By admin 
On the eve of the country’s 250th birthday, the very concept of patriotism feels fraught. In a new YouGov poll, 55 percent of American citizens said the country is less patriotic than it used to be, and roughly 35 percent admitted the same about themselves, most of them Democrats. Pride in the country’s past or faith in its future has also become politicized. The president has a habit of calling everything and everyone he dislikes “unpatriotic,” including journalists, protesters, Supreme Court justices, and lawmakers who vote to rein in his war powers.
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At a Fourth of July picnic at the home of a colleague some years ago, the host asked the group if we all felt patriotic. The question seemed like a breach of etiquette. We were eating hot dogs and hamburgers ostensibly to celebrate the founding of our nation, but a few people around the table squirmed slightly with embarrassment. The language felt both charged and alien. Only one member of the party had grown up in a home that flew the flag.
Among American progressives, I’ve noticed a temptation to reject patriotism as a kind of jingoism, tainted by xenophobia, racism, and other forms of bigotry. On the college campus where I work, any talk of patriotism will likely feature Samuel Johnson’s barb that love of country is “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Or maybe George Bernard Shaw’s remark that patriotism is “a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”
If the anti-patriots have the best lines, they also misrepresent the concept, especially as it’s been practiced in America. Patriotism is, above all, a form of loyalty. Much of American life would be lost without it. But the ideals that forged the country as a place of liberty, equality, and freedom—one that welcomes immigrants and tolerates difference—make patriotism here capacious enough to include both pride in America’s accomplishments and shame in its shortcomings.
A love of country can coexist with a fierce criticism of it, and peaceful protest is arguably the epitome of patriotism. It is the work of those who love a country strongly enough to insist on trying to close the gap between what it is and what it could be.
The right of resistance is intrinsic to America’s bedrock values. This is a country founded on rebellion, and the subversive ethos that empowered early colonialists to throw off the yoke of the British Crown is enshrined in the country’s foundational documents. The Declaration of Independence states that if ever a government fails to heed the “self-evident” truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” then “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
Patriotic loyalty is not to any one government, but to the rights that government is meant to protect and sustain. And as Henry David Thoreau argued in “Civil Disobedience,” a love of country need not necessitate a love of government. Rather, good citizens must withdraw support from their government in cases where doing otherwise would violate one’s conscience.
Personal conscience is surely a slippery metric of justice. The politics of conscience in America have inspired the abolitionist movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and a Kentucky county clerk’s refusal to grant licenses for same-sex marriages. One person’s noble rebellion may meet another person’s definition of bigotry.
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Yet a patriotic understanding of civil disobedience has also informed some of the most constructive social movements of the past century, including Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful protest against Britain’s imperial rule in India, the American civil-rights movement, and countless other efforts to bridge the gap between a country’s shortcomings and its ideals. As James Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son, in 1955: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Some progressives dismiss America’s past and promise, insisting instead that the country was founded to preserve white supremacy—that the rot, essentially, runs too deep. This does a disservice to the generations of Americans whose patriotism motivated them to achieve a more perfect union. Slavery and racism may be an irreparable stain on America, but they are not the essence of America.
The practice of slavery was contested from the beginning. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton headed abolitionist societies. Upon George Washington’s death, his will freed his slaves and provided for their future education and provision. He and other slave owners plainly understood that the practice was wrong. There are good reasons to question any leader who fails to grasp the meaning of those “inalienable rights,” but the problem is not with the rights or with the ideals of freedom and equality that inspired them.
In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to the country to live up to its principles. “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights,” he wrote. He coupled his protests against racial segregation with a deference to the rule of law: “I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”
American patriotism, moreover, has always been aspirational. The phrase e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”) graces our currency. The words Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free adorn the Statue of Liberty. A country demonstrates its worthiness of loyalty by acknowledging the ways it has fallen short of its principles. Consider Ronald Reagan’s apology to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II.
If patriotism must be reclaimed on the left, it must also be recaptured from those on the right who have politicized the term with strict ideas about who is worthy of America’s promise and who isn’t. Many conservatives have dismissed activists who protest the president and his agenda as “un-American.” This forgets not only the rights enshrined in the Constitution, but also the command to remind lawmakers that their power comes from the consent of the governed.
A common feature of American protests—against the Vietnam War, the results of the 2020 presidential election, or the current administration’s aggressive crackdowns on immigrants—has been to fly the American flag upside down. This is the gesture of citizens who worry that a country they love may be straying from its mission. This is the gesture of Americans who love their country, but also see it clearly: as flawed and sometimes unfair, but also valuable, essential, beautiful, and full of promise.
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