AMAC Exclusive – By Neil Banerji
A new Gallup poll released last week has further exposed a shocking collapse in patriotism – and is yet another reflection on the sorry state of American education.
According to the survey of 1,013 U.S. adults conducted from June 1-22, only 39 percent of Americans say they are “extremely proud” to be American – a mere 1 percent higher than last year’s all-time low of 38 percent.
That figure includes just 18 percent of adults aged 18-34. As recently as 2013, 85 percent of adults aged 18-29 said they were “extremely proud” to be American. In other words, young adults are nearly 80 percent less likely to be extremely proud to be an American today than they were a decade ago.
Meanwhile, Americans 55 and older were nearly three times more likely to be extremely proud of their nationality.
But the greatest demographic differentiator when it comes to national pride remains party identification. 60 percent of self-identified Republicans said they were “extremely proud” to be an American, as opposed to 33 percent of Independents and a paltry 29 percent of Democrats. When Gallup first began asking the question back in 2001, those figures were 64 percent, 54 percent, and 46 percent, respectively.
But what are we to make of the fact that the two demographic groups least likely to be “extremely proud” to be American according to Gallup are young people and self-identified Democrats?
One possible explanation is that there is significant overlap between the two groups – younger people tend to vote more Democratic, while older people tend to vote more Republican.
But why is it exactly that young people today are so much less patriotic than their older peers, and are even less patriotic than young people just 10 years ago?
The seemingly obvious answer is the public education system.
While schools have been rife with anti-American propaganda for decades, the rise of Critical Race Theory and other “alternate histories” of the United States are reflected in just how hostile young people have become toward their home country.
Take, for instance, one recent story about how an influential teacher group is pushing educators to teach students that we live in “violent, oppressive, and tumultuous times” and provide lessons on “oppression” and “antiracism.”
In Washington D.C., the nation’s capital, elementary school and middle school students are given a full dose of Critical Race Theory instruction.
Dozens of public school teachers throughout the country have protested state laws that restrict them from teaching that the United States is a systemically racist country.
New curriculum like “reparations math” is teaching students that minorities are still discriminated against in the United States and are the victims of systemic racism.
The federal Department of Education under Joe Biden wants educators to teach that racism is endemic in America, and has openly praised leading proponents of Critical Race Theory like Ibram X. Kendi.
The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which holds that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, argues white Americans are inherently racist, and has been thoroughly debunked by scholars, is taught in more than 4,500 American schools.
In one of the most telling statistics on what kids are actually learning in school, a majority of students leaving high school say that they are familiar with the concepts “America is a systemically racist country,” “America is built on stolen land,” and “America is a patriarchal society.”
Meanwhile, math and reading scores are in sharp decline.
Things are even worse in America’s higher education system.
Dozens of U.S. colleges and universities have said that the very land their campuses are built on is “stolen,” while dozens more have issued statements claiming America is systemically racist.
Stanford University has now declared that even the term “American” is “harmful.”
A study of the top 100 medical schools in the country last year found that 58 have mandatory courses in Critical Race Theory.
Given these anecdotes, it seems a wonder that even 18 percent of young Americans still have pride in their country at all.
As conservatives have long warned, the left’s anti-American indoctrination crusade is also having disastrous downstream effects on things like military and first responder recruitment. If young people aren’t even proud to be from America, why would they risk their lives to defend it?
In his farewell address, President Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?” If these anecdotes and Gallup’s poll results are any indication, the answer is a resounding “no.”
Neil Banerji is a proud Las Vegas resident and former student at the University of Oxford. In his spare time, he enjoys reading Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke.