As America’s 250th anniversary approaches – the birth of this nation will be celebrated by millions. But what does it mean to be truly patriotic in the U.S.?

Guests

Dominic Erdozain, visiting scholar at Emory University. Author of “To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America.”

Book Excerpt

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

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I  

DENNIE: Hello, this is Dennie. And yes indeed, I consider myself a patriot.

JACK: I do consider myself an American patriot.

TIM: I’m a patriot because of my long-held belief in the idea of America, the fact that we believe in people’s rights, that we believe in equality, the fact that we are tolerant of one another.

SAVANNAH: As a mixed-race Alaska Native woman, I will not call myself patriotic.

JIM: I would describe myself as a reluctant patriot, a principled patriot, a pained patriot.

LORI: I don’t call myself a patriot. Even though as a middle-aged, middle-class white woman, the U.S. has always been really good to me and my family, I just can’t believe in a country that talks about justice, equality, equal rights, but whose actions say the opposite.

LULU: I’m ashamed of this country, and I’m seriously thinking about moving elsewhere.

DANIEL: I think patriot has almost become a dirty word in a lot of my circles. When I hear patriot, I think of a January 6th rioter.

LARRY: I think the biggest thing that my dad taught me was that he fought in Vietnam for the right to be discerning of our government, the right to critique our government.

TONY: I love my country much the way I love my family and friends. If I see somebody doing something that will harm themselves or others, I speak up.

ERIC: My parents came here after the fall of Saigon. So as a child of refugees, I can honestly say that I owe the United States a debt of gratitude that goes beyond patriotism, in that the United States literally saved my family’s lives.

ZACHARY: I do not consider myself to be patriotic, not for lack of wanting to be proud to be American, but for lack of examples right now of ways that I should be proud of our country.

ERIC: In this current moment, with all the divisions that we’re feeling, I do maintain hope that we can get through this, and it’s through looking back at America and what it has gone through that I’m able to see that and want to fight for that.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: So you just heard from On Point listeners Dennie Galloway, Jack Stark, Tim Hopmann, Savannah Hensel, Jim Mustacchia, Lori Lobenstine, Lulu Cheri, Daniel Mata, Larry Hamberlin, Tony Nguyen, Eric Silva and Zachary Silberman from Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Washington state, Texas, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Oregon, New York, Colorado and North Carolina.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the formation of the United States, we’ve been looking at different ways to think about the idea of America, and firmly embedded into that idea or those ideas is the concept of patriotism.

After all, Revolutionary War militias fighting the British were broadly known as patriots, but the word has also had very complex connotations, not just now, even back then, 250 years ago.

In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, the word patriot was often pejoratively used to describe seditious rebels battling against the monarchy, but those same rebels later co-opted the phrase and proudly made it their own. But that then immediately made the next question rise up. Who was a true patriot?

What did it mean exactly, even back then? Thomas Paine offers us a fascinating view into how fraught those questions were, even in December of 1776, when he famously wrote, quote, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”

So a word that broadly means a person who loves their country, which should be a uniting force, has, since this nation’s origin, also been one that’s just as frequently been used to divide fractious Americans against themselves. And in that, we have been consistent for 250 years. And this is why Dominic Erdozain’s new book is so fascinating, because he writes about that particularly American trait of patriotism in To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America.

And he joins us today from On Point station WABE in Atlanta, Georgia. Dominic, welcome to On Point.

DOMINIC ERDOZAIN: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: What drew you to the idea of wanting to take a deeper look at patriotism as it lives and breathes and battles against itself in America?

ERDOZAIN: There’s some fascinating perspectives in your array of excerpts at the start there which really resonate with me, and that phrase, “a pained patriot,” and then those who see it as a word that’s tainted and associated with January the 6th.

I think since living here, I’ve felt that there were two kinds of constitutions, almost there’s a written Constitution with all its checks and balances, and its concern for equality before the law, et cetera. And then there’s a kind of unwritten constitution of sort of preeminence or entitlement.

And I think of when I was researching my book on guns, I was kind of, I fell in love with the sort of sophistication of people like James Madison talking about human dignity and yet human fallibility, that, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. And then patriotism comes along and says actually, we are the angels.

I felt that there was this higher law that kind of overrode the Constitution, and that tension has always fascinated me.

CHAKRABARTI: You know what? Before we get into the deep history that you unfold in the book, since you mentioned January 6th, that also stood out to me in the stream of voices that we heard from listeners there.

