Democrats controlled the Senate. That figure was basically unchanged in 2017, though it has ticked up to 74 percent this year.
Brit Hume of Fox News concurred with this assessment of a supposed “patriotism gap,” charging that “only about a third of Democrats now say they love the country.” He settled on that formula only after deleting a tweet declaring “hate may be a strong word but they sure don’t love it.”
Now, there are a couple of problems with this slander. For starters, the Gallup poll did not ask respondents if or how much they “loved” America, but only how proud they were of the country. But more important are two different notions of patriotism that are at the very heart of the disagreement between conservatives and liberals. For those on the right, the question is largely one about America as it is. But for many of those of us to the left of center, pride in the United States concerns America as it should be. And this higher patriotism, one which holds the nation we love to account, isn’t some quixotic, utopian quest; it is a requirement. It is demanded of all 328 million Americans by our nation’s founding documents.
To be sure, I love my country as much as anyone, and I’m about as liberal as they come. I want the United States of America to be safe, powerful, and prosperous. I want all of our citizens to share in that prosperity and for each to enjoy the freedom and dignity of American life. I want American ideals and values to shine as a beacon to the world, both to bring freedom-loving people from around the world to our country and to inspire liberty, justice, and equality in their own. I believe our successes and triumphs were not and are not pre-ordained, but at critical points in American history required painful, often unpopular choices to make our nation “the last best hope of earth.” As President Lincoln said in his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, just one month before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect:
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.
But love of country is not enough. Not for Americans. In a nation of immigrants, to speak of an America united by “blood and soil” isn’t just ridiculous on its face; it is a dangerous obscenity. Let the French, Germans, English, Danes or those of any other nation debate, bicker and battle over the meaning of and membership in their respective nationalities. To say “America, right or wrong” or “America, love it or leave it” is the façade of patriotism, merely the regurgitation of mantras altogether insufficient for our nation with its founding ideals and founding documents. Blind, unthinking nationalism and aggressive chauvinism, after all, are also the kindling which can ignite the fires of fascism and totalitarian tyrannies of every political stripe.
Above all, American patriotism requires everyone to think and to work. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States don’t just lay out first principles for the nation. They demand of each generation of Americans fidelity to those principles and the constant national improvement toward their achievement. Consider the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
We say these truths are self-evident, but nevertheless among the defining—and never-ending—conflicts in American history is making them true in the lives of all the nation’s people. As long as the franchise belonged solely to propertied white men, or just white men or even only white people, the American project was a failure. The question of “who is an American” never goes away. But the answer must always get closer to the ideal the Declaration defined. That we must mean what we say in our noblest principles was precisely the point Abraham Lincoln made in 1855 to the American Firsters of his day, the Know-Nothings:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
That hypocrisy was and is all the more galling when the Constitution commands us that the American national project is to ceaselessly work toward the realization of our national ideals. The preamble tells us so:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The Constitution is the promise that Americans made and continue to make to themselves and all future generations. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, to share his American dream, he challenged us all to simply be true to our founding Declaration and seek that more perfect Union:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
When Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” his was the accusation of a true American patriot demanding national accountability in keeping with the promises of the Declaration and the Constitution. So, too, when he wrote his fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in 1846 that his admiration for America dissipated and disappeared in the face of the country’s chattel slavery:
But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding, robbery and wrong,— when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing, and led to reproach myself that any thing could fall from my lips in praise of such a land.
(Even as late as 2010, Republicans were still defending the Constitution that codified slavery and counted slaves as “three-fifths” of a person. Noting that Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan had approvingly quoted Justice Thurgood Marshall’s self-evident truth about the Founders that “the government they devised was defective from the start,” the Republican National Committee issued a press release asking, “Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?")
