Reclaiming Pride in America Amid the Voices of Shame

The country turns 250 today. A generation ago, a Democratic president said there was nothing wrong with America that couldn't be cured by what's right with it. Somewhere in between, one side traded that gratitude for a grievance. It didn't have to.

Two hundred and fifty years is a birthday, and you don't read the guest of honor a list of his failures at his own party. You raise a glass. You tell the story of how far he's come. There is a time for the hard conversation, and it is not the moment the candles are lit.

Yesterday, on the eve of the semiquincentennial, the mayor of New York gave a speech from George Washington's desk. Zohran Mamdani is himself the American promise made flesh: a boy who arrived from Uganda at seven, saw the Statue of Liberty from an airplane window, and grew up to run the largest city in the country. He said so, movingly. And then he spent much of his address on what he called "a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions," on children who go to bed hungry while a trillionaire "hungers for more," and he offered the country a new definition of the word we are all supposed to be feeling this weekend.

Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. Zohran Mamdani, America 250 address, July 3, 2026

It is a beautiful sentence. It is also only half of the thing. Dissent is a form of love, yes. So is gratitude, and so is the plain forward-looking confidence that the best of this country is still ahead of it. Somewhere in the last twenty years, one half of the country came to treat protest as the only respectable expression of patriotism and treated hope itself as a little embarrassing, a little naive, the sentiment of people who haven't thought hard enough about the flaws.

It was not always this way

Rewind thirty-three years. Here is a Democrat, a draft-skeptic from a poor Arkansas town, standing on the Capitol steps at his first inauguration:

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. Bill Clinton, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1993

Clinton was nobody's idea of a flag-waving simpleton. He campaigned in 1992 on the phrase "make America great again" and called the country "the greatest nation in human history." That was the mainstream Democratic register. In the 1990s the two parties competed over who loved the country more, not over whether love was the right posture at all. The pride was the baseline. The argument was about how to live up to it.

You can watch the shift happen. In 2008, campaigning for her husband, Michelle Obama told a Wisconsin crowd, "for the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country." She later explained she meant the surge of civic hope she was seeing on the trail, not a blanket verdict, and that is a fair clarification worth taking seriously. But the sentence landed the way it did because it named something real and rising: a growing sense on the left that pride in America was conditional, that it had to be earned by the country before it could be extended by the citizen.

Mamdani's patriotism says look how far we have to go. Clinton's said look how far we've come, and look what we can still build. A country moves forward on the second sentence, not the first. One side has quietly stopped saying it.

The gap is real, and it is recent

This is not a vibe. Gallup has measured it for a quarter century. The share of Democrats who say they are "extremely" or "very" proud to be American has fallen into the thirties in recent readings, while the Republican figure sits above eighty. That spread did not exist in Clinton's era, when Democratic pride ran well above sixty percent, close to the national average. The gap opened over the last fifteen to twenty years. It was not handed down from the founding. It was a choice, made recently, and choices can be unmade.

None of this requires pretending the country is finished or flawless. It isn't. The people who marched under the heavy sun that Mamdani honored were right to march, and the country is better for every one of them. Frederick Douglass gave the greatest Fourth of July speech ever delivered, and it was an indictment. Dissent is woven into the thing. No one is asking anyone to hand in their conscience at the cookout.

But a country is allowed a birthday

The case for gratitude is not the case for complacency. It is the case for perspective. Consider what 250 years actually produced, on the merits, for a person to be plainly glad about.

A set of farmers and printers wrote down that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, then lost the opening battles of the war and kept going anyway. A country that began with the stain of slavery fought its bloodiest war to end it and amended its founding document to say so. It built the assembly line, the polio vaccine, the transistor. It put twelve people on the moon and brought every one home. It took in the Italian and the Syrian and the West Indian and the Ugandan, and turned some of their grandchildren, and one of their sons, into mayors and senators and astronauts.

And that is the irony he could not see. Mamdani's own life is the argument against the bleakest reading of his own speech. A nation that is only a machine of contradiction does not carry the immigrant's son to the founder's desk at all. The promise he critiqued is the same promise that carried him to the microphone. He is evidence for the prosecution he declined to make: that the country works, slowly, unevenly, and then all at once.

What this publication believes

We spend most of our time here disagreeing with the framing in this city's press, and we will again next week. But not today. Today the argument is smaller and older and more important than any of it.

Love of country is not a reward the nation earns by being perfect. It is the starting posture that makes improving it possible, the way you fix a house you love rather than one you're ashamed to be seen in. You can hold the flaws and the gratitude in the same hand. The people who built this place did. The people who improved it did. The only ones who insist you must choose are the ones who have decided gratitude is for the unserious.

It isn't. On the country's 250th birthday, gratitude is the most clear-eyed thing you can feel, because it is the only sentiment honest enough to admit how much there is to be grateful for. Happy Fourth. Raise the glass. The hard conversation will keep until tomorrow, and we'll be back for it.