By Hugo Gurdon, Editor-in-Chief
March 28, 2023
- Americans are losing faith and interest in their country and its future. There is no other way to read the devastating results of an opinion poll published on Monday by the Wall Street Journal.
It finds that only 38% of respondents think patriotism is very important, not much more than half the number who thought so as recently as 1998, when the poll was first conducted.
Likewise, there has been a massive decline of interest in religion : Thirty-nine percent now say it is very important compared to 62% 25 years ago. America was founded in large part by people who wanted the freedom to practice their different faiths unmolested. Thus, a founding purpose of America is being rapidly discarded by the inhabitants of the current culture.
Having children was regarded as very important by 59% of respondents a generation ago, but by only 30% now, effectively a halving of concern to perpetuate the nation with succeeding generations. The number was even more dire on this subject (as on the others) among people under the age of 30, those close to the age when they might be expected to become mothers and fathers, with only 23%, fewer than 1 in 4, thinking it is very important to do so.
This is a picture of a people and nation in trouble: disaffected, demoralized, and losing hope.
Collapsing engagement with neighbors is another token of present trouble and possible future calamity. The proportion of people who think community involvement is very important has fallen from 62% just four years ago in 2019 to 27%.
The one thing that has become more important, the survey finds, is money, with 43% saying it is very important compared to 41% four years ago and 31% 25 years ago. This is the one statistic in the survey that defies easy interpretation. It could signal a real and lasting shift over a generation but could, alternatively, merely reflect temporary circumstances, specifically the inflation-savaged value of people’s incomes and the growing threat of a recession.
Pollster Bill McInturff told the Journal the “differences are so dramatic, it paints a new and surprising picture of a changing America.” Really? Yes, the differences are dramatic and new, but they do not seem very surprising to me. They seem predictable, even inevitable.
How could patriotism not be in sharp retreat under the Left’s daily assault on America?
Who at political demonstrations chants and holds up signs that read, “America was never great”? Left-wingers. Who teaches a venomous and fabricated history of this country, insisting that the raison d’etre of America was slavery? The Left, as represented by the New York Times and its dubious “1619 Project.” Who sows division and hopelessness in schools by teaching children that if they are white, they are irredeemable racists, and if they are black, they are victims without agency in their own future? The Left. Who moves at every opportunity to interfere and instruct ordinary people what they may and may not do, how they may and may not live, what they may and may not think? It is a panoply of enervating bossiness that seeks to control everything — from how people invest their savings to how they cook their meals (no more gas stoves) and how they wash their laundry.
People who are taught by an arrogant governing and opinion-forming class that encompasses much of our major institutions, from the president and his party to big businesses, schools, and universities, plus most of the news and entertainment media, learn every day that their country is not and never really was a place to thrive, enjoy freedom, or pursue happiness, as the Declaration of Independence made clear was the reason for America. They are seeing their own nation and culture being saturated in self-doubt and their government less and less capable of or willing to exercise any sort of leadership that made this country great. It becomes harder and harder to see America as a shining city on a hill, a light unto other nations.
So, no, it is no surprise that Americans’ support for their own country (patriotism) is collapsing; it is no surprise that religion, which is constantly assailed as formalized bigotry in its traditional teaching, is fading; it is no surprise that more and more people, particularly those of child-rearing age, should wonder what the point is of bringing a new generation into such a benighted and pointless nation.
It is no surprise, but it is a calamity. The nation is where it is because it has been attacked from within by people of a political persuasion that, for generations, has paid only hypocritical lip service (if that) to being on America’s side.
