At 250 years old, there isn’t much that the United States of America hasn’t experienced, including periods of intense political protest and violence, the last of which ended around the late 1970s. The ’80s and ’90s weren’t entirely protest-free, but they weren’t protest-driven either.
Most of Generation We thought it was doing good in the world, and it also just seemed like a lot of effort.
In 1999, a chair flew through a window during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. In 2011, Wall Street was said to be ‘occupied’, and in 2020 many American cities were on fire, ostensibly because of the death of George Floyd.
Protest culture was back, with a vengeance.
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Today, as the battle for Minneapolis rages, not just rhetorically but in physical confrontation, we mourn the death of Renee Good, while still reeling from the murder of Charlie Kirk. It feels like our country is back in the deadly maelstrom of the violent protests of the 1960s and 1970s.
Protesters hold several signs including “The Power of the People” and “No Kings No Royalty” during a pro-democracy rally in Hancock Adams Common on April 19, 2025. (Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
So what was it, in the late 1970s, that pulled America out of the nosedive of near-constant political protest and violence? Looking at the events, one answer stands out more than any other: patriotism.
There is some symmetry here, because in 1976 the US celebrated its bicentennial, and just as this year will happen for the half century (okay, we’ll just call it the 250th), there were major patriotic celebrations all over the country.
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Heading into the bicentennial, America was still suffering from the failures of Vietnam and the shame of Watergate, not so different from our own relationship with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the scandal of Joe Biden’s absent presidency.
In 1976, things started to change. It marked the beginning of an anti-American fever, and there was a man leading this movement, a man named Ronald Reagan, whose presidency would, in his own words, bring back the “morning in America.”
For those old enough to remember, the 1980s were a time of shocking new patriotism. We listened to “Born in the USA” (hilariously missing Bruce Springsteen’s intended point) and watched Rocky Balboa take out Soviet Ivan Drago and the entire nation cheered on our Olympians, like sprinter Carl Lewis and gymnast Mary Lou Retton. It was all very sincere.
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When it came to protests in the 1980s and 1990s, exceptions such as anti-apartheid sit-ins and the LA riots of 1992 proved the rule; teens and young adults of Generation
On January 14, fireworks were set off near the scene of a shooting in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)
Ultimately, in the last two decades of the second millennium AD, there was little for Americans to protest. We had won the Cold War and were the world’s only superpower. To all the world it seemed that if we could fix the Y2K computer bug, we would be good as gold.
How on earth did the first two decades of the 21st century return us to a place of violent protest clashes and political assassinations? Once again the central theme here is patriotism, but this time its rapid decline.
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By the 2000s, political correctness, which would soon evolve into wokeness, had already turned our education system into one that always finds a way, first and foremost, to blame America and the West for all the world’s misery.
Our history was no longer taught as the imperfect story of a nation making great strides toward equal opportunity, but rather as a fixed power structure, always supporting mediocre white men and always oppressing magical minorities.
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Our television shows would start telling us that America really isn’t the greatest nation on earth, that it’s a lie and that we are in fact an ignorant bully who needs to cede more power (while still paying for everything, of course).
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It’s ugly rhetoric that has put us in an ugly place.
In the next three years, with the country’s 250th anniversary, the hosting of the World Cup and the Olympic Games, and further potential foreign policy victories under President Trump around the world, we may see an opportunity for patriotism to rise again, just as it did in the early 1980s.
A Gallup poll Last year, only 36% of Democrats were found to be extremely or very proud of being Americans, with Republicans at a whopping 92% and independents, as usual, stuck in the middle at 53%.
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There is probably no measure that is more predictive of who one will vote for and whether one will protest than being proud of one’s country. In many ways, it is the central divide that explains so much of the chaos of violence we see today.
Patriotism is the answer. Patriotism is what our nation so desperately needs, and the good news is that we can display and celebrate it all every day.
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