‘USA is a slice of the continent… USA is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills. USA is a set of big-mouthed officials with too many bank accounts. USA is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. USA is the letters at the end of the address when you are away from home. But mostly USA is the speech of the people.’

From USA, by John Dos Passos, 1930.

The United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary deeply divided and widely detested, a condition that long predated Donald Trump’s return to office. Americans’ pride in their country, at roughly 40 per cent, has dropped to a historic low, according to Gallup, although it remains considerably higher than in most European countries. This decline is most evident among younger, more educated Americans.

One recent survey of young Americans found that most believe they are living in what respondents describe as ‘a dying empire led by bad people’. Once, there was little difference between the parties in levels of patriotic sentiment, but the divide has steadily widened, in a trend that also predates Trump.

The number of Americans willing to fight to defend their country has shrunk to barely two in five. That figure compares favourably only with a third of Britons, roughly a quarter of Germans, fewer than one-fifth of Austrians and an astonishing 16 per cent of Italians who say they would be willing to fight for their country.

A key factor has been an education system in which the past is increasingly presented through a ‘progressive’ lens, with a focus on race and gender and an emphasis on the nation’s ongoing perfidy. Civics – that is, an understanding of the nation’s origins and political system – receives little emphasis at the grade-school level. As a result, by 2022, barely 13 per cent of US students were proficient in American history.

This lack of basic understanding of America’s past is evident among historical illiterates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently floated the bizarre notion that the American Revolution was directed against ‘the billionaires’ of the day. She appears remarkably unaware that many of the Revolution’s leading lights, including financier Robert Morris, George Washington, John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, stood at the apex of colonial society.

So great is the disillusionment with the US among many politicians on the left, notably those associated with the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, that they regard the Third World, where dictatorship and squalor are commonplace, as their preferred model. Some American politicians, particularly on the left, even get away with declaring that they favour other countries in the FIFA World Cup – in one recent race, Senegal and Mexico – over their own, a position that once would have been politically disqualifying.

Today, some people who once declared that Donald Trump is ‘not my president’ increasingly seem to feel that America is not their country either. In sharp contrast with the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, there is in many places a conscious effort to tone down this year’s commemorations. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has sought to restrict celebrations, including public events in Times Square, citing safety concerns, while the traditional Fourth of July fireworks display in Long Beach, California, has been cancelled. Hollywood, once a promoter of patriotism, has ‘no plans’, as one critic notes, to celebrate America’s quarter-millennial anniversary.

Polarisation is increasing, extending even into jury rooms, while distrust of government has become ever more widespread. Donald Trump, with his foul-mouthed bombast and open disregard for ethical norms, certainly bears some responsibility. In 1976, by contrast, the country had a Republican president, Gerald Ford, whose reassuring, benign presence allowed liberals and Democrats to feel comfortable raising the flag, drinking a beer and setting off fireworks.

Trump, a stranger to propriety, has sought to turn the anniversary into what the National Review labelled ‘another Trump campaign rally’. That may not fully explain the muted celebrations, but even organisations with no obvious left-wing orientation have withdrawn in disgust. Trump has become closely associated with a jingoistic Christian nationalism epitomised by secretary of war Pete Hegseth. In the Manichean world of American political commentary, one is expected either to embrace anti-Americanism or to become a Trumpista.

Yet, as the Free Press recently observed, ‘America’s birthday isn’t about Trump’. Look beyond the media haze and listen instead to what Dos Passos called ‘the speech of the people’. For all the talk of decline, most Americans, including many young people, expect their future to improve. Indeed, according to a recent survey, most Americans still embrace the founding principles that ‘all men are created equal’ and that the purpose of government is to secure ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

To be sure, those principles did not originally extend to women or black Americans. Yet for their time, when misogyny and slavery were widespread throughout the world, including in Africa and the Ottoman Empire, they were genuinely revolutionary ideas. America emerged as a transformative force, inspiring movements across Europe and Latin America during what historian RR Palmer famously described as ‘the age of the democratic revolution’.

America has clung to its revolutionary mythology throughout its history. During the heyday of Manifest Destiny, William Gilpin, one of the concept’s leading boosters, described it as ‘a way to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity’. It may not have appeared that way to the Canadians, whom Americans twice attempted to conquer, or to the Mexicans, who lost a vast portion of their territory. Nevertheless, Americans saw themselves as builders of the ‘Empire of Liberty’ envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.

Sadly, we are no longer the nation that liberated Europe twice, defeated the Soviet Union and deposed Saddam Hussein. Our decline became apparent in Afghanistan and is now reflected in Trump’s naked cynicism towards Iran. Instead of honouring the promise to Iranians that ‘help is on the way’, Trump is now seeking a friendly deal with the murderous Islamic regime – in part to curry favour with the kinds of autocratic monarchs against whom Americans rebelled 250 years ago. And, of course, he even managed to acquire a fancy plane in the process.

