Look Past Partisanship and Celebrate 250 Years of Freedom
It’s tragic that the country’s 250th anniversary is coming at a time of profoundly performative division.
In one part of America, and among certain classes, the very idea of patriotism is off limits. Once there was little difference between the parties in patriotic sentiment, but more recently — even before President Donald Trump — the gap has expanded dramatically. In Gallup’s most recent survey, 93% of Republicans call themselves very or extremely proud to be an American, versus just 27% of Democrats.
The rising class of anti-American Americans is concentrated in our cities and college towns, most notably among younger, educated people. One recent survey of young Americans concluded that most thought they were living in what surveyors described as “a dying empire led by bad people.”
Many who declared Trump “not my president” now increasingly feel that America is not their country, either. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has tried to restrict some celebrations, including public events at Times Square. The traditional Fourth of July fireworks show in Long Beach has been canceled. San Marcos, an affluent San Diego County community that leans Democratic, has even banned hanging flags on the street.
Hollywood, now largely a bastion of the progressive left, is not likely to celebrate our semiquincentennial, either. Not with stars like Billie Eilish claiming that “no one is illegal on stolen land.” I doubt she plans to hand back her manse to the Tongva, the original inhabitants of Los Angeles, or to move somewhere that has no history of taking land from someone else (if she can find such a place).
Some leftist politicians, notably from the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, see the autocracies of the Third World as their preferred role model. Some politicians, particularly on the left, even get away with saying they favor other countries over their own. The two Democrats in one of the recent New York congressional primaries said they were cheering for Senegal or Mexico, rather than the US, in the Word Cup, a position that once would have been disqualifying.
Many would say that President Trump is not helping to bring Americans together, either. Critics say that he has attempted to turn the 250th anniversary into what the National Review labeled “another Trump campaign rally.” The leftist New Republic called the celebration “Donald Trump’s lost cause.”
Read the rest of this piece at California Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Anthony Quintano via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
