America 250

Stop Hating America

Plus: failing power grids, Canadian euthanasia, AOC running for president, and more...

Liz Wolfe | 7.2.2026 9:30 AM

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Land that I love? Younger Americans are less patriotic than ever before. Two new polls illustrate this: Only 31 percent of youngsters aged 18 to 29 are "extremely" or "very" proud to be an American, per a new NBC poll, compared with 75 percent of those 65 and older. And a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute reports that only 34 percent of that same younger age group are proud to be an American, whereas 66 percent of those 65 and older, 59 percent of Americans aged 50 to 64, and 43 percent aged 30 to 49 feel proud to be FROM THE GREATEST COUNTRY THAT EVER WAS.

I guess they're in good company. "Oh my country," John Adams once wrote. "How I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecility, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!"

John Adams is dead, but Zoomers aren't yet, so there's still time to convince them of how much there is to love: American Flag cake and tech innovation and federalism and homesteading and Martha Stewart and the Beach Boys and the Fourth Amendment and going to space and Lana Del Rey and religious pluralism and Michael Jordan. But it's so much more than my silly little fixations: America is the land so many of our ancestors took a chance on and embraced great uncertainty to immigrate to. It's the place where risk, coupled with work ethic, has historically been rewarded; where upward mobility seemed possible; where rising above your station—socially, economically, whatever—has been not just allowed, but encouraged, even for the fools and knaves among us. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, baby!

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