Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
To be a patriot in Donald Trump’s America is like sitting through a loved one’s trial for some gruesome crime. Day after day your shame deepens as the horrifying testimony piles up, until you wonder how you can still care about this person. Shouldn’t you just accept that your beloved is beyond redemption? And yet you keep showing up, exchanging smiles and waves, hoping for some mitigating evidence to emerge—trying to believe in your country’s essential decency.
Patriotism is as various and complex as the feeling of attachment to one’s own family. It can be unconditional and unquestioning, or else move—even die—with the fluctuations in a nation’s moral character. It can flow from a hearth, a grave, a landscape, a bloodline, a shared history, an ethnic or religious identity, a community of like-minded people, a set of ideas. During his travels through the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville saw American patriotism as different from that of tradition-bound, hierarchical Europe, where an “instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling” connects “the affections of man with his birthplace.” In the young republic, Tocqueville found “a patriotism of reflection”—less a passion than a rational civic pursuit: “It is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen.”
For Tocqueville, this democratic patriotism depends on a belief in equality, inalienable rights, and the consent of the governed—in effect, on the beliefs and actions found in the Declaration of Independence. But that universal creed can’t exist solely in abstract nouns. To mean anything—to survive at all—it requires the participation of the governed as citizens. The purpose of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was to remind Americans that self-government would not endure without the efforts of patriots on its behalf. When ancestry defines national identity, patriotism requires nothing other than allegiance. But the blood of the Union dead and the soil of the cemetery that Lincoln had come to dedicate bore a larger meaning: the liberty and equality of all human beings. Patriotism was the devotion of Americans to these principles, and to preserving them through self-government.
Following the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Stephen A. Douglas tried to limit the truth that “all men are created equal” to one lineage—the original British colonists and their descendants. His Americanism excluded not just the enslaved but the foreign-born. During the 1858 U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois, Lincoln mocked Douglas for defacing the Declaration and excluding half the country’s citizens—immigrants from other lands, whose connection to the United States came not through a bloodline but through the founding itself: “They have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are,” Lincoln said. “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
The words of the Declaration shaped Lincoln’s patriotism and justified his politics. He called Thomas Jefferson “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” That truth gave Lincoln the basis for ending slavery and winning the Civil War.
The argument about whether patriotism comes from democratic idealism or American heritage has flared up ever since the founding. The argument doesn’t always fall neatly along the lines of left and right. Until the mid-20th century, much of the Democratic Party was defined by a combination of economic populism and white supremacy. The most important conservative figure of the past century, Ronald Reagan, swore by the Founders’ civic religion.
Almost 250 years after the Declaration, we’re in the midst of another fight over the meaning of being American. This one is particularly dispiriting, because neither side seems capable of mustering a patriotism based in active citizenship. Gallup regularly asks Americans how proud they are of their country. For the past quarter century Republicans have answered “extremely” or “very” proud at a fairly consistent rate of about 90 percent. In the same period Democrats have slipped from the mid-80s to the mid-30s, with the percentages generally rising during Democratic presidencies and falling under Republicans, most dramatically this year with the return of Trump. In June the number was 36 percent for Democrats and 92 percent for Republicans—the largest partisan gap since Gallup began asking the question, in 2001. Republicans remain highly patriotic while their party hollows out America’s democratic institutions and their leader flirts with kingship, as if their love of country has nothing to do with its founding principles. Democrats have a hard time feeling proud of their country unless one of their own is in office, pursuing their favored policies, as if their patriotism goes no deeper than their politics.
Both types of patriotism described by Tocqueville have led Americans into dead ends. In the age of Trump the instinctive kind accepts authoritarianism, while reflective patriotism creates cynicism, alienation, and civic passivity. Neither produces the citizens that Lincoln, Walt Whitman, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., and other American democrats believed were essential to preserving a free country.
