1. Just as the nation had largely recovered from its disillusionment over the Watergate scandal, Bill Clinton’s slimy “can’t keep it in his pants” Presidency, complete with epic public deceit (“It depends on what the meaning of “is” is…”) surrendered the ground that had been recaptured by Ronald Reagan. Congress befouled itself by turning Clinton’s impeachment trial into a joke. The devastation of the Presidency as an honored institution in which the occupant always began with the good will of all American was underway.
2. Beginning in the Clinton administration, the quality of members of Congress took a nosedive. The Religious Right was a big part of the problem, along with a terrible crop of GOP leaders. During the Bush 2 years, Americans watched revolting Congressional leaders like Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert and others display horrible character and incompetent leadership.
3. As I wrote (on the now lost to posterity website “The Ethics Scoreboard), Democrats began tugging hard at the threats of the fabric of democracy after the 2000 election, claiming the Supreme Court “stole ” the Presidency for Bush. The news media, of course, neglected to point out that the claim was nonsense on the facts: the election was a statistical tie, with the difference in the Florida vote being less than the margin of error. In such a situation, you shut up and accept the result in the best interests of the nation, as Tilden, Cleveland, and Nixon had done before. The Democrats shattered this “democratic norm,” and, as I predicted, that thread they kept pulling started to unravel public trust in our institutions. Democracy is a government system that is based on trust.
4. The decision to invade Iraq based on a perfect storm of Saddam’s perfidy, U.N. corruption, intelligence failures and neo-con passion was (and is) presented to the public by the news media and Democrats (who knew better) as Bush 2 “lying” to get us into a war. Then the war was botched (though it didn’t have to be that way).
5. John Kerry, a lifetime political grifter (who ran for Senate with a shamrock as his symbol in Irish-stuffed Massachusetts even though he wasn’t Irish) continued the stolen election tactic in 2004 when he lost an election he deserved to lose almost as much as Kama Harris would in 2024. Again, the news media made the public think there was validity to his claims. There weren’t.
6. Barack Obama’s election should have given impetus to American bipartisan pride, but instead he used divisiveness and the denigration of his own country to have the opposite effect, in part because it shielded him from accountability for a disastrous eight years. His wife actually said that Obama’s election was the first time she ever was proud of her own country. The news media and popular culture pronounced Obama beyond criticism, and along with Obama embedded the narrative that American law enforcement was hopelessly racist. The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and later, George Floyd were weaponized for political gain, public trust in law enforcement and the nation’s culture being collateral damage.
7. “Critical Race Theory” wormed its way into school curricula, so an entire generation was indoctrinated into the absurd belief that the United States had progressed hardly at all since Jim Crow in its quest for equal opportunity and the elimination of racial prejudice. Democrats, again, did this deliberately to cement a larger voting bloc, and if it destroyed the public trust, c’est le vie!
8. Democrats were so certain that they were on the way to permanent domination that they nominated established Ethics Villain Hillary Clinton as their candidate for President in 2016. By a strange (and lucky) twist of fate, aided by her own epic corruption (the secret server) and a campaign even worse than Kerry’s or Al Gore’s, Donald Trump, falsely framed by the media as a “reality TV star,” became the fifth U.S. President elected without winning the popular vote. Shocked out of their minds and angry at the world, Democrats launched an attack on the Constitution itself. Hillary Clinton, with the help of Obama, promoted “resistance” to an elected President, something that had not occurred since the Civil War. The election itself was illegitimate, she suggested and the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the “resistance,” Democrats, and the progressive media) insisted. Then the Axis set out to make it impossible for the new President to govern. It manufactured the Russian collusion scandal. The Justice Department, the FBI and the judiciary proved themselves incompetent at best and corrupt at worst.
9. The Democrat-controlled House voted for two partisan impeachments, neither backed by sufficient evidence or fair hearings. This shattered another “democratic norm.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi descended into personal denigration of the President, even tearing up his “State of the Union” speech on TV in open contempt. Democrats had been so programmed to detest President Trump at this point that this didn’t even register as uncivil, divisive, unethical conduct.
10. President Trump, spoke, tweeted and behaved more crudely and unprofessionally than any President in history, permanently degrading the institution of the President. This pattern he continued in his second term. I doesn’t help.
11. Every U.S. institution failed the public during the Wuhan virus pandemic. Governors and mayors enforced dictatorial mandates on the public based on dubious science pronounced by lying health specialists..and then violated their own rules. Democrats used the resulting chaos to ignore election integrity rules, traditions and laws. The party’s position that somehow George Floyd demonstrators should be immune from the public strictures being enforced on “everyone else”the little people” (on the theory that “racism is a public health issue”) revealed the ugly double standard in our justice system.
12. President Trump, following the unethical standards set by Democrats in 2000, 2004 and 2016, refused to accept the 2020 election results. As a sitting President, his conduct was more damaging and worse than the previous election deniers. His irresponsible rhetoric planted the seeds of Capitol riot.
13. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a bad decision that had been allowed to stand decades too long. Democrats and the news media made sure that the public didn’t understand the decision or what it meant (it did not “outlaw abortion,”) but the drumbeat of ignorant demonization of the conservative majority further devastated the public trust in the Court, which has already been damaged by Democrats’ “SCOTUS stole the election from Gore!” lie.
14. Democrats cynically inflicted a senile President on the nation, as the White House, the news media and party leadership engaged in an audacious cover-up. With unelected back-room operatives at the helm, Democrats gleefully began imposing the “good discrimination” DEI measures, to the great pleasure of its minorities-dominated base. Finally, a cure for America’s perpetual racism, sexism and ethnic prejudice! That cure was unconstitutional, so when the Trump Administration correctly reversed it, Democrats became “ashamed” of their country.
15. Throughout all of this, the U.S. educational system, particularly universities that had become dominated by lock-step progressive bias and public schools, manipulated by the extreme leftist teachers unions, relentlessly indoctrinated students into their narrative that the U.S. is a racist, sexist, white supremacist colonial power that has been a blight on the world and the human race and has cruelly eschewed that utopian method that makes everyone safe, wealthy and free, socialism

The foregoing is, admittedly, an incomplete explanation. However, in the light of all that, you have to marvel that the Republican level of national pride has remained so high.