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.
Give me something to be proud of, and I’ll be fucking proud.
But currently…
We have hands down, the most corrupt federal government in our history.
We’re blowing up non-military boats without any due process.
We’re shooting missiles in elementary schools and threatening the death of an entire country.
We’re financially and materially supporting/encouraging a genocide.
We’ve hung Ukraine out to dry.
We’ve absolutely skull fucked the global economy.
We’re being lead by (probably) a core member of the largest child trafficking operation in the last century.
Our people can’t afford healthcare, childcare, housing and food.
The right to vote is actively being undermined.
You know what would make me fucking proud?
Fining (or better yet liquidating) the corrupt companies, individuals and organizations that are party to trumps grifts, using that money to establish UBI, pay reparations to Iran (of all fucking things), establish fair and sensible taxation policies, reset the supreme court, and put every fucking member of the Trump admin through an actual justice system that is accountable to the people.
Franky, anyone who is proud of the US right now needs to be fucking locked up.
Oh, I forgot, we have literal concentration camps in the US right now… For the second time in 10 years!
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
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.)
Well if that’s the case someone from a formerly poor or war torn nation can have pride being from there because their ppl survived. You’re just moving the goal post
I could see that being compelling. Proud that you survived oppression or whatever. But it doesn’t really apply to the us, which is what this topic is focused on.
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.
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.
Republicans are out of touch on virtually everything. What a surprise.
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.
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.
The fucked up thing is that you could post this comment every day, with the reasons replaced with different (equally fucked up) reasons, and it would take months to run out of examples.
The scale of the rot is truly breathtaking.
Imagine Billy Joel remakes “We didn’t start the fire” but replaced it all with stuff happening over the last couple years… The song would last 45 minutes
nothing to be proud of a neo nazi state
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?”
We wouldn’t be anywhere close to qualifying for admission into the federation. They require a stable world government.
Oh no I was thinking more like a lost ship or something stumbles on earth. Given the choice they’d probably take one look and move on.
In the show they landed in plenty of authoritarian versions of Earth.
Even Picard’s god-awful season 2 went into the absurdities of the US’s medical industry and the treatment of immigrants.
Voyager also had a 2-parter with a 90s US techbro as the villain.
When you want to be pumped to celebrate America’s 250th birthday but remember all the history you weren’t taught in school.
At the same time, most U.S. adults say that being an American is “extremely” or “very” important to their identity, highlighting an enduring connection, even as some become increasingly critical of the country’s past or the government’s current actions.
[…]
He has a bald eagle tattooed on his back to represent the United States, its freedoms and “all the things we’re supposed to stand for as a country.”
Most USA citizens are unaware of the degree of propaganda we’re fed starting during childhood. I remember saying the pledge of allegiance (a very weird thing to teach to children) in school every day. It’s like the hitler-youth. And singing the star spangled banner, in first grade, every morning. Very weird thing to make us do.
When I was 18 years old, we rented the animated Transformers movie from the 80s and played it on silent with trippy music while we were on acid. The animation was so cool that we later rewatched it with sound on after we came down and it held up. We thought the GI Joe movie might also remain good and rented that next. It was child-propaganda. My then-gf turned to me and said, “this was Regan’s amerika.” She was right. It was trash.
We were taught how awesome we were since I was a child while the truth is that we brutalize, overthrow, and extract. I read an 800 page history of WWII and came away with the primary thought that the USSR won that war, not the USA. I can’t believe how much we lie to ourselves. But it makes it easier to justify all the horrors. Look at repubs trying to sanitize the teaching of history even further. I wonder why…
Just woke up, not proofing, may have typos, oh well.
America: Asians discovered it, Africans built it, White people destroyed it.
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.
To all the bots and the ideological batshit insane people I’m seeing in this comment zone: he who’s nation has no guilt, cast the first stone.
I am left wondering is any of these comments are from actual humans.
So we can’t criticize our own nation’s faults because other nations might also have faults? Do you not see why that’s ridiculous?
Where did you get that? Almost everything in here is talking about how America is evil has always been evil and will forever more be evil. No way for anyone or anything to change. Nobody here has ever aspired for anything better nobody’s fought for the benefit of others.
You think that’s a reasonable approach?
Take note, it all started because I was criticizing my own country, and trolls and Bots piled on telling me I’m so naive.
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.