Ultimately, the Southern States chose secession and civil war in order to preserve slavery and white supremacy in the face of growing Northern political and economic power. But to patriotic Americans, the carnage and destruction of the Civil War wasn’t a national tragedy, but the necessary price to be paid for entire country’s tragic complicity in the true sin of slavery. As Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address on March 4 ,1865:
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
But if the Civil War was perhaps the greatest liberation of the human spirit in history (at least to that time), the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution should have permanently enshrined it in law for all Americans for all time. That they did not during and after Reconstruction due to revanchist white supremacy, racism North and South and the anachronistic politics of the Supreme Court is a tragedy that still defines American society today. Nevertheless, the 14th Amendment, especially its first section, provides both the tools to achieve and the yardstick to measure the realization of the national creed for all Americans:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
And to be sure, the 14th Amendment was not designed, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia put it in 2013, “only for the blacks.” (Unsurprisingly, Scalia made the argument in support of a white plaintiff in an affirmative action case.) It’s not just that the 14th Amendment literally says “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” shall be citizens of the United States and that no State shall deprive “any person” of due process of law or equal protection of the laws. Those words were not accidental. Their author, Rep. John Bingham (R-OH), introduced them into the text in 1866 precisely to protect the rights of all Americans from falling victim to mischief at the hands of the states:
A few days earlier, the committee had agreed on language for the proposed amendment that focused exclusively on the evils of racial discrimination, reading, “No discrimination shall be made by any State, or by the United States, as to the civil rights of persons because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” However, Bingham convinced his fellow committee members to broaden this language.
Bingham’s key move was to craft a new provision that promised “equal protection of the laws” for all persons, not just African Americans. In one of the most important edits in American history, Bingham added text that was, as he later explained, “a simple, strong, plain declaration that equal laws and equal and exact justice shall hereafter be secured within every State of the Union,” guaranteeing “equal protection” for “any person, no matter whence he comes, or how poor, how weak, how simple—no matter how friendless.”
Over the years, the ranks of the friendless—African Americans, American women, gay Americans—have been quite large. In cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 14th Amendment has enabled these and other groups to achieve “equal dignity” in education, marriage and the most personal relationships in their private lives. That the 14th Amendment has not been interpreted to automatically apply the Bill of Rights to the States or has been used to support corporate power at the expense of individuals shows how much work remains to be done. And as the retirement of Lawrence and Obergefell majority opinions author Justice Anthony Kennedy now shows, battles thought won could yet be lost.
Now, if this assessment of America’s current greatness seems pessimistic, maybe because that’s part and parcel of the liberal worldview. Human nature is not perfect and cannot be made so, but can be made incrementally better. The United States is not perfect, but our national mission statement is to make a “more perfect Union.” Studies generally show that conservatives are more optimistic (if not necessarily happier) than liberals. Democrats are probably more in the camp of “the glass is half empty.” As Bruce Springsteen explained his philosophy to CBS 60 Minutes back in 2007, “I guess I would say that what I do is I try to chart the distance between American ideals and American reality.” Or as Senator Edward Kennedy eulogized his slain brother Robert in June 1968:
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:
Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.
The United States of America, too, was once a thing that never was. But our predecessors committed their dreams to paper forever: that all men are created equal and have rights to due process and equal protection of the laws in every state of the more perfect Union we will never stop building.
That’s why there’s no contradiction between loving America and being disappointed in her. That’s why there’s no conflict between the pride taken in the Marshall Plan that saved Europe after World War II and the shame felt in witnessing families now separated simply for fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Record income inequality, millions without access to health care and millions more living on the edge of financial catastrophe may be good enough for the “America, Right or Wrong” crowd, but not for true patriots who believe in the Constitution’s admonition that We the People seek to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” To simultaneously cherish the First Amendment and argue the press is an “enemy of the people” is worse than hypocrisy; it is a betrayal. America’s declining white population isn’t a cause for panic and immigration is no reason for fear; as Europe stagnates, it is part of our comparative advantage. There are no degrees of American citizenship, no checklist for authentic “Americanness” and no religious test for belonging. (To put it another way: Americans, love ‘em or leave ‘em.) Don’t take my word for it: The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence say so.
It is often said that America is great because it is good. That is too low a standard. America is great because it is good and because it demands of itself that it become better. That concept isn’t just inextricably linked to the American idea; it could be said to define American Exceptionalism itself. To call attention to our national failings and demand their remedy isn’t bad-mouthing America, but instead living up to the high standard of engaged, self-critical citizenship our Founders envisioned for us. Sorry, Republicans. That’s not hating America. It’s a higher patriotism.
UPDATE: As FiveThirtyEight reports, YouGov also released a poll this week, one which offers more background on the differences in the partisan definitions of what it means to be “patriotic.”