Fake Patriots are destroying everything that makes America great

Not long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive moment: national celebrations, hot dogs and parades, waving flags and fireworks. John Updike commemorates the traditional 4th July holiday Rabbit rest (1990), the last novel of his Rabbit Trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s anti-hero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star, is now in trouble in his late middle age, dressed as Uncle Sam (a parade in Pennsylvania (a disguised real-life disguised speech)) at the parade of his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania). His fake beard is uneasyly bound by Scottish videotapes, and Angstrom investigates American crowds gather in patriotic joy:

White-haired women sat on an aluminum lawn chair, dressed like obese babies, and their invisible veins sting out in checks and decorations. Middle-aged man squeezes his thighs into bicycle shorts that suits boys. The young mother comes from the bikini’s backyard upground pool and spandex twists on the high side that leave half of the hips and breasts.

Like Angstrom, celebrators are imperfect and plagued by their own personal anxiety, but also allow beneficiaries of a country to allow them to enjoy the Jeffersonian commitment to the pursuit of happiness in some way. Despite the physical decline, Angstrom’s epiphany was an epiphany: “Harry’s eyes burned, but the impression was full of impressions-if he was lifted up to investigate all human history–more and more–make his heart worse and worse, all of which are the happiest fucking country in the world, the happiest country in the world ever seen.”

Of course, Jefferson’s dream of freedom has never been shared equally and has actually been actively stolen by many people. Compared to the cheers of Updike’s triumphal player, we also condemn Frederick Douglass’ classic 1852 author, “What is the 4th of July?” Douglas reminds the world with words that will never be forgotten, and for the enslaved people, patriotic celebrations of freedom and citizenship are worse than meaningless – a cold lie of their sufferings.

The abolition of slavery did not end the sting or relevance of Douglas’s speech. In 2025, there is a president in the United States who has done everything he can to remove the principles of reproductive citizenship, one of the reconstruction achievements Douglass has worked hard to fight in the 14th Amendment.

In Donald Trump’s United States, Douglass’s harsh criticism of patriotic hallucinations is more real than Updike’s Paeean, rather than “the happiest fucking country in the world.”

Polls recorded increasingly pessimistic national sentiment. According to Gallup, only 31% of Americans believe the country is heading in the right direction. Additionally, Gallup records that national pride is now at a “new low.” Only 58% of Americans say they are very proud of their country or very proud. (This is lower than the 91% highest point in 2004. Among Gen Z Americans (between 1997 and 2012), only 41% are proud of their country.

Of course, this dark national sentiment goes beyond Trump’s presidency and eventually goes back to bipartisan failures that ruled the new century, starting with George W. Bush’s imperial crimes in the global terror war, and Barack Obama’s inadequate response to the 2008 economic collapse (which continues to exacerbate economic despair). It happens that Updike’s hometown reading perfectly illustrates the longer arc of national despair. Now, Reading is a mostly Latino city that remains a democratic stronghold for Kamala Harris to win with 60% of the vote, but Trump increased his voting share by 16% from 2020 to 2024, resulting in his victory in Pennsylvania. These 16-point shifts are one of the biggest waves in the 2024 election. Like many inland cities, Reading has never recovered from deindustrialization and overseas job transfers.