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In 1776, the United States was nothing, but it promised to become everything. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of this auspicious founding moment, the United States, having become everything, threatens to become nothing again.

This prospect arises because of the growing polarization and distrust of the American people for one another, and above all a notable decline in old-fashioned patriotism and respect for our fellow citizens. The fraying bonds of social trust among Americans might snap if present trends continue.

That the American people, or at least their engaged political class, are deeply polarized is not breaking news. According to repeated surveys over the last 20 years, partisan and ideological distrust has been growing rapidly. One of the more eyebrow-raising recent trends is the number of Republicans and Democrats (over 50% in some surveys) who say they don’t want their children to marry someone of the other political party.

More ominous is the declining number of Americans who express love for country or pride in being American. According to a recent NBC News and Gallup survey data, as recently as 2004, 70% of Americans said they were “extremely proud” to be American. By last month that number had fallen to just 33%, while the number of Americans saying they were “not at all proud” or “only a little proud” of being American had risen from basically zero 20 years ago to a total of 24% today.

But this trend has a lopsided distribution: It is largely an ideological and partisan phenomenon. Patriotism and love of country is conspicuously plummeting among liberals and Democrats. Gallup’s annual survey on patriotism finds that Republican patriotism or pride in citizenship has remained around 70% or higher for the last 25 years, regardless of which party was in power in Washington. The GOP trend line is so stable you could balance a glass of water on it. Democrats have always been a few percentage points lower than Republicans, even when a Democrat was in power, but they fell precipitously when George W. Bush and Donald Trump were in the White House.

In other words, to put it bluntly, patriotism among a growing number of Democrats seems conditional about whether they are in power or not. And a conditional patriotism is a weak patriotism. The last time so many Democrats were conditional about their attachment to the country and their fellow citizens ended in a civil war. “Patriotism is civic friendship,” the political philosopher Harry Jaffa once wrote. “Patriotism is the link between justice and friendship in its purest or transpolitical form. Those who see each other as utterly alien cannot be fellow citizens.”

Bitter partisan divisions over the best course for the country have been with us from the very beginning. Is there something different about today’s disaffection with the country? One clue might come from revisiting the bicentennial in 1976. Old readers will recall that the country was at a low point in 1976. The nation had good reason to be depressed and divided. The wounds from the Vietnam War and the social unrest of the 1960s were still fresh, as were the doubts about our future in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The economy was also in dreadful shape.

Despite all the reasons for pessimism, there was very little decline of patriotism among Americans. To the contrary, the celebration of the bicentennial, with the large-scale spectacle of colonial era “tall ships” sailing up the Hudson River in New York serving as the visual highlight, helped lift the nation out of its sour mood. The “tall ships” procession on the Hudson is going to be repeated this July 4, though we can speculate whether a President Kamala Harris might have preferred a procession of slave ships instead this year, given her many prior comments about how the arrival of American colonists led to the oppression of minorities.

But zoom in a little closer and we can find a sharp contrast with the present moment. Back in 1976, even the Left was on board with celebrating the nation’s founding. While the Left did not relent in its radical critique of modern America — especially American capitalism — it found it useful or necessary to don the rhetorical garments of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

The most notable effort was the “People’s Bicentennial Commission,” led by young leaders from the anti-Vietnam War movement. While the PBC was Marxist to the core, they were careful to wrap themselves in the American Founding and attempted to associate their anti-capitalist crusade with the “revolution” of 1776. The PBC very cleverly assailed the commercialism of the bicentennial — large consumer brands had gone in big for using bicentennial imagery and official logos on their products — as representing a “buy-centennial.”

Less effective were their attempts to associate the revolutionary leaders of 1776 with the radical totalitarian revolutionary leaders of the 20th century. The leader of the PBC, Jeremy Rifkin, wrote that “a genuine understanding of revolutionary ideals is what links Thomas Paine, Sam Adams, and Benjamin Rush, and the American people, with Lenin, Mao, Che [Guevara] and the struggles of all oppressed people in the world.”

Their attempts to wrap themselves in the mantle of the American Revolution were so obviously insincere that the Senate Judiciary Committee, run by Democrats in 1976, held a two-day hearing to expose the essential radicalism of the PBC. The committee concluded that the PBC “is a propaganda and organizing tool of a small group of New Left political extremists who seek to use the Bicentennial to further their own goals.”

Can anyone imagine congressional Democrats today convening a congressional committee to investigate the Democratic Socialists of America, several of whose leaders have admitted they are running for office as Democrats only as a convenience toward their end of radical revolution? To the contrary, New York City Democrats just chose three DSA candidates, at least one of whom has said openly her goal is the abolition the United States as we know it and “the total eradication of Western civilization”. All three DSA candidates will enter the House of Representatives next January, unless the House votes to refuse to seat them on the sensible grounds that they cannot uphold their oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.”

Beyond the DSA candidates of this election season, today the Left barely makes a perfunctory effort to embrace the American founding. Instead the Left’s ideological and ahistorical propaganda today is best exemplified by the “1619 Project” of the New York Times, which asserts America is and always has been a “slavocracy” rather than a democracy. Scratch a leftist today and he admits that he thinks America is and has always been a fraud. The Nation magazine unintentionally revealed this in its dyspeptic July 4 issue in an article celebrating its hero, Senator Bernie Sanders: “Sanders doesn’t really go for Fourth of July-style patriotic boasting.”

Some of the founders of 1776 and 1787 were gloomy about the nation’s prospects and worried that the nation might not survive very long. America has been through many periods of crisis that were followed by renewal. Abraham Lincoln, foreseeing as young man the dire consequences of neglecting or forgetting the principles of the founding, began warning as early as 1838 that the nation needed to recur constantly to “our ancient faith” if it was to avoid being the author of its own destruction. That’s a message patriots should keep in mind on this semiquincentennial.

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Steven F. Hayward is a visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and the author of nine books, including “Patriotism Is Not Enough.”

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The Patriotism Crisis That Could Tear America Apart