Americans think their country is the best on Earth. But patriotism is tearing the United States apart

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David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

Patriotism – the “noble idea” of Napoleon and the “last refuge of the scoundrel” of Samuel Johnson – isn’t unique to the United States. Surveys show high rates of patriotic sentiment in India and Australia and South Korea. Canada, spurred by U.S. President Donald Trump‘s musings about annexation and tariffs, suddenly is making a strong showing.

But patriotism’s home base clearly is the United States. Fully half of Americans think their country is the best on Earth, according to a 2021 YouGov survey. And yet one of the greatest elements tearing the country apart is patriotism itself.

Across the United States, as the country prepares for next week’s July 4 celebration of the 249th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there are myriad examples of what we might call the Patriotism Paradox.

One group of Americans believes patriotism can be expressed by chanting “USA! USA! USA!” – the war cry that greeted Mr. Trump at U.S. Steel’s Irvin Works in West Mifflin, Pa., late last month when he announced he was doubling tariff duties on steel to 50 per cent. A separate group finds that chant cloying, even embarrassing.

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One group of Americans considers Mr. Trump the personification of patriotism. Others cite his five deferments to military service and regard him as a traitor to America’s deepest values.

One group believes the country can do no wrong, and has done nothing wrong. Another group believes that sentiment is a principal reason why the country is going in the wrong direction.

One group believes patriotism means de-emphasizing slavery and applying a pumice stone to capitalism’s rough edges. An opposing group believes true love of country requires an honest look at its history.

One group believes patriotism means going it alone in the world. Others think patriotism means that national pride in the country’s institutions, values and interests require playing a global role.

One group believes patriotism means rallying behind the President after the bomb-and-missile assault on Iran last weekend, a notion fortified by Iran’s response. Another group believes patriotism means asking questions about the prudence and legality of the American attack itself.

One group believes patriotism means that testing the Constitutional guardrails of executive power is necessary because this is a time of crisis. Another believes the crisis is a president seeking and exceeding the far reaches of Constitutional restraints.

In his farewell address, delivered in 1989, Ronald Reagan called for an “informed patriotism” that was “grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge” and urged a dinner-table conversation about “what it means to be an American.”

Mr. Reagan left office a third of a century ago. Today the conversation at the American dinner table is a food fight.

And patriotism, which seems to be everywhere in the Trump rhetorical portfolio, may actually be in a period of decline. Seven out of 10 Americans in 1998 said they viewed patriotism as very important. Last year, a Wall Street Journal poll reported that just four in 10 viewed it that way.

It is not a coincidence that John Trumbull, whose beloved but thoroughly inaccurate 1818 painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence hangs in the Rotunda of the Capitol, is known as the “patriot-artist.” And it is telling that over the decades, perhaps as a metaphor, the massive painting by a one-time military aide to George Washington repeatedly has been cleaned and restored.

For decades, July 4 – the anniversary of that moment – was a time of national celebration. It was a quintessentially American observance of past triumphs and a time for florid assertions of a future of boundless progress and prosperity – all providing new power to Lincoln’s “electric cord.”

In 19th-century daguerreotypes, in mid-20th-century black-and-white photographs, and in modern-day colour cellphone snaps, “the glorious Fourth” – the olden-days characterization of the holiday at a time when people spoke of “the Glorious Cause of America,” upper-case letters always – was marked by parades and festive barbecues. There were, always, soaring speeches extolling the countless virtues of the country’s founders; praising the inspiring courage of its crude, soiled Revolutionary soldiers; noting the contagious impact of the notion embedded in the phrase “all men are created equal”; and acknowledging the sobering struggles and uplifting successes designed to redeem what the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. characterized as the country’s “promissory note.”

Not this year.

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America’s Independence Day celebrations come in a national environment when, according to a Gallup poll taken at this time last year, 67 per cent reported being extremely or very proud of being American, a decline from 91 per cent in 2004.

July 4 celebrations were muted in the bloody Civil War years, during the struggles of the world wars, as the country was convulsed in Vietnam-era protests, and amid the political battles of Watergate, when so much seemed endangered, but when – it was impossible to know this at the time – so much less was at stake than is today.

In those periods, there was an unsettling undercurrent of unease. This year, the tensions are on the surface.

