How liberals should celebrate the Fourth

Fireworks at the Navy Yard in DC, 2024

Folks on the left are often accused of being less patriotic than conservatives.  There's something to this.  Every year, Gallup asks us questions about our feelings for the USA. This year, 92 percent of Republicans said they were extremely or very proud to be an American. Only 36 percent of Democrats feel that way. 

Trump has something to do with this, but the gap was still wide in the middle of the Biden administration, 52-36. And Republicans even had an 8-point edge in the Dems' most patriotic year of the Obama administration. The younger they get the less patriotic.  Gen Z Democrats were 42 percent less proud to be Americans than the oldest cohort of Dems over the last five years.

Why is this?  Many reasons, I'm sure, but here's one I've observed first hand in studying and teaching US history over the past 37 years, and as a parent of three children.  You might call it the Howard Zinnization of the American history curriculum. 

From what I can see Howard Zinn's very popular book "A People's History of the United States," has influenced a majority of teachers now teaching US history, and might be the single most popular book to assign in their history classes. To quote the website of the Howard Zinn Project: 

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country.... With more than 168,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.

Zinn's book was first published in 1980, sold 4 million copies by 2022, has been translated into a dozen different languages, and was adapted for children and assigned to my my daughters in middle school.  Here's what Zinn had to say that was relevant to the topic of national pride in the original edition of his book (which, yes, I own):

We must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.  The history of any country presented as the history of a family conceals fierce conflicts of interest … between conquerors and conquered masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

We've seen the problem with this thinking in recent years, as the left has been divided into a circular firing squad more intent on dividing itself into victims and oppressors so the latter can be cancelled, and some have exited the left in response.  The Philosopher Richard Rorty forsaw this way back in 1998 in his wonderful antidote to Zinnism, Achieving Our Country, a book that liberals and leftists should read in the town square every Fourth after they recite the Declaration of Independence: we should 

refrain from thinking so much about otherness that we begin to acquiesce in what Todd Gitlin has called, in the title of a recent book, "the twilight of common dreams." It means deriving our moral identity, at least in part, from our citizenship in a democratic nation-state, and from leftist attempts to fulfill the promise of that nation.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

We of the Left—not the environmentalist left or the LBGTQ left or the feminist left or the labor left or the progressive or moderate left—but a broad left-of-center coalition capable of winning national elections have to believe that we are capable of moving the country toward a better future—like Lincoln and Roosevelt did. Otherwise, we abandon the government to a Right that seems to want more, not less selfishness and sadism. 

Notes

For some thoughts about reasons to feel patriotic about America, I recommend Isaac Saul's essay for Independence Day 2025  "Do I love America? On patriotism and my country," on the Tangle website. It includes a link to the Tangle podcast version where he reads the essay. Also, "How Democrats Can Maintain Their Patriotism in the Trump Era," by Michael Baharaeen on the Liberal Patriot Substack. And Yasha Mounk giving an outsider's view of his adopted country.