In 2001, 87% of Americans said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. After 9/11, that number climbed to 90%. For the next fifteen years, it barely moved.
It is now 58% — the lowest figure Gallup has recorded in 25 years of asking the question.
That drop didn’t happen overnight. It has been sliding since 2017, accelerating after 2020, and the 2025 Gallup survey released ahead of last July 4th confirmed what many suspected was coming: a new record low, down nine points in a single year. As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, fewer people are expressing enthusiasm for the country than at any point in modern polling history.
Each Generation, Less Proud Than the Last
The generational breakdown is one of the more striking findings in the Gallup data. Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation still report pride levels in the 75–83% range. Generation X sits at 71%. Millennials drop to 58%. And among Generation Z — Americans born after 1996 — only 41% say they are extremely or very proud.
Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones noted that this isn’t just a youth phenomenon: every generation has become less patriotic than the one before it, and each generation has also become less patriotic over time. The trajectory is consistent across age groups, not confined to younger cohorts who might “grow into” pride as they age.
The data also shows a pronounced partisan dimension — pride varies significantly by political affiliation — though Gallup notes this pattern has been present for decades, shifting depending on which party holds the White House. What’s distinct about 2025 is the magnitude of the overall decline, not the existence of the divide itself.
Freedom Is Still the Answer
A Pew Research Center survey released this week — conducted across 25 countries and 33,000 respondents — asked people in their own words what makes them proud of their country. Americans are more likely than almost any other nation surveyed to cite freedom as their primary answer.
Twenty-two percent of Americans named freedom unprompted — free speech, civil liberties, the right to dissent. That figure places the U.S. among the highest of any country surveyed for freedom-based pride. It also suggests that even as overall pride has declined, the core value Americans reach for hasn’t fundamentally changed.
What has changed is the emotional temperature around it. The same Pew report found that Americans are more likely than people in most other surveyed nations to offer a negative sentiment when asked what makes them proud — a pattern that points less toward apathy and more toward something more complicated: a gap between the ideal and the lived reality.
The Psychology of Collective Self-Esteem
Social psychologist Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory — developed alongside John Turner in the 1970s and still foundational in the field — argues that national identity operates through two mechanisms: self-categorization (seeing yourself as part of the group) and affect (the emotional attachment that comes with it). Pride, in this framework, is not simply a political opinion. It functions as a form of collective self-esteem, tied to how we evaluate the groups we belong to.
When that evaluation sours — when the gap between what a country represents and what it appears to be doing widens — pride doesn’t disappear immediately. It reconfigures. People often hold onto the values while releasing the satisfaction, which may explain why freedom remains the top answer even as enthusiasm for the country overall declines.
Research published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition found that national identity is shaped not just by pride but by a mixture of pride, shame, and ambivalence — and that people across cultures tend to agree more on what their country should be ashamed of than what it should be proud of. Shared critique, it turns out, can be as binding as shared celebration.
What 250 Years Looks Like From the Inside
There’s a particular irony in the timing. This year marks the United States’ 250th anniversary — a milestone that will generate considerable public ceremony. It arrives at a moment when the number of people who would describe themselves as enthusiastically proud has never been lower in the polling era.
That doesn’t mean the country is less loved. It may mean it is being held to a higher standard — measured not against other nations but against its own stated ideals. Whether that’s a crisis of identity or a sign of a more demanding kind of civic engagement depends largely on how you interpret the gap between 90% and 58%.