Why 71% of Democrats Are Wrong Not to Be Proud of America
Why America is the greatest nation that has ever existed.
Last Sunday, there was a historic UFC fight on the White House lawn to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. It was truly the greatest event in the history of the UFC, and not just because for the first time ever, every fight ended in a knockout or TKO.
The crowd was all soldiers and UFC-friendly celebrities, the fighters walked out with Medal of Honor winners, the military did an amazing job of handling the music, the fireworks were awesome, and the flyover by the jets was incredible:
Then, to top it all off, in the final fight of the night, when Justin Gaethje began his walk-out, he was standing in the White House looking at the original Declaration of Independence.
Gaethje, who was a huge underdog, followed that up by winning the title in a fight so good it’s practically guaranteed to be added to the UFC Hall of Fame:
Know what else stood out about that event? The openly patriotic, pro-American, pro-military ads we saw throughout the event:
Watching that event made me even prouder to be an American, which is why it really stuck with me when I saw how rare that sentiment apparently is in the blue half of the country:
Let me just be blunt: If you’re not proud to be an American, there’s something wrong with you. Either there’s something wrong with your mentality, your knowledge of history, your view of human nature, or your understanding of the world, because it doesn’t get much better than this, and to the extent it does, it’s because we keep topping ourselves.
The United States is the oldest surviving democracy on the planet, and our Constitution has been THE STANDARD against which all others have been judged. We have also freed more human beings than all other nations combined.
We fought a war to end slavery in our country, saved the free world in WW1, were the key nation in the fight for freedom in WW2, and then helped free over a hundred million people by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Europe is free because of us. South Korea is free because of us. We even had the foresight to help rebuild former enemies like Italy, Germany, and Japan, and turned them into friends.
We’re the country that produced George Washington, Steve Jobs, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Daniel Boone, Elvis Presley, John Rockefeller, Charles Lindbergh, Robert Oppenheimer, the Wright brothers, Ray Kroc, Ben Franklin, Douglas MacArthur, Henry Ford, Edgar Allan Poe, Sam Walton, Mark Twain and a thousand other legends that will be remembered as long as there are history books.
We have also been the greatest center of commerce, invention, and human advancement to ever exist. Putting a man on the Moon? The Internet? Airplanes? The helicopter? The Interstate highway system? The light bulb? Air conditioning? Microwaves? Refrigerators? Personal computers? The telephone? Self-driving cars?
WE DID THAT.
After WW2, when our industrial base was intact, we had the most powerful military on the planet, and we were the only nation with nuclear weapons; we could have swallowed the planet. Instead, we helped our friends and, even more notably, our enemies, rebuild. Then, we helped enforce a global order that has endured for most of a century and made the world a better place.
Even today, we could conquer Canada and Mexico anytime we wanted. Why haven’t we done it? Because it’s not who we are. As you look back through history at other nations with the sort of power we have, you’ll see conquest and subjugation, but you won’t see other nations that are as strong as we are behaving the way we do. Even today, just look at how willing China and Russia are to militarily dominate their neighbors when they think they can get away with it. We’re not like that, even though we could be ten times worse if we wanted. WE’RE BETTER THAN THEM. No nation in history has ever been more of a worldwide force for good than the United States.
Oh, you say, but that’s the past. What about today? Are we still great today?
YES, WE ARE.
America has the strongest military in the world, the strongest economy in the world, and America’s people have the highest amount of disposable income in the world. There is a reason why half the planet would come to America if they could get in, and why so many millions of people are even willing to break the law to get here.
“Oh, but they have free this in one European country, and the welfare state in another European country is better than ours!” True, but European nations are also stagnant, weak, increasingly tyrannical, and their taxes are much higher. Most European nations are poorer than the worst-performing states in America on disposable income. For example:
Do you want to create a new company, get rich, or build a comfortable life for yourself? This is the place to be. You want to live in one of the biggest cities in the world? A beautiful spot in the country? In the desert? Near the sea? Next to some of the most beautiful landscapes on planet Earth? America can accommodate you like nowhere else.
Do you like freedom of speech? Do you like having an extraordinary amount of freedom across the board as long as you leave everyone else alone? Heck, do you even like the idea of having an extremely low tax rate on the people who aren’t making as much money as the guys at the top?
The truth is that most of the people who don’t like it in America have one of two problems.
Some of them have that disease that Machiavelli described so long ago:
They compare what’s good in the real world versus their imaginary, utopian vision of how the world should be, and they become deeply dissatisfied because reality doesn’t match their nonexistent fantasy. You know, “I should be able to draw and play video games all day long, everything should be free, people like me should be celebrated in society, and people I don’t like should be torn down because it would make me feel better to see them fail!” Sorry, but the world doesn’t work like that unless you’re oppressing everyone else and making them suffer to create your “utopia” at their expense.
On the other hand, some people are just deeply unhappy. They don’t like themselves. They’ve embraced ideas, ideologies, and ways of looking at the world that make them miserable, and they just happen to be in America.
If they moved from here to France, Japan, Dubai, or Australia, they’d be just as depressed because the real problem is them, not where they live. Even if the place they live in changes, they’re stuck with the real source of their own misery everywhere they go. See feminists, race-obsessed people, communists, advocates of intersectionality, people with victim-oriented mentalities, lazy people who want handouts, the they-them crowd, etc., etc., etc., for great examples of this. America looks sour to them because they’re sour people, but dealing with that would require a lot of effort, work, and worst of all, they’d have to CHANGE. So, they blame America instead of shining the light of truth on themselves and realizing that much of the ugliness they see in the world is a reflection of the lens through which they view it.
Our country has never been perfect, and we have always had and will continue to have our challenges, but this really is the place to be on Planet Earth. If you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. All of us should be proud to be part of a country like this. Just being an American makes you one of the luckiest people on Earth.
Thank you for this article. I’ve ignored a family member for days after he texted me on Sunday morning gleefully saying rain and storms were going to cancel the event. It bothered me. A lot.
He’s ex military, former defense contractor, we come from a military patriotic good family - why is he like this?? But your article helped me: He’s a sour person. He doesn’t want to change or look inward. He’s bitter and sarcastic and - while he can be very funny - it always turns MEAN. Sometimes downright nasty.
I’ve invested enough emotional energy in anyone, family or not, who gets their kicks this way. Enough.
"On the other hand, some people are just deeply unhappy. They don’t like themselves. They’ve embraced ideas, ideologies, and ways of looking at the world that make them miserable, and they just happen to be in America.
If they moved from here to France, Japan, Dubai, or Australia, they’d be just as depressed because the real problem is them, not where they live. Even if the place they live in changes, they’re stuck with the real source of their own misery everywhere they go."
Excellent piece.
The part quoted above very consistent with this recent Mike Munger piece:
https://kidsprefercheese.substack.com/p/money-and-happiness
"Using the same Track Your Happiness dataset, they found that people are mentally disengaged from what they are currently doing roughly 47 percent of the time — and that this mind-wandering is among the single strongest predictors of unhappiness in the entire dataset, outpacing income, activity type, and most demographic variables.
This finding reframes the whole income debate. The chronically unhappy group for whom money stopped working were almost certainly not unhappy because of insufficient funds. They were unhappy for reasons internal to their own patterns of attention and thought."