American patriotism is a volatile substance, never able to settle into a quiet, modest love of country. It swings wildly between “All are welcome” and “Beware of dog.” Drain from it the universal principles of equality, freedom, and self-government, and it turns into a snarl. The Republican Party has abandoned Reagan’s city on a hill for the blood-and-soil nationalism of Europe’s old monarchies and new dictatorships—Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary. At a rally in Madison Square Garden just before last year’s election, Trump’s chief ideologue, Stephen Miller, expressed an idea in seven words that he might have adapted from the German Ausländer raus! (“Foreigners out!”): “America is for Americans and Americans only!” The meaning of for is unclear, but the important word in the sentence is only.
[Read: Are you a ‘Heritage American’?]
Trump’s America is defined by those who belong and those who don’t. Its essential act is exclusion. Back in power, Trump is showing that mere citizenship isn’t enough. The president and his circle determine who the real Americans are, and if they don’t like your origins or your views, they’ll try to take away your constitutional birthright and deport you. Vice President J. D. Vance has become the administration’s chief spokesman for a version of American identity similar to the one that Stephen Douglas championed and Lincoln derided. During a July speech for the conservative Claremont Institute, Vance set out to “redefine the meaning of American citizenship” as stingily as possible. To Vance, the founding creed should be no basis for Americanness. “Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence” fills the vice president with horror, because it would include those he wants to leave out, and exclude those he wants to leave in. The billions of people around the world who believe in democracy would suddenly have a right to come here. And the 100 percent Americans—the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and extremist white nationalists—would be stigmatized, even if their ancestors fought in the Civil War.
As it happens, the founding creed doesn’t require everyone on the planet who believes in the equality of all human beings to be put on a plane and brought here as candidates for citizenship. But leaving Vance’s illogic aside, his purpose is to remove democracy from our national identity and open the way to the authoritarianism that comes with blood-and-soil nationalism. He defines American identity by where your ancestors lie moldering in their grave—an idea that he first presented in 2024, at the Republican National Convention, in a paean to the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where five generations of Vances are buried.
Because his wife’s parents come from India, Vance is obliged to allow a carve-out for certain immigrants—but it’s conditioned on a gratitude test. According to Vance, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, failed the test when, after years of apparently ignoring Independence Day, he released this statement on July 4: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” Vance convicted this anodyne cliché of rank ingratitude. A Ugandan immigrant “dares to insult” the country that gave his family a safe home “on its most sacred day? Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Vance is proposing a hierarchy of citizenship. If you trace your ancestry back to Shiloh or Yorktown, you can ignore the Constitution, embrace the Justice Department as the president’s police, pal around with white nationalists, and still call yourself a patriot. But if you just got here, you’d better be grateful and keep to yourself any critical thoughts about America’s failure to live up to its own ideals. Patriotism is the right to dress in red, white, and blue and wave the flag on July 4 while defiling its creed.
This shrunken, desiccated corpse of patriotism has its own ancestry. It comes to life when large numbers of aspiring Americans arrive on our shores, and it almost always brings an odor of racial or religious bigotry. In the 1850s, the nativist and anti-Catholic American Party, also called the Know Nothings, had a brief career in opposition to German, French, and Irish immigration. The wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries finally crashed against legal restrictions from Congress and the extralegal actions of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Then, following the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the system of national quotas and bans created in 1924, people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America came here in such numbers that, today, immigrants make up a seventh of the U.S. population, about the same as the historical high in 1890. One result is MAGA.
Ahead of Flag Day in June, Representative Chris Deluzio, a Navy veteran and two-term Democrat from a competitive district in western Pennsylvania, handed out American flags to colleagues and announced the creation of the Democratic Veterans Caucus. He had already helped form a group of anti-corporate House Democrats calling themselves the “New Economic Patriots.” “It ties into our goal of aggressively pushing back every chance we can when someone in the MAGA movement, up to and including Donald Trump, acts as though they have a monopoly on loving this country,” Deluzio told me. “I will take that fight as often as we can.” He added, “We need more of that in our party. I think there is a huge opportunity to contrast the selfishness, the cravenness of the MAGA movement and its disconnect from the true love of country.”
