Most Americans Like America A Lot, And The Left Should Stop Ignoring This Fact

A quick Third of July observation and complaint

Almost every cohesive human group has beliefs, practices, or claims that other groups find strange. In most cases, at least in the modern, developed world, this doesn’t matter. We’re pretty good at live-and-let-live. I find Catholic and Muslim and Orthodox Jewish rituals weird, but as long as no one is dragging me to church or mosque or synagogue, that’s all fine with me: Do your thing. I’m sure you guys find my beliefs weird.

In some cases, though, groups that are hoping to change the world can be stymied by the fact that they have adopted beliefs others are very skeptical of. One example, in many progressive and lefty circles, is the idea that the United States is extremely evil or unfair or just otherwise bad. This takes a lot of different forms. On foreign policy, we are an evil, imperialist “empire” extracting resources from vulnerable countries at the cost of distant, dark-skinned people’s lives. Domestically, we’re little better: Everything is so stacked against the poor, and inequality has run so rampant, that if there was ever anything like “the American dream” — itself a propagandist phrase, of course — it has long since been strangled to death by the oligarchs.

There is obviously some truth to both claims. In many ways, the concerns of the rich get undue attention from our politicians — witness the domestic agenda the House is voting on as I write this, which according to The New York Times would “slash taxes by a total of $4.5 trillion, increase funding for the military and border security, cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid and reduce food assistance for the poor.” We’ve also committed some truly heinous acts abroad since World War II, causing millions of deaths.

What’s softened me on, well, America, is recognizing the importance of historical context. The intuition that we should judge people by the context of their time is pretty easy to grasp: If a guy from the nineteenth century is a great author, but was also anti-Semitic in a manner that was pretty normal for his his time and place, my tendency is to shrug and say, That sucks, and I wish he would have had the moral clarity to overcome the bigotries of his time, but most people don’t.

Obviously the behavior of a nation-state represents much, much higher stakes. The analogy is almost offensive. But I do think the same logic applies. The question shouldn’t be what the United States has done wrong — or not just what it has done wrong — but how it has behaved relative to other nations with similar levels of power. And it’s here where the progressive and lefty views of an especially or uniquely evil U.S. collapse entirely, I think.

Our nation has pockets of extreme poverty, still. We have what is, in some ways, a highly inefficient and inadequate social safety net. We’re definitely dysfunctional when it comes to the increasingly intense game of ping-pong that ensues whenever we switch from a red to a blue president or vice versa, now that we are in an age of ever-expanding executive power. And on the international side, yes, Vietnam and Iraq and countless other smaller and/or more covert disasters were all horrific.

But I just don’t think that the U.S. has acted in a particularly horrific manner, either at home or abroad, given its power. The U.S. does not suddenly decide it wants to annex some foreign territories and launch a ground invasion and/or a bunch of cruise missiles. The U.S. does not, for the most part, repress its own citizens in anything like the way actually repressive regimes do. If law enforcement mistreats someone, and it’s captured on video, it becomes a national story.

There are all sorts of responses to these claims: Yes, police departments close ranks and sometimes enjoy state laws that shield violent or otherwise negligent officers from responsibility. Yes, “Well, we’re not as bad as other empires” is thin comfort for dead Iraqis. But I’m sorry: We are a gentle superpower, at home and abroad, by any reasonable standard. Or gentle enough that it’s silly to pretend we’re especially or uniquely bad.

It took me some time to come to this belief, and I still have something of a knee-jerk reflex against it. I think the U.S. is unfair in a lot of ways, many of them (at least in principle) fixable, and while “the American dream” isn’t dead — if it were, word would get out and there wouldn’t be so many people trying to get here — it’s severely overhyped. A country as wealthy as ours should treat poor people better, shouldn’t punish so many middle- and lower-class people for a little bit of bad luck, and should have the accoutrements, infrastructure-wise, as the much-poorer European nations that absolutely lap us when it comes to trains and roads and all that other boring but exceptionally important stuff.

Anyway, I don’t have the time, space, or expertise to lay out the detailed, bulletproof case for America at least being a “relatively benign” or “not particularly terrible” superpower. But it doesn’t really matter, if we’re talking about politics, because hardly any Americans believe this, and they don’t like to hear it.

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I knew, going into this piece, that the American public are routinely surveyed about how proud they are to be American. When I googled, the first hit was an article in Gallup headlined “American Pride Slips to New Low.”

“Pride,” as measured here, is the percentage of Americans who are “very” or “extremely” proud to be American. What do you think this “new low” is? Thirty percent? Forty-five?