What Happened to Loving America? As pride in America plummets, especially among the young, it’s clear we haven’t just failed to teach history—we’ve failed to teach why the nation is worth loving at all. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/05/what-happened-to-loving-america/
Just in time for Independence Day, Gallup released polling results showing that a remarkable number of Americans are losing faith in their country and what it represents. Unsurprisingly—given who controls the levers of power in the federal government—Republicans are more proud to be Americans this year than last, while Democrats are significantly less so. What’s troubling, however, is that pride in the nation has fallen considerably among political independents and has fallen, over time, among all age groups of respondents. Most disturbingly, only 58% of American Millennials and a scant 41% of Generation Z-ers are proud of their country. “Notably,” as Gallup puts it, “more Gen Z Democrats say they have little or no pride in being an American (32%) than say they are extremely or very proud.”
Some observers, including some who are very smart and very well plugged in, have suggested that a big part of the problem here is that American kids simply aren’t taught today what makes this country so great. Instead, kids are taught more about the nation’s weaknesses than its strengths, more about its failures than its far more numerous successes. These observers ponder the question asked by President Reagan in his farewell address—“Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?”—and they answer, “Clearly, we are not.”
There’s not much to dispute here. This conclusion is almost inarguably correct. The American education system, at all levels, is woefully derelict in its teaching of history, American history in particular. What young children are taught about this nation’s past focuses largely on the negative, while overlooking most of the positive aspects.
Unfortunately, there’s much more to it than just that. The lack of education about America’s rich and amazing history is a small part of a much larger problem. It is more a symptom than the illness itself.
Pride in one’s country—or “patriotism”—is more than just a “feeling.” It is more than a mere emotional response to the power a nation wields or the victories it accumulates. Rather, patriotism is a virtue, which is to say that it is a good and productive reflex, a positive behavior, but it is something that itself must be taught, must be teased out of “the little human animal.” It is not enough merely to teach history. We must also teach the appropriate way to respond to that history. Among other things, patriotism is the means by which we come to know what is important and valuable, and moral in our community. And it must begin, therefore, with a common understanding of what is important and valuable and moral in our community.
In his famous 1984 Lindley Lecture (given on the campus of the University of Kansas, Rock Chalk Jayhawk) “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” the recently deceased communitarian moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it this way:
I understand the story of my life in such a way that it is part of the history of my family or of this farm or of this university or of this countryside; and I understand the story of the lives of other individuals around me as embedded in the same larger stories, so that I and they share a common stake in the outcome of that story and in what sort of story it both is and is to be: tragic, heroic, comic. A central contention of the morality of patriotism is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country. For if I do not understand it, I will not understand what I owe to others or what others owe to me, for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation, for what benefits to my nation I am bound to feel gratitude.
Patriotism involves more than just standing up and cheering “yay team!” when the nation does something right or “boo, team!” when it does not. Patriotism begins (but does not end) with understanding what makes us us, what we share with one another, and what that says about us in the broader arc of history.
What this means in practice is that restoring pride in America, restoring the true and productive practice of patriotism, would involve far more than merely retelling the story of the nation more frequently than we do now. That would be a good start, to be sure, but it wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—the end.
The other day, Elie Mystal, a leftist commentator and writer, declared that the United States is “the bad guy on the world stage,” that Americans are “a menace” to “free people” and “peaceful people” everywhere. He asserted that “we need to be sanctioned,” presumably by a more genuinely moral international authority.
Part of this, of course, is pure Trump Derangement Syndrome. To most Democrats and a great many independents, whatever Trump does is by definition evil and therefore in need of rebuke.
Part of this is Elie Mystal’s shtick. He plays a role for his loving TV audience, and he must, by all means and at all times, stay in character.
Another, perhaps bigger part of Mystal’s rant, however, is the explanation for the political left’s declining pride in the country, as well as an indication of how immensely difficult it will be to restore that pride. Mystal is, in many ways, typical of those on the left and of those his age and younger. He doesn’t believe that America is good and, indeed, believes that it is evil, not because he doesn’t know its history, but because he doesn’t share its historical ideals. He knows what the United States has done on the world stage and understands what that has meant. He simply doesn’t appreciate it. He has been convinced, or has convinced himself, that he and those on his political “team” have nothing in common with the other team, much less with their ancestors who lived long ago and often failed to live up to those historical ideals. He doesn’t care about the “morality of patriotism,” in large part because he doesn’t believe in the same moral principles as the rest of the country or its Founders.
In other words, Mystal and those who share his political predilections are not merely victims of an educational system that denies the importance of teaching American history. They are also the products of a shift in the cultural ethos that began in the 1960s and ‘70s, took firm hold in the ‘80s, and has emphasized, to the exclusion of everything else, the differences between Americans. Diversity, they have been taught, is our strength, never learning that superficial diversity can only be an asset if it is underpinned by a more substantive commonality, a more serious belief that we are all part of the same tradition and, thus, part of the same story.
As MacIntyre indicated, patriotism has nothing to do with supporting the government, right or wrong, or with being an unfailing supporter of everything the country does or has ever done. Rather, it’s about agreeing on the basic principles that animate our common existence and help us determine what is good, bad, right, and wrong, and then acting on those principles whenever and however we can.
Teaching America’s history—honestly and fairly—would be a good start, an important component of rebuilding pride and faith in the country. That said, a common understanding of what the nation is and why it is good and righteous is a necessary part of resuscitating and rebuilding the virtue of patriotism.
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