That was a comment I made on television last night, talking about the 250th anniversary celebration, which I said is muted compared to the Bicentennial. I took a few minutes out from a family Independence Day party to appear on Outsiders–the first time the hosts had seen me without a tie on. Along with Independence Day, we talked about Tim Walz and Keith Ellison pardoning a convicted rapist to spare him from the horror of deportation. And I answered the question whether the Communists and anti-Semites being nominated by the Democrats represent a significant slice of the American public:
It must be something of a holiday in Australia, too, as James Morrow was the only one of the three Outsiders regulars in attendance.
STEVE adds: If you are a subscriber to the Daily Wire, you can take in my parallel column on this same point, entitled, “The Patriotism Crisis That Could Tear America Apart.”
If you’re not a subscriber, here’s the key point:
Patriotism and love of country is conspicuously plummeting among liberals and Democrats. Gallup’s annual survey on patriotism finds that Republican patriotism or pride in citizenship has remained around 85 percent or higher for the last 25 years, regardless of which party was in power in Washington. The GOP trendline is so stable you could balance a glass of water on it. Democrats were very within a point or two of Republicans, when a Democrat was in the White House, but falling precipitously when George W. Bush and Donald Trump were in the White House.
In other words, to put it bluntly, patriotism among a growing number of Democrats seems conditional about whether they are in power or not. And a conditional patriotism is a weak patriotism. The last time so many Democrats were conditional about their attachment to the country and their fellow citizens ended in a civil war. “Patriotism is civic friendship,” the political philosopher Harry Jaffa once wrote. “Patriotism is the link between justice and friendship in its purest or transpolitical form. Those who see each other as utterly alien cannot be fellow citizens.”
Here’s the chart:
