American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present

In June 1826, Thomas Jefferson penned his last-ever letter, an essay on the American project. He had been invited to attend a celebration in Washington, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, and he politely sent his regrets. Sickness now controlled him, but he applauded the sentiment, the fervor of commemoration, and offered his own thoughts on the American experiment. America was a nation built on an idea; an idea “pregnant” with “the fate of the world”; an idea that would drive tyranny and bondage from the earth. What was it? What was the secret of American felicity and prosperity? It was the scandal of equality, the brave assertion of human dignity: “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.” No. In America, every life is sacred, and nobody is born to rule. That was America’s calling and its gift to the world.

Consciously or otherwise, Jefferson was quoting from a speech delivered by the English radical Richard Rumbold moments before he was executed for high treason in 1685. But the tables had turned. What was crime and delusion in the Old World was real and true in America. Patriots of Jefferson’s generation had the dizzying sensation of learning from the pioneers while breaking free and building something new. America was first in freedom, a lamp and guide to the nations. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man,” he marveled. America’s anniversary was a message to the world, “the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.”

And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy.

Only Jefferson could turn a dinner invitation into a lecture on time and progress. Although he was famously skeptical in matters of theology, Jefferson’s patriotism was untrammeled by doubt. Had he applied the same scrutiny to his political philosophy, he might have seen the irony of preaching equality from Monticello, a neoclassical mansion perched on a slave plantation in Virginia. Did America’s grandeur excuse his own? Was the majesty of America’s historical mission enough to forgive the indiscretions of the present? Jefferson wrote extensively on the evils of slavery, and he introduced bills for emancipation in Virginia, but in a crucial and telling disclaimer he averred that the problem would not be solved until Providence, “the power of a superior agent”, lifted the curse.

This nonchalant maneuver enables Jefferson to extol America as the seat and refuge of liberty over and against the contradictions of the hour. Indeed, the belief that America’s destiny is larger than a troubled present assists the evasion. Like an Old Testament patriarch whose sins are absorbed in a greater story of redemption, America’s identity as the apostle of liberty relieves it of the excesses of introspection. Certainly it were better that such a nation live than tear itself to pieces over the fate of the slave. Abraham Lincoln stated the principle when he declared, “Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any GREAT evil, to avoid a GREATER one.”

Such is the problem of patriotism: a higher law that is really a lower law, because it substitutes a theory about America for the reality. It esteems the state above the person, the shell above the contents, in the hope that what is good for one will be good for the other. It has never worked that way. Where patriotism has meant exceptionalism, the belief that America was born to lead, it has wreaked havoc on the cause of democracy and fair dealing, at home and abroad.

America’s descent, on its 250th anniversary, to the demagoguery of an unapologetic nationalist is not the aberration many want it to be. It is the consummation of forces that have been latent from the start: a rumbling warfare between a political theory of equality and a more visceral urge for mastery. And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy. When the answer to Donald Trump is a renewed and refined patriotism, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that claimed nearly a million lives, it is clear that we need to go deeper.

Then, as now, patriotism had a way of hiding divisions under a glittering rhetoric of unity and, by doing so, perpetuating the fractures it professed to heal. To say that patriotism is always marked by falsehood would be unfair, but hyperbole is the time-honored idiom, as though one cannot be true to one’s country without drowning it in praise. Part of the faith, or superstition, of the patriot is that the end will justify the means: that the progress of the nation will deliver all that America stands for, even in war.

It is patriotism, not economic or military necessity, that has propelled the nation into so many of its military adventures, flush with certainty that light will prevail against darkness and that we are the light. Far from being the antidote to our own age of nationalism, Lincoln’s attempt to close America’s sectional wounds in a “mighty contest” of war, to conjure a nation out of fire and blood, is the high-water mark of patriotic fantasy, something I am reminded of every time I see a “Sons of Confederate Veterans” license plate in the snarl of an Atlanta rush hour or a Confederate flag hanging in sullen defiance by the roadside. We are still fighting that war, still nursing those wounds, and the task of history is to find causes, not wallow in myths.

There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress.

Jefferson, like every political philosopher of his time, was rightly concerned about “superstition” and government, those audacious and “interested” pieties that turn power into the will of God. He hated the falsity as much as the cruelty of the divine right of kings, with its grim conjecture that one family had been called to govern the rest. But patriotism reframed, rather than solved, the problem, achieving for Jefferson and his slaves something akin to what theology had done for kings.

My conviction, as a true believer in what the journalist Randolph Bourne called the “American promise,” is that America needs to shed the conceit of exceptionalism to fulfill its democratic mandate. We must lose the myth of preeminence to see the world as it is. From foreign policy to health care, education to the environment, questions of freedom and justice have been lost in the mists of national pride: the still-religious intuition that we have already arrived. The paradox, as Bourne defined it during the nationalist frenzy of World War I, is that America will have to become less patriotic before it can recover what is true and beautiful in its creed.

There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress. As the irrepressible Emma Goldman lectured a jury, as she defended herself against charges of conspiring against conscription, there are more kinds of patriotism than carnivals of self-regard.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” she told a court in 1917, “we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs.”

“Our patriotism,” she continued, “is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” Goldman loved the American people, and the “great possibilities” of a free society, but she hated the “cant” of an Americanism that trampled on freedom and expected to be thanked for it: the misconceived idealism that deemed a flag more precious than a person. Patriotism, Goldman argued in an earlier essay, had become a “Moloch” and a “menace to liberty,” a value that cheerfully “abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” When a court could sentence a man to ninety days in prison for quoting the nation’s founding document, in a manner supposedly subversive of the war, the crisis was complete.

Goldman’s homily did not move the jury, who convicted her of conspiring against the war effort on the palest of evidence. Her case wound its way up to the Supreme Court, where she was duly exonerated, before that “terrible solidarity” of patriotism had the last word. Goldman was deported to Russia in the Palmer Raids of 1919, an undocumented immigrant, shipped to obscurity.

But the question did not go away: Does patriotism help or hinder the democratic project? As the peace activist Devere Allen quipped in 1930, one “can analyze nationalism and live to tell the story; but woe be to that individual who undertakes in public to scrutinize the idea of patriotism with anything resembling scientific detachment.” I make no profession of scientific detachment, but I agree with Allen that the distinction begins to crumble when patriotism means exceptionalism, an idea, as Tolstoy observed, that denotes not equality and brotherhood but the recognition of one nationality as superior to all the others. America is a revolution wrapped in a myth: an idea trapped in its own publicity.

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Excerpted from To Love a Country by Dominic Erdozain. Copyright © 2026 by Dominic Erdozain. Published by Crown, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House