Not too long ago, the Fourth of July was a festive occasion: a day of national celebration, hot dogs and parades, flag-waving and fireworks. John Updike memorialized the traditional July 4 holiday in Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel of his Rabbit trilogy. In that novel, Updike’s antihero, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star now in his paunchy and troubled late middle age, dresses up as Uncle Sam for a parade in his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania (a thinly disguised rendition of the real-life Reading). His fake beard uneasily held on by Scotch tape, Angstrom surveys the American throng gathered in patriotic jubilation:

White-haired women sit in their aluminum lawn chairs down by the curb dressed like fat babies in checks and frills, their shapeless veined legs cheerfully protruding. Middle-aged men have squeezed their keglike thighs into bicycle shorts meant for boys. Young mothers have come from their back-yard aboveground swimming pools in bikinis and high-sided twists of spandex that leave half their buttocks and breasts exposed.

Like Angstrom, the celebrants are imperfect and beset by their own private anxieties, but also beneficiaries of a country that has allowed them in some small way to enjoy the Jeffersonian promise of the pursuit of happiness. Exultant despite his physical diminishment, Angstrom has an epiphany: “Harry’s eyes burn and the impression giddily—as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history—grows upon him, making his heart thump worse and worse, that all in all this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Of course, the Jeffersonian dream of liberty has never been shared equally and indeed has been actively stolen from many. As against Updike’s triumphalist good cheer, we also have the bracing rebuke of Frederick Douglass’s classic 1852 oration, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In words that can never be forgotten, Douglass reminded the world that for the enslaved, the patriotic celebration of liberty and citizenship was worse than meaningless—it was a callous lie paid for by their suffering.

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December 2025 Issue

The abolition of slavery hasn’t ended the sting or relevance of Douglass’s words. In 2025, America has a president who is hell-bent on demolishing the principle of birthright citizenship, one of the great achievements of Reconstruction that Douglass fought so hard to enshrine in the 14th Amendment.

In Donald Trump’s America, Douglass’s stern critique of patriotic illusions rings truer than Updike’s paean to the “happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.”

Polls record an increasingly pessimistic national mood. According to Gallup, only 31 percent of Americans feel that the country is moving in the right direction. Further, Gallup records that national pride is now at a “new low.” Only 58 percent of Americans say they are extremely proud or very proud of their country. (This is down from a high of 91 percent in 2004.) Among Democrats, this number stands at 38 percent, among independents at 53 percent. Among Gen Z Americans (born between 1997 and 2012), only 41 percent feel pride in their country.

The darkening national mood of course goes beyond Trump’s presidency and can ultimately be traced to bipartisan failures that have dominated the new century, starting with George W. Bush’s imperial crimes in the Global War on Terror and Barack Obama’s inadequate response to the economic meltdown of 2008 (which continues to fuel economic despair). As it happens, Updike’s hometown of Reading perfectly illustrates the longer arc of national despair. Now a predominantly Latino city, Reading remains a Democratic stronghold that Kamala Harris won with 60 percent of the vote, but Trump increased his share of the vote by 16 percent from 2020 to 2024, which contributed to his victory in Pennsylvania. This 16-point shift was one of the largest swings in the 2024 election. Like many inland American cities, Reading has never recovered from deindustrialization and the shift of jobs overseas.

But there is no question that Trump and his Make America Great Again movement—although using all the rhetoric of puffed-up patriotism—has made it harder for many Americans to love their own country.

The political fight over immigration shows how MAGA is a project not to make America great but to make it more grotesque. The hard-won victory of the Civil War made equality of citizenship central to the nation’s identity, at least as a legal principle if not always a lived reality. Trump is undermining this principle not just with his attacks on birthright citizenship but with threats to deport political opponents such as Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of New York.

Some of Trump’s followers have gone even further. On Monday, Laura Loomer, a right-wing provocateur who is also a Trump confidant, tweeted:

Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.

“Alligator” is a reference to the migrant detention center being built in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” There are 65.2 million Latinos in the United States, the vast majority of whom are citizens. Loomer’s post was nothing less than a call for the imprisonment and ethnic cleansing of 65 million people based on their ethnicity. It’s hard to think of an uglier vision of the nation’s future short of mass extermination (a concept that is at least metaphorically implicit in Loomer’s quip about feeding the alligators). After being criticized for this post, Loomer disingenuously tried to claim that she was only referring to “illegal aliens” and not Latinos. The problem with this defense is that there are only roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, while there are in fact 65.2 million Latinos. The intent of her original post is clear.

Trump’s deportation threats, the attacks on birthright citizenship, and the eliminationist rhetoric used by Loomer all add up to a coherent, if sinister, national vision. The policy dimensions of this national vision can be seen in the “big, beautiful bill” that the congressional GOP is working to pass as I write: a budget that ramps up spending on Trump’s deportation machine, cuts taxes for the ultra-wealthy, and deprives nearly 12 million Americans of health insurance. MAGA patriotism means dividing the country into the haves and have-nots. The haves include the rich who will get richer and pro-Trump Americans (mostly white) who will get the protection of citizenship. The have-nots include those who need government assistance for healthcare and those whom MAGA wants to deprive of citizenship for belonging to the wrong ethnicity or having the wrong political opinion.

MAGA patriotism means turning America into a xenophobic, authoritarian dystopia. While I’m not an American, I wish America nothing but good (despite the fact that Donald Trump also wants to extinguish my country, Canada). For the Fourth of July, I can only encourage Americans to heed the lessons of the great critical patriots—figures ranging from Frederick Douglass to Jane Addams to Martin Luther King Jr.—who taught that loving your country often means opposing its government.