‘America is bad’ is a stone-cold loser

Patriotism is good for progressive politics and policy

Years ago, a seasoned political consultant confided in me that he’d polled a proposal to impose mandatory life sentences on child molesters and had been shocked to discover that Americans hated the idea. Why? Not because the sentences were too steep—rather because people wanted those pedophiles executed. If someone had done something terrible to a little five-year-old girl, almost nothing could satisfy America’s vengeance.

I use this example to point out that there are narratives in life that resonate beyond the way we ordinarily understand their topical valence. In politics, consultants regularly pore over polling data to discern which issues are most salient—the economy, the border, reproductive rights, climate change, inflation, and so on. Candidates, seeing one issue move up or down the list, may rearrange their stump speeches to reflect what they believe the public wants to hear.

But even if a candidate’s priorities lined up perfectly with any given voter’s concerns, news that the candidate has abused a child, or even that the candidate had not been sufficiently determined to bring pedophiles to justice, would likely render the other stuff meaningless. The emotional valence of a deeply moral issue can block out the sun. That’s because it speaks to something deeper—what the famous journalist Walter Lippmann termed the “pictures in our heads.” The world is too complex for any individual to understand—but an act or position so egregious can provide a window onto a reality that colors everything else.

Why do I bring this up on America’s 250th birthday? Because it bears directly on contemporary progressivism’s relationship with patriotism. How we on the left and center-left feel about America isn’t typically measured among the litany of issues we’re asked to rank. But what I’ve termed our “cultural aversion to power”—our deep suspicion of any institution that has imperialistic, colonial, patriarchal, or coercive roots—has come to frame how many of us perceive the nation as a whole. Within the progressive bubble, the U.S. is a society rife with racism, sexism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and the list goes on. And it follows simply that outsiders, hearing our critique, have come to presume that we believe that America is bad.

That narrative is both substantively wrong and politically toxic. Even if American history is beset with all sorts of ugliness—and it certainly is—few Americans outside our ideological bubble doubt at root that America is good. Arguing that America is actually a malign influence is a “tell” in the worst way politically because to many Americans, patriotism is more than just a concept, it is a virtue. Set aside what we plan to do to strengthen the social safety net, protect the right to choose, bring peace to the Middle East, or fight climate change. If the electorate is led to believe our collective view is that America is fundamentally bad, few outside our narrow sliver of the electorate are going to stand with us at the polls.

Patriotism is good politics

Before exploring why progressives should embrace patriotism, I want to step back and establish that Americans are, by and large, patriotic. This may not be readily apparent in some parts of the progressive bubble, or even in the sort of ivory tower rooms I occasionally find myself in. But across the fulcrum of ordinary life, the bulk of your neighbors are proud to be Americans, and believe America acts in the globe’s better interests.

At my request, the Searchlight Institute did some preliminary polling on the topic in August 2025, well before the Iran War. Seventy-seven percent of respondents were at least somewhat “proud to be an American” (including 62% of Democrats), with a full 46%, a large plurality, saying that they were “very proud.” We then asked: “Overall, do you think America is a force for good in the world?” On this question, the responses again weren’t close: 68 percent of respondents said yes (including 53% of self-identified Democrats), while only 24 percent said no, with seven percent unsure.¹ Put another way, however pessimistic progressives may be—however much we may feel as though the American Dream is slipping away—we have remained a fundamentally patriotic nation.

Then we asked a very different question: “Do you believe that most Republicans (and, in a subsequent query, most Democrats) consider America to be a force for good in the world?” Note—this question wasn’t asking what respondents themselves thought about the country—it was asking them about what they believed other people thought about America. And the results were striking. A full 65 percent of Americans stated that they believed Republicans consider America a force for good in the world—but only 43 percent stated that Democrats believe the same. When asked separately which party is more likely to view America as a force for good, the GOP maintained a 26-point advantage.

Put simply, the broad-based perception that Democrats aren’t patriotic cuts against reality. Sixty-two percent of Democrats reported being proud to be American, compared to only 33% who were not. But there remains a kernel of truth to the myth: Democrats are, in fact, the least rah-rah patriotic. Polling from Searchlight finds that Democrats are significantly less likely to consider clearly-patriotic ‘rah-rah’ acts as such. If Democrats intend to expand our appeal beyond the self-identified progressive tent—to the extent we want to draw together a coalition of heterodox thinking who might eventually constitute the supermajority we need to govern—we will need to draw support from those who are proud to be American.

