What It Means to Love America

Americans have never settled the question of how best to love this country. Does patriotism mean prioritizing unconditional loyalty—the Pledge of Allegiance I remember repeating every morning of elementary school, right hand over my heart—or does it first demand skepticism and vigilance, a setting and resetting of expectations, a love that needs to be earned?This tension goes back to the very beginning, to the ratification of the Constitution, when Federalists and anti-Federalists debated whether there was enough glue to hold this new political entity together. To argue for a union was to willfully overlook the irreconcilable divisions between the states—slavery being the most obvious gulf. Our most fondly remembered Founding Fathers took a leap of faith. Whatever doubts they had, they threw an idealistic blanket over the whole enterprise, covering the mess by proclaiming that providence had decreed that this union had to exist, and therefore it should. The anti-Federalists were not so sure. They saw a clash that could lead to war, as it eventually did. But Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others drowned out these doubters, doubling down on the claim that America was graced with a unique role in the world: to be a beacon of freedom, a country that had been preordained.This exalted patriotism, a “still-religious intuition that we have already arrived,” as Dominic Erdozain puts in his new book, To Love a Country, has been a deafening force in American history. It has, he argues, left festering injustices unattended, led us into what Barack Obama once called “dumb wars,” and produced a perpetual red-white-and-blue fireworks display that distracts from difficult truths about the country’s failings. Erdozain writes with a poet’s concision but a maximalist’s zeal, leaving no room in his historical account for any doubt that American exceptionalism has been a singularly detrimental force. His allergy to patriotism is so extreme that it reminded me occasionally of my