I'm Proud To Be An American

It is a strange thing to be born into a nation that both saves and sins. Stranger still to love it. Stranger still, perhaps, not to.

In April of 1945, U.S. soldiers liberated Buchenwald. What they found—bodies stacked like cordwood, children too weak to stand—shattered the postwar illusion that history had been moving gradually toward progress. It was a revelation not just of evil, but of its capability to flourish in silence.

The United States did not discover evil in Europe. But it confronted it. And more importantly, it resolved to restrain it—not through imperial dominion, but through the creation of institutions, alliances, and post-war norms built on ideas. That moment—when force was met with order, when liberty stared down nihilism—is one of many reasons I am proud to be an American.

Because to be an American is not merely to occupy land within borders. It is to be formed by a proposition. And to be responsible for it.

The American Proposition: Fragile, Fierce, Enduring

Lincoln called it “the last best hope of Earth.” Jefferson risked his life for it. King dreamed within it. Solzhenitsyn praised it from exile. The proposition was simple, profound, and maddeningly hard to live by:

That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

Not granted by government. Not purchased by status. Not inherited by blood. But intrinsic, divine, and unconditional.

This proposition is not a myth. It is a test. And the test is ongoing.

Slavery denied it. Segregation mocked it. Cronyism, empire, inequality, and apathy all erode it. But it remains there, like a cornerstone beneath the soil—sometimes hidden, but unremoved.

The Critics Are Not Entirely Wrong. But They Are Incomplete.

It is fashionable now to condemn America as irredeemable. To compile its sins, frame its founding as an act of theft, and declare the project a failed experiment. The irony, of course, is that such declarations are possible precisely because the American system allows—even protects—them.

The freedom to despise your country is an American freedom. But the moral logic often stops short. Condemning America without reference to its self-correcting character is like condemning the church while ignoring its saints. Worse, it assumes that other civilizations do not bear equivalent or greater guilt.

The measure of a nation is not the absence of sin, but the presence of repentance, and the structures that make repentance possible. America—perhaps uniquely—has built those structures into its political DNA.

We abolished slavery. We passed civil rights legislation. We enfranchised women. We elected a Black president. These are not absolutions, but they are signs of capacity—for change, for conscience, for collective moral movement.

That is rare. That is precious. That is why I am proud.

A Nation Not of Comfort, But of Conscience

America was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be just, and that is a much harder thing.

Justice requires dissent, discipline, and delay. It requires conversation between people who disagree fundamentally yet live under the same flag. The First Amendment is not an aesthetic. It is the foundational acknowledgement that truth and liberty emerge not from control, but from contestation.

And here, in this brutal century, amidst the collapse of truth into spectacle and thought into ideology, the American experiment still holds out something ancient and defiant:

That the individual matters.

That government must be constrained.

That conscience cannot be coerced.

This is not political rhetoric. It is civilizational doctrine. And it is under siege—not only from without, but from within.

What Patriotism Actually Means

To be proud of America is not to be blind to her faults. It is to be able to hold them in one hand while defending her principles with the other.

I am proud to be an American because I believe that the moral architecture of this country—its founding ideals, its constitutional order, its built-in skepticism of power—is one of the greatest achievements in human history. That pride is not uncritical. But it is unashamed.

It is rooted not in sentiment but in serious reflection. It is not a reaction to fashion, but a commitment to something older and deeper than the present cultural mood.

And it is a declaration that hope belongs to those who refuse to surrender it to cynicism.

Here, at The Outrider Post, we will think slowly. Speak plainly. And hold the American project to account—not for its ruin, but for its renewal.

Because even now, despite it all, I am proud to be an American.

And I believe there is still much worth saving.