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!
Nationalism generally should be shunned.
I’ve never been “proud” of the country I happened to have been born in and have lived in because I’ve never had the means to move anywhere else.
I’m much less satisfied with how things are going in this country over the past 10 years, but it’s never been great. Healthcare is a constant struggle, and terrible, for instance.
I don’t take pride in anything billionaires accomplish for themselves, which is 95% of what is usually pushed forward to take pride in. It’s all bullshit.
Recently, we’ve bombed children in other countries, should we be proud of that? I’m ashamed of my country at the moment.
nothing to be proud of a neo nazi state
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.
Never understood the national pride thing. People born here didn’t choose here.
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/
America is not my country. It is my prison.
When you want to be pumped to celebrate America’s 250th birthday but remember all the history you weren’t taught in school.
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.
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
I still have pride in what The United States aspired to be between the two times the billionaires took over.
Truth, justice, compassionate for most (not Nazis, for example) and a vision for a future that lifts up all cultures and takes responsibility for our mistakes.
I am definitely not proud of who we are right now.
what a joke
america has always been a terrorist right wing state since its inception, when did it represent those values? americans are most propagandized species
America has always been owned by the capitalist class, since Jamestown. White supremacy has always been prevalent, even during the short period of social Democracy under FDR.
The United States has never aspired for any of those things. It was founded on Slavery and Ethnic Cleansing, values still institutionalized today in for form of penal slavery and chauvinism. Even the modern nazi movement of MAGA echos back to the supremacist practices the Nazi’s got from the US.
The values you like have never come from The United States, they’ve come from the history of resistance of American workers, from abolishionists to suffragettes to sewer socialists
You mean some of the 12 years when FDR was president? That may be the only time that somewhat matches your description, but still not full 12.
And that took a country in literal starvation.
Wow…never seen such an ignorance of modern American history. Are you forgetting all the “interventions” the US did since the end of WW2, especially in South America where despite the supposed “war on drugs” the CIA teamed up with drug cartels, arming them, funding them, even allowing them to smuggle drugs into the USA to fund rebel fighters to overthrow governments? How it massively increased it’s prison population and then allowed them to be used as slave labour by corporations, actively got minorities hooked on drugs, used it’s own National Guard to kill protesting university students at Kent State?
Look up CIA involvement in Indonesia.
Right, i’m totally unaware of any of those things because otherwise I could not possibly have any aspirations or good feelings about the higher goals of many people in this nation have. Martin Luther King Jr. was just a fool if he even existed because this country is so horrible.
Truly, the fact that I still live in this country means that I am as bad as every one of those things that you described, because I haven’t killed myself or left in disgust before now.
LMFAO
Would that be before or after they drove all the Native Americans out in order to try to establish this?
I did say aspired for a reason. The actions of the leadership does not necessarily mean the ideals are bullshit. Ask the abolishionists who were fighting against slavery in 1800.
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.
Not lost on me the ONLY time a president has been elected to serve more than twice was the most democratically socialist president the country has ever had. He was so good that Wall Street capitalist swine conspired to stage a coup led by General Butler, who did the right thing and exposed the fuck out of those assholes.
Oh if only principled and brave generals and admirals like Butler still existed today…
America: Asians discovered it, Africans built it, White people destroyed it.
Republicans are out of touch on virtually everything. What a surprise.