Because the attack on the Capitol of January 6th 2021, was a moment in which I think we absolutely saw the sort of two faces of America because many of the insurrectionists who stormed, flooded, attacked the Capitol attacked law enforcement, brought to a halt a legal proceeding of the United States government, were Americans themselves who proudly said, because of their own belief in their patriotism, that is what forced them to act against the United States government. It is seemingly a paradox, but I actually think, and by the way, we should also mention that more than 1,600 of them were tried in U.S. courts and found guilty of their actions.

But it shows the inherent contradiction in what Americans have always believed patriotism to be.

ERDOZAIN: Yeah, people always expect me as a Brit to be an expert on the royal family, which I’m not. But I feel as though that kind of patriotism is like the divine right of kings.

It’s a personal entitlement, and it cuts, on the one hand, they want a king. They look to their president who they felt had won that election as some sort of king. But also, it’s the personal sense of, ‘I know more than the law.’ I know more than these mechanisms and these experts, and it does lead to violence.

The person that springs to mind here is the economist Thorstein Veblen who says he’s being ironic because he’s an indifferent patriot who will let life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness get in the way of the main business at hand. And he describes patriotism of that era, the First World War era, as a kind of a love that covers a multitude of sins.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. I’m gonna keep that thought in mind as we now go through this history. So in the book actually, you know what? We should lay out what you believe the most appropriate definition of patriotism is or should be, Dominic.

ERDOZAIN: That was the excitement of writing it, generally, you have a clear thesis when you’re sitting down to write a book, and this is one of those occasions where I didn’t know who was gonna be the star of the show really as I sat down to write it. And I felt that because here I am in Atlanta and MLK just becomes your person … you have the foil for all the madness that we’ve been living through in these last 10 years.

I felt that almost exacerbated the problem for me as an immigrant that I didn’t really have a model for living here that wasn’t MLK, that it wasn’t someone who’d influenced him directly. And I found in people like Jane Addams, I found in, or Paul Robeson, and many of the sort of skeptics and radicals I discuss in the book, I found a model for a different kind of patriotism.

But I think, I suppose it’s a patriotism that is comfortable with dissent. I think a patriotism that sees America as unfinished business. I forget the phrase of someone, one of the people quoted at the start, but the idea that hope the faith in the idea can transcend the lived reality of the time.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s go back then to early American history. In the book you talk about, this surprised me, the Puritan influence on the idea of American patriotism.

ERDOZAIN: Yes. I think you get this tension. There’s a lot of discussion now about how the founders would be turning in their graves to see this resurgence of Christian nationalism and this rededicate 250 stuff, talking about providence and special destiny.

But I think that overstates the secularism of the founders in the sense that, yes, they were not orthodox Christians. Many of them were either skeptics or deists, and they didn’t believe in that direct kind of Calvinist theology that inspired the Puritans. But they were political Calvinists in the sense that they all believed in a special destiny for America, and they used that belief to cover over the cracks and the divisions in these 13 colonies. And, of course, the biggest division of all, over slavery.

So they did, they inherited this notion of providence, and with it, the idea, even though most of them were anti-militarists and they didn’t want professional armies, with it the idea of invincibility that we’re too special, too important to fail.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then do you think that notion has led to some of the, I think you’d probably call it abuses of patriotism thereafter in the decades and centuries after it?

ERDOZAIN: Yeah. I think it’s, I keep coming back to this idea of the divine right of kings, and this is something, I don’t wanna fast-forward too much chronologically, but this is something that William Jennings Bryan talks about in his great anti-imperialist presidential campaign of 1900.

Most people know Bryan for his disastrous performance in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, where he’s opposing evolution. But he was actually a profound political thinker who was an anti-imperialist, and he said this doctrine of imperialism, of conquering other countries, is monarchy.

It’s exactly what we fought the revolution to defeat. He calls it the doctrine of thrones, and he sees it as a betrayal of the principle of consent, and he says the Declaration of Independence is inherently internationalist because it says all people are created equal, and he wants to know how that was overridden, and he’s a probably more fervent Christian than most of the imperialists at the time.

But he sees this as a gross distortion of his Christian faith or of his belief system to turn it into a doctrine of conquest.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Dominic, I actually just want to also throughout the hour listen to some of the examples that you look at in American history of the greatest American patriots in your mind, and Jane Addams is one of them.

