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“I think this country was founded on a lot of great ideas, but it was also founded on slavery,” U.S. Soccer Team star Megan Rapinoe said recently.
Such remarks, which have been asserted in various and sundry ways for years, and have largely gone unchallenged, certainly explain much of why a recent Gallup Poll, conducted in June, found that fewer than half of U.S. adults — 45 percent — report feeling extremely proud to be Americans.
American history is now mostly taught as just a string of injustices, going back to colonial days, with almost everything having to do with the maltreatment of minority groups and women. Of course, there has been much injustice that has occurred in U.S. history, but statements such as America was “founded on slavery” are at best, ignorant, and at worse, malevolent.
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On the contrary, slavery was not unique to America, but has existed across the globe since the dawn of human history. The United States was founded with the secession of the colonies from the British Empire. One can search in vain for anything in the Declaration of Independence that cites the preservation of slavery as among the reasons for that separation.
While America’s experience with slavery, and all other ills in the country’s history, should be taught, those “great ideas,” such as the belief that our rights from God, not government, should also be taught. Yet, in the schools, in the media, in the popular culture, and in political discourse, all one hears are remarks like Rapinoe’s.
Gallup found that politics has played a large part in our coming to this point. According to Gallup, Democrats’ feelings of patriotism is strongly tied to whether the president is a member of their political party. Republicans, on the other hand, have historically been mostly unaffected in their patriotic feelings by election returns. “Even when Barack Obama was in office, Republicans’ extreme pride never fell below 68 percent.”
In stark contrast, the poll found that a mere 22 percent of Democrats feel extreme pride now.
This is well illustrated by the comments made by then-First Lady Michelle Obama after her husband was elected president, when she said it was “the first time” she had been really proud of her country. And this association of pride in the country with who is in the White House is quite common among those on the Left. I remember a sports reporter who often interjected his liberal views into sports stories for the Norman Transcript, and who, in covering the first game of the 2009 football season for the University of Oklahoma, wrote that it was the first time he really felt proud to stand for the National Anthem, because America had voted for Obama!
But to the Left, everything is politics. It has never crossed my mind to measure my pride in standing for the National Anthem by who is president of the United States.
This phenomenon of being proud of America only when a Democrat occupies the White House was also demonstrated when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. Some readers may recall that when military planes flew over the inauguration event, one Democrat activist famously declared, “Those are our planes now.”
When many of President Clinton’s more liberal policies met with resistance, he expressed disbelief that some could say they love their country, but “hate their government.” Actually, pride in America, while correspondingly holding a healthy distrust of the government, is a long tradition going back to the founding of the country. While it might seem contradictory to some, taking pride in one’s country even while detesting this or that government policy is perfectly normal. After all, Germany is a nation of great achievements, yet who would blame a liberty-loving German in 1938 who loved his country, yet did not like the regime of National Socialist dictator Adolf Hitler?
While no one should take pride in that slavery existed in America, it was not the country’s “original sin,” because America did not originate the ugly institution of slavery. In fact, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 specifically banned slavery in the lands north of the Ohio River, making the United States the first modern nation to ban slavery anywhere within its borders. Soon after the independence of America, many states began banning slavery. Before the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, it appeared that slavery would soon cease to exist anywhere in the country.
As with American history, this poll should also be put into some broader perspective. While only 45 percent express “extreme” pride in the country, after decades of the denigration of the country by vote-seeking politicians, academia, media, and popular culture, 70 percent of Americans still do express pride in being Americans.
The danger in this incessant attack upon a patriotic view of the country is that it plays into the hands of globalists, who dishonestly portray such expressions as a negative, arguing that the world would be better with a world government. Patriotism is usually referred to as “nationalism” by these globalism proponents, who blame wars on the continued existence of independent nations.
As Americans celebrate the anniversary of its independence, they should take pride in all the positives of what this country has given to the world, and not just dwell on its failures.
Photo: scyther5/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Steve Byas is a college history instructor, and author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected].