Yet for all this, America’s remarkable achievements deserve to be recognised, not only by foreigners but also by Americans themselves. My daughters were shocked when I told them about seeing ‘coloured only’ signs on the road to Williamsburg, Virginia, in the early 1960s. By contrast, they grew up watching a man of African descent win the presidency and live in a society in which, as the Brookings Institution notes, racial tolerance is embraced by a large majority.

We have seen successive waves of immigrants arrive in this country and improve not only their own lives but ours as well. They have come primarily to pursue what remains America’s most enduring promise – ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. No other nation was founded on the principle that individuals and communities possess an inherent right to strive and improve their circumstances.

America is, above all, a nation of ambition played out across a vast continental canvas. At times this makes us appear rude or short-sighted, but it is preferable to following Europe’s green-tinged anti-growth agenda amid ever-louder calls to expand the welfare state. The continent that gave birth to America is increasingly becoming a delightful destination for North American, Asian and Arab tourists. It is considerably less appealing, however, for working- and middle-class Europeans as their industries continue to decline, even in Germany.

For all its faults, America remains a restless country where people strive, often unsuccessfully, in their ‘pursuit of happiness’. People’s freedom to pursue their family or personal interests may be more constrained by the government, but Americans keep moving and investing in those parts of the country that show the most promise. That was once New York, then California, and now, increasingly, Texas and the South.

This restlessness tends to make inequality worse, but also makes us overall much richer. The animal spirits have not been entirely suppressed. Meanwhile, a more ‘civilised’ Europe has fallen behind in productivity, economic growth, investment and wealth per capita. Great Britain, the motherland of self-government and industrial innovation, has fallen so far behind that it would now be the poorest of our 50 states.

Even as the market fluctuates, America dominates the very largest companies on Earth, notes economist Gad Levanon. An immigrant from Israel, he observes that roughly 82 per cent of global market capitalisation is American, with 38 of the top 50 companies. And this dominance is getting stronger, not weaker.

This is not mostly the work of the old families, but of people who came here more than a century after America’s founding, as mine did at the turn of the last century. A large proportion of the CEOs of top Silicon Valley companies are themselves foreign-born. And by far the most consequential of our entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, is himself an immigrant from Africa.

Our tech companies dominate the new industries. The world’s most valuable companies are all US-based and some are worth more than most countries. Due largely to innovations such as fracking, the US also produces the most oil and gas in the world, as well as being the largest food exporter. America is consolidating its dominance of aerospace, with far more orbital launches than the rest of the world combined.

Few Europeans grasp the link between Americans’ ‘pursuit of happiness’ and this success. Journalists hanging around Washington, New York and increasingly California do not always see this reality. The American formula is that, if you do not like the status quo, you move to places or industries that offer more opportunity. As my colleague, geographer Ali Modarres, once pointed out, Europe has no burgeoning cities like Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix or Atlanta. We are constantly reinventing ourselves; some communities shrink, but others are born, many of them in the exurbs.

To be sure, America is not a model for the world, although we are far less pessimistic than our Anglophone cousins in Britain and elsewhere. To see our innovation, you need to go to places like Bastrop, where SpaceX is located, or to El Segundo, just outside LAX, where over a hundred smaller firms – many with spin-offs from SpaceX – are producing space components, opening new ways of mining, making more efficient aircraft and reinvigorating a long-stagnating defence industry.

But this is only one side of Dos Passos’ ‘voice of the people’. It extends beyond the language of ‘tech bros’ and is also found among immigrants and their descendants. We conducted a poll at the University of Texas of Latinos nationwide, and found that most wanted basic things like owning a home, having security and good schools. At the bottom of the list was the desire to live in a community where people look like them and speak Spanish.

The greatest Americans – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Roosevelts – may be horrified by the banality of Trump’s America today, as well as its gaping fiscal worries. But they would also find much to admire in a very diverse society still growing, still seeking and still reaching ever further into the solar system. Talk about manifest destiny.

As Dos Passos would know, America’s strength lies in its reluctance to surrender to autocracy or to the dictates of elites, economic or bureaucratic. Parts of blue America may want off this train, but there remains a grand radical tradition in America, from the Jacksonians to the abolitionists, the trade-union movement, the socialists under Eugene V Debs and, to be honest, some members of my own family.

But even American radicalism, when distanced from foreign influences, has a distinct flavour. Despite the best efforts of our academic elites, even most left-of-centre Americans do not wish to emulate Europe or the Third World.

In America, the original idea of constitutional democracy remains part of our basic DNA. On the Fourth, even as some deep-blue areas shun the celebration, I know my own California suburban enclave will be full of tricolour bunting and fireworks, keeping the neighbourhood dogs barking all night. My neighbours, from New England, China, India, Vietnam and Mexico, all know that America is still a very good deal.

Despite a decade or more of what many see as weak and ineffective leadership, the US continues to show what people can do if you let them. Our model may be tarnished, but it is not in decline. The founders would be shocked by some of what they find here, but they would also have much reason to feel proud.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute. Find him on Substack here.