Tell us about why.

ERDOZAIN: I love Jane Addams because she is part of a chorus of critics of the imperialist sort of turn of 1900. The conquest of the Philippines, which excited so many of her contemporaries, including Mark Twain and the philosopher William James. But I think where all of them tended to look back to this sense of kind of what would Jefferson say, Addams does that, to some extent.

She says we should be proud of our tradition of anti-militarism and proud of our status as a peace nation. But she also wants to look forward. She says, really, this notion of imperialism is built into the idea of exceptionalism, the idea that we’re superior, and we have to lose that conceit.

And she’s perhaps better known as the founder of Hull House in Chicago, and she was proud of the multiplicity of nationalities there, and she said here is our key to peace. Here is absorbing the insights and variety and richness of these different cultures. Someone like Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, is saying, when the immigrants arrive on the docks, on the shores of New York, there their education begins.

And Jane Addams says no. That’s when our education begins. We’ve got to learn from them. So she has this really dynamic kind of pluralist vision of America, and she sees it as the solution for militarism and the antidote to an aggressive kind of nationalism.

CHAKRABARTI: And by the way, for folks who don’t know, she did win, what, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, right?

ERDOZAIN: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: In 1931. … So a remarkable woman. You know what’s interesting? Okay, so this is one thing that comes up over and over again in your book, in that you consider her one of the greatest American patriots in part because of her willingness to say, “Here is what makes America great,” right?

That sort of the cacophony of international influences in the country, and here at the same time is how we are abusing that greatness abroad, worldwide. So essentially, she follows in the long tradition of the loyal critic.

ERDOZAIN: She does, and I think there’s something about the way in which she generously, she respects the past but says it’s time to move on.

She doesn’t want to insult any generals or anyone who fought in the Civil War, but she goes, some of us are starting to think that we might be able to develop a new kind of man, a new kind of masculinity, and perhaps we’ve made as many presidents as we can from those who’ve distinguished themselves in war.

So she has a very gentle but firm critique of contemporary patriotism. And she demasculinizes if that’s a word, Theodore Roosevelt calls her the leading voice of the shrieking sisterhood. But she in a sense embraces that and says, “Actually, this is why more people need to, women need to vote.”

War itself is the biggest indictment of a kind of a masculine electorate.

CHAKRABARTI: Shrieking sisterhood. Another thing that we’re seeing is that pejorative terms often become, do get co-opted by people and turned around and used to their advantage. Okay. So let’s move backwards actually a little bit to the Civil War.

Because we can see the Civil War as perhaps the strongest example after the Revolutionary War of how the concept of patriotism is literally played against itself depending on what side of the Civil War you were on. Like both sides essentially, North and South, claimed a form of patriotism in the rending of the country.

And trying to preserve the country from that rending.

ERDOZAIN: Yes. I think my Civil War chapter’s the one that people will find most startling and I think perhaps most challenging. Because I think one of the things I’m suggesting there is that the Civil War created a Southern patriotism that didn’t actually exist before.

The initial secession was seven states, and most people in Virginia, in fact, had just voted not to secede before the fighting started at Fort Sumter in April 1861. So it kind of created a division that was greater than that existed before, and this is something that Robert Penn Warren talks about, that it actually left the South more Southern than before.

And the North, I take his line that really it didn’t solve very many problems. It developed a martial and aggressive form of patriotism that was triumphant in the North in a military sense, but didn’t actually heal the wounds ultimately, and I think that’s the point. And this is something that Jane Addams is saying, is that it militarizes patriotism in a way that would have actually horrified the founders.

For all their faults and all their immersion in slavery, they would not have prosecuted the Civil War with the vigor and the ruthlessness with which Abraham Lincoln did. And what you get at the end of the Civil War is a much more militarized sense of what it means to be an American.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you talk a little bit more, though, about what you mean specifically by a form of Southern patriotism?

ERDOZAIN: I talk about the time when General Butler executes someone for desecrating a U.S. flag in New Orleans and what is events like that actually create a unity that didn’t quite exist, that there wasn’t much of a kind of Confederate nationality until these atrocities started to happen. And the individual wars and some of the abuses that followed when Lincoln moved towards what some scholars refer to as total war.

