In the wake of Team USA’s historic men’s hockey victory, I’ve noticed some patterns.
I’ll acknowledge that there are probably plenty of liberals celebrating the win happily and without hesitation.
But there are also many that have expressed a reluctance or inability to fully embrace the American hockey team because of “what’s happening” politically – or more accurately because they didn’t get their way in 2024.
Their “patriotism” is largely dependent on who’s in the White House. I wish this was conjecture or anecdotal, but it’s actually been studied.
Gallup began measuring this in 2001. Before 9/11, 87% of all Americans surveyed said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American and after 9/11, that figure increased by 3%. The proudest Democrats ever were was in 2013 following Obama’s reelection, when 85% of the liberals surveyed expressed the sentiments. As of 2025, only 36% of Democrats polled could say the same. For reference, the all-time low for Republican respondents was 84% in 2022.
The political left’s “love” of country is contingent on control.
During Trump’s first term, I remember seeing leftists “opt out” of the Fourth of July. They couldn’t bring themselves to commemorate the day our nation came to be, because they lost an election.
And as much as they like to pretend that Trump is some kind of unique exception, I remember them calling McCain and Romney Hitler because there was a time when I believed them.
Nevermind an administration they opposed; when Biden was in the White House getting lost on his way to the bathroom and the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a lot of them decided that the country was unworthy of a birthday party.
So it really didn’t come as a surprise to me that I was seeing articles and social media posts about the other side of the aisle grappling with whether or not they could or would root for their own country.
What clicked for me for the first time in the aftermath of the Winter Olympics was that the way a person feels about America seems to be a reflection of the way they feel about themselves. At least to an extent.
I’m not saying this is a perfect law of nature, it’s just something I’ve observed too often for me to think it’s a total coincidence.
There are so many people with this deep seated resentment for the United States with some level of subconscious and reluctant awareness that they need the country they hate.
I remember watching a man on the street interviewer talking to two Mexican women. I get the impression that both were either born here or came here when they were very young based on their accents and mannerisms. He asked them what the greatest country in the world was, and they both said “Mexico” without flinching. But when he asked them why they lived here, or why so many Mexicans were desperate to live here if that was the case, they couldn’t answer.
People will try to pretend there’s nothing special about this country while contradicting everything they claim on a daily basis.
It reminds me of the dogmas that dominated women’s discourse for nearly a decade from “trans women are women” to “healthy at any size.” So many people would repeat slogans and one-liners that they clearly didn’t believe but gave themselves or others a false sense of reassurance.
And I think people unwilling to admit the truth about America are often struggling to come to terms with the truth about themselves.
I think of the type of person that likes to fancy themselves as some kind of counter cultural revolutionary that was contracted by Fortune 500 companies to give speeches about DEI in 2020. Or the 200 lb woman that insisted all bodies were beautiful until Ozempic hit the market. Or the rabidly progressive woman of color that tweets like Louis Farrakhan but exclusively dates white men.
I think on some level they know they’d drown in the gap between who they are and what they believe if they ever held themselves accountable, but lucky for them, their ideologies incentivize interrogating everyone but themselves.
People will tell themselves all kinds of stories about why they should hate America while making excuses for every other country in the world. They can look at histories rife with bloodshed and tyrannical governments and find nuance as long as they see them as “marginalized” or on their side of the war on western civilization, but all America will ever be to them is slavery and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And they’re just as oblivious in their own lives. They’ll lead a lynch mob because they found out a white woman sang the unedited version of Kanye West’s Gold Digger at a bachelorette party when their own records would never survive the scrutiny they put everyone else under.
I’ve also noticed that many of the people who only see our country as its faults can only see what’s wrong in their own lives. Their ingratitude permeates everything they do, and blinds them to their blessings. They seem much more focused on lamenting what they don’t have than appreciating what they do.
There’s a certain kind of leftist obsessed with the rest of the world’s perception; especially Europe’s. They’re desperate for validation and eager to prove to people they think of as superiors that they’re not those kind of Americans, but worldly, sophisticated and enlightened. And I think those leftists tend to be just as insecure as individuals. I think it’s what drives certain people to grandstand on social issues and pretend they can actually taste the difference between $15 wine and $50 wine even though they can’t.
They’re more interested in seeming like a “good hecking person” than actually doing good. They’ll march in an anti-ICE protest (that they’ll make sure to post on social media) and block agents from arresting a child molester. They wrote dramatic polemics after Jordan Neely died about how “the unhoused are people too” and then play stupid when a woman is burned alive on a train. They carried protest signs about kids in cages while voting exclusively based on how easily they could kill a child in the womb.
Hard core communists are forced to ignore reality, human nature, and history to justify their ideology, and people that willfully blind politically are even more so personally. If someone can pretend that Cuban healthcare is a success or that every Venezuelan in the diaspora is lying about Maduro, they can convince themselves of anything. Under the right conditions, this level of delusion could be harnessed for good but for them it only ends in destruction.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone. Well adjusted leftists may be an endangered species, but they do exist.
America has plenty of problems, and I think we should talk about them. If you aren’t willing to criticize something I don’t know that you actually care about it, because in order for anything to reach its full potential its shortcomings must be addressed. But I do believe a pathological disdain for your country often accompanies disastrous habits and if we’re ever going to find the cure I think we have to find the cause. Kidding! (Kind of)
what do you think?