Why I’m proud to be an American
It’s in tumultuous times that we celebrate the 242nd birthday of the United States of America. Everywhere, people will be waving American flags, having barbecues, and watching fireworks; that much is certain. But underneath it all is a lot of negative sentiment about our country, too. A recent poll, in fact, showed that, for the first time this century, a minority of people are extremely proud to be Americans. The number has fallen by over 20% in the last 15 years, and the declines are sharpest among Democrats and progressives.
It’s easy to infer, based on the current political climate, that the reason for this is twofold: Among many progressives, there is a dislike for America’s individualistic culture — that promotes self-sufficiency, independence, and individual freedom as core values — as opposed to a more community-centered, socialistic culture that promotes interdependence and the sacrificing of individual freedoms for the good of the community. This is bad, they say, because it encourages individuals to seek gain at others’ expense — to seek their own good first.
The other is that in light of modern social justice movements, people are also coming to see America’s history in a different light. As children, most of us were taught that the founders of our country were courageous freedom fighters who were fighting for ideals of liberty and justice that transcended petty politics. They were the ones who wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Through the spirit of rugged individualism and ambitious enterprise — and with the view that all hard-working men were capable of making a satisfying living for themselves — people expanded the nation from coast to coast and made it the strong, wealthy bastion of liberty it is today.
Now, an increasing number of people see the founders as rich white men who didn’t like being taxed by the king, and the following generations as those who stole the entire continent from Native Americans, owned slaves and treated black people and minorities as subhuman, and stole their wealth by exploiting the rest of the world through warfare and imperialism.
Both descriptions have some validity to them. There’s a lot to be admired about American accomplishments, but it has to be pointed out that a lot of them came at the expense of others’ violation and exploitation. And there’s plenty of that in America’s past that we don’t really like to talk about. There’s even a fair amount of it in our present. People on both sides of the political spectrum idolize the rich and powerful who exploit others for their own gain. We still reap the benefits of the bad things our ancestors did. Some African-Americans still feel the effects of slavery from 150 years ago and segregation laws from just 40 years ago. We’ve got some people who want to remake America into a supposed socialist paradise, and some people who wish the government basically didn’t exist.
So in light of all the black marks on our past, is there good reason to be proud to be American?
Of course there is, and I would go a step farther and say that I am not just proud to be American, but I think America is, all things considered, probably the best country on Earth. And what makes this country unique is not its dominance of the world, its vast size, its history, or its great victories. What makes the United States of America different — and greater — is that it was a nation founded on ideals. This sets it apart from almost all other nations. Most nations were founded by a people group, or an alliance of people groups, with a common ethnic background, for self-preservation and consolidation of power.
The USA, when it formed, did not need any of those things. Their existence as a people was not in jeopardy. They did not need to consolidate power (and wanted to do exactly the opposite). That’s not to say every motive behind the American Revolution was noble. After all, the colonial leaders were rich white European men who didn’t like being taxed by the king. But they also wanted to do things very differently from the way Great Britain had done them. It wasn’t simply that they wanted to be free from Britain and be ruled by their own king. They didn’t think they should be ruled by a king at all. Nor did they think the common man was there to serve the interests of a few oligarchs. Instead, they declared that “all men are created equal.” They didn’t think that anyone’s human rights could come and go at the behest of anyone else. Instead, they declared that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Not by a king. Not by a slave owner. Not by a human rights council. Not by the majority. All human beings possess certain rights and freedoms simply by existing. The government doesn’t give people rights; the government’s job is to ensure that people’s rights are preserved, including the right to freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, expression, etc.
And they didn’t just declare that arbitrarily like the European Union’s human rights charter does. To justify such a radical claim that seems to go against the obvious disparity of natural endowment among humans — some are far more beneficial to society than others — they appealed to our common Creator. It’s ironic that so many Americans hate it when religion is brought into the political sphere, when one of the most fundamental principles America is built on is explicitly a religious one. By appealing to a common Creator to justify their claim of universal human equality, the founders put some weight behind that claim. To deny universal human equality, you have to deny the Creator we believe in. That was an ideal that few nations had dared to govern by, and one that today still relatively few nations dare to govern by.
We know that many of the founders and their successors were famous hypocrites, not abiding by the words of the declaration they signed and paid lip service to, as they owned slaves and drove Native Americans out of their homelands. But they still laid the foundation for those ideals to be fully realized, and they sacrificed to do it. Some of them sacrificed their homes and their lives. They laid the foundation and built into it a mechanism for leaders to be held accountable by the people, and where people could make change when the government strays or acts counter to those ideals.
With a foundation like this, it’s no wonder that America is by far the most benevolent world superpower that’s ever existed. (Replace America with any of the great superpowers of the past — Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, the European powers of the early modern period — and there would likely be no Canada or Mexico.) It’s no wonder that, despite all its problems past and present, the US is one of the least racist nations in the world. It’s no wonder the US still has a reputation of being a land of opportunity. It’s no wonder that, with the US as the global superpower, the world has advanced more in the last 50 years than it ever did in the last 5,000. It’s not because the government is just so magnanimous. It’s because the American people, driven by the ideals of human equality and freedom, have the means to keep the government in check and not stand for oppression, even against people halfway around the world we’ll never see. That doesn’t mean we always do, but it means we can as long as we’re consistent with those ideals.
And so it’s those ideals that make me proud to be an American. It’s not how Americans have butchered those ideals in the past, but the fact that they exist, and have a firm foundation. They don’t need to be changed, and they don’t need to be remade. They’re a solid base to which we can always appeal when our country is not looking like it should. That solid foundation is what we can all celebrate and take pride in, because it’s a foundation most other countries don’t have.