That created a solidarity. You got a woman in South Carolina saying, “They will never conquer us, they’ll never subdue us, even if they conquer us,” which is almost a perfect paraphrase of something that Thomas Hobbes says in Leviathan. Saying the problem is, with war is that he that is slain is overcome but not conquered, for he is still your enemy.

And that was the idea that Lincoln didn’t really grasp when he pursued this total war. Thinking that it could create unity, and of course, it didn’t.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so unity as an outgrowth of a kind of new Southern patriotism. Because I was wondering if we could also see it from the point, from the angle of was the Confederacy, did they champion what they believed to be actually the true American patriotism insofar as preserving the idea of America that was actually enshrined both in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the overt, excuse me, with the preservation of slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution at that time.

Because I think the Southerners would be able to argue, in the Civil War, that is the America of our founding, and we are patriots for preserving that.

ERDOZAIN: Some of them did. But really the better guide there is Alexander Stephens, his famous Cornerstone Speech, and that the cornerstone of the new nation, the new Confederacy, was going to be what he saw as the great truth of inequality, that the races were not created equal, and he saw the Constitution as a great fallacy, and he, following people like John C. Calhoun and many Southern intellectuals like George Fitzhugh, they openly deride the Declaration of Independence.

They openly mock the idea of the pompous inanities and the kind of, the plagiarism of Thomas Jefferson, that they were firmly against the notion of equality. So they saw themselves as patriots.

They saw themselves more as correctors and revisers of that mistaken notion of equality.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay. Interesting. There’s so much in your book that part of me is a little sad to have to move quickly through U.S. history, but let’s do it anyway. So let’s move into the ’50s and ’60s, right? So here we have the Cold War and McCarthyism.

And you had mentioned Paul Robeson earlier. And so let’s talk about him a little bit. But before we do that on June 12th of 1956, Paul Robeson, who, singer, actor, activist athlete, he was dragged before the House Un-American Activities community to testify about his time in Russia.

Now, we actually have a little bit of tape of a reenactment of that hearing obviously, because we don’t have a recording of the original hearing. But James Earl Jones voices Paul Robeson’s words.

PAUL ROBESON: In Russia, I thought for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi. No color prejudice like in Washington.

It was the first time I felt like a human being, where I did not feel the pressure of color as I feel it in this committee today.

Why do you not stay in Russia?

ROBESON: Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I’m going to stay here and have a part of it just like you, and no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?

You’re here because you’re promoting the communist cause.

ROBESON: I am here because I’m opposing the neo-fascist cause, which I see arising in these committees.

CHAKRABARTI: Fantastic. Dominic, talk about Robeson.

ERDOZAIN: Thank you. He is one of my favorite characters in the book, and he is so brave. He is such a buoyant internationalist.

He loves and embraces the cultures and the music of other countries. He learns languages purely so that he can sing in the indigenous language of different countries. And he is absolutely mystified that people accuse him of being unpatriotic, and he’s walking along in Harlem, and a fan approaches him and chats him, almost whispers in his ear, says, “So Paul, were you born in Russia?”

He says, “No, I wasn’t. I was born here. I’m American.” And he explains that this is the curse of nationalism and the McCarthyism and that this culture of aggression to persuade people that to seek friendship with other countries, to seek the admission of China to the UN, to seek racial justice and support colonial, anti-colonial movements is somehow to be un-American.

He goes, “These are the essence- of being American,” and he will never back down on his American identity. And he’s open and say, “Look, actually, you’re the betrayers.” He says, “You’re the non-patriots. You’re the un-Americans.” And he does call them the neo-fascists. So he is a fervent example of the way in which this kind of ultra-nationalism has trampled on the Constitution, and he defends himself vigorously in that exchange.

CHAKRABARTI: The line, “I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you,” just rings so powerfully in my ear.

ERDOZAIN: And I feel that the number of people I know who are saying, with a second Trump election, “I’m gonna leave. I’m going to Canada,” they never do. But I think that I feel really empowered and inspired when I hear Robeson saying that because if we think we’ve had it hard, look what happened to him and he didn’t give up on the concept.

CHAKRABARTI: Absolutely. Okay, so let’s move forward a little bit. You had mentioned earlier that because you’re in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looms very powerfully over your scholarship. So let’s hear a little bit of Dr. King. This is April 4th, 1967, when he was at Riverside Church in New York talking about the Vietnam War, a pivotal moment for King because it was the first time he spoke out against U.S. militarism and overtly, vocally opposed the Vietnam War.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.: I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

CHAKRABARTI: There are probably a million reasons to talk about Dr. King as being one of the great American patriots, but what are your reasons for that?

