Proud to Be American Only When Your Side Wins?

Democrats won Congress this week, and many people said they finally felt proud. I came here at six from Odessa. This is what I tell children.

Democrats won the House and the Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections. NBC News reports that they flipped seven Senate seats, Kansas, Texas and Ohio among them. The Washington Post reports that they ran on high prices and anger over the war in Iran. My feeds filled with relief.

The word everyone keeps using

Then I kept reading. People wrote that they finally felt proud to be American. A school board member I know said she had not felt proud until yesterday. Others promised an end to the corruption and the forever wars, a blue utopia at last.

I stopped on the word “finally.” Did anyone listen to what they were saying? They spent years unable to love their own country because the wrong man lived in the White House. A poll discussed on Fox News puts American pride at 51 percent this year, down from 82 percent in 2013, and the drop follows party lines.

You cannot wear patriotism like a cape, on for the good days and off for the bad ones. I know people with prestige and good schools behind them who treat it exactly that way. They have forgotten what this country is.

Why my family love America

I came to Brooklyn from Odessa in 1977, at age six. My family left a place where the state decided what you could say and punished you for saying it. Nobody I loved asked which party held power before loving America. I wrote about my own road from open-schools mom to filmmaker, and it begins with that gratitude.

What exactly was embarrassing?

So tell me what embarrassed you all those years?

Did it embarrass you that America kept its place in the world and helped keep nuclear weapons away from a regime that calls us the big Satan and Israel the little one?

Did it embarrass you that this President protected women’s sports from men who compete in them, and stood for informed consent when children face irreversible medical procedures built on ideology instead of evidence? Any parent can read the research in our Gender Toolkit.

I will not pretend the President is spotless. He is a New York businessman who inherited a fortune and grew it, and I assume he has done things I would rather not know about. I suffered from Trump derangement syndrome in 2016. I was wrong about him, and I say so in public.

I hold the other side to the same standard.

In October 2020, fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop bore the marks of a Russian operation. Years later, Biden’s own Justice Department entered that laptop into evidence at Hunter’s trial. I used to respect the Clintons, and I no longer do.

I believe the Obama years taught a generation to read American history as a story of guilt, and that guilt now fills a country that no longer knows what to call itself. We argue about protecting our nation’s borders and many have been convinced that the only Jewish state is the only one our nation must treat as illegitimate.

The founders planned for disagreement

The founders did not agree on everything either. Adams and Jefferson ran a vicious campaign in 1800, and each side swore the other would ruin the country. The republic survived because the founders wrote rules for losing. The Declaration and the Constitution expect Americans to disagree and give us a system for it.

That system worked this week. The President said Democrats did a good job and accepted the result. I want every child to see a peaceful transfer of power at least once, whichever side wins.

Citizenship also means speaking up for children when it is unpopular. I learned that when American schools stayed closed and most adults looked away. A few of us said so out loud, and we kept saying it until the doors opened. That is the example I want children to see: a person who stays loyal to a country by telling it the truth.

It is why I made 15 DAYS.

I made 15 DAYS because I watched institutions tell parents to trust them while schools stayed closed far longer than anyone promised. City Journal covered the film and what it found about who drove those decisions. People who love their country and know its rules notice when someone takes their rights away. Beth Ann Rosica also wrote in our pages why we were right to fight for open schools.

What I tell children about being American

When children ask me what it means to be American, I tell them you can love your country and still criticize the people running it. I tell them a neighbor who votes differently shares your citizenship in full. I tell them to learn what this country did wrong and what it did right, from the documents and not from slogans. The Washington Times recently described how parents can start at home.

That column leans on Lincoln, who saw the need for a “political religion,” what we would now call civic education, to hold up free government. He understood that America is a creedal country, bound together by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. He urged parents to teach their children love of country and respect for its laws from a young age. Without that creed, the country is nothing special.

I also tell them how fragile this republic is, because I come from a place where the alternative was real. It lasts only if each generation decides to defend it, in the years their side wins and in the years it loses.

Watch 15 DAYS. No one is coming to save our kids but us.