I’m not suggesting that progressives whitewash American history or pretend that our collective past isn’t beset with all sorts of moral flaws and blemishes. It’s not to deny the reality of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and the rest of it. But it is to argue that those cuts do not entirely spoil our society’s remarkable and heroic story. America’s shortcomings need to be understood within the context of what can only be described as a kind of miracle—a nation of people with no common history, heritage, or language has managed to build and maintain the world’s longest surviving democracy. And until we progressives begin to understand the impact of dismissing that triumph—until we grapple with this deeper narrative challenge—we will struggle to win over voters who are fundamentally enamored with American society even if our policy agenda appears more to their liking.

How we got here

That progressives are deeply cynical about America will be entirely obvious to anyone who sits inside the academy, where it’s almost apostasy to interpret the world through any other lens. Postmodernism, critical theory, postcolonial studies—these phrases may not mean much to those who haven’t pursued a post-graduate degree. But in many cases they have had the combined effect of changing the underlying object of academic inquiry. Many researchers now set out first and foremost to uncover how some oppressive force has gone rogue: How capital has coerced labor, or how one nation has forced another to kowtow, or how an oppressive state has trampled over the civil liberties of its people.

To be clear, these dynamics are real—they are worthy of inquiry, and in many cases should be studied and addressed. But they are all born of the same narrative—that someone with power is doing something bad to someone without. In other words, the core frame in today’s academic discourse—the picture in academics’ heads—centers on a deep cynicism about authority. And that same framing has come to define progressive politics writ large. Downstream of that gestalt is the notion that America is bad. American society, as reflected by all its flaws, is just another incarnation of the abusive centralized authority that many in the progressive movement writ large want to vanquish.

This wasn’t always the case. From the progressive movement’s birth through, say, Watergate, reformers not only weren’t inclined to vilify centralized authority—they tended to venerate it. From the Wilson administration’s creation of the FTC and the Federal Reserve, to the New Deal’s stirring of a massive alphabet soup of social welfare programs, to JFK’s first inaugural, to Lyndon Johnson’s massive “War on Poverty,” progressivism’s prevailing impulse was to use public power to do big things. America wasn’t bad in that story—it was good. The TVA bringing power to the poor farmers in the Upper South was good. The Marshall Plan—a “TVA for Europe”—was good. The Peace Corps was good. NASA was good. America was, in the progressive worldview, a force for good.

But then progressives discovered, much to their own disgust, that the “establishment” running those behemoth programs weren’t always working in the public interest. The urban highway program slashed through neighborhoods, and government bureaucrats let agricultural behemoths spray DDT on crops, and Washington let Detroit produce cars that were, in Ralph Nader’s famous phrase, “unsafe at any speed.” The progressive impulse to deploy centralized authority was replaced by a desire to cut it down to size. And with that cynicism came a generalized skepticism of American society—a sentiment that could easily be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as the antithesis of patriotism.

That change in story was justified. Today, who among us would have such faith in a standard-issue government agency to carry out a New Deal project like the Tennessee Valley Authority? We on the left are often now the ones suing and blocking the government from legalizing multifamily housing opposed by the locals, building interstate transmission lines across pristine forests, and constructing large scale infrastructure for fear of the impacts on various neighborhoods. Those emanations of public authority now look to many of us like the most likely perpetrators of social injustice. Had only Robert Moses been answerable to the broader public—the American people almost certainly would have been better served. But that skepticism fueled a notion, prevalent in certain corners of the left and center-left, that the American government was bad.

In many cases, the progressive movement—a movement to which I myself subscribe—still *thinks* that it’s united by a desire to empower public authority to do more. We *think* we want to empower government agencies to build a Green New Deal and reindustrialize the country. But we don’t actually want to engage with the trade-offs necessary to empower these agencies. That’s because fundamentally we believe that whenever America exercises its power—whenever someone is granted authority—it will be used in a way that is rotten at its core. That’s why I don’t just want progressives to reclaim patriotism for political reasons. I want us to believe in the inherent good of America because it is a prerequisite for accomplishing the policy change we seek.

