Fake Patriots Are Destroying Everything That Made America Great

Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late middle age, dresses up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Reading). His fake beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:

White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that leave half their buttocks and breasts exposed.

Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their own private anxieties, but also beneficiaries of a country that has allowed them in some small way to enjoy the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant despite his physical diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: “Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Of course, the Jeffersonian dream of liberty has never been shared equally and indeed has been actively stolen from many. As against Updike’s triumphalist good cheer, we also have the bracing rebuke of Frederick Douglass’s classic 1852 oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In words that can never be forgotten, Douglass reminded the world that for the enslaved, the patriotic celebration of liberty and citizenship was worse than meaningless—it was a callous lie paid for by their suffering.

The abolition of slavery hasn’t ended the sting or relevance of Douglass’s words. In 2025, America has a president who is hell-bent on demolishing the principle of birthright citizenship, one of the great achievements of Reconstruction that Douglass fought so hard to enshrine in the 14th Amendment.

In Donald Trump’s America, Douglass’s stern critique of patriotic illusions rings truer than Updike’s paean to the “happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Polls record an increasingly pessimistic national mood. According to Gallup, only 31 percent of Americans feel that the country is moving in the right direction. Further, Gallup records that national pride is now at a “new low.” Only 58 percent of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down from a high of 91 percent in 2004.) Among Democrats, this number stands at 38 percent, among independents at 53 percent. Among Gen Z Americans (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41 percent feel pride in their country.

The darkening national mood of course goes beyond Trump’s presidency and can ultimately be traced to bipartisan failures that have dominated the new century, starting with George W. Bush’s imperial crimes in the global War on Terror and Barack Obama’s inadequate response to the economic meltdown of 2008 (which continues to fuel economic despair). As it happens, Updike’s hometown of Reading perfectly illustrates the longer arc of national despair. Now a predominantly Latino city, Reading remains a Democratic stronghold that Kamala Harris won with 60 percent of the vote, but Trump increased his share of the vote by 16 percent from 2020 to 2024, which contributed to his victory in Pennsylvania. This 16 point shift was one of the largest swings in the 2024 election. Like many inland American cities, Reading has never recovered from deindustrialization and the shift of jobs overseas.