This is a letter that I wrote to The Gallup Poll organization. I intend to send a possibly revised version of it after reviewing whatever comments I receive on this thread from DUers. (I will have to omit the last, “summary” section, in order to fall within the 1000 word limit.)
Dear editor:
I was very intrigued with your recent “Proud to be an American” poll. Though I consider the phrase “proud to be an American” a meaningless abstraction – since I’m certain that it means very different things to different people – I nevertheless feel that further exploration of this subject carries the potential to shed much light on an issue that has often dominated political discourse in our country.
I found it very interesting that three groups of people who least frequently responded that they were “extremely proud to be American” were liberals (40%), Democrats (47%), and those with postgraduate education (49%) – three groups of people who overwhelmingly voted for John Kerry in 2004 – and that Republicans were the group that
most frequently responded that they were “extremely proud to be American” (74%).
I believe that it would be very important to explore the causes and consequences of these responses, given the extent to which this issue permeates our politics – for example,
John Kerry,
John Murtha, and
Richard Durbin have been widely castigated as being “un-American” for criticizing our government during war time. And I would like to propose some avenues for doing that. One of the first questions that comes to my mind is:
Does “proud to be an American” mean a fervent believe in the principles upon which our country was founded?To test this question you could explore the extent to which people are knowledgeable of and in agreement with the document that most expresses those principles – our Declaration of Independence. Specifically, I would explore these two basic principles: 1) That all men (and women and children by implication) are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and 2) That whenever government becomes destructive of those rights, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
But rather than simply asking whether people agree with that statement (since certainly few people would openly admit disagreement with it), I would ask questions that spoke to the heart of the matter. For example, a recent
World Public Opinion poll asked this question:
As you may know, the US participates in the UN Commission on Human Rights, which reviews human rights standards in various countries including the US. Recently the Commission has evaluated how the US treats detainees at Guantanamo Bay and determined that the US has held certain individuals for interrogation for several years without charging them with a crime, contrary to international conventions. Do you think that the US should or should not change this practice according to the prescriptions of the UN Commission on Human Rights?
By asking whether people are
aware of this issue and correlating that with how “proud to be American” they are you could ascertain the extent to which being aware of government practices which impinge upon the unalienable rights of men spoken of in our Declaration correlates with being “proud to be American”. And by asking the question posed in the above poll you could ascertain the extent to which
agreement with that principle correlates with being “proud to be American”.
The second major principle spoken of in our Declaration, the right to abolish government when it becomes destructive of our rights, is closely tied to the freedom of the press issues encompassed in the First Amendment to our Constitution. We could learn more about that issue by asking people their opinions on the government’s use of taxpayer money to provide
propaganda disguised as news. Or another way to get at this issue would be to ask people about George Bush’s idea that journalists who report on matters that he considers “secret”
should go to jail.
But what if we found, as I suspect we would, that people who claimed to be “extremely proud to be American” were less likely than other people to demonstrate knowledge of or agreement with the founding principles of our nation. In that case we might explore other reasons for being or claiming to be “proud to be American”. In particular:
Does “proud to be an American” have arrogant or racist implication for some people?This question came to me as I pondered the many reasons why people might say that they are “extremely proud to be American”. Though I would certainly say that I am proud
of America when it practices the principles upon which it was founded, I would no more say that I am proud
to be an American than I would say that I am proud to be white, for example. Why? Because I had little or no choice in these matters. I was simply born that way.
One interesting track would be to explore the extent to which “proud to be American” is associated with approval of our country’s decision to invade Iraq. I expect we would find that “proud to be American” and approval of the war are highly correlated. But learning that wouldn’t be enough – we would need to know the reasons for that correlation, since there are many different reasons why people might be in favor of a war.
Fear is one reason. Ignorance is another. And some people favor particular wars because they believe that they have self-defense or humanitarian purposes. But what about those people who connect their eagerness for war – usually wars that other people have to fight – with some abstract principle like “pride in being American.” What would lead someone to favor a war simply out of “national pride”?
I suggest to you that racist feelings may be motivating many of these people, and that that possibility should be explored. Also, questioning people about their concern for the collateral deaths of civilians in war, or asking them “Which do you feel is worse – the death of one American soldier or the death of a thousand ‘enemy’ civilians?”, would explain a lot about the motivation of those people who favor war on the basis of “national pride”.
In SummaryI believe that simply asking people how “proud to be American” they are, without exploring the causes and consequences of that attitude, is a worthless exercise at best and provides highly misleading information at worst. But by exploring the causes and consequences of those feelings we stand to learn a great deal about the motivations that people have with respect to some of the most important issues of our day.
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