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Our crisis of collective self-doubt has reached unprecedented levels.
The number of Democrats who declared themselves “extremely” or “very” proud to be American was a whopping 88% in 2004, even as the Iraq War was becoming more divisive.
It was 85% as recently as 2013. By 2022, the number had dropped to just 65%.
Remarkably, that figure fell to just 36% this year, the sort of rapid drop that might otherwise make a pollster doubt her results.
But the numbers are real, and they point to something darker.
That a growing number of Americans are losing faith in both America as a reality and as an idea presents an unusually thorny problem for American power. It is difficult to wield power confidently if there is little confidence to begin with.
If you’re not proud to be American, then you’re more likely to think other cultures, peoples and nations are superior and it may very well be better to hand off global responsibilities to them.
If America is irredeemable, the real question isn’t how to wield power more effectively but rather whether to wield it at all.
This tendency towards self-contempt is disproportionately concentrated among people of privilege, particularly left-leaning elites, young upwardly mobile progressives and those who helm mainstream institutions more broadly.
Waiting a generation is unlikely to help much. The younger you go, the lower the pride — only 24% of Gen Z Democrats say they’re extremely or very proud to be American.
This is not to exempt the United States from well-deserved criticism for a long list of destructive interventions abroad and its very real disappointments at home. Being able to look inward and acknowledge our own flaws is vital. In fact, one might argue self-criticism is essential to a healthy patriotism, to prevent it from devolving into jingoism or xenophobia.
Democracy itself encourages self-doubt. It fosters an environment of vigorous debate, and this in turn means it’s possible to reckon with the past without apology.
But something has changed. Until recently, such reckonings with the sins of the past could coexist comfortably with a hard-won patriotism.
As James Baldwin so eloquently put it, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
In other words, his disappointment in America was a product of his love for it. Because he loved it so much, he couldn’t help but be let down.
Today, however, the necessary and difficult act of self-love despite great faults has grown increasingly rare.
Most Americans will be familiar with the term “xenophobia,” a particularly resonant word for a country of immigrants. Xenophobia is the hatred or fear of strangers and foreigners (or those who appear foreign).
The opposite of xenophobia, “oikophobia,” is likely a new word for many readers. Oikophobia is “the fear or hatred of home or one’s own society,” signifying a dislike or discomfort with the familiar.
Under the sway of oikophobia, one’s own home becomes the Other. Where home and “us” are devalued, other cultures and systems of government are idealized and even fetishized as superior. The more exotic, the better.
In this pendulum of sentiment between xenophobia and oikophobia, citizens — and sometimes even the same citizens — vacillate between dislike of “them” and dislike of “us.” Neither of these modes is particularly healthy.
Coined in 1993 by the British philosopher Roger Scruton, oikophobia is a relatively recent object of study.
In one of the few extensive treatments of the concept, the Swedish author Benedict Beckeld emphasizes the role of both evil and exceptionalism. For the oikophobe, he writes, “Western civilization has been uniquely evil in its pursuit of colonization and slavery, with the implication that other civilizations have not engaged in such things.”
The desire to recast America’s founding as inextricably linked to the country’s most inhumane moments — rather than its most humane — is one manifestation of the phenomenon.
But the United States is not particularly unique in this regard. The founding of any country includes unforgivable acts of violence.
As social scientists and historians have long pointed out, the process of state-building involves war and perhaps even requires it.
As the sociologist Charles Tilly memorably put it: “War made the state, and the state made war.”
These are simply realities. They do not make America’s evils any less evil. But they do serve as a reminder we are not as special as we might suspect. We may be exceptional in other ways, but we are not exceptional in this way.
This raises the perennial question of whether “exceptionalism” is a useful prism for understanding America’s strengths, if not necessarily its flaws. I, for one, think it’s useful. And I would go one step further. America needs to believe in its own exceptionalism.
A country that doesn’t believe in itself is one that is vulnerable to challengers and competitors.
The case for “exceptionalism” of any kind is getting more difficult to make. In my writing, I have asked myself many times whether I really wanted to use words like “dominance” or “exceptionalism,” which I know can be off-putting to a significant number of readers.
But I am increasingly convinced this instinctive discomfort is itself part of the problem.
Why does the idea of America being better elicit such negative reactions in the first place?
Somehow, over the course of a few decades, outward displays of patriotism became coded as uncouth and aggressive.
A year ago, I was asked to give a talk to a group of students who were part of a summer internship program in Washington, DC.
As I walked into the rented apartment that doubled as a living and events space, I noticed an American flag hanging on the wall. And it was really big.
I was a bit confused. It occurred to me I hadn’t seen an American flag in someone’s home for years. In fact, I have no real recollection of everseeing an American flag in someone’s home.
(The twist was that this was a Muslim internship program. And each of the interns was a child of immigrants. I don’t think this was an accident).
How did our flag come to be seen as a liability, as something to be ashamed of?
How did the mere expression of American pride become unfashionable among Democrats and progressives?
Whatever the reasons, American self-doubt is now an integral part of mainstream elite cultural production, in universities, media and film.
The question of how a culture changes in this way is a difficult one.
As the conservative author Michael Brendan Dougherty notes, culture has almost a mystical quality to it — its judgments “so familiar that it exists like a voice in your head. And yet it is impossible to explain exactly how this happens.”
For better or worse, oikophobia is simply in the air we breathe, difficult to locate but also impossible to escape.
Yet it has never been more important for Democrats and liberals to escape it.
A party made up of people who do not believe in their country’s own founding principles is a party that will fail to gain traction with the American people. It will fail to win.
But the alternative is not just political defeat but something more fundamental: the gradual abandonment of any claim to lead a country they have convinced themselves isn’t worth leading.
Shadi Hamid is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. His new book is “The Case For American Power,” from which this is adapted.