ERDOZAIN: I think he is, the moral passion is one thing, but the sophistication with which he disentangles what it means to be American from the sort of smug civil religion that says we’re already there.

With King, patriotism is a dynamic thing. It has to break down inherited structures. It has to be critical. He says in one of his late essays is our hope is in dissent. He also says in that same essay, which is published in Playboy of all places, he says that those, America’s not changing because people think it doesn’t need to change, and he says this is the illusion of the damned.

He really inverts the sort of theocratic idea of American exceptional, the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that sort of God blesses the way things are. And he does that in order to give life or give, to reenergize the humanistic side, the idea of human dignity and human value.

And he sharply distinguishes loving country from nationalism. And the great thing, one of the greatest things about that speech in New York is the way he talks about those we are called to think of as enemies, those we are told to believe as our enemies. He goes, “Nothing can make them any less our brothers.”

So his patriotism is internationalist. He talks about the one world house. We’re all really just co-residents of the world house at the end of the day. And yeah, he’s an inspiration.

CHAKRABARTI: So again, I think this is a thing that comes up over and over again, is that Americans have always had, and this may be a form of our individual exceptionalism, we’ve had our own personal definitions of patriotism that are often completely in opposition to one another, right?

There’s the patriotism of if you’re truly loyal to this country, and if you truly love this country, you will not criticize it, right? But then there’s also the patriotism of the likes of Dr. King and others in your book that say, No. True American patriotism demands speaking truth to power.

Look at the Declaration of Independence. It is maybe the most powerful document of the 18th century that is literally speaking truth to power. And if sometimes speaking truth to power happens to be, or the power happens to be the government of the United States itself, then I am behaving in the purest and most authentic form of patriotism baked into the American identity.

ERDOZAIN: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the most important voices in the book is Randolph Bourne who’s a radical journalist in the First World War, and he is adamant that we think of the country, patriotism should be based on who we are. It’s the people and the traditions. It’s not the state.

The state is actually the servant of the people. And what happens in war is that the state stages a kind of coup against the people. So we’re told that we have to serve the state as our willing sacrifice, but then we’re punished brutally sometimes if we refuse to obey. And he said, “We’ve got to distinguish that thing, the country and the people, which should be the focus of patriotism, from the state and the government, which are servants of the people.”

CHAKRABARTI: I wane play one more clip here. We’re headed towards a break in just a minute or so, but it’ll set us up nicely for a conversation that I want to have in the last portion of the show. So this is April 3rd, 1964, and we’re about to hear Malcolm X, and he gave a famous speech called The Ballot or the Bullet.

This was at the Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. And again, this is 1964, and in the speech, Malcolm X questions the very idea of America.

MALCOLM X: When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who have, who has enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism.

We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare.

We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy. We’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy.

CHAKRABARTI: Dominic, is this patriotism too?

ERDOZAIN: I don’t think Malcolm X would call himself a patriot. I think he’s, if I can use the word prophetic voice, I think he is one of the most coruscating and brilliant and fiercely historical thinkers who diagnoses the whole problem.

He says, it’s not Mississippi, it’s America. He’ll say that there’s no Mason-Dixon line. It’s anything south of Canada. He indicts the whole phenomenon, and it says that America is responsible for the oppression of African Americans. And I think that is a great service to the nation, but he’s certainly himself not a patriot.

And like King, but more aggressively, he unpicks that civil religion. He talks about, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.” And I think that’s a service to the country.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Dominic, now we played Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. back-to-back for a specific reason, and it has to actually do with a key word in the title of your book, and that is love.

Now, I don’t know whether Malcolm X loved America or not. I’m gonna lean towards the idea that he did not. But Dr. King’s words over the course of his career make me think that there was a love if not America as it was in the ’50s and ’60s, but rather the idea of America as it could or should be.

So there was a love there, and he kept, Dr. King kept talking about we seek equality and justice in order to fulfill the ideals that were actually put in the Declaration of Independence. And so there’s a belief in the potential of America, which I don’t necessarily think that Malcolm X shared.

So I wonder if, again, you put it in the title of your book, if love, which is a very complicated emotion, but love is actually at the center of these differing versions of patriotism.

