The Pride Gap
Gallup’s June 2026 patriotism survey, released ahead of the country’s 250th , found 70 percent of Republicans and 14 percent of Democrats describe themselves as “extremely proud” to be American. A 56 point gap, the widest Gallup has recorded since it began asking the question in 2001. Widen the measure to include “very proud” and the numbers move to 93 percent and 27 percent. Independents, for what it’s worth, sit closer to the Democratic number than the Republican one.
The response from the right has been swift and, within its own frame, coherent. Rep. Harriet Hageman took to the House floor to argue the numbers reflect a deliberate project: the left has “weaponized our history with slavery to indict our nation as irredeemable,” replacing shared pride with what she called “self-flagellation.” The implicit charge is not just that Democrats feel less patriotic. It is that a specific faction, Democratic Socialists most pointedly, have made insufficient love of country into something closer to a political program. Given a summer where Mamdani-aligned candidates were sweeping Democratic primaries in New York, the timing gave the argument a live target.
Take the argument on its own terms before answering it, because it deserves that. There is a real pattern underneath the outrage. A YouGov survey conducted the same month found that half of Republicans define patriotism as supporting one’s country unconditionally, compared to 11 percent of Democrats. Ninety six percent of Republicans report being proud to be American against 58 percent of Democrats. The gap is not a polling artifact. Something has genuinely diverged in how the two coalitions relate to the nation, and pretending otherwise does not serve anyone.
But notice what the argument assumes before it even gets to the data. It assumes that the highest form of patriotism is unconditional, that pride ought to hold steady regardless of what the government does, and that any softening of that pride in response to the government’s conduct is itself the defect to be diagnosed. That assumption is doing all the work in Hageman’s speech, and in the broader charge against the Democratic Socialist left. It is worth asking, before accepting it, whether unconditional loyalty to a nation state is actually the virtue this argument takes it to be, or whether it is something closer to a category error, mistaking the state for a claim on the self that no state, of any party, in any century, was ever owed.
That is where a much older argument becomes useful.
Two Definitions Wearing One Word
Political psychologists have a name for the split the YouGov numbers are actually measuring, and it predates this election cycle by a quarter century. Robert Schatz, Ervin Staub, and Howard Lavine, writing in 1999, distinguished between blind patriotism and constructive patriotism. Blind patriotism is rigid and uncritical: national symbols and policy alike are placed beyond question, and dissent reads as disloyalty. Constructive patriotism is attachment paired with a willingness to criticize, on the theory that loyalty to what the country claims to stand for sometimes requires opposing what the country is currently doing.
Once that distinction is on the table, the Gallup and YouGov numbers stop measuring a single thing called patriotism and start measuring two different commitments that happen to share a word. Half of Republicans defining patriotism as unconditional support is not a footnote to the pride gap. It is close to the whole explanation for it. A person who holds the blind definition will report high pride almost regardless of current events, because current events are not the input the definition asks about. A person who holds the constructive definition will report pride that moves with the government’s conduct, because conduct is precisely the input their definition is built to track. Ask two groups holding two different definitions the same question and a large gap is not evidence one side loves the country more. It is evidence they are answering different questions while using the same four words.
This matters for how the charge against the Democratic Socialist left should be read. When Hageman describes the left’s relationship to national history as “self-flagellation,” she is not simply wrong that something has changed. She is applying the blind definition and treating any departure from it as a symptom rather than an alternative. A critic operating from the constructive definition would put it differently: refusing to look away from slavery, or from a strike that killed 156 people, most of them schoolchildren, in a country where the government’s own investigators found the strike was likely American, is not a failure of love for the country. It is what love for the country’s stated ideals actually requires when the country falls short of them. The alternative, pride that holds steady no matter what the government does, is not a stronger patriotism. It is a patriotism that has stopped listening to its own object.
None of this settles which definition is correct. That is a genuine dispute, not a rhetorical trick, and a fair reading has to admit that constructive patriotism, taken far enough, can curdle into something closer to alienation than love, an objection worth taking as seriously as the one aimed at the blind version. But it does mean the debate currently being fought over a pride gap is actually a debate over which definition of loyalty deserves to be called patriotism at all. That is not a question polling can answer. It is a question with a very long history behind it, considerably older than Gallup, and considerably older than the republic being asked about.
