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At 250 years old, there isn’t much that the United States of America hasn’t gone through, and this includes periods of intense political protest and violence, the last of which ended roughly in the late 1970s. The ‘80s and ’90s were not completely protest-free, but they were not protest-driven.
Most of Generation X, the young would-be protesters of the time, saw little purpose to it because, by and large, we liked America. We thought it was doing good in the world, and it also just seemed like a lot of effort.
By 1999, a chair would fly through a window in Seattle during the World Trade Organization protests. In 2011, Wall Street would be “occupied,” and in 2020, many American cities were ablaze, ostensibly over the death of George Floyd.
Protest culture was back, with a vengeance.
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Today, as the battle of Minneapolis rages, not just rhetorically but in physical confrontation, we mourn the death of Renee Good, while we still reel from the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It feels like our nation is back in the deadly maelstrom of 1960s and ’70s violent protest.
So what was it, back at the end of the 1970s that brought America out of the nosedive of near constant political protest and violence? Looking at the record of events, one answer stands out more than any other: Patriotism.
There is some symmetry here, for in 1976 the U.S. celebrated its bicentennial, and just as will be happening this year for the semiquincentennial (fine, we’ll just call it 250th), there were vast patriotic celebrations across the land.
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Heading into the bicentennial, America was still suffering from the failures of Vietnam and the disgrace of Watergate, not so different from our own relationship to the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the scandal of Joe Biden’s absentee presidency.
Something began to change in 1976. It marked the beginning of an anti-American fever breaking, and there was a man to lead this movement, a man named Ronald Reagan, whose presidency, in his own words, would bring back “morning in America.”
For those old enough to remember it, the 1980s were a time of shocking new patriotism. We listened to “Born in the USA” (hilariously missing Bruce Springsteen’s intended point) and watched Rocky Balboa knock out Soviet Ivan Drago and the whole nation cheered our Olympians like sprinter Carl Lewis and gymnast Mary Lou Retton. All of it was quite sincere.
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As for protests in the 1980s and ’90s, exceptions such as anti-apartheid sit-ins and the 1992 LA riots, proved the rule, Gen X teens and young adults mocked their boomer parents’ tales of anti-government agitating glory days and had no intention of repeating them.
At the end of the day, in those final two decades of the 2nd millennium AD, there wasn’t a whole lot for Americans to protest. We had won the Cold War and were the world’s only superpower. For all the world, it looked like if we could fix the Y2K computer glitch, we’d be good as gold.
So, how on Earth did the first two decades of the 21st century bring us squarely back to a place of violent protest clashes and political murder? Once again, the central theme here is patriotism, but this time, its swift diminution.
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By the 2000s, political correctness, soon to metastasize into wokeness, had already changed our education system into one that always first and foremost finds a way to blame America and the West for all the woes of the world.
Our history was no longer taught as the imperfect tale of a nation making great strides toward equality of opportunity, but rather as a fixed power structure, always propping up mediocre White men, always suppressing magical minorities.
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Our television shows would begin to tell us that America really isn’t the greatest nation on Earth, that it’s a lie and, in fact, we are an ignorant bully which needs to cede more power (while still paying for everything, of course).
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It is ugly rhetoric that has brought us to an ugly place.
Over the next three years, with the 250th birthday of the nation, the hosting of the World Cup and the Olympics, and further possible foreign policy victories under President Trump around the globe, we can see a chance for patriotism to rise again, just as it did at the dawn of the 1980s.
A Gallup poll last year showed that only 36% of Democrats are extremely or very proud to be American, with Republicans at a staggering 92%, and independents, as usual, stuck in the middle at 53%.
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There is likely no form of measure more predictive of who one will vote for and whether one will protest than if one is proud of the country. In many ways, it is the central divide that explains so much of the mayhem of violence we see today.
Patriotism is the answer. Patriotism is what our nation so badly needs, and the good news is that all of us can exhibit and celebrate it every day.
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