Americans have never settled the question of how best to love this country. Does patriotism mean prioritizing unconditional loyalty—the Pledge of Allegiance I remember repeating every morning of elementary school, right hand over my heart—or does it first demand skepticism and vigilance, a setting and resetting of expectations, a love that needs to be earned?
This tension goes back to the very beginning, to the ratification of the Constitution, when Federalists and anti-Federalists debated whether there was enough glue to hold this new political entity together. To argue for a union was to willfully overlook the irreconcilable divisions between the states—slavery being the most obvious gulf. Our most fondly remembered Founding Fathers took a leap of faith. Whatever doubts they had, they threw an idealistic blanket over the whole enterprise, covering the mess by proclaiming that providence had decreed that this union had to exist, and therefore it should. The anti-Federalists were not so sure. They saw a clash that could lead to war, as it eventually did. But Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others drowned out these doubters, doubling down on the claim that America was graced with a unique role in the world: to be a beacon of freedom, a country that had been preordained.
This exalted patriotism, a “still-religious intuition that we have already arrived,” as Dominic Erdozain puts in his new book, To Love a Country, has been a deafening force in American history. It has, he argues, left festering injustices unattended, led us into what Barack Obama once called “dumb wars,” and produced a perpetual red-white-and-blue fireworks display that distracts from difficult truths about the country’s failings. Erdozain writes with a poet’s concision but a maximalist’s zeal, leaving no room in his historical account for any doubt that American exceptionalism has been a singularly detrimental force. His allergy to patriotism is so extreme that it reminded me occasionally of my poor dog’s reaction to the all-night explosions of the Fourth of July. She hides under the table, shaking with fear and loathing.
Erdozain’s parade through our history begins with those Founders saluting the flag and signing the compromise that was the Constitution while abandoning their commitment to the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” truths. Harriet Beecher Stowe once diagnosed these men as having divided spirits—their political orientation was toward John Locke and the universalism of other Enlightenment theorists, but their theology was rooted in Puritanism and predestination. The former tradition “taught equality, compromise, and rational self-interest,” writes Erdozain. The latter “taught inequality and division, imparting a hard and heroic element to the American character.”
Erdozain dismisses the theological strain of American patriotism as a kind of lunacy, which “should have been left behind in 1776.” (Religious zeal, as he sees it, presents itself as an absolute belief in God’s hand guiding the country, placing America beyond reproach; he devotes less attention to moments when faith has served as a redemptive force, a stimulant for abolitionism and the civil-rights movement.) It is easy to mock today’s manifestations of this colonial-era theology—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calling America’s successful bombing of Iran a result of God’s “miraculous protection” and “almighty providence,” for example—as a perversion of godliness. But a sense of higher purpose was a key binding agent for a country not otherwise held together by much. Political theory, for all the justice it preached, was very often trumped by this doctrine of chosenness.
[Read: What the Founders would say now]
Centuries of cognitive dissonance followed. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Fredrick Douglass asked, with good reason, in an 1852 address. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”
Such hypocrisy is not hard to find. In Erdozain’s reading, even the Civil War, which most people commemorate as the bloody triumph of founding values over an unjust reality, was merely another victory for a militaristic patriotic spirit that would not countenance disunion—“What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union,” Abraham Lincoln wrote. I should point out a polemical tendency in this book toward selective quotation—Lincoln, for instance, did condemn slavery as inherently evil. Erdozain insists that securing true freedom for all citizens was never the motivation of the war, and that it was, instead, driven by an abstracted idea of maintaining America’s integrity as a supreme symbol of freedom.
On Erdozain goes—through America’s imperial adventures in the late 19th century, its involvement in World War I, and then its immersion in the Cold War. (He mostly skips World War II, in which patriotic violence was deployed against a worthy enemy—an exception, and a triumph, that would seem to contradict his point.) His argument is that, again and again, the myth of America allowed its leaders to act in ways that violated the founding ethos, that the country was “an idea trapped in its own publicity.”