What the Tradition Already Says About Unconditional Loyalty
The dispute over which definition of patriotism deserves the name is not new, and it does not start with Gallup. It is close to the oldest political argument in the Hebrew Bible, and it does not go the way the blind-patriotism position would predict.
In 1 Samuel 8, the elders of Israel come to the aging prophet with a request: give us a king, so that we can be like all the other nations. Samuel takes the request personally, but God tells him something sharper. “They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” What follows is not a simple yes. Samuel is instructed to warn the people exactly what a king will cost them: sons taken for war and labor, daughters taken for the palace, fields and vineyards confiscated, “and you shall be his slaves.” The people hear the warning in full and ask for the king anyway. God grants it, under protest, and the warning proves accurate almost immediately. Saul and then Solomon deliver, point by point, everything the text predicted.
Read plainly, this is a story about a people trading a direct, accountable relationship for a centralized human authority they were told in advance would extract from them without limit. It is also, notably, not a story where unconditional support for the new arrangement is treated as a virtue. The text’s sympathy runs the other way. Wanting a king “like the other nations” is the thing being criticized, not the thing being praised.
The New Testament takes up the same tension from the opposite direction, not a people asking for a king, but a people already living under one, and being tested on how far their loyalty to him extends. In Mark 12, Pharisees and Herodians, an unlikely pair, ask Jesus whether it is lawful to pay the imperial tax to Caesar. It is a trap built with real teeth. Say yes, and he is siding with an occupying power against a nationalist audience that despised the tax as a mark of subjugation. Say no, and he is advocating sedition against Rome. He asks for a coin, one that would have carried Tiberius’s image and an inscription naming him son of the divine Augustus, and asks whose image is on it. Caesar’s, they answer. “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
The line gets quoted as a tidy division of church and state, render unto each its own sphere, but that reading undersells what the second half is actually doing. If the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image, the question the text leaves hanging is obvious: whose image does a human being bear? Genesis answers that one a chapter into scripture. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” The line is not a balanced split between two equal claims. It is a demotion. Caesar gets the coin. God gets the person entire, which means Caesar’s claim, however real, sits inside a much larger one that limits it. Loyalty to the state is bounded from the very moment it is affirmed.
Neither passage tells a reader not to pay taxes, not to acknowledge civil authority, not to live within the laws of the nation one happens to be born into. Paul is direct about that elsewhere, be subject to governing authorities, they are not instituted for nothing. What neither passage does, anywhere, is treat unconditional loyalty to that authority as the marker of faithfulness. If anything, both texts single out the demand for unconditional allegiance to an earthly power as the thing worth warning against, not the thing worth defending.
Which is worth holding next to a concrete case rather than an abstract one. In March 2026, a US strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran, killing 156 people, most of them schoolgirls. A preliminary US military investigation found the strike was likely American, the result of outdated targeting data. The president, on Air Force One, blamed Iran. That response, denying a finding one’s own investigators reached, is what unconditional loyalty actually requires in practice. It is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is what the blind-patriotism position produces when the government it is loyal to does something indefensible: not silence, but denial. Caesar’s coin does not ask for that. It asks for what is owed, not for a story about what did not happen.
Where True Loyalty Actually Sit
If unconditional loyalty to a nation is the category error the tradition warns against, the natural next question is where loyalty of that kind, total and unconditional, actually belongs. The tradition has an answer, and it lays out in three tiers, each one closer to earth than the last:
- Heavenly citizenship. The only claim entitled to be unconditional. Everything else is owed something less than everything.
- Global citizenship. What loyalty looks like in practice, this side of heaven, given that the biggest threats a person faces today do not stop at a border.
- National citizenship. Real, and owed real things, taxes, obedience to just laws, but bounded and never total.
Heavenly citizenship comes first. Paul, writing to a congregation in Philippi, a Roman colony whose residents took real pride in their civic status as citizens of Rome, uses the technical term for that status and redirects it: “our citizenship is in heaven.” The author of Hebrews describes the patriarchs the same way, as people who understood themselves to be strangers and exiles on the earth, seeking a homeland they had not yet reached, “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” Early Christians kept using this language for themselves, sojourners, resident aliens, in whatever empire or nation they happened to occupy. This is the one claim in the whole tradition that is treated as entitled to be unconditional. Not because earthly citizenship does not matter, but because it is not ultimate, and only the ultimate claim gets to ask for everything.
