Why does a party that once felt pride in our nation now flinch at the sight of the American flag? Something broke, and once you see where the crack started, you won't be able to look away.
I previously wrote about how the Democrat Party has become the anti-America party, and the polling proves it isn't a fluke or a one-off. A new NBC News poll found that fewer than 30% of Democrats say they're extremely or very proud to be American, compared to roughly 90% of Republicans. The same poll found Democrats now trust colleges and universities more than they trust the U.S. military. A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll produced nearly identical results.
The change may not have happened overnight, but it was quick. Go back to January 2001, and the picture looks completely different. Back then, 90% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats said they were extremely or very proud to be American. By 2026, the Republican number hadn't budged. The Democratic number had collapsed to 29%. Republicans have spent 25 years flying the flag, celebrating the Fourth of July, and saying out loud that they love this country. Democrats spent those same 25 years drifting in the opposite direction on every single measure.
So what changed? I think the answer is obvious, and it has a name: Barack Obama.
Obama's presidency could have been a turning point for our nation. But the "post-racial" America that so many people hoped for never showed up. Instead, Obama’s election became a turning point that accelerated the party’s break with traditional American values and institutions. Race relations got worse, not better, and polling backs that up. Democrats used Obama’s race as a way to declare anyone who opposed his agenda was racist. Obama himself gave Americans every reason to see their country not as one that had grown past its worst chapters, but as one still defined by them.
It didn't stop at race.
Obama used the presidency to cast America as the source of the world's problems rather than a force for good in it. In his early overseas speeches, he leaned more heavily on America's mistakes than its achievements. He weakened belief in American exceptionalism by constantly emphasizing the nation's flaws over its triumphs, and he made identity politics the centerpiece of Democratic messaging, defining Americans by race, gender, and group identity instead of a shared national identity. Pride in country, once bipartisan, became something Democrats began to treat with suspicion.
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Obama never saw America as a great country. He saw it as a project to be fixed. He campaigned on a promise to "fundamentally transform the United States of America," and the left took that as permission to believe their country wasn't great at all, just a flawed system that needed to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Heck, Michelle Obama deserves some blame, too. Remember, it was during a February 2008 campaign rally that she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country," linking national pride to a political movement.
Under Obama, the language of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” became mainstream. He helped move his party toward open borders, undercutting the very idea of our national sovereignty. He also normalized hostility toward law enforcement, religious institutions, and constitutional traditions.
The Obama era proved that the party of Bill Clinton's welfare reform, secure borders, and personal responsibility was gone. What replaced it is a party obsessed with systemic oppression, historical grievance, and perpetual group-based victimhood, one that views America primarily through the lens of its failures rather than its achievements.
Make no mistake about it, Barack Obama made hating America fashionable on the left. He gave Democrats permission to believe their own country was the villain, the source of every problem at home and abroad. That permission never expired. It just kept compounding, year after year, until pride in America became a uniquely Republican trait and hatred of America became a Democrat one.
