Land that I love? Younger Americans are less patriotic than ever before. Two new polls illustrate this: Only 31 percent of youngsters aged 18 to 29 are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, per a new NBC poll, compared with 75 percent of those 65 and older. And a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute reports that only 34 percent of that same younger age group are proud to be an American, whereas 66 percent of those 65 and older, 59 percent of Americans aged 50 to 64, and 43 percent aged 30 to 49 feel proud to be FROM THE GREATEST COUNTRY THAT EVER WAS.
I guess they’re in good company. “Oh my country,” John Adams once wrote. “How I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecility, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!”
John Adams is dead, but Zoomers aren’t yet, so there’s still time to convince them of how much there is to love: American Flag cake and tech innovation and federalism and homesteading and Martha Stewart and the Beach Boys and the Fourth Amendment and going to space and Lana Del Rey and religious pluralism and Michael Jordan. But it’s so much more than my silly little fixations: America is the land so many of our ancestors took a chance on and embraced great uncertainty to immigrate to. It’s the place where risk, coupled with work ethic, has historically been rewarded; where upward mobility seemed possible; where rising above your station—socially, economically, whatever—has been not just allowed, but encouraged, even for the fools and knaves among us. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, baby!
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day’s news every morning.
America hasn’t always treated every group that it set out to protect correctly, but Enlightenment ideals make clear what we’re striving for: Each person has inherent dignity and equality, and ought to be afforded as much liberty as we can muster. Honest Abe said that America was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Pretty good mission statement, kinda nails the essentials. Culturally and politically, we’ve historically been broadly opposed to massive wealth redistribution and think people mostly ought to be able to keep what they earn. We’ve valued privacy highly, and let community flourish far away from the prying eyes of the state. We tend to have a high tolerance for rebelliousness and nonconformity, experiments in living both good and bad, and we’ve set high standards for our people. Make something of yourself. Don’t be a freeloader. Follow your dream, see if there’s a market for it, and leave it all out on the field. These haven’t always been perfectly executed ideals—libertarians can find a lot to quibble with, and the trend lines might not look great—but it sure as hell beats France, Morocco, or China.
More broadly, the fact that so many younger Americans don’t feel proud of our country, and appreciative of the great American experiment, says that we’re taking our political circumstances for granted. And when we take our blessings for granted, we lose not only perspective but also hope in our country’s betterment.
It is true that we botch a lot of things in America. Allowing slavery, forcing Natives down the Trail of Tears, interning Japanese-Americans, enacting the New Deal, and going to war in Iraq were all travesties that should not have been so. Our leaders are not always prudent. Our political parties lead us astray. Our bureaucrats are often dunces. Our legislators are frequently clownish, just in different flavors. Team Red/Team Blue partisanship feels ever nastier these days, and the socialist wave threatens to knock us all off our feet.
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” said Benjamin Franklin. If you think we’ve become less free, consider whether we’ve become less virtuous; if you think we’ve become less virtuous, consider whether we’re struggling to handle all that freedom. But let’s not give up on one another. It’s long been civic discourse that’s helped us define what exactly virtue looks like, and communities coming together that give us the opportunity to live virtue out. Put down the phones; talk to your neighbors. Be charitable in thought and deed.
America is still a fundamentally good experiment—one still in progress, and one very much worth keeping. We can’t be cynical about everything, we’ve gotta pick some things to love. I pick America, long may she live. Happy Fourth of July weekend to you and yours!
Scenes from New York:
New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool.
Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can.
Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings,…
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 1, 2026
Some more inside baseball about NYC’s power grid (and how ill-prepared we are for a heat wave):
Our new hydropower line to Quebec went down suddenly!
Gov Hochul got it permitted, but it only just turned on this month and it’s apparently not stable yethttps://t.co/LWMiRf1d2Y
— Alex Armlovich (@aarmlovi) July 2, 2026
QUICK HITS
- Tell it to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
Air conditioning has reduced heat deaths in the US by three quarters since the 1970s. https://t.co/oMmrKiOeml
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 1, 2026
- “OpenAI has begun preliminary discussions about giving the US government a 5% stake in the ChatGPT-developer, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the talks. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and other executives proposed that move as part of a broader arrangement under which Washington would hold 5% of each of the leading US AI developers, the FT reported. That might include Anthropic PBC and listed sector leaders Google and Meta Platforms Inc., though it’s unclear if those other firms would agree with the proposal,” reports Bloomberg.
- Russian strikes in Kyiv kill at least 17.
- “In the decade since Canada legalized euthanasia, known there as medical assistance in dying, or MAID, its physician-assisted death regime has developed into one of the most permissive in the world. Between 2016 and 2024, 76,475 Canadians received lethal doses from doctors or nurse practitioners. The 16,499 cases in 2024 accounted for 1 out of 20 deaths in Canada. In some regions of Quebec, the rate is 13 out of 100,” writes Charles Lane for The Washington Post. “Now, however, Canada might finally be maxing out on MAID. On June 17, a special parliamentary committee recommended that the government ‘indefinitely exclude’ patients whose only medical condition is a psychiatric one such as depression or schizophrenia. Pro-euthanasia activists had urged that MAID eligibility be expanded to include them, but ‘safe and equitable implementation’ of MAID in such cases is simply not possible, the committee said.”
- Lord help me:
Reporter: JD Vance just said in an interview that he thinks you are going to be the leading Democratic candidate for president in 2028. What’s your response to that?
AOC: pic.twitter.com/s5qodMBiN1
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026