That top tier does the real work, and it is also, notably, not a claim that requires importing anything from outside the tradition itself. A Catholic reader does not need Kant, or systems theory, or a contested twentieth century cosmology to arrive at bounded national loyalty. Samuel and Mark and Philippians get there on their own, and arguably get there more clearly than most modern political theory manages.
Global citizenship comes second. A first tier that only tells you what loyalty is not owed to does not, by itself, tell you what a rightly ordered loyalty looks like in practice, this side of heaven, in a body that still has to live in a country, pay its taxes, and decide what it owes the people around it. That is what the second tier is for, and it starts from a simple observation: consider the actual shape of the threats a person born in 2026 faces. None of them stop at a border. A pathogen does not check a passport. An asteroid does not consult a treaty. A warming or cooling atmosphere does not distinguish Ohio’s air from Ontario’s. Carl Sagan’s reflection on the pale blue dot, a single pixel of light photographed from the edge of the solar system, makes the same point without needing a single verse of scripture: everyone who has ever lived did so on that pixel, and every rivalry, every border dispute, every claim of national superiority was fought over a fraction of a fraction of it. The scale problem is not a rhetorical device. It is a fact about where humanity actually lives, in a thin, breathable layer around a rock moving through a hostile and indifferent cosmos, with no backup and no rescue.
Contemporary existential risk scholarship, most rigorously catalogued in Toby Ord’s work at Oxford, treats coordination failure, not any single hostile actor, as the dominant multiplier across nearly every serious threat to the species: pandemic, engineered or natural, climate destabilization, nuclear escalation, unaligned artificial intelligence. Fragmented sovereignty is bad at solving problems that do not respect the lines sovereignty draws. This is not a call for world government, and it should not be read as one. It is closer to what political theorists call functionalism, authority pooled narrowly, by function, only where a problem is genuinely planetary, the model already quietly operating behind the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, rather than authority pooled broadly, by sovereignty, in the way a world government would require. Global citizenship is not a mystical claim about human unity. It is a practical recognition that some obligations are owed to the whole crew of the vessel, because some risks threaten the whole vessel, and no single cabin can address them alone.
National citizenship comes third, which leaves it where it belongs, last rather than first. National citizenship is real. Paul tells the Roman church to be subject to governing authorities, and means it. Taxes are owed. Laws bind. A nation is not nothing, and nothing in the first two tiers licenses treating it as such. But a nation is bounded and functional, owed the coin, not the soul, and the moment a nation’s claim on its people is asked to become unconditional, total, immune to correction by what the nation actually does, it has stepped into a place in the hierarchy that was never assigned to it. Not by the framers. By the tradition itself, considerably earlier, and on considerably higher authority.
The Gap Reconsidered
Return, one last time, to the fourteen and the seventy.
The instinct behind the Gallup numbers, and behind Hageman’s floor speech, is that the fourteen percent represents a failure, a coalition that has somehow lost or forfeited its love of country. Nothing in the argument above requires denying that something real separates the two groups. It does require asking a different question about what that something is.
A person operating from the first tier, ultimate loyalty reserved for what is actually ultimate, will not report unconditional pride in any nation, because unconditional pride in a nation is not a category their loyalty has room for. That is not indifference to country. It is the same instinct that made the elders’ demand for a king look, in the text, like a rejection rather than a request. It is the same instinct behind a coin held up and a line drawn around what it can and cannot buy. A drop in “extremely proud” is not obviously a defect once the alternative on offer is unconditional loyalty to a state, any state, and once the tradition being invoked to defend that loyalty is the same tradition that has, since Samuel, treated the demand for it as the thing to watch for.
None of this means the fourteen percent is beyond criticism, or that constructive patriotism cannot tip into something closer to contempt than love, a real risk worth naming rather than waving off. But the poll was never actually measuring love of country in some neutral, theory-free way. It was measuring agreement with one particular, contestable definition of what loyalty to a country ought to look like, a definition the tradition its loudest defenders claim to represent has been quietly arguing against since before the country existed.
James Allen Ramsey creates J Allen Insights on the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and human development. He is a retired tax attorney and consultant whose career included GM, PwC, Shaw Pittman, EY and Bionic System Analytics.