AMERICA Needs PATRIOTISM

The experiment only works if people believe in it.

- BY GEORGE PACKER

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.”