Hint: It's not the reason you think. Well, not entirely, anyway.
David mentioned Gallup's latest survey results briefly in his post about Bernie Sanders, but it's worth a longer look in the context of Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialist win in the Democrats' New York City mayoral primary. Gallup conducted another iteration of its annual polling on American pride as Independence Day approaches, and the news looked pretty grim. Pride in America has sunk to its lowest standing ever, mainly led by a collapse among Democrats:
Gallup poll results that will surprise absolutely no one. While Republicans overwhelmingly are proud to be American, Democrats are not - and the number keeps falling. pic.twitter.com/5H9cvRVBKb
— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) June 30, 2025
A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” (41%) or “very” (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020. The 41% who are “extremely proud” is not statistically different from prior lows of 38% in 2022 and 39% in 2023, indicating most of the change this year is attributable to a decline in the percentage who are “very proud.”
These findings are from a June 2-19 Gallup poll conducted before the June 21 U.S. military action in Iran. It is unknown whether Americans’ national pride has been affected by that action.
In addition to the 58% of U.S. adults who are extremely or very proud, 19% say they are “moderately” proud, 11% “only a little” proud and 9% “not at all” proud. The combined 20% on the lower end of the pride scale essentially ties the record 21% measured in 2020. Until 2018, less than 10% of U.S. adults had consistently said they had little or no national pride.
Gallup also acknowledges the partisan divide in the results, but notes that something else is in play, too:
There are clear generational differences in American pride, with each new generation significantly less likely than the previous one to say they are extremely or very proud to be an American. ...
The youngest two generations, millennials (born between 1980 and 1996) and Generation Z (born after 1996), are the most distinct. From 2021 to 2025, less than half (41%) of adults who belong to Generation Z have been extremely or very proud to be Americans, compared with 58% of millennials. The rate increases to 71% of Generation X, 75% of the baby boom generation and 83% of the Silent Generation.
The changes aren't as dramatic in the age demos as they are in the partisan splits. However, I'd bet that this is more of a driver of this decline in pride, and it's expressed in the partisan demos as a secondary rather than primary effect. To put it another way: younger voters are affiliating as Democrats or independents because they are more cynical about America, rather than becoming more cynical about America because they are Democrats.
Zohran Mamdani is a clear example of this, even though he's only been in the US since he was seven years old. The catalyst for this trend isn't the Democrat Party, but Academia, which has churned out at least two full generations of graduates with no firm education on American values, constitutional ideals, or even basic civics. Instead, they've had their heads filled with anti-American propaganda, indoctrinated by professors with chips on their shoulders about the US, and fed curricula designed to produce contempt rather than understanding about the country in which they live.
Mamdani attended Bowdoin College, a prominent liberal-arts school, graduating in 2014 with a degree in African studies. Coincidentally, we have some contemporary observations about the academic environment during Mamdani's time at Bowdoin from the Claremont Review of Books in the form of a colloquy from Thomas D. Klingenstein, in response to a barbed criticism of him by then-Bowdoin president Barry Mills. This has nothing to do with Mamdani directly. but speaks to the kind of education he received during his formative years.
Mills had hotly defended Bowdoin after an argument between the two men during a round of golf, which Klingenstein insists Mills mischaracterized. Mills suggested that Klingenstein was a racist for criticizing Bowdoin's diversity efforts, but Klingenstein had actually objected to the one-note education Bowdoin offered students in that era (via Tom Elia from Austin):
I am pleased to say that I’m with him in thinking American college education ought to preserve “the nation’s democratic traditions.” But I reserve full-throated approval until I learn what he considers these to be. He says nothing in his own words, leaving it entirely to the influential Martha Nussbaum, a distinguished professor in the University of Chicago’s Law School, Divinity School, and philosophy department, to speak for him. After quoting at length from her most recent book, he said, “Simply stated, this [referring to the Nussbaum quotes] is what a Bowdoin education is about—the preservation of our tenets of democracy.”
Having no detailed knowledge of Ms. Nussbaum, I read two of her books, including the one Mills cited, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). I found that she proposes radical surgery on the American republic. She would retain America’s political superstructure, but remove its soul (i.e., its identity and character) because it is here that patriotism lives. And patriotism, according to Nussbaum, is the primary source of hatred and conflict in the world. She therefore insists that a person’s primary allegiance be not to America, but to the community of human beings.
Whatever the merits of her views, one would be hard pressed to characterize them as part of “our nation’s democratic traditions” or the “tenets of our democracy.” It seems that Professor Nussbaum, not The Federalist or Abraham Lincoln, is Bowdoin’s guide to the nation’s “democratic future.” Is it unreasonable of me to doubt whether Mr. Mills really means what he says about increasing “the diversity of views” on campus? Is this not still another retraction?
Wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt (perhaps Mills was not all that familiar with Nussbaum’s views), I took a look at Bowdoin’s American history offerings. I am sorry to have to report they are right out of Nussbaum’s playbook. There are any number of courses that deal with some group aspect of America, but virtually none that deals with America as a whole. For example, there is African-American history from 1619 to 1865 and from 1865 to the present, but there is not a comparable sequence on America. Every course is social or cultural history that looks at the world through the prism of race, class, and gender. Even a course on the environment (offered in the history department) “examines the links between ecology and race, class, and gender.” Do Bowdoin alumni know their alma mater offers not one history course in American political, military, diplomatic, constitutional, or intellectual history, and nothing at all on the American Founding or the Constitution; that the one Civil War course is essentially African-American history (it is offered also in Africana Studies); and that there are more courses on gay and lesbian subjects than on American history? Is it possible this is one reason why some conservatives are disinclined to send their children to Bowdoin? Mr. Mills did not inquire.
Unfortunately for those parents, Bowdoin's curricula and objectives were and are the rule in Academia, not an exception. Higher-ed institutions, especially those in the elite of the industry, have spent decades trying to "deconstruct" Western civilization in general and specifically American achievements in civics and civil liberties. Around the same time as Klingenstein's essay, the National Association of Scholars warned about Academia's attack on Western and American values, not to mention rational and constitutional self-governance, by either obsessing over their failures or simply ignoring them altogether. That has been going on for decades in Academia.
Is it any small wonder, then, that Democrats in NYC hoisted up someone whose rhetoric is filled with Marxist claptrap?
An investigation by Just the News shows that in tweets, speeches, and affiliations, Mamdani, at his core, holds a strong affinity for straight-up Communism: praising and campaigning with a Marxist state senator in New York; declaring that NYC needed a mayor just like a famously young Indian mayor who was a member of an explicitly Marxist and Communist Party; praising the bloody 1917 Russian Revolution which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union at the cost of millions of lives; arguing about the need to “seize the means of production” in a reference to a core Marxist principle; praising famous radical Communist figures; and much more.
Those who feel repelled by Gallup's latest survey results may be looking at the wrong institution. The Democrat Party is merely the tent to which these indoctrinated children trek. The real institutional failure is in Academia -- and that's where reform is most needed.
Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show asks: Newsrooms or Narrative Labs?
- How did the news media transform into the narrative-propagation industry?
- Andrew Malcolm wrote an excellent column based on a lifetime of experience in the field.
- We discuss the celebritizaton of journalism, starting with All The President's Men, the impact that higher-ed indoctrination had on reporting, and how it misleads the people who need real facts the most: voters.
The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!
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