"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."
"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.""
Patriotism under Donald Trump's presidency often feels like watching a beloved stand accused, producing shame alongside continued loyalty and hope for redeeming evidence. Patriotism can be unconditional or contingent on national moral character, rooted in hearths, graves, landscapes, bloodlines, shared history, ethnicity, religion, community, or ideas. Alexis de Tocqueville saw American patriotism as a "patriotism of reflection"—a rational civic pursuit nurtured by laws, rights, and participation. Democratic patriotism hinges on belief in equality, inalienable rights, and consent of the governed, and requires active citizen participation. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address aimed to remind citizens that self-government depends on patriotic effort.
Read at The Atlantic
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