ERDOZAIN: Yes. I think, when I talk about Frederick Douglass shifting from this view that the Constitution is just a radically slaveholding document to seeing some potential within it, I describe his change of approach with a quote from Dostoevsky where he says, “Judge a man for what he aspires to be, not from what he is.”

And there is this sense of judging America already, embracing America for what it aspires to be in King. And, you look to his initial speech at Holt Street Baptist Church in December 1955, he’s very patriotic at that point. He’s saying, “Look, we can do this because we live in a land, a free country.

We’re not gonna be locked in a dungeon. We’re not gonna be arrested for speaking our minds.” He has this great hope, and in the letter from Birmingham Jail, he’s the same. I think at some point we’ll see that those who are sitting down in counters and protesting segregation were standing up for what’s best in the American dream.

But then the bombing of the church in Alabama, the murder of Medgar Evers really darkens his spirit a bit. It’s almost as if he then realizes the depth of the challenge, and he adopts a much more caustic approach. He still speaks through tears of love, as he puts it. He still speaks as someone who loves his country, but he’s far less hopeful.

And the last sermon he was going to deliver before he was assassinated was that he phoned in Ebenezer Baptist Church to say the title, and it was Why America May Go to Hell. That’s extreme, but he’s not saying it’s going to, but he’d developed a far more he converges with Malcolm X, I think, towards the end of his life in just the scale of the challenge he was facing, both in terms of militarism and the and poverty, as well as the race question that had dominated his earlier career.

CHAKRABARTI: This is why I’m so fixated on the idea of to love a country in terms of thinking about patriotism because, again, with all this history of these giant loyal critics, the giants in our history, if you didn’t love your country, why would you bother fighting for it or fighting for its improvement?

ERDOZAIN: Yes, and I think there’s a great quote from George Kennan, who was the diplomat who was responsible for the Long Telegram from Moscow, which really he felt hurt, he later regretted it because he felt that it started the Cold War and this really bleak image of the Soviets as just irrepressible warmongers, and he regretted that, and he moved away from nationalism.

He says, To love a country and to know its faults and to see it as this kind of fallen but still beautiful thing is one thing, and that’s patriotism, but romantic nationalism and the notion of superiority, which after all was the view that the Cold War really bred and diffused, that is a different thing, and I think to love something is really to embrace its imperfections.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. The reason why I’m quite focused on this, Dominic, is because it brings me to today essentially. And that it’s pretty, I think it’s pretty easy to argue that especially since the era of Reaganism and then to today, so in the past 40 years, that politically the right in America, and especially the far right, have laid claim, completely laid claim to the concept of patriotism, that their definition of patriotism is the one true definition, and anyone who disagrees is un-American.

We’ve been hearing that language with extreme frequency for the past decade.

That’s an easy argument to make, that they have done that. But I would also like to press the left in this country for allowing the right to win that argument by … for years now, there’s very common language heard on social media, in the regular media, et cetera, of people saying, “I do not love this country. I think American history is full of nothing but darkness, bleakness, and despair. I am not going to say that I am proud to be an American.”

So in that sense, they have handed the concept of patriotism to the far right so that it can be metastasized into something that actually isn’t, what I would argue, the original and purest form of patriotism, which is, as you’ve been talking about, being the loyal critic.

ERDOZAIN: I couldn’t agree more.

The person who really did it for me was Gandhi. There’s this great debate between Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, who’s the Nobel Prize-winning poet who hates nationalism. He thinks nationalism is the curse of the modern age, and it’s the engine of war, and he’s telling Gandhi not to be nationalistic with all these non-cooperation protests, and burning English cloth, and refusing to speak English and really critiquing English culture.

And Gandhi says no, we need to be able to stand on our own two feet. We need to be able to defend ourselves on a cultural level as well as a political level. And there’s nothing wrong with a pride that is linked to what’s good in our country. It doesn’t have to be weaponized as aggression.

He says, “I want the cultures of all the world to blow through my house, but I don’t want to be blown off my feet by any.” And that made me think about what you’re saying there that with the Trump era, frankly, one is inclined to give up on America and give up on the notion of patriotism.

And what I found when I was looking at the Paul Robesons and the Jane Addams is a resource, really a personal resource to be able to say, ‘No, I can love this country by loving some of these people at the margins.’

