The Generation Gap Begets a Generation Chasm

By David Samuel McCalmont

The Patriotism Conundrum

Besides Alan Dershowitz, my favorite Democrat is Ruy Teixeira, a Washington think-tanker who has lately migrated from the pugnaciously irritable Center for American Progress to the prickly dyspeptic citadel of neoconservatism American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Teixeira has a Substack curiously called The Liberal Patriot, which is remarkably clear-sighted about most that is wrong with today's Democrat Party, particularly the way it has spurned the long-held allegiance of America's blue-collar class in favor of the information economy's new elite who dominate government, the media, education, entertainment, and corporate business.

But Mr. Teixeira is also remarkably myopic about his party's capacity for change and renewal. No matter how insane or remote from the everyday concerns of ordinary folks the Democrats’ policies under Joe Biden are, and no matter how many of their traditional supporters they appear to have alienated, Mr. Teixeira is forever proposing a tweak here or a tweak there that will, he believes, correct the problem, and so bring the old-time Democrats back home to the quondam Party of the Working Class.

Maybe the problem will even correct itself. Recently, The Liberal Patriot purported to explain "Why Democrats Will Become Energy Realists."

The short answer?

“There is no alternative.”

My Goodness, Ruy, how little you know them. For Democrats, there's always an alternative to realism – and, indeed, to reality itself. Having thrown in their lot with the fashionable ideologues in higher education and prestige media, they always have the option simply to stick their heads in the ideological sand, confident that their most loyal supporters – along with those they have frightened half to death with the specter of environmental apocalypse, or another Donald Trump presidency – will do the same.

The Democrats' preserving for themselves this opt-out from reality is the reason why they have turned from the interests of regular Americans to ideology in the first place; they hear from their ideological brethren the siren song of inerrancy. You can never be wrong if you stick to the ideology, because the ideology – being as it is "on the right side of history" – can never be wrong (despite the fact political philosopher Leo Strauss punched all sorts of holes in this "destiny" argument 60 years ago).

Here's another recent headline from Mr. Teixeira: "The Democrats' Patriotism Problem Revisited," which is subtitled "The patriotism gap remains." You have to wonder if a "patriotism problem" isn't a bit more than just a "problem" for a political party with aspirations to win elections in a healthy nation-state premised on the democratic process. Patriotism is the sign and art of demonstrating love and fealty to the nation.

Maybe it's more of a patriotism-problem problem.

Maybe ours is not a very healthy democratic republic.

“Dissent” as the Highest Form of Patriotism?

Mr. Teixeira recognizes in the very title of his Substack that – historically – it is not enough for a political party in America to be simply "liberal." As patriotism is inherently conservative, it has always been important in the past for liberals to reassure most patriotic Americans that their deviations from the rest of the conservative program do not imply any less love of country on their part.

Indeed, I seem to remember those old-time liberals announcing that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism," and erroneously attributing the saying to Thomas Jefferson. This dubious proposition – which originated among opponents of the Vietnam War back in the 1960s and was made popular by (among others) Mayor John Lindsay of New York City (no Jeffersonian he) – could still be heard during the Iraq War protests of the early twenty-first century.

But those protests are now as distant in time from the new generation of young protestors – who most recently gathered this spring on college campuses across the nation to damn Israel and praise Hamas – as World War II was from those of the Vietnam era. And today's protesting American youth don't even bother to pretend to a higher patriotism, or that they have not aligned themselves with the sort of people who just this week scribbled with red paint "**** AmeriKKKa" on the building housing the president of Stanford University.

Telling It To the Pollsters

Polling evidence also suggests that Mr. Teixeira's "patriotism gap" is real. Writing for "The Hill," Kevin Wallsten and Jack Citrin note that:

Liberals and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans have long diverged on questions related to patriotism, but the gap has increased sharply in the last decade. Today, liberals are significantly less likely than conservatives to feel that being an American is important to them, to express pride in being American and to believe there is a cultural core to America's identity. They are more likely to say that other countries are better than the United States, that America is a racist society and that ourpolitical system requires structural transformation.

Some of this attitude is doubtless left over from the liberal reaction to President Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan. Remember the former governor Andrew Cuomo's saying in reply that America "was never that great" to begin with?

But the authors find that the liberal young are now particularly susceptible to such unpatriotic feelings: More concerning, however, is the yawning generational gap in national identification and the greater ideological chasm among the young. The 2022 American National Election Study (ANES), for example, found a thirty-six-point gap between liberals and conservatives over sixty-five on the question of how important "being American" is to their identity, with 60% of liberals and 96 percent of conservatives in this cohort saying that "being American" is "very" or "extremely" important to them. By contrast, the liberal-conservative gap among those under thirty (Gen Z) was fifty-five points, with only 18% of young liberals saying that "being American" is important to their identity. More recently, the Spring 2024 iteration of the Harvard Youth Poll found that 74% of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old Republicans but only 55 5 of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old Democrats would "rather live in America than any other place.” In the same poll, young Democrats (but not young Republicans) expressed far greater trust in the United Nations than in the U.S. military.

That last detail is the real "tell" as we attempt to puzzle out the childish ignorance of young Democrats. No one who knows anything about the United Nations apart from the noble ideals promulgated as the reason for its founding would trust it at all in any matter of importance. The idea is as laughable as "Queers for Palestine", which also appears to be the product of abysmal ignorance. Queers may be for Palestine, but Palestine is most definitely not for queers.

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