When Americans Stop Thinking About America - 7/7/25

As we return to work after the 4th of July holiday weekend, a new Gallup poll provides some unsettling information about the deteriorating relationship between our country and its citizens.

For almost 25 years, Gallup has regularly asked Americans whether they were proud of their country. Their first poll, conducted in January of 2001, found that 87 percent of respondents were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans. Those numbers ticked up slightly to 90 percent after the September 11 terrorist attacks that fall. There was a drop-off to 83 percent in 2005, as public opinion turned against the Iraq War, where they remained fairly constant for more than a decade.

When Donald Trump first took office, the percentage of those voicing pride dropped again to what was then an all-time low of 75 percent and then steadily declined through his time in the White House. After a brief shift upward at the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency, the numbers have been falling again for the past four years.

But Gallup’s new poll shows that only 58 percent of Americans are now proud of their country. It’s not surprising that the Trump-era drop-off among Democrats and, to a lesser extent, independent voters, have fueled this decline. There is a worthwhile column to be written about the increasing polarization of this country’s politics and the unfortunate consequences of so many of us tying their pride and patriotism to whether the sitting president is a member of the same political party. 

But the much more alarming poll results are not those broken down by political party but by age. While more than 80 percent of the Greatest Generation (those born before 1946) and 75 percent of Baby Boomers (born between 1946-1964) responded by saying they were extremely or very proud to be Americans, a mere 41 percent of Generation Z (born 1997-2012) answered that way. 

How did we get to a place where young people are so emotionally unattached to the country in which they live? There are many contributing factors. Someone whose formative years were shaped by the Great Recession and/or the Covid pandemic is understandably less likely to harbor affection for the nation that floundered in addressing those crises. But the Greatest Generation survived the Depression and WWII, and every other subsequent age group has been buffeted by seminal economic, cultural, or societal upheaval. There is also a growing body of research that demonstrates the isolating effect of social media, but previous generations also faced tremendous disruption from earlier advances in communications technology.

The most important remedy is a straightforward one: we must put a much greater emphasis on civics education in America’s public schools. Thirty of the fifty states require only one single semester of civics education for their students to graduate from high school, almost all of which offer that course in the 11th or 12th grade. The lesson that we are inadvertently teaching our children is that their democracy is so unimportant that we don’t bother to talk with them about it for their first ten years of school. We then offer a 15-week crash course that is somehow to miraculously transform them into regular voters and engaged citizens.

It should not surprise us that such an instructional drive-by is not doing the job. But there are exceptions from which we can learn. In the nine states that require at least one year of civics, Colorado and Utah are known for the rigor of their programs. Utah actually includes civics in every social studies class from kindergarten through high school. If every school in the country followed that admirable example, and every student was given the opportunity to learn not just their country’s history but the benefits of civic engagement continuously throughout their elementary and secondary education, Gallup’s numbers would almost certainly improve dramatically.

Ironically, this type of civic awareness and investment was an original purpose of public schools in this country. Long before the emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic became the primary focus of what our children needed to learn, our first educators recognized that a functioning society required an engaged citizenry and understood the importance of instilling those values in young people. 

Not every answer to our nation’s future challenges can be found in its past. But on this question at least, learning from our own history should be a required course for all of us.