The nationalist right’s rejection of the creedal definition of Americanness leaves an opening for Democrats to reclaim patriotism as a core identity. But for decades now, going back to the Vietnam War, many liberal and left-wing Americans have been skeptical of, even hostile to, patriotic symbols and emotions. This aversion has come at a high political cost.
I grew up during the ’60s and ’70s in a household that never raised an American flag—not out of any anti-American feeling, but because it would have sent the wrong message. It would have associated us with the jingoistic party of Nixon and Reagan. It would have meant “America—love it or leave it,” regardless of war and racism. There’s no denying that our reluctance also reflected social snobbery. Waving a flag was something that working- and lower-middle-class Americans did, like repairing their own cars.
The college-educated professionals who began to take over the Democratic Party in the 1970s prided themselves on having a sophisticated grasp of American history. They recoiled from the Republicans’ crude, coercive patriotism, which demanded a kind of national idolatry—a celebration of America that was blind to slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Vietnam War. In Republican politics, love of country became a negative force, almost the same thing as hatred of compatriots in the opposition. National symbols such as the flag, the anthem, and the Pledge of Allegiance turned into partisan weapons. In 1988, the performance of patriotism constituted most of George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign and might have cost Michael Dukakis the election.
“The Republicans learned to own the flag and own the symbols,” the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, who has written numerous books on the American left, told me. At the same time, an influential strain of thought from the ’60s anti-war movement became left-wing orthodoxy: the idea of the U.S. as an almost uniquely awful nation, the source of most of humanity’s ills—white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, militarism, settler colonialism, environmental destruction. Howard Zinn’s immensely popular A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, taught several generations of young Americans on the left to see patriotism as an embrace of something evil.
“I wouldn’t say the New Left took over the Democratic Party,” Kazin said, “but some of the ideas did percolate, and the Trump people are right that the universities moved to the left.” The American Studies Association—the principal academic organization devoted to understanding American history and identity—came under the control of a faction so hostile to its own subject matter that in 1998 the organization’s president suggested removing American from the name. In 2017, the organization’s national council explained that “American studies scholarship teaches us that rubrics of ‘law and order’, patriotism, and ‘traditional values’ are discourses of retrenchment. We must illuminate the ways their use criminalizes and stigmatizes struggles for empowerment, self-determination, and dignity.” And in 2019, its executive committee announced: “We strive to model forms of solidarity, sustainability, and social justice that foster alternative visions and practices to supplant the rotting empire bent on destruction.”
In the past decade, profound pessimism about the American experiment has grown beyond the niche viewpoint of American-studies professors. With the universities came important sectors of the public. The popularization of academic ideology peaked in 2019, when The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project” declared that U.S. history began with slavery. The notion immediately spread through schools, universities, workplaces. According to the project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the country’s founding principles—the ideas of Jefferson and Lincoln—were specious.
For very different reasons, in recent years the progressive left and the nationalist right have reached the same conclusion: The “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” is a mirage, a trap, a lie. It doesn’t define us as Americans.
Few politicians say this out loud, or even articulate it to themselves. “Maybe some part of our coalition has become less comfortable with outward displays of love of country,” Deluzio said—but lawn flags are uncontroversial in western Pennsylvania. Most Republicans still think that the flag has something to do with democracy. Most Democrats would never release a social-media post on Independence Day like this one from Cori Bush in 2021, when she was representing Missouri’s First Congressional District: “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.” But J. D. Vance and Cori Bush might simply be ahead of their parties, speaking for younger, more skeptical Americans.
For the right, now in power, the abandonment of the American idea is license to build an authoritarian regime. The left, having spent decades proving that the idea is a sham, can hardly protest its dismantling.
In 1998, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country: “Each new generation of students ought to think of American leftism as having a long and glorious history” and to see “the struggle for social justice as central to their country’s moral identity.” He was referring to the kinds of American reformers who embraced patriotism while urging their country to live up to its creed: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the feminist Susan B. Anthony, the poet Walt Whitman, the socialist Eugene V. Debs, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and finally Martin Luther King. Theirs is the democratic patriotism that Tocqueville saw in America almost 200 years ago, rooted in the revolutionary promise of the Founders and the active work of self-governing citizens to realize it. Rorty urged leftists of his time to remember the “civic religion” of their predecessors, identify with their country, and work toward the fulfillment of its moral vision.
