There's a sinister reason for Democrats' collapsing pride in America

Yahoo

10 hours ago

One of America's two great political parties no longer thinks of itself as proudly American. As recently as 20 years ago, Democrats were almost as keen on their country as Republicans were, according to Gallup polling. In 2005, fully 81 per cent of Democrats said they were 'very' or 'extremely' proud of being American. Today that number is just 36 per cent.
Republicans have hardly changed in that time: 93 per cent were 'very' or 'extremely' proud 20 years ago, and 92 per cent feel that way now. Their national pride didn't decline much even during the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Democrats have grown more disenchanted with America whenever Donald Trump has been president, but their alienation isn't only about him.
There was a time when even the Communist Party USA went out of its way to present itself as patriotic, insisting that 'Communism is 20th-century Americanism'. The 21st-century Democratic Party is rather less eager to present itself as characteristically American.
If the Gallup surveys provide one indication of a post-American mentality taking root among Democrats, recent events supply further evidence. When illegal immigrants clash with law-enforcement in cities like Los Angeles, many Democrats, including office holders, side with the foreign lawbreakers. There are some 212 Democrats currently serving in Congress, but only seven voted for a House of Representatives resolution condemning the recent violent protests in LA. The Democrats have come to see themselves as a party that represents populations other than just American citizens.
The charismatic 33-year-old who is the Democratic party's nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is himself an American citizen. But in 2013 his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, was quite emphatic in telling the Hindustan Times that Zohran 'is not an [American] at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. … He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.'
That may have changed since he acquired US citizenship in 2018. Then again, his mother was already a US citizen when she made her boast to the Indian newspaper. Mamdani's father, for his part, is a professor at Columbia University renowned, the New York Times notes, as 'a major figure in the field of post-colonialism'.
Mamdani might very well tell Gallup he's very or extremely proud to be an American, if he gets called during the next poll. But it's still fair to suggest that a Democratic Party already drifting in an ideologically 'post-colonial' and post-American direction is apt to accelerate down that path if the son of a top post-colonial academic becomes one of its future leaders.
At the elite level with the Mamdanis and at the street level with the riots against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Left side of America's political spectrum is consistently committed to breaking down the connections between citizenship and the nation-state.
Instead of the American federal government serving as an instrument of its citizens, the Left envisions a government administered by an elite without strong national loyalties, which rules in the name of humanity. To their minds, citizenship and national pride are anachronisms, indeed barbarities, that prevent the realisation of a more just, redistributive, 'post-colonial' society – the kind of thing that Mamdani's mayoral campaign might well have in mind with its call to 'shift the tax burden … to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighbourhoods.'
Republicans have a steady sense of pride in being American because their view of politics prioritises country over party: America doesn't stop being a source of pride simply because Barack Obama or Joe Biden is president. Democrats, however, clearly have a weaker attachment to the country in general, and that attachment is more party-dependent than it is for Republicans, according to the data.
This suggests that what is a source of pride for Democrats is how well America's government approximates the Left's post-national ideal. Trump moved steadily away from that ideal during his first term in office, causing Democrats' degree of pride in America to slump, dropping every year to a low of 42 per cent of Democrats who said they were very or extremely proud of their country in 2020. (The number then shot up to 62 per cent – still 25 points below the Republican mark – in Biden's first year.)
In his second term, Trump has asserted national distinctions against transnational ideals still more aggressively, triggering a corresponding collapse in Democrats' sense of pride in America, to today's record lows. For Democrats, 'national pride' means being proud of transcending the old nation.
This wasn't always the case. For all the bad publicity Democrats rightly received for the antics of their anti-American, radical Left-wing during the Vietnam War, the party had a patriotic mainstream. The high levels of pride in America recorded by Gallup's polls of Democrats 20 years ago attest to how long that mainstream survived.
But since then the party has adopted a new outlook, fostered by a highly educated elite. This first cost the party much of its working-class white support and is now eroding its working-class Hispanic and black support, while Democrats have picked up new donors and publicists from the ranks of old guard Republicans with an internationalist outlook.
Yet this influx of a few libertarians and neoconservatives isn't nearly enough to offset the loss of working-class voters, and what's worse, it contributes nothing to restoring the party's feel for the nation – quite the opposite, in fact. One of America's two parties is now a world party instead. Yet voters, especially Americans, prefer the nation to the world.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor in chief of Modern Age
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