The Scots got to Boston first. They came for the World Cup in kilts, marched down the avenues behind bagpipes, and joked about renaming the city New Scotland. Japanese fans filmed themselves eating Texas barbecue. In Lawrence, Kansas, locals carved the Algerian flag into a lawn for visitors who had never set foot here and did not know what to expect.

Most of them expected worse. They had been told they were flying into an angry, dangerous country in irreversible decline, and they found the opposite. They could not stop filming the small things. Free refills. Strangers who said hello. One visiting comedian marveled that Americans talk about ranch dressing like it is one of humanity's greatest achievements.

Flawed but fundamentally good is not a hard thing to see. A Scottish soccer fan saw it in an afternoon. The people who could not see it were the ones who explain the country for a living, and they spent its 250th birthday explaining why you should feel bad about it.

Bill Maher hates Trump and loves the country anyway

Bill Maher is no friend of this president. In May he spent a monologue mocking the lineup for Trump's Freedom 250 concert, a bill of Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli that he said showed the president cared about the unemployed.

A few weeks later he gave a monologue in defense of the country itself. Patriotism is not embarrassing, he told his audience. The name of the country is America, not Utopia, and we can only be more perfect than Belgium. The foreign fans pouring in for the World Cup, he said, were reminding Americans their own country is kind of awesome.

Maher can tell the country apart from the man who runs it.

He can dislike the president and still love the nation the president happens to govern. That distinction used to be ordinary. It is the whole game now, and half the country has misplaced it.

A Times columnist spent the Fourth pining for Norway

Nicholas Kristof greeted the 250th, in his New York Times column, with what he called misgivings and malaise, and told America to study the Nordic model instead. He quoted Norway's finance minister saying the American dream is now more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.

Norway is five million people whose government banks two trillion dollars in North Sea oil money, the largest such fund on earth. A columnist who marks his own country's birthday by recommending a different one has already told on himself.

Nobody is risking their life to reach Oslo. The line has formed at the American border, and it has stood there for a century.

Common Dreams called the celebration an imperial, dictatorial display of self-glorification. House Democrats put out a 55-page report calling the festivities a hotbed of corruption. A New York Times guest essay by Robin Givhan went furthest of all. She wrote that she could barely stand the sight of red, white, and blue, that the colors themselves now "make my heart ache." The flag went up, the fireworks went off, and a whole slice of the commentariat could not find a kind word for any of it.

Mamdani read America a grievance from Washington's desk

Zohran Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York, dropped the pretense entirely. He marked the 250th from City Hall, seated at George Washington's desk, and described the country as an arena of supremacy. He reached for the oldest script there is: the world's first trillionaire, the oligarchs who buy elections, the wealth held in the soft hands of a precious few. He called the elected government an authoritarian regime and its officers masked agents terrorizing the streets.

The vice president answered him that same day. In New York Harbor, JD Vance named the "couple small but loud voices" who "speak obsessively not of our national greatness, but of our national imperfections."

Mamdani preaches one thing and lives another. He wants the abolition of private property; his family rents out an armed-guarded villa above Lake Victoria in Uganda, lap pool and cook included, on Airbnb. He lectured America about inequality on its birthday while his wife skipped the country for a wellness retreat on a Spanish island. This is who cannot see that America is good. Not the Scot at Fenway. Not the family at the cookout. A man with a mansion abroad and a grievance at home.

Fourteen percent of Democrats are extremely proud of America

Maher named the disease back in the spring. Democrats, he said, remember patriotism for about an hour at their convention when they are trying to win back swing voters. You cannot take back the flag in an hour, he told them, if the rest of the time you treat it as something vaguely embarrassing.

This year, extreme pride in being American fell to 33 percent, the lowest in the quarter-century Gallup has asked the question. Among Democrats, extreme pride ran at 56 percent under Obama in 2013. It fell to 22 percent by 2019 under Trump, climbed back to 34 under Biden, and sits at 14 percent today. Republican pride moved far less. Even when they lost the White House under Biden, Republicans stayed the proudest of the three groups. Only one side's pride in the country cracks apart the moment its party loses an election.

Sixty-nine percent of Republicans fly a flag outside the house; 26 percent of Democrats do. In 1991, after the Gulf War, the two parties barely differed.

The gap is new. Half the country now loves America only when its own side is running the place, which is just a longer way of saying it has confused the country with its team.

Storms delayed the show and the crowds stayed

The birthday did not run perfectly. Washington baked under an extreme-heat warning, a severe thunderstorm forced an evacuation of the Mall, parades were scrapped in Philadelphia and towns across the map, and Trump did not take the stage until after eleven at night. When the fireworks finally rose, billed by the White House as the largest in the country's history, they competed with the lightning.

And the crowds stayed. Thousands packed the Mall in the heat to watch. One woman visiting from southern Ohio told a reporter that everybody was smiling and happy, so you go with the flow. The tourists saw what she saw. Maher saw it. The three in four Americans who still feel some pride in their country saw it.

The people who missed it carried press credentials and faculty appointments. They filed their dispatches about the heat and the grift. The country they described is one their own readers do not live in.

Not every Democrat has gone this way. Bill Maher keeps saying it out loud, and on the Fourth of July John Fetterman wrote that patriotism must transcend politics, that America is the best nation now and forever. But they are the exceptions the party tolerates, not the ones it puts forward. The faces it promotes, the mayor who lectured America from Washington's desk among them, have narrowed their loyalty down to the party itself.

A party can lose the argument on taxes or the border and still be trusted with the country, because both sides still love the country. A party whose leading voices love only themselves is asking Americans for power while owing the nation nothing. Fourteen percent is what that looks like on a chart. The Fourth of July is what it sounded like out loud. Why should any American vote to hand them the country?