As Americans recently marked Independence Day, one year before the nation’s 250th birthday, a striking new Gallup poll reveals a troubling fracture in the American soul: Only 36% of Democrats now say they are “very proud” to be American, down from 80% in 2015. Among Republicans, pride remains high, at 92%.
This isn’t merely partisanship.
It’s a crisis of national identity that now threatens to unravel the very idea of American exceptionalism. For those of us watching from Israel, this American crisis of confidence risks the fate of our alliance. The shared democratic values that bind us ultimately depend on how Americans perceive themselves.
For many Democrats, Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 wasn’t just a political upset. It was a psychological earthquake. It shattered the core assumption that their vision of America’s moral arc was inevitable. President Donald Trump’s victory revealed a chasm between elite confidence and working-class disillusionment that few had fully grasped at the time.
But the roots of this disaffection run deeper than Trump. The 2008 financial collapse and the decision to bail out Wall Street over Main Street left millions feeling betrayed by their own government. For many Americans, then-president Barack Obama’s skillful speeches about hope and change masked a painful reality: The system wasn’t working for them.
That resentment would eventually fuel Trump’s populist insurgency and leave lasting scars on Democratic confidence in American institutions. However, Trump alone didn’t cause America’s fracture, although he definitely exposed it. His presidency revealed a raw and growing polarization that goes beyond politics into the realm of fundamental values and identity. That internal division created something more dangerous than gridlock: It opened space for external actors to exploit American self-doubt and undermine faith in the American project itself.
Yet that project remains genuinely exceptional. America was not born from bloodlines or ancient territorial claims but from the idea that the government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Yes, like all empires, America’s history includes profound moral failures: slavery, displacement, imperial overreach. But it also created the most prosperous and peaceful global order in world history.
The “Pax Americana” isn’t perfect, but it has delivered unprecedented human flourishing. Interstate wars have declined dramatically. Global poverty has plummeted. Democratic norms have spread across continents. This happened not despite American exceptionalism, but because of it.
America is not without flaws. It wields its influence ruthlessly across the globe through its mighty military and even more mighty dollar, but even more through culture, technology, and leadership with its exceptional democratic institutions.
It’s easy to laugh at the absurdity of how many Americans think that “The USA is the best country in the world.” But maybe we’re just a bit jealous. The truth is that we need a nation like America. Arrogant, vast, powerful, but one that has “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” ingrained into the fabric of its identity. If I must choose an empire (and if you study history, you know that you always have to), I choose the American empire.
Critics dismiss American exceptionalism as a myth.
Sometimes it is. But the absence of national pride can be equally dangerous. When self-confidence erodes, cynicism rushes in to fill the vacuum. Founders become villains. Revolutionary ideals become colonial impositions. National identity becomes a source of shame rather than aspiration.
Israeli poet Nathan Alterman captured the danger in his poem “Then Said Satan,” where the adversary seeks not to destroy Israel’s body but its belief in its own justice. “Only this will I do,” Satan says, “I will dull his mind, and he will forget that justice is with him.”
That dulling appears to be happening in the United States. When nearly two-thirds of Democrats say they feel little pride in their country, they become vulnerable to narratives that portray US power as purely exploitative. Social media amplifies these messages, often promoted by foreign adversaries, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of national self-doubt.
The consequences extend far beyond America’s borders. Support for Israel among Democrats has plummeted in near-perfect correlation with declining American pride.
What was once a bipartisan consensus has become a partisan divide, with Democratic sympathy shifting dramatically toward the Palestinians. Some of this shift reflects real critiques of Israel’s occupation, its rightward political drift, and the human costs of conflict. But there’s more to the story. It represents a deeper questioning of the narrative that has long bound America and Israel together.
Israel’s founding story, Jews returning from exile to establish a democracy in their ancestral homeland, has always echoed America’s mythic self-image: a people forging a new nation from conviction and struggle.
The US-Israel alliance was never purely based on interests. It was also based on shared values, rooted in common beliefs about democracy, innovation, and the potential for national renewal.
When Americans stop believing in their own exceptionalism, they inevitably question allies who embody similar narratives. In 2022, a video by Al Jazeera exploring the US-Israel relationship was promoted on Twitter/X with the provocative line: “There’s nothing more American than Israel.”
The article behind it laid the groundwork for denying both nations’ uniqueness by portraying the Zionist project not as a people’s return to their ancestral land, but as one rooted entirely in theft, expulsion, and bloodshed.
Funded by Qatar, these messages once lingered on the fringes of American discourse, but as Americans lose faith in their own story and identity, those messages begin to take hold.
Israel needs America. But America needs America even more.
The United States is now at a crossroads of profound cultural, demographic, and moral transformation. And you can’t fix your country without pride in your identity and heritage. Yes, Israel depends on American support. But even if we end our wars and make peace with every neighbor, we won’t win back that support unless Americans once again take pride in who they are. Because in this case, Al Jazeera is right: There’s nothing more American than Israel.
At the next protest, I urge Americans to take a page from Israel’s recent protest movement against judicial reform, which has mounted one of the largest civic demonstrations in its history despite being in the opposition. One of its most powerful tools was the choice to use the Israeli national flag as the symbol for the protests, not out of despair, but out of deep love and national pride.
If Americans, especially Democrats, want to change their country, I suggest they do so while waving the star-spangled banner with pride.
The writer is a Middle East Initiative fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an Elson Israel fellow at the Jewish Federation of Tulsa. He is a former executive director of the Reut Institute and an expert on Israel-US relations and world Jewry.