The tensions come in part from the White House, where the administration’s hiring guidance speaks of “Recruiting Patriotic Americans for Federal Service,” which wouldn’t be extraordinary except for the way it aligns patriotism with loyalty to the Trump ethos. One hiring memo mentions “patriotic Americans” seven times.

Mr. Trump, moreover, has promulgated an “America First” sentiment that, along with putting the country’s domestic interests ahead of the international role it has played since the end of the Second World War, asserts that the United States is superior to all other lands and is possessed of few moral and political flaws.

“People used to live and die for God, family and country – for having a sense there was something bigger than oneself,” said Brenda Hafera, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “If you’re constantly telling people to dwell on grievance it doesn’t encourage them to be strong, gracious, or forgiving. There’s a lot of improper portrayal – cherry-picking – of our history.”

The tensions also come from the semi-permanent Never Trump vanguard that considers the President a serial violator of the country’s most precious values and most fragile political restraints while overlooking the corrosive effects of racism, sexism and the wealth gap.

“Nationalism has been weaponized by Trump and used not to bring us together but to attack groups both within and outside the country,” said Laura Beers, the American University political historian who wrote the 2024 Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century. “Trump is re-writing history so America comes out the ‘winner’ and contentious parts of the past are sanitized. Patriotism does not mean being uncritical of the nation.”

And the tensions come from a time far before Mr. Trump.

“Trump has not changed patriotism, nor is he an agent of change,” said Peter Hatemi, a Penn State University political scientist. “Rather he is merely a symptom … of a decaying, fractured and changed America.” He argues that patriotism has become the “pretense of love and selfish service.”

All this troubles Americans of all stripes, worried about the divisions that seem to be widening with each day, or with each social-media post.

“What matters – what brings us together – isn’t where our ancestors came from but instead a shared history that includes the Constitution,” said Matthew Smith, a Miami University of Ohio historian who was reared in England and became an American citizen in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term. “We’ve lost that. Patriotism now divides rather than unites us.”

Two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum convened a panel that used Caroline Kennedy’s A Patriot’s Handbook – a kind of Laura Secord assortment of readings about the American tradition – as a touchstone to examine patriotism. The event came at a high-water mark of patriotism and in the wake of legislation permitting widespread surveillance of Americans and allowing intrusions on civil liberties and detentions without trial. It was called the Patriot Act.

That Kennedy Library conclave, which I attended, provides a useful benchmark for assessing the state of patriotism in an America far different from the one in which Mr. Kennedy was in the White House.

Ms. Kennedy said at the event that in the course of assembling her book she was “reminded over and over that, really unlike almost any other country, America was founded on ideas.” She said that “even though we’ve often stumbled on our journey, I think the fact that we do have the oldest Constitution in the world is really proof of the enduring power of those ideas.”

She referenced the 1801 inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. His defeat of a sitting president, the Federalist Party’s John Adams, came after 36 House of Representatives ballots. In that address, he offered words for our time as well as for his:

“Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

That prompted Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, to speak of the contention that patriotism sometimes evokes.

“We have one tradition in our country that thinks of patriots as heroes, as bulwarks of the nation, as defenders of the American way of life,” he said. “But there’s another strand of thought that has been with us for a very long time that casts a much more skeptical eye on patriotism.”

In the MAGA world view, patriotism is an antidote to internationalism and a response to the celebration of diversity the President seeks to stanch.

While Mr. Trump is not a student of history, his view of patriotism is likely congruent with what John Jay wrote in 1787 in the Federalist Papers, the compendium of explanations of the elements and philosophy of the Constitution:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.”

The peculiar thing about patriotism – what sets it apart from other human sentiments – is that tensions over patriotism are part of the wages of patriotism.

Indeed, in his 1995 address when receiving the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the historian David McCullough said that “history is – or should be – the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.”

Perhaps the most sober view of the patriotism paradox – perhaps the way forward for Americans – is a statement made at the Independence Day holiday just last year by a Republican who was endorsed for the Senate by Mr. Trump and who endorsed Mr. Trump for president.

“Love of country does not mean that we overlook our nation’s flaws,” said Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska. “Quite the opposite – patriotism can inspire Americans to right wrongs, making our grand experiment even better. Consider our ancestors who spent their lives fighting injustices, including the abolitionist, suffragist, and Civil Rights movements. When you love something, you don’t give up on it – you work hard to make it an even better version of itself."

Or, she might have added, to make an even better version of patriotism.