We must stop pretending America is just an idea
A Gallup survey marking the lowest point in twenty-five years of polling has found that only seventeen percent of Americans describe themselves as 'very proud' of their country — a figure that arrives not merely as a data point, but as a mirror held up to a nation uncertain of its own reflection. In Wyoming, Representative Harriet Hageman has read that mirror as evidence of a deliberate unraveling, tracing the decline to what she sees as a sustained ideological campaign against the American story itself. Her response is not only a diagnosis but an appeal — to the founding, to the 250th anniversary, to the possibility that a people reminded of their origins might yet recover their sense of belonging to something worth honoring.
- A 26-point collapse in Democratic pride — from 62 to 36 percent in a single year — signals something more volatile than ordinary political disillusionment.
- The partisan gulf is now almost total: Republicans report 92 percent pride while the overall national figure sits at a historic low, suggesting Americans are not just divided in opinion but in their fundamental relationship to the country itself.
- Hageman places the blame squarely on the left's reframing of American history, arguing that projects like the 1619 Project have transformed shared inheritance into a source of shame rather than complexity.
- Her counter-vision insists that welcoming a diverse nation does not require Americans to dissolve their own cultural identity — a line she draws carefully between pluralism and self-erasure.
- She points to the ongoing 250th anniversary celebrations as a live experiment in whether collective memory, consciously invoked, can reverse a trend that polling suggests has been years in the making.
When Gallup released its 2025 survey showing only 17 percent of Americans felt "very proud" of their country — the lowest figure in the poll's quarter-century history — it did not land quietly. For Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, the number confirmed a suspicion she had long held: that something more than political frustration was eating at the national spirit.
The partisan breakdown was striking. Democratic pride had fallen from 62 to 36 percent in a single year, a 26-point drop that dwarfed any other shift in the data. Republicans held at 92 percent. Independents slipped to 53. The overall figure of 17 percent was, by any measure, a historic low.
In a floor speech prepared for the coming week, Hageman offered her diagnosis plainly. The left, she argued, had "weaponized" the history of slavery to render America irredeemable in the public imagination. She named the 1619 Project specifically, calling it part of a broader cultural revolution designed not to reckon honestly with the past but to delegitimize the nation's foundations entirely.
Her argument was not purely defensive. She drew a distinction between welcoming immigrants into American life and being obligated to dissolve the culture they were joining. America, in her framing, was not merely an abstract idea but a living inheritance — one that required active stewardship rather than endless revision.
Hageman closed on a note of tempered hope, pointing to the 250th anniversary celebrations already underway as a possible turning point. Whether the festivities could move a number that polling had spent years watching fall remained uncertain — but she believed that a country consciously returned to its founding story might yet find its way back to pride in it.
A Gallup survey released in 2025 found that just 17 percent of American adults described themselves as "very proud" of their country—the lowest figure in a quarter-century of polling on the question. The number landed like a stone in political discourse, and Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming seized on it as evidence of something deeper than mere dissatisfaction with current events. In a floor speech set for delivery in the coming week, she framed the decline as a crisis of national identity, one she traced directly to what she called a deliberate campaign by Democrats to delegitimize American history and culture.
The Gallup data itself told a stark partisan story. Among Democrats, pride in the country had collapsed from 62 percent the previous year to just 36 percent—a 26-point drop that dwarfed declines elsewhere. Republicans, by contrast, reported 92 percent expressing great pride. Independents fell to 53 percent, down seven points from the year before. The overall figure of 17 percent represented the lowest point in the survey's 25-year history.
Hageman's diagnosis was unambiguous. She argued that the left had "weaponized" American history, particularly the legacy of slavery, to paint the nation as fundamentally corrupt and irredeemable. She singled out the 1619 Project—a historical framework centered on the arrival of enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619—as emblematic of what she called a "cultural revolution" designed to tear society apart. "My friends on the other side of the aisle have worked mightily to weaponize our history with slavery to indict our nation as irredeemable," she said. The speech rejected what she characterized as a purely ideological reading of the American past, one that she suggested required citizens to abandon their own cultural inheritance.
Yet Hageman's response was not simply defensive. She articulated a vision of American identity that she believed could coexist with pluralism. The country, she noted, had historically welcomed immigrants and people from around the world. But that welcome, in her view, did not require Americans to subordinate their own history, culture, and traditions. "By inviting those who seek to make our country home, however, we are not obligated to subjugate our American history, culture and traditions for theirs," she wrote. Instead, she framed immigration as an invitation to participate in "the American way of life" as it existed—not to remake it entirely.
Hageman rejected the notion that America was merely "an idea" without substance or shared cultural moorings. That framing, she suggested, had left the country vulnerable to the kind of historical revisionism she believed was driving down patriotism. She called for a deliberate effort to restore national pride by returning to an honest reckoning with the founding—not a sanitized version, but one grounded in what she described as accuracy rather than ideology.
The congresswoman expressed cautious optimism that the trend could be reversed. She pointed to celebrations already underway for America's 250th anniversary as a potential catalyst for renewed national purpose. "I am, in fact, optimistic that those festivities we've already enjoyed are currently inspiring a new sense of purpose in our national identity," she said. The implication was that by consciously reconnecting with the founding era and its legacy, Americans might recover the sense of pride that recent years had eroded. Whether that optimism reflected the broader mood remained an open question—the Gallup numbers suggested a country deeply divided not just in its politics but in its basic relationship to itself.
Citas Notables
My friends on the other side of the aisle have worked mightily to weaponize our history with slavery to indict our nation as irredeemable.— Rep. Harriet Hageman
We must stop pretending that America is just an idea, or that we have no shared culture worth fighting for.— Rep. Harriet Hageman
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
What does it mean that only 17 percent of Americans say they're very proud of their country? Is that actually a crisis, or just a number?
It's a number that points to something real—a fracturing in how Americans relate to their own country. When you see Democrats drop 26 points in a single year, you're not looking at normal political disagreement. You're looking at people who've become alienated from the basic story their country tells about itself.
Hageman blames the left for weaponizing history. Is that fair, or is she doing the same thing in reverse?
Both things can be true. She's right that there's been a deliberate reframing of American history—the 1619 Project is explicitly designed to center slavery as foundational. But her response is also a kind of reframing. She's saying: yes, slavery happened, but don't let that define us. The question is whether you can hold both truths at once, or whether one has to cancel the other out.
She says America has a distinct culture worth preserving. What does that mean in practice?
It means she's drawing a line between welcoming people and asking them to assimilate into something already existing. It's the old debate about the melting pot versus the mosaic, but she's staking a claim that there is a pot—a coherent American identity—and it matters whether people join it or try to replace it.
Can patriotism actually be restored by focusing on the founding?
That's the real gamble in her argument. She's betting that if Americans look back at 1776 with what she calls honesty and accuracy, they'll feel proud again. But the people who've lost pride are often the ones who've looked at that history and found it wanting. So it depends entirely on whose version of honesty wins.