Nothing reveals the psychological decay of modern Leftism quite like watching Leftists answer a simple question about America.
Supposedly educated adults answer the question like hostages blinking Morse code under a table.
CNN recently hosted a panel where Kasie Hunt unveiled polling data asking Americans whether the United States is a great country. The results looked less like public opinion and more like a national Rorschach test for ideological damage.
Twenty-three percent said America is the greatest country in the world.
Forty-one percent said America is one of the greatest countries in the world.
Then came the number that should have caused emergency sirens to erupt in every public school administration office in America: twenty-three percent said the United States is not one of the greatest countries in the world.
Not “could improve”, or “struggling at the moment.”
Not “going through a rough patch after four years of Bidenomics and national sedation.”
No. Nearly a quarter of respondents essentially looked at the globe, scanned every available option, and concluded that America belongs somewhere beneath… what exactly? Belgium? Fiji? A Scandinavian utopia powered entirely by smugness and antidepressants?
It takes a remarkable civilization to produce citizens so comfortable they can cosplay as dissidents while living in the most desired nation on Earth.
That last group fascinates me because it exposes the modern Democratic Party’s greatest achievement.
Democrats have managed to cultivate a generation of Americans who inherited the greatest engine of liberty and prosperity ever assembled and somehow concluded they are victims of it.
That level of historical illiteracy doesn’t happen naturally. It requires cultivation. Like mold in a damp basement.
And before anyone accuses me of blind nationalism, let me acknowledge the middle 41 percent. Those are the diplomatic hedgers, the people trying desperately to avoid sounding “too American” at cocktail parties where everybody pretends Denmark invented happiness.
Their answer, “one of the greatest countries,” is the geopolitical equivalent of saying your wife is “among the greatest women” you could have selected. Technically acceptable. Spiritually suspicious.
Granted, there are categories where other nations excel. Switzerland runs trains with the precision of a German watchmaker on espresso. Japan somehow combines futuristic efficiency with the social discipline of a samurai monastery. Singapore keeps its streets so clean you could probably perform surgery on a bus stop bench.
Yet despite all that, when the world’s ambitious people dream about reinvention, they still overwhelmingly choose America.
The evidence is impossible to ignore because humanity conducts a daily poll on this issue through immigration.
People do not crawl through deserts, dodge cartels, survive human traffickers, and cling to rafts because Texas sounds relaxing this time of year. They come because, despite every flaw, America remains the greatest upward mobility machine in human history.
Even our enemies know it.
Chinese elites send their children to American universities while lecturing us about collectivism. Russian oligarchs don’t hide money in Belarusian savings accounts. They buy penthouses in Miami and Manhattan. Middle Eastern royalty criticize Western decadence while vacationing in Beverly Hills and undergoing medical procedures in Houston.
Apparently America becomes intolerable only until it’s time to educate your children, protect your money, or survive a complicated surgery.
Then suddenly Old Glory starts looking like a warm security blanket stitched together by bald eagles.
Meanwhile, the American Left continues its bizarre spiritual pilgrimage toward national self-loathing.
They insist America is systemically evil while simultaneously refusing to leave it, which is an odd marketing strategy for oppression.
Imagine hearing somebody say, “This restaurant is racist, exploitative, toxic, colonialist, and fundamentally immoral.”
Then watching that same person eat there three meals a day for forty years.
That is modern progressivism in a nutshell.
The irony becomes almost poetic when you consider history.
The United States rebuilt Europe after World War II through the Marshall Plan. According to the U.S. State Department archives, America distributed over $13 billion in aid to reconstruct Western Europe after the war, which would exceed $150 billion today when adjusted for inflation.
America pioneered aviation, revolutionized computing, dominated entertainment, created Silicon Valley, mapped the human genome, and planted a flag on the moon while the Soviet Union was still trying to figure out why grocery stores should contain groceries.
Even the internet itself, now primarily used by leftists to explain why capitalism is evil from inside climate-controlled apartments delivered to them by DoorDash, emerged from American innovation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, laid the groundwork for what became the internet.
Yet somehow the country responsible for modern technological civilization became, in elite academic circles, the villain of history.
That ideological mutation didn’t occur accidentally. Universities spent decades replacing civic gratitude with grievance studies. Patriotism became unfashionable. National pride became associated with backwardness. The American flag, once viewed as a symbol of aspiration across the world, became for many progressives a triggering object somewhere between a Confederate monument and a tax audit.
And this cultural rot accelerated during the Biden years.
Under Joe Biden, Americans watched inflation devour purchasing power at rates not seen in decades. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest annual increase in over forty years.
The administration responded the way divorced dads explain missing mortgage payments: with tremendous confidence and absolutely no believable answers.
Groceries soared. Energy prices exploded.
The southern border transformed into what can only be described as a TSA line sponsored by chaos.
Meanwhile, Americans were repeatedly informed that the economy was actually excellent and that their empty wallets merely reflected misinformation. Nothing says compassionate governance quite like explaining to citizens that their suffering is statistically inappropriate.
Then came the return of Donald Trump, whose presidency restored something Democrats never understand because they fundamentally distrust it: national confidence.
Confidence matters. Countries are psychological organisms as much as political ones. A nation constantly told it is wicked, oppressive, and irredeemable eventually begins behaving like a sedated giant apologizing for its own existence.
Trump disrupted that pathology the same way a defibrillator interrupts cardiac arrest.
Suddenly Americans were again encouraged to celebrate success instead of apologize for it. Manufacturing mattered again. Borders mattered again. Merit mattered again. Patriotism ceased being treated like an embarrassing relative at Thanksgiving dinner.
And here’s the delicious contradiction buried inside that CNN poll.
Only in the United States can citizens openly insult the country, monetize their resentment, gain celebrity status from anti-American commentary, and still enjoy constitutional protections unavailable in most of the world.
Try pulling that stunt in China. Your podcast becomes a prison diary.
Try it in Iran. Your stand-up routine abruptly transitions into a blindfold fitting.
Try it in North Korea and your audience includes armed guards and one confused goat.
America is so free that anti-Americanism itself became a profitable industry.
That fact alone accidentally proves the greatness these people deny.
And perhaps that’s the central tragedy of modern America. Previous generations viewed this nation as an inheritance to protect. Increasingly, the Left views it as an inheritance to dismantle, convinced that civilization itself is oppression unless managed by faculty lounge philosophers and emotionally unstable activists with ring lights.
Yet despite the endless cultural pessimism, despite the media’s addiction to decline narratives, despite academia’s obsession with teaching young Americans to hate the country that gave them the luxury to study interpretive dance theory for $140,000, the truth remains stubbornly obvious.
America is still the country the world runs toward, not away from.
Always remember that when you hear privileged activists explain how terrible this nation is while standing in line for $9 oat milk lattes named after indigenous weather patterns.
Because if America truly weren’t great, millions of people around the globe wouldn’t spend every waking moment trying to get here.
