Harger: In 2004, 91% of us were proud to be American. On our 250th birthday, 33% are

I’ll say the unfashionable thing right up front. I love this country. Not in the chest-thumping, my-country-right-or-wrong way, and not in the hand-wringing, apologize-for-everything way either. I love it the way you love a family that drives you nuts. Eyes open. Flaws and all.

This Fourth of July, America turns 250.

Two and a half centuries of the loudest, messiest, most improbable argument in human history, and the thing still runs. That’s worth a party, no matter who’s in the White House.

I was 15 months old on July 4, 1976. I don’t remember a thing.

But the bicentennial stuck around our house for years. The flag with the “76” logo. An Uncle Sam figurine on a shelf. Red, white, and blue everything, including, I’m told, a sheet cake that could’ve put a kid in a coma. My brother was 13, my sister was 11. They remember the fireworks, the hot dogs, the whole block-party spectacle of it.

My family wasn’t glued to the news. They were celebrating.

Keep that in mind, because 1976 was a mess.

America’s bicentennial was chaos, and we threw a party anyway

The president and vice president had both been forced out of office. They committed crimes, resigned in disgrace, and were replaced by a man nobody elected. Gerald Ford was running against a Georgia peanut farmer most of America couldn’t have picked out of a lineup two years earlier.

The economy was wrecked. Gas was expensive. Unemployment was ugly. New York City had just begged D.C. for a bailout to keep from going broke.

And we threw ourselves a 200th birthday party anyway. Tall ships in the harbor. Fireworks over every small town in the country. My family lit sparklers like the world wasn’t falling apart, because from the porch, it wasn’t.

Go back another 50 years to 1926, and I promise you it was fraught too. Prohibition. The Klan marching on the nation’s capital. A stock market about to take the whole country off a cliff. Nobody living through it thought they had it easy either.

That’s the thing about this country. There’s never been a calm year. We just remember the parties and let time crank up the nostalgia.

Gallup says American pride just hit a 25-year low

Now we turn 250, and the numbers are brutal.

33%.

That’s the share of American adults who told Gallup they’re “extremely proud” to be American. Lowest in the history of their trend, going back to 2001. Add in “very proud,” and you barely clear half the country at 53%.

In 2004, that combined number was 91%.

Among adults under 35, extreme pride sits at 14%. Among women, 26%. Among people of color, 20%.

Those numbers all deserve a long look. But the partisan split is the one that tells the story.

70% of Republicans said they’re extremely proud. Only 14% of Democrats agreed.

Fifty-six points apart. On whether they love their own country.

Pride drops under Trump, then drops under Biden

Republicans are prouder right now. That’s real.

During President Trump’s first term, Democratic pride dropped to 22%. When President Biden took over, Republican pride fell to 58%. Now Trump’s back, and Democratic pride has cratered to 14%.

If Kamala Harris had won in November, those lines would’ve crossed the other way. Republican pride down, Democratic pride up. We’ve seen this movie. We know the script by heart.

Love of country now rises and falls with election results, like a stock ticker. Up when your side wins. Down when it loses.

That’s the disease right there. Republicans question whether Democrats even love America. Democrats question whether Republicans qualify as decent people. And every four years, half the country gets told it’s unworthy of the flag it grew up saluting.

You can’t run a country that way and expect the pride numbers to go anywhere but down.

Democrats handed away the American flag, and Republicans grabbed it

Only 26% of Democrats display an American flag now. In 1991, it was 58%.

I fly one on my porch in Auburn. Some people probably make assumptions about my politics because of it. They’re usually wrong, but they seem to enjoy themselves.

That flag flew there when Joe Biden was president, too. It’ll fly under whoever comes next. A flag is the whole team, not one side’s jersey.

Handing the flag to one political party was a choice. And the people who gave it up own as much of that as the people who grabbed it.

What World Cup visitors see that Americans have stopped seeing

We’re hosting the World Cup right now. Tens of thousands of visitors from all over the planet are walking the streets of America for the first time.

You know what they keep talking about?

The friendliness. The smiles. The way total strangers strike up a conversation in the coffee line. The size of the place, the diversity of it, the fact that somehow this loud, sprawling, contradictory country actually works. A fan from Brazil, a fan from Australia, and a family from Tulsa end up in the same restaurant, share a beer, enjoy the air conditioning, and nobody needs a policy paper to explain why they’re getting along.

We’re too close to see it. We marinate in the dysfunction because cable news and the phone in your pocket serve it up on a drip, 24 hours a day. Step out of that feed for a week, and the country looks nothing like the inside of a Gallup poll.

America was never perfect, and that was always the point

Is America perfect? Come on. It was never perfect. Not in 1776, not in 1926, not in 1976, not now. We were founded by brilliant men who wrote that all men are created equal, while some of them owned human beings. We have been arguing our way toward that sentence ever since, one bloody, halting, magnificent step at a time.

Perfection was never the deal. The whole thing is an experiment, and experiments are sloppy by design. We were never going to agree on everything. Two and a half centuries in, we still don’t agree on much.

That’s the part I love. A country big enough and free enough to hold 340 million people who question each other’s politics and somehow still throw the same birthday party. Still argue. Still build. Still sit down next to someone we voted differently from and watch the same fireworks.

We do it. When we choose to.

Independence Day in Washington, with the flag and the grill

So let me say what I’ll be thinking about this weekend.

The country has always been bigger than whoever’s sitting in the Oval Office. Bigger than any one election, any one party, any one bad year. My family knew that in 1976 with a resigned president and expensive gas. Their grandparents knew it in 1926. We get to know it now.

There’s a lot to love about this place that has nothing to do with who’s in charge. The neighbor who fires up his own chainsaw to clear the cedar off your road after a windstorm, nobody asking him to. The stranger who waves you into traffic. The co-worker who votes the opposite of you and still covers your shift when your kid is sick. That’s the country. Not the cable panel. Not the comment section.

We forget we have more holding us together than pulling us apart. The flag on my porch says the guy across town and I are on the same team, even if we question each other’s politics.

So this weekend I’ll be celebrating. Flag on the porch. Grill hot. And the social media notifications turned off.

Happy 250th, America. You beautiful, exhausting, sloppy experiment.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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