As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there’s one group that public polling consistently shows isn’t in a celebratory mood: Democrats. But the modern liberal disdain for the United States is rooted in a great delusion that there is anywhere else in the world that is better – even for progressive values.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll out this month, a plurality of Democrats – 42 percent – say that Independence Day is about “friends and family time,” compared to only 24 percent who say that the holiday is about “celebrating America.” Among Republicans, meanwhile, 65 percent say the holiday is about celebrating America, while 23 percent say it’s about friends and family.
The same poll also asked whether respondents would display an American Flag this July 4. Just 27 percent of Democrats said yes, compared to 64 percent of Republicans. When that same question was asked in July 2001, 68 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of Democrats said they would display the flag.
But perhaps the most astonishing finding on the left’s patriotic collapse is that more than half of Democrats don’t even want to live in America.
That data point comes from a new Elon University/YouGov poll, which found that 55 percent of Democrats said there is another country in which they would rather live than the United States. Just 10 percent of Republicans said the same.
This result goes beyond disappointment in the state of modern American politics or even disagreement with the current administration and congressional leadership. Democrats are increasingly rejecting America outright.
This begs an obvious question: Where, exactly, do they plan to go?
Among those who wanted out, the most popular answers were Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Ireland, Switzerland, and Norway.
But let’s take a closer look at these countries Democrats want to move to. Would their lives really be that much better in these supposed socialist utopias?
Democrats constantly laud Canada for its government-run healthcare system. But Canadians have to wait more than six months on average to see a doctor. The country’s housing market is even worse off than the United States, unemployment is higher, and economic growth has stagnated. While liberals maintain a fantasy that our neighbor to the north is a progressive success story, the reality is exactly the opposite.
Then there’s the United Kingdom. This seems like a good choice, right? After all, they speak English, have public healthcare, and have many cultural similarities to the United States. But wannabe Brits forget that if the U.K. were an American state, it would be the poorest in the country. 85 percent of British homes don’t even have air conditioning.
Japan is safe and orderly with a high standard of living. But perhaps Democrats who want to get out of the U.S. don’t know that Japan is also far more culturally conservative than the United States. (For instance, it remains the only G7 nation where gay marriage is illegal.) It is also a racially homogenous society that is deeply skeptical of outside immigration.
Liberals wouldn’t have to spend very long in Japan to realize that their support for open borders and child gender transitions is even less welcome there than in the United States.
Australia, meanwhile, is in the middle of a severe housing crunch, with median advertised rents rising about 48 percent for both houses and units over the decade ending March 2025. Its public health system is also in crisis, with many patients suffering “irreversible complications” while waiting years to see specialists. And for liberals who insist America is insufficiently protective of civil liberties, Australia does not even have a federal Bill of Rights.
Ireland may sound like an idyllic alternative for disaffected American leftists, but it has one of the worst housing crises in the developed world. The OECD says rising home and rent prices have worsened “long-standing affordability issues,” with housing-related costs taking up 26 percent of household consumption, above the OECD average.
Switzerland is wealthy, beautiful, and exceptionally well-run — but it is not a socialist utopia either. Its universal healthcare system is built around mandatory insurance premiums, not free care; Swiss officials say that the average health insurance premium will be about $500 per person per month this year.
Nor is Switzerland some open-borders progressive fantasy. Ordinary naturalization generally requires at least 10 years of residence, including three of the previous five years, and a permanent residence permit.
Norway is probably the closest thing on the list to the socialist ideal Democrats imagine. But Norway’s welfare state is heavily supported by oil wealth, and Americans cannot simply pack a bag and claim the benefits — skilled-worker residence permits normally require a concrete job offer or a qualifying business.
In other words, Norway can sustain its expansive welfare state because it strongly restricts who comes into the country – which is precisely why 99.1 percent of the country is white. That’s hardly the multiracial paradise that Americans liberals constantly say they want. (In fact, every country on this list is far more racially homogenous than the United States, and every country except Japan is far whiter.)
In short, the left’s fantasy version of these nations does not exist. The countries Democrats claim to envy are expensive, restrictive, culturally distinct, and often far less permissive than the United States in ways American liberals fail to acknowledge.
The United States is also one of the easiest places on Earth to live as a left-wing progressive. As toxic and morally wrong as it may be, the Constitution protects the right of liberals to denounce their own country, fly foreign flags, organize protests, demand socialist policies, despise religion, criticize the police, promote gender ideology, call for open borders, and campaign against capitalism – and still enjoy constitutional protections that many other countries do not recognize.
This is not to say that America has no problems. The same Elon/YouGov poll found that 73 percent of Americans rate the health of U.S. democracy only “fair” or “poor,” that 52 percent say the country is falling short of its founding ideals, and that even a slim majority of Republicans think the Founders would be disappointed in us today. But there is a difference between believing your country has problems and believing your country is the problem.
This is the crucial distinction dividing Democrats and Republicans today. As AMAC Newsline previously reported, only 26 percent of Democrats now say that the United States is a force for good in the world, compared to 83 percent of Republicans. Since 2001, the number of Democrats who say that they are proud to be an American has collapsed from 87 percent to just 36 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Republicans saying they are proud to be an American has actually increased from 90 percent to 92 percent.
That marks a real break from the older liberal tradition. For much of the 20th century, Democrats and Republicans fought bitterly over policy but still argued from a shared assumption that America was worth defending.
Today’s left sounds different. Its criticism is not merely that America has failed to live up to its founding ideals, but that those ideals are themselves suspect — that the country is defined less by liberty, opportunity, and self-government than by oppression, exploitation, and grievance.
And yet, the U.S. ranks fifth for economic freedom and fifteenth on the Human Freedom Index, alongside Switzerland, Ireland, and Australia and ahead of large nations such as Canada and Japan that the disaffected claim to envy. Those rankings themselves are arguably biased against the United States – there is a strong argument that nowhere is better than the U.S. for economic or human freedom.
American output per person tops almost every E.U. country when adjusted for purchasing power, and even Mississippi, the poorest American state, comes close to the GDP per capita of Germany, long considered Europe’s economic engine.
America has been the single most desired destination for would-be migrants every year since Gallup began tracking in 2007, and actual immigration hit record highs as recently as 2023. The whole world is lined up to get in – including people from the very places American liberals claim to want to escape to.
That is the great Democrat delusion. They want the freedoms, prosperity, and tolerance America provides, while rejecting the ideals that give rise to them. For all their talk of leaving, almost all of them will stay, because deep down, even they know there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
