America, the world’s oldest, continuous, modern democracy, will soon celebrate its 250^th birthday—mired in conflict and piloted by a belligerent and mercurial nationalist. James Madison designed a system in which power would be balanced by power, like a delicately poised planetarium, but in a Donald Trump presidency, these powers have collapsed. One man’s whim is another nation’s tariff—or another nation’s war.

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. 

But as well-intentioned and alluring as this narrative that patriotism will heal America may be, it is a mistake. Unless patriotism can be conceived as something very different from the orthodox narrative of American exceptionalism, our enduring maladies of racism and militarism will persist. To heal America, we must reimagine what it means to be patriotic.

The limits of, and issues with, patriotism

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 irony, he wrote in Playboy, was that those who “have given up on America are doing more to improve it than are its professional patriots.”

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. 

But if nationalism is a hunger for prestige and preeminence, America’s self-image as the City on a Hill is nationalism in embryo. If patriotism contains the belief that America is exceptional, and uniquely positioned to lead the world in the ways of freedom, it is already nationalist—because “indispensable” nations are not given to dialogue or restraint. All men are created equal, but not all nations, it seems.

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. 

And when NBC’s Meet the Press recently asked Trump about his campaign promises not to start new wars, he denied facts. “I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?” Trump quipped. When challenged about his false claims about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, he stormed out. 

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

Watching the United States throw its weight behind wave after wave of strikes on Gaza posed two urgent questions for me as a newly minted U.S. citizen. Could I ever be at home in a nation so unapologetically wedded to war? Are there ways to be patriotic that don’t bow before the idol of exceptionalism? I began to look for other forms of patriotism, other ways to belong, and the findings brought me closer to Orwell’s remedy than I expected.

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. 

The Declaration of Independence said that all humans were created equal. The Constitution—with its “three-fifths” and fugitive slave clauses—declared the opposite. Patriotism was the force holding the nation back from its creed. For Garrison, the flag was a symbol of failure. Every speech on American greatness and the indivisibility of the Union, he raged, was a blank check to the slave power.

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..

In the Civil War, patriotism once again took precedence over racial justice, lamented Garrison—a war that “saved the Union” before dropping the African American like a stone. Black codes in the “New South” were expertly engineered under a beaming discourse of national unity. America-the-nation-state trumped America-the-idea. 

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.”

The journalists Crystal Eastman and Randolph Bourne argued similarly amid the nativism and nationalism of the First World War, a time not unlike our own. Militarism and nativism were two sides of the same coin, observed Eastman. The answer was not to fight the storm so much as transcend it with a more inspiring vision of America as “a nation of nations.” Step onto the campus of a “vivid American university,” urged Bourne, and you will feel this new America—a place where internationalism is implicit and friendships span the globe. Here, or in any of the nation’s great cities, were the ingredients of a richer and grander patriotism. But we have to move on from the old conceits, demanded Bourne: “We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” 

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.