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Why progressives need to reclaim patriotism

No one’s denying that America is far from perfect. But like any wayward family member, or grandparent who makes off-hand comments that are entirely politically incorrect, our national story cannot be defined exclusively by our worst moments. And the alacrity with which some of the most vocal members of the progressive movement make that jump—the eagerness with which they attack our national history as an abomination—not only misses the essence of our story but it alienates voters who might otherwise join our cause.

This isn’t a new revelation—and it certainly isn’t mine. Consider Frederick Douglass’s counterintuitive approach to championing the cause of emancipation in the years before the Civil War. The Great Orator might have been tempted to harangue northern whites for having allowed the institution of chattel slavery to exist in the U.S. for as long as it had. As a former slave himself, Douglass could have emerged as a moral voice demanding recompense—certainly he wouldn’t have been wrong to shower them with approbation.

Instead, however, Douglass chose not to frame the white and Black experiences in America as separate and at odds, but rather as parallel and in concert. He likened the emancipation of the slaves to the birth of liberty born from the Declaration of Independence. He connected the Black struggle inside the U.S. to the nation’s broader march toward freedom and prosperity. In his telling, America wasn’t bad for embracing slavery, terrible as that institution was—it could be exalted for banishing the practice. And that being the case, it was now incumbent upon every American to take up the cause.² To note, Martin Luther King Jr. employed much the same strategy when leading the Civil Rights movement a century later, explicitly connecting the Black struggle to the American creed born in 1776.

In neither case was the progressive call to limit the power of the American state. King advocated for a Marshall Plan for Black communities— which would have had the federal government invest billions in physical infrastructure for urban slums and rural hamlets alike. But in the decades since, that same cultural aversion to power that has soured progressivism on patriotism has hardened into the notion that government authority can’t be trusted.

Douglass and King’s instincts should be instructive for all of us who subscribe to the goals of progressive politics. It does us no favors today to embrace some notion that America is irredeemably bad—to suggest or imply that its founding principles are corrupt, that its governing institutions are shrouds for malign intentions, that we’re all ciphers in some grand conspiracy to keep the powerless oppressed. And from a more practical standpoint, set aside whether you support any given progressive idea on the merits—there’s no reason to believe that even the most lightning-rod proposals (Medicare for All, or student loan forgiveness) would be more likely to be achieved if more Americans believed government was bad.

The bottom line here—the notion that progressives should embrace a worldview that America is good, actually—won’t seem like much of an ask to most progressives. After all, as the polling reveals, most voters in the party they identify with are already there. But if patriotism is banal among the party’s rank-and-file, many who comprise its educated elite—those who have been steeped in the cultural aversion to power for decades—will likely find the notion harder to swallow. And as the Searchlight Institute polling suggests, those are the ones who define the public’s perception of the Democratic Party’s relationship with patriotism.

All too often, at the end of a losing campaign, progressives lay the blame at the feet of their messaging. Had they only chosen a slightly different way to frame their agenda, we tell ourselves, we surely would have won. More often than not, however, our indictment of the message serves simply to protect us from having to look under the hood. At long last, we need to peer more incisively into our branding—beyond even our policy agenda. We need to derive a better picture of how ordinary voters understand our values. What do they think has gone wrong in America? Do they think we’re rooting for America to succeed—or do they think we want to take American society down to the studs? What is the story in their heads?

Put more simply, to succeed politically, our movement needs to be proud of America. We need to make clear that we are cognizant of where it has fallen short, and broadcast that we are hopeful about what it can achieve in the future. We should be honest about the mistakes that our country has made, but we should simultaneously acknowledge that, for all its flaws, America is a shining city on the hill. The birth of freedom represented by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago was a miracle at the time and continues to represent one of the great moments in human history. Yes, we’ve faltered in our past. But the progressive creed should promise to brighten America’s glow and expand the circle of those who can bask in its glory here at home and everywhere around the world.

1. In subsequent polling conducted after the beginning of the Iran war, these numbers dropped by a few percentage points across the board.

2. “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852.