One response to the chaos of the Trump era has been to fight nationalism with patriotism, and recover “the soul of America” from what is held to be a temporary aberration. Leading historians have advocated this approach, and this was the substance of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Contrary to a widespread belief, patriotism tends to inhibit bold solutions to these problems by convincing Americans that they already live in the greatest and freest land in the world. It is patriotism that whispers the idea that Trump is an anomaly and that a healthy turnout in the next election will restore order. It was patriotism, packaged as national security, that signed away constitutional safeguards against executive overreach after 9/11. And when moderates told Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to slow down and stay in his lane in the 1960s, caution was invariably framed as patriotism. This notion that Americans are fundamentally good—the best and healthiest of nations—King once said, “is the illusion of the damned.”
The patriotism-to-cure-nationalism idea can be traced back to a classic essay by George Orwell, in which the writer characterized nationalism as a disease that grows on the ruins of religious faith and kinder, humbler forms of patriotism. According to Orwell, nationalism is egoism, aggression, a “desire for power.” The nationalist not only tolerates crimes committed by his own people, observed Orwell, he doesn’t even notice them. Disagreeable facts “bounce off” his consciousness like rain hitting a windshield. Patriotism,” he ventured, could serve as “an inoculation against nationalism.
President Biden’s answer to a question about military engagement, in October 2023, was a perfect illustration of Orwell’s point about knee-jerk nationalist responses. Asked by 60 Minutes whether the U.S. is capable of sustaining conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza at the same time, Biden shot back: “We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world.” Of course, we can “take care” of our allies and still maintain our supremacy.
It is not just the military question that is swallowed in the boast: it’s the morality. For the nationalist, the ethics of war are as straightforward as the logistics. This is not an alternative to America First. It’s another version.
How to heal patriotism
In the early days of the republic, there were many radicals and reformers who shared my suspicion that patriotism was an evasion, substituting songs and speeches about liberty for the reality. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison exposed the intimate relationship between the narrative of America as a chosen nation and the original sin of slavery. To say that the Union was sacred and the touchstone of democracy was to strengthen slavery by sanctifying the state that protected it. Patriotism was more than a glaze on a flawed structure: it was the mortar, they argued. It bound the building blocks of democracy to the rotten timber of a slave empire.
Douglass agreed. For him, the orthodox view of America as the “last hope” of a fallen world was more than an unfortunate case of narcissism. It was a rivet on the chains of four million enslaved people. It was the divine right of kings, transferred not destroyed. Douglass ridiculed the cult of the founders as a case of arrested development, suggesting that men only worship their ancestors when they have something to hide. “Who were your daddies?” anyway, joked Douglass. Men, not gods..
Reformers of the Progressive era shared many of these anxieties, yet their instinct was to revise rather than reject the patriotic impulse. Jane Addams felt that Americans could take pride in the antimilitarism of the founders and their vision of America as an alternative to the highly militarized, garrison states of Europe. More importantly, she believed Americans should embrace the kaleidoscope of cultures within their shores and weave that energy into their national identity. Who wants to live in a melting pot, after all? she protested. Rather than lecturing immigrants, or melting them into a drab conformity, we should learn from them. In the “cosmopolitan humanitarianism” of a community like Hull House, her settlement in the west side of Chicago, Addams found a model for presidents and a template for world peace. “When this newer patriotism becomes large enough,” she wrote, “it will overcome arbitrary boundaries and soak up the notion of nationalism. We may then give up war, because we shall find it as difficult to make war upon a nation at the other side of the globe as upon our next-door neighbor.”
This is a more enticing response to the misery of the Trump years than the liberal bromide “this is not who we are.” Addams and Bourne anticipate the dynamic patriotism of the civil rights movement and the quest to redeem (rather than merely recover) the soul of America.
I can still hear Garrison, thundering against hero worship and the crimes of the founders. But patriotism is a movable feast, and the likes of Eastman and Addams are no less the anchors of my American identity than Jefferson or Madison. Reclaiming patriotism does not mean reclaiming the flag. It means rediscovering the people who refused to give up on democracy, even when they were called un-American for doing so.
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