By means of attacking equality of citizenship, MAGA is smashing the rules of nationwide delight.
No longer too way back, the Fourth of July was once a festive instance: an afternoon of nationwide birthday party, sizzling canines and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the normal July 4 vacation in Rabbit at Relaxation (1990), the ultimate novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former highschool basketball megastar now in his paunchy and bothered overdue heart age, clothes up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his fatherland of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Studying). His faux beard uneasily hung on by way of Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng accumulated in patriotic jubilation:
White-haired ladies sit down of their aluminum garden chairs down by way of the curb dressed like fats small children in exams and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully sticking out. Heart-aged males have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts supposed for boys. Younger moms have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that go away part their buttocks and breasts uncovered.
Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by way of their very own non-public anxieties, but in addition beneficiaries of a rustic that has allowed them in some small strategy to benefit from the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant in spite of his bodily diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: “Harry’s eyes burn and the impact giddily—as though he has been lifted as much as survey all human historical past—grows upon him, making his middle thump worse and worse, that each one in all that is the happiest fucking nation the sector has ever noticed.”
After all, the Jeffersonian dream of liberty hasn’t ever been shared similarly and certainly has been actively stolen from many. As towards Updike’s triumphalist excellent cheer, we even have the bracing rebuke of Frederick Douglass’s vintage 1852 oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In phrases that may by no means be forgotten, Douglass reminded the sector that for the enslaved, the patriotic birthday party of liberty and citizenship was once worse than meaningless—it was once a callous lie paid for by way of their struggling.
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The abolition of slavery hasn’t ended the edge or relevance of Douglass’s phrases. In 2025, The us has a president who’s hell-bent on demolishing the primary of birthright citizenship, one of the crucial nice achievements of Reconstruction that Douglass fought so tough to enshrine within the 14th Modification.
In Donald Trump’s The us, Douglass’s stern critique of patriotic illusions rings more true than Updike’s paean to the “happiest fucking nation the sector has ever noticed.”
Polls file an an increasing number of pessimistic nationwide temper. Consistent with Gallup, best 31 p.c of American citizens really feel that the rustic is shifting in the correct route. Additional, Gallup information that nationwide delight is now at a “new low.” Most effective 58 p.c of American citizens say they’re extraordinarily proud or very proud in their nation. (That is down from a excessive of 91 p.c in 2004.) Amongst Democrats, this quantity stands at 38 p.c, amongst independents at 53 p.c. Amongst Gen Z American citizens (born between 1997 and 2012), best 41 p.c really feel delight of their nation.
The darkening nationwide temper after all is going past Trump’s presidency and will in the end be traced to bipartisan disasters that experience ruled the brand new century, beginning with George W. Bush’s imperial crimes within the world Conflict on Terror and Barack Obama’s insufficient reaction to the commercial meltdown of 2008 (which continues to gasoline financial depression). Because it occurs, Updike’s fatherland of Studying completely illustrates the longer arc of nationwide depression. Now a predominantly Latino town, Studying stays a Democratic stronghold that Kamala Harris received with 60 p.c of the vote, however Trump higher his proportion of the vote by way of 16 p.c from 2020 to 2024, which contributed to his victory in Pennsylvania. This 16 level shift was once one of the crucial greatest swings within the 2024 election. Like many inland American towns, Studying hasn’t ever recovered from deindustrialization and the shift of jobs in another country.
However there’s no query that Trump and his Make The us Nice Once more motion—even if the use of the entire rhetoric of puffed-up patriotism—has made it more difficult for lots of American citizens to like their very own nation.
The political combat over immigration displays how MAGA is a mission to not make The us nice however to make it extra gruesome. The hard-won victory of the Civil Conflict made equality of citizenship central to the country’s id, a minimum of as a prison idea if now not all the time a lived fact. Trump is undermining this idea now not simply along with his assaults on birthright citizenship however with threats to deport political fighters reminiscent of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Birthday party’s nominee for mayor of New York.
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A few of Trump’s fans have long gone even additional. On Monday, Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur who may be a Trump confidant, tweeted:
Alligator lives subject. The excellent news is, alligators are assured a minimum of 65 million foods if we get began now.
“Alligator” is a connection with the migrant detention middle being inbuilt Florida referred to as “Alligator Alcatraz.” There are 65.2 million Latinos in the US, nearly all of whom are electorate. Loomer’s publish was once not anything not up to a choice for the imprisonment and ethnic cleaning of 65 million folks according to their ethnicity. It’s tough to think about an uglier imaginative and prescient of the country’s long term wanting mass extermination (an idea this is a minimum of metaphorically implicit in Loomer’s quip about feeding the alligators). After being criticized for this publish, Loomer disingenuously attempted to say she was once best relating to “unlawful extraterrestrial beings” and now not Latinos. The drawback with this protection is that there are best kind of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, whilst there are in reality 65.2 million Latinos. The intent of her unique publish is obvious.
Trump’s deportation threats, the assaults on birthright citizenship, and the eliminationist rhetoric utilized by Loomer all upload as much as a coherent, if sinister, nationwide imaginative and prescient. The coverage dimensions of this nationwide imaginative and prescient may also be noticed within the “giant, gorgeous invoice” that the congressional GOP is operating to move as I write: the cheap that ramps up spending on Trump’s deportation gadget, cuts taxes for the ultra-wealthy, and deprives just about 12 million American citizens of medical insurance. MAGA patriotism way dividing the rustic into the haves and have-nots. The haves come with the wealthy who gets richer and pro-Trump American citizens (most commonly white) who gets the security of citizenship. The have-nots come with those that want executive help for healthcare and the ones whom MAGA desires to deprive of citizenship for belonging to the fallacious ethnicity or having the fallacious political opinion.
MAGA patriotism way turning The us right into a xenophobic, authoritarian dystopia. Whilst I’m now not an American, I want The us not anything however excellent (even if Donald Trump additionally desires to extinguish my nation, Canada). For the Fourth of July, I will best inspire American citizens to heed the teachings of the nice important patriots—figures starting from Frederick Douglass to Jane Addams to Martin Luther King Jr.—who taught that loving your nation incessantly way opposing its executive.
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