Nearly three decades later, what are the grounds for patriotism? The institutions created at the founding no longer work well. Our elected leaders have sunk to abysmal depths of selfishness, corruption, and cowardice. The words of the Declaration bring tears to your eyes and the taste of ashes to your mouth. “It’s not easy to defend the American ideals, because there’s so much cynicism about how they’ve been used and politicized,” Kazin said. “Young people are much less enamored of the ideals as they understand them, much less willing to be proud of the country. They’ve been tainted by fierce ideological conflict.”
Liberals—the last believers in institutions and incremental reform—cry “Democracy, democracy, democracy!” But when the Supreme Court puts the president above the law, the president uses his office for shakedowns, the White House defenestrates speakers of inconvenient facts, the State Department flirts with dictators while shutting the door on dissidents and refugees, Justice Department lawyers lie to the courts, Congress votes liars onto the bench and pours money into a masked secret police force, and most Americans don’t seem to notice or care, then what good is democracy? The country and its government belong to us, so the most honest response is self-disgust.
But I don’t want to stop believing in my country’s essential decency. I don’t want to conflate America with one president, one party, or both parties. I want to feel, as Whitman did, that America and democracy are inextricable; and, as Dewey did, that democracy makes us agents who can always act to better our country and affirm our self-respect.
Tocqueville wrote: “In the United States it is believed, and with truth, that patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance.” In a democracy, that observance takes the form of participation in public life. Harder still, it requires a vision of that life with everyone in it. We cannot wish away the other party, the other states, the other faiths, the newest arrivals, the oldest tribes. In his Claremont speech, Vance said one true thing: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common.” A nation—especially this one, with its short memory and incomprehensible diversity—can’t cohere simply as a geographic boundary and a set of laws. It needs a common language and culture—a way of life.
The intersectional multiculturalists of the left think that there is no common American culture, that the notion itself is a form of oppression—there’s only a collection of groups, dominant or subordinate. Vance and the nationalists of the right think that American culture comes from the dirt and the past, “a distinctive place and a distinctive people”—by which they mean a race and a faith that came here long ago, bringing a way of life to which all others must adapt. Both of these views are wrong—unpatriotically wrong.
American culture is as distinct as that of any other nation, but it’s the only one that comes from an idea. That idea is the equality of all human beings; their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the form of self-government that secures their rights, including the right to change their government if it becomes tyrannical. This idea produced a mass culture famous for loud voices, informal address, innocence and ignorance, generosity and violence, bluntness and cluelessness—a culture of individualists who refuse to accept that anyone is their better, any station fixed for life, any possibility closed to them. It is the easiest culture in the world to join, and if the first generation can’t then the second will. It absorbs, changes, and is changed by each new one, blatant and accessible enough to provide a lingua franca in which they can all understand and be understood. It has no elaborate rules or ancient secret codes. It flattens and simplifies other cultures into music, clothing, food, and words whose vulgarity appalls and seduces the rest of the world. It is stronger than any religious orthodoxy or class rank. What Americans have in common is a way of life made by their creed.
If you still believe this creed matters—if the idea and the culture and institutions that it created still keep you attached to this country—you’re holding on in a hard wind. Around the globe, autocracy is on the march and democracy’s reputation is in decline as its leading light extinguishes itself. In America, most of your fellow citizens in both parties think democracy has stopped working on their behalf. You have to make the case that all the promised shortcuts to greatness are roads to hell—that there is no path toward a more decent life except through the common effort of free and equal citizens. And you have to keep believing it in the face of their utter folly. The only way to be a patriot is to work together with those fools, your fellow Americans, to stop this growing tyranny so that we have a chance to redeem ourselves.
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “America Needs Patriotism.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
