Fake Patriots Are Destroying Everything That Made America Great
By attacking the equality of citizenship, Maga breaks the foundations of national pride.
Not so long ago, July 4 was a festive opportunity: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, agitation and fireworks. John Updike has commeted the traditional July 4 holidays Rabbid rabbit (1990), the final novel of its rabbit trilogy. In this novel, Updike’s anti-hero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his late and troubled from the end of the Middle Ages, dresses like Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinning of actual reading). His false beard is uncomfortable by Scotch Tape, Angstrom examines the American crowd gathered in a patriotic jubilation:
Women with white hair are seated in their aluminum garden chairs by the sidewalk dressed like large babies in checks and nets, their vented legs without forming shape happily. The middle -aged men tightened their Keglike thighs in bicycle shorts for boys. The young mothers came from their swimming pools with the back-ground in bikinis and the spandex twists and turns which leave half of their buttocks and the breasts exposed.
Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and assaulted by their own private anxieties, but also the beneficiaries of a country which allowed them to take advantage of the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exulting despite his physical decrease, Angstrom has an epiphany: “Harry’s eyes burn and the dizzying impression – as if he has been raised to study the whole human history – blows the heart of his heart, which, on the whole, is the fucking country that the world has ever seen.”
Of course, Jeffersonien de la Liberté’s dream has never been divided also and has indeed been actively stolen from a lot. Due to the triumphant good joy of Updike, we also have the opposite reprimand of the classic oration of Frederick Douglass in 1852, “What is the slave on July 4?” In words that can never be forgotten, Douglass reminded the world that for slaves, the patriotic celebration of freedom and citizenship was worse than meaning – it was a lie insensitive to their suffering.
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The abolition of slavery has not ended the bite or the relevance of the words of Douglass. In 2025, America had a president determined to demolish the principle of the citizenship of the right of birth, one of the great achievements of the reconstruction that Douglass fought so loudly to consecrate the 14th amendment.
In Donald Trump’s America, Douglass’s severe criticism on patriotic illusions is more true than the Updike Paean to the “fucking country that the world has ever seen”.
The polls record an increasingly pessimistic national mood. According to Gallup, only 31% of Americans estimate that the country moves in the right direction. In addition, Gallup indicates that National Pride is now a “new hollow”. Only 58% of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down compared to a summit of 91%in 2004.) Among the Democrats, this number amounts to 38%, among the independents by 53%. Among the Americans of generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41% are the pride of their country.
The darkening national mood goes of course beyond the presidency of Trump and can finally be attributed to bipartite failures which dominated the new century, starting with the imperial crimes of George W. Bush in the world war against terrorism and the inadequate response of Barack Obama with the economic collapse of 2008 (which continues to feed economic despair). In this case, the hometown of the reading of Updike perfectly illustrates the longer arc of national despair. Now a city with a Latin predominance, Reading remains a democratic bastion that Kamala Harris won with 60% of the vote, but Trump increased his share of the vote by 16% from 2020 to 2024, which contributed to his victory in Pennsylvania. This change of 16 points was one of the largest oscillations of the 2024 elections. Like many interior American cities, reading has never recovered from deindustrialisation and change of employment abroad.
But there is no doubt that Trump and his Make America Grand Grand movement again – even if using all the rhetoric of swollen patriotism – has made more difficult for many Americans to love their own country.
The political fight on immigration shows how Maga is a project not to make America brilliant but to make it more grotesque. The hard victory of the civil war has made the equality of central citizenship to the identity of the country, at least as a legal principle if not always a lived reality. Trump undermines this principle not only with his attacks on the citizenship of the birth law, but also with the threats of expelling political opponents such as Zohran Mamdani, the candidate of the Democratic Party to the Mayor of New York.
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Some of Trump’s disciples have gone even further. Monday, Laura Loomer, a right -wing provocateur who is also a Trump confidant, tweeted:
Alligator Lives Matter. The good news is that alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now.
“Alligator” is a reference to the construction of the migrant detention center in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz”. There are 65.2 million Latinos in the United States, the vast majority of which are citizens. Loomer’s position was nothing less than a call for imprisonment and ethnic cleaning of 65 million people depending on their ethnicity. It is difficult to think of a more ugly vision of the future of the massive extermination of the nation (a concept which is at least metaphorically implicit in Loomer’s joke on the food of alligators). After being criticized for this post, Loomer attempted in a way in a way in a desinant manner, she only referred to “illegal foreigners” and not to Latinos. The problem with this defense is that there are only about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, when there are in fact 65.2 million Latinos. The intention of his original post is clear.
Trump’s deportation threats, attacks on the citizenship of the birth law and the rhetoric of eliminationist used by Loomer are all added to a coherent but sinister national vision. The political dimensions of this national vision can be seen in the “big and beautiful bill” that the Congress GOP works to pass while I write: a budget that accelerates expenses on Trump’s expulsion machine, reduces taxes for ultra-rich and deprives nearly 12 million health insurance Americans. Maga’s patriotism means dividing the country into wealthy and helpless. The wealthy include the rich who will become richer and pro-Trump (mainly white) Americans who will obtain the protection of citizenship. The poor include those who need government help for health care and those that Maga wants to deprive citizenship to belong to the bad ethnic or have a bad political opinion.
Maga patriotism means transforming America into xenophobic and authoritarian dystopia. Although I am not American, I only wish America nothing but good (despite the fact that Donald Trump also wants to extinguish my country, Canada). For July 4, I can only encourage Americans to take into account the lessons of the great critical patriots – figures ranging from Frederick Douglass to Jane Addams to Martin Luther King Jr. – who taught that loveing your country often means to oppose your government.
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