This point lands with force in the Donald Trump era, when there is little more to the American idea than publicity. Earlier presidents, such as Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, invoked those universal values in the service of foreign incursions that frequently betrayed those ideals. But at least they were acknowledging that the United States stands for something. Under Trump, there is only tautology: We are a blessed nation that can never do wrong, simply because we are blessed; God protects us, Hegseth says, because we are America, damn it. Trump invests his energies into building a triumphal arch or a statue garden of heroes for us to look up to and admire; his executive order on museums and parks forbids any descriptions “that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times),” decreeing that the focus should be only “on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” What Trump commands of his followers is an empty reverence. He seldom appeals to our love of freedom or equality or democracy. It’s all just fireworks.
What could a healthy form of patriotism look like? Erdozain makes a convincing case against exceptionalism. But we do need a story; every nation does. A few alternatives present themselves.
The early-20th-century critic and essayist Randolph S. Bourne made a smart distinction between “country” and “state.” The feeling you have for your country is something like what you might feel for your family; country is the agglomeration of culture and people and environment that surrounds and grounds you, something you share with others. The state is the country acting as a political unit and imposing its will by means of government bureaucracy, the military, and any other entity that exercises power on behalf of the country. The two are separate, Bourne writes, even if, in war, the state tries to usurp the country and speak for it. But in principle, if you make this distinction, you can love your country while being skeptical of the state. This does seem like a way to claw back patriotism from its more exploitative uses, and even celebrate a nation that has become an amalgam of people from everywhere in the world. “Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live,” Bourne wrote (I think here of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land). “But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects.”
[Read: The left needs to rediscover its patriotism]
Erdozain has his own preference. He imagines a patriotism that taps directly into the humanism and universalism of those original “self-evident truths.” He ends his book by citing the famous speech John F. Kennedy, delivered a few months before his death in 1963, which marked a shift from the zero-sum militarism of the Cold War toward a spirit of cooperation with the Soviets. (Kennedy would soon propose a joint trip to the moon.) In the speech, he named some universal traits so obvious that their enumeration was profound. “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal,” Kennedy said. A patriotism of this flavor would celebrate the America that strengthened international institutions, forged enduring treaties, celebrated scientific advancement across borders, and defended human rights.
Erdozain himself knows how pie in the sky this sounds today. “The dubious achievement of patriotic ardor has been to make ideas fundamental to the Declaration of Independence sound foreign and utopian,” he sadly concludes. But he is also underplaying just how fervently humans desire a particularistic, rooted identity. An America that was all about defending universal values wouldn’t offer much to people seeking something special about being American.
One other possibility shows up in Erdozain’s account, and it feels more promising: patriotism as process. This is the acknowledgement that American ideals were not meant to be something we can win or lose but something we should continuously strive for. It is the promise embedded in the “promissory note” invoked by Martin Luther King Jr. He was the most eloquent prophet of this version of patriotism, one that looks squarely at our imperfections but asserts that being an American is essentially a job of constant renovation, of working to shorten the distance between dream and reality. “We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future,” Bourne wrote in an earlier iteration of this idea. We are moving toward.
More recently, Obama grabbed this mantle. Honoring the civil-rights activists who marched in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he spoke of their belief that “America is a constant work in progress,” and praised this attitude as the highest form of patriotism. “What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical?”
This sounds like a worthy alternative, although whether Americans will find the self-critical patriotism of loving a work in progress as compelling as chest-thumping jingoistic nationalism remains an open question. After eight years of hearing Obama stress the humility of being unfinished, voters turned to Trump’s gilded bravado. But loving what is not yet complete is within our capacity. I know this is true because I’m a parent, and children are the best example of incompleteness. A parent’s love for even the rowdiest, most disruptive toddler emerges from a kind of double vision: simultaneously seeing who they are and who they will eventually be. After the exhaustion of the day, a parent watches that toddler sleep and is flooded with something like anticipatory nostalgia, caught between the desire to have them be grown already and the urge to hold on to who they are right now. This collision of contradictory feelings creates a unique kind of love.
Pardon me if I’m getting a little sentimental; maybe 250 is a little old for a toddler. But I wonder if our adoration for our country can look more like this: just as clear-eyed and accepting of mess as Obama’s patriotism, but less disapproving and more nurturing. This kind of love is exhausted by the waiting and the heartbreak, by the sense that nothing is getting better fast enough, but it also sees in America what parents see in their children: the promise of eventual maturity, and the hope that one day they might achieve the things we couldn’t.
Leave a Reply