Young Americans don't love the US like boomers do, and that's a good thing
Younger generations' poorer view of America and capitalism reveals a clarity of vision and sober assessment of reality
You, dear reader, would likely not be surprised to read today that in my home nation of the United States of America crises currently abound. Our previous President is facing dozens of criminal charges, over a million of us have died of Covid-19, our national credit rating was just downgraded for only the second time in our history, one in eight American children go hungry each day even though we as a nation throw out a third of the food brought to market, and one in every 30 American children is homeless.
Beyond that, American worker’s wages have been effectively stagnant for the past half-century, and feelings of job insecurity are high, much to the delight of our nation’s financial leaders who, like longtime Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan once testified to Congress, believe that worker insecurity is beneficial to the economy.
The income required to buy the average single-family home in our fine nation rose from $82,825 in the first quarter of last year to $102,557 in 2023’s first quarter. Not one of our 50 states has a median income that comes close to $102,557. Our food prices in America are at their highest point in decades, so food is about as hard to come by as housing, and household debt is at the highest it’s ever been, here.
All this news is easy to come by and alarming. However, much of American politics and punditry would have you believe that the real crises are our citizens not being as proud as we should be of the aforementioned state of affairs. Take as an example columnist Ingrid Jacques who writes for one of our most widely distributed newspapers - USA Today - and her recent essay titled “Gen Z doesn’t love the US like boomers do. That doesn’t bode well for our future,” where she critiques as ignorant younger Americans who are less proud of our country and have less faith in its economic system of capitalism than do and have older generations of people.
For mainstream American pundits like Jacques, more uncritical pride in America and its economic system and policies is needed, not structural change. After all, she asserts, “We can’t blame young people for not loving and defending a system they don’t understand…You defend what you love. Yet, you cannot love what you don’t know.”
It is true that millennials and zoomers have less charitable estimations of American history, our economic system and a less optimistic outlook on the future made for us by previous generations. I’d argue that is because we, in fact, have a better understanding of that nation’s history, not less, and because we acutely feel the dire reality that capitalism as wrought.
Furthermore, such a critical assessment is the foundation of our only hope as a people and so does actually “bode well for our future.” Ignoring the devastation that the American way of doing things has left both domestically and internationally won’t change our wage, housing, food, healthcare, or education crises - it’s actually the first necessary step to ameliorating all those things and more.
It is precisely because we know America that we have difficulty loving it. What, beyond one another and our expansive, beautiful land & waterways, is there to love, exactly?
We were founded on White nationalist settler colonialism, dispossession of indigenous peoples, and racialized chattel slavery. After slavery we created a racial apartheid system that inspired Adolph Hitler and his Nazis.
After we reluctantly joined the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and China to defeat Nazis, Italian fascists, and imperial Japan, we employed former high-ranking Nazis to create the world’s largest military alliance, NATO, which now has the blood of millions of peoples on its hands and is currently increasing the risk of a third world war starting, as well as had key Nazi officials like Reinhard Gehlen work with our Army and Central Intelligence Agency.
Those same American military and intelligence agencies have gone on to overthrow many democracies across the globe and help install dictators as well as train mercenaries to kill women and children, and help Western corporations steal other nations’ natural resources, pressure other nations to not negotiate war ceasefires, and has helped uphold apartheid regimes like the former one in South Africa and the current one in Israel.
All this might have contributed to why in a WIN/Gallup survey of people in over 60 countries the United States was listed more often than any other country as the globe’s biggest threat to world peace. Today’s younger generations may be more connected to their peers in other nations through the internet than previous generations, and thus more informed as to the full extent of the carnage produced by American imperial adventurism.
We also may be the ones most acutely feeling how bad things are, domestically, in the US. Our wealth gap is growing and at Gilded-Age levels, the power of the dollar is diminishing, we work more hours for less vacation time than our parents and grandparents, more personal debt is needed to make ends meet, pensions are rare and so we are growing increasingly dependant on one of the weakest social welfare states in the first-world.
Beyond that, we’re not safe. American police kill many more of us than police forces from other wealthy nations do of their own residents. We incarcerate more people than any other nation on both a per capita and overall basis.
American military troops are used inside our borders to jail citizens, our government assassinates and tortures its citizens, and we have an increasingly for-profit slave labor prison system.
Our government operates ethnic concentration camps at our Southern border filled with families that we’ve trafficked after ignoring federal and international law by refusing them amnesty application processes. Our government refuses to give healthcare to all its people, even during a pandemic, and so more people died of Covid-19 here - by a large margin - than did in any other nation.
We jail journalists and their sources for reporting on our war-crimes, and our infrastructure is crumbling. We allow over 500,000 Americans to go homeless every year despite our capitalist market hoarding 16 million houses that currently sit vacant, with no occupants.
Our life expectancy has gone down despite us being the richest nation in the history of human civilization, and it had already gone down before we let the covid-19 pandemic ravage us. The gap between the policies Americans say they want our federal legislators to enact and what they actually do in concert with their corporate backers is so wide that experts have deemed the US an oligarchy.
We don’t elect our own Presidents.
What, exactly, is there to be proud of? What corporate pundits like Jacques lament is the decline among young Americans of what pollsters call “extreme” Patriotism.
Extreme American patriotism in light of the state of affairs is not only deluded and immoral, it’s treasonous. The only useful patriotism is revolutionary patriotism which throws off the shackles of colonialism.
Sadly many racial minorities in America still live in what civil rights leader Malcolm X called internal colonies because of the racist structure of our economy and other national systems. Older generations may be and have been blind or unwilling to see the US for what it is and always has been.
As a result, they made things worse for us. Things can only be improved once we recognize the need for improvement.
Americans can only be legitimately proud to be Americans once we fight to reshape it from the belligerent warmonger that it is into a peaceful nation, once we make it a country that values justice and equality instead of one whose economic engine requires murderous poverty to generate obscene wealth for the few.
The uncritical patriotism of the past has enabled American empire to wreak death and havoc across the world as well as within our own borders. The millennial and zoomer generations’ poorer view of America and capitalism reveals a clarity of vision and sober assessment of reality.
Such a perspective and posture, one willing to damn one’s own nation for its sins, is necessary if we can ever hope to rebuild it to become better. Jacques asks, misleadingly and hopelessly, “Americans increasingly don’t value God, country or children. Can anything still unite us?”
Americans creating a God in their own image helped us justify indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, and near countless wars, so we needn’t fear any real or imagined trend towards secularism. Her subsequent assertions, that we don’t value country or children is, of course, absurd.
Her claim about not valuing children is about younger generations not having as much of an interest in having children, which cannot be detangled from our inability to afford life’s necessities as it is. As for valuing the country as a whole, I maintain that there are few truer expressions of care for one’s nation than wanting to improve it and make it work for more people.
The late American political philosopher Sheldon Wolin argued for a patriotism based on aspirational values, “a reasoned but critical allegiance to certain shared values that define the kind of collective identity to which we would want to think of ourselves as loyal.” Beyond that, he also imagined that a nobler communal goal than any patriotism was possible and preferable.
Wolin said it was time for Americans to devote their fealty to democracy instead of cruel economic systems or jingoistic patriotism. “I would propose democracy: It is far less exclusionary, in principle and practice, than nationalism, patriotism or the ideology of capitalism,” he wrote.
In younger generations’ honest and wise evaluation of America we see a statement of what we value - life, liberty, justice, health, and one another - and that expression lists the things that can and should legitimately unite us.