Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) had a simple request for Democratic activists attending anti-Trump rallies: “Bring an American flag.”
“When you are going to one of these rallies,” Slotkin told supporters, “you know everybody has all their different signs, all their different issues that they care about. Bring an American flag. Wear the red, white, and blue.”
If only it were that simple. Hostility toward America is now a defining characteristic of the Left. This antipathy has been cultivated for decades by elite academia, celebrities, and Democratic leaders. Slotkin’s proposal assumes that a “patriot switch” can be flipped, but this is naive in the extreme.
Young Democrats today would sooner burn a flag than wave one. A March Harvard Youth poll of 18-29-year-olds found that only 24% said they were proud to be American, while 54% said they were embarrassed. Meanwhile, an April YouGov poll of all Democrats found that the share who said they were proud to be American dropped to only 58%, down from 66% last year.
President Donald Trump’s reelection probably affected these numbers, but Democratic patriotism was declining long before that. The percentage of Democrats who professed “extreme pride” in being American fell to 34% in June 2024, down from 65% in 2003, according to Gallup.
Many factors account for the Democrats’ patriotism problem. Most obviously, Democrats, particularly Democratic youth, have been systematically indoctrinated to view the United States as irredeemably bad and a root cause of evil in the world. The New York Times’s lauded 1619 Project, adopted by school districts in blue states, framed America as an inherently oppressive nation founded on slavery instead of liberty and freedom, which are, of course, the ideals that led to the abolition of slavery.
The influential project framed all American history within the Marxist binary of privileged and oppressed, which inevitably leads to the conclusion that American power is illegitimate and must be dismantled. And dismantling America and all its influence is a motivating force for the Left generally and for many Democrats, too. To them, America cannot be a force for good that, despite flaws, has advanced liberty and prosperity globally. It cannot be redeemed. It can only be occupied and overthrown. This is what a generation of Americans has been taught from elementary school through university.
This makes Slotkin’s call for “reclaiming patriotism” absurd, even if it is marginally charming and amusing. On the Left, patriotism has not simply been lost but trashed and extirpated.
This isn’t solely a problem for the youngest generation of Democrats. By her own admission, former first lady Michelle Obama didn’t feel proud of her country until she was 44 years old. She voiced her dissatisfaction with a country that made her a quasi-royal figure and multimillionaire with homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Hyde Park. Speaking Monday with her brother Craig Robinson about Trump’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, the former first lady described America as having “so much bias and so much racism and so much ignorance” against “people of color all over this country.” One wonders what Slotkin might say to a person with these sentiments.
MAKE THE 100TH DAY A TURNING POINT
The Democratic Party will not solve its patriotism problem by attempting to rally around the flag as a political strategy. Instead, it needs to address its anti-American sentiment, realize that it stands for much that is evil against much that is good, and stop indoctrinating the young in hard-left social and political theory that views America as a malignant force in world history.
Until it does, America will continue to see Democrats as bent on anti-American revolution, not on making America great. Slotkin has her work cut out for her.