And also I think that for me, when I see the MAGA movement, and I see those January the 6th-ers, I just think of some of the people in the book like Abraham Bishop, who’s just saying, Look, this notion of nationalism is really where you lose your identity.

You feel proud, but actually you’re just swallowing your personal identity into somebody else’s agenda. And I think that if we’re to develop a more egalitarian and more gentle patriotism, it would be one that actually affirms individuals and doesn’t just sweep us into a herd.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, completely. And just don’t, do not be satisfied with one definition of patriotism. Do not relinquish that to one extreme of the political spectrum. And actually, this is why Dominic, I’m thinking back to the voices from On Point listeners that we heard at the top of the show, and one of them that particularly stood out to me was Tony, who talked about the fact that I believe his family is from Vietnam.

And that were it not for the United States he would not exist, right? And his family would be dead. You can make the argument of course, that the United States was a major part of the catastrophe in Vietnam. Let’s not ignore that, again, in our desire to be loyal critics here. But I have found in, just to be completely transparent with you and listeners, like I am the child of immigrants, and in my experience, immigrants to this country are the most fervent patriots.

Because their passion for the possibility of this country is right there on the surface. It’s why they’re here, and I heard that in Tony’s voice, and I wonder what you think about that, that oftentimes the people who have the greatest belief in the positive possibility of America are the ones who weren’t necessarily born on this soil.

ERDOZAIN: Yes. It’s an odd one for me to bring up here, Rudyard Kipling saying, “What know they of England who only England know?” So he, if you grow up in your country, you don’t actually know that much about it, but you travel to another country and things and they strike you, and you’re grateful for them.

Because, even with all the challenges of living here in the last 10 years, America has given me things that I didn’t have back home and certainly for my family. And I think there is that freshness. I’m thinking of someone like Louis Brandeis, who was a fervent patriot and a descendant of European Jews.

And I think that to criticize America sometimes implies that everywhere else in the world is okay. And I think to travel is to be grateful for what we have, and to be a patriot that is critical but also affectionate for a land that has accepted you.

CHAKRABARTI: Do you feel that way as a naturalized American?

ERDOZAIN: I feel this book has helped me. And it hasn’t been, it’s been a rocky ride for me personally, and writing a book on guns was probably not the best way to assimilate myself. But yeah, I do. I feel grateful. I don’t know, the word. I think some of the voices at the start, words get associations.

I think of the word patriot, I think of perhaps unhealthy things like Patriot missiles or whatever. I wouldn’t call myself a patriot, but I do feel myself as an American.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. And you know what’s interesting … can I just ask you quickly is there also a, what does patriotism mean, say, in the UK?

ERDOZAIN: I think we’re just such a chastened country. Of course, there is Brexit, and we’ve now got the rise of nationalism and reform, which is this sort of a neo-imperialism and people saying we once commanded this empire. We should be able to negotiate some trade deals. And it’s good luck with that.

There is a sort of delusional quality on the right, but I think generally we’re a little bit kind of tail between our legs and World Cup comes round and there’s this ritual of building up the team, but knowing we’re not going to get anywhere. I think that sort of sums up where we feel.

And I think, so arriving in America, I did my PhD on Victorian Britain. I feel like I’ve gone back to Victorian Britain, where it’s absolutely axiomatic that for most of the culture that you live in the greatest country in the world. And it’s something that we now feel a bit embarrassed about, and maybe we shouldn’t feel quite so ashamed as we do.

But certainly among academics, you’re not gonna find too many British academics who call themselves patriots.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. Let’s actually listen to two more voices that evince very different views of what genuine patriotism is. So this is, first one is from February 5th, 2018. A few days after President Trump gave his State of the Union address that year, he accused Democrats of being, quote, “un-American” for not applauding during his speech.

DONALD TRUMP: You’re up there. You’ve got half the room going totally crazy, wild. They loved everything. They want to do something great for our country. And you have the other side, even on positive news, really positive news like that, they were like, death. And un-American. Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. Yeah, I guess why not?

Can we call that treason? Why not? They certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much. But you look at that, and it’s really very sad.

CHAKRABARTI: President Trump on February 5th, 2018. Just three years before that, March 7th, 2015, President Barack Obama spoke in Selma, Alabama. It was the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches.

And in his remarks, Obama stressed that America is a constant work in progress.

BARACK OBAMA: What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

CHAKRABARTI: That was President Barack Obama on March 7th, 2015.

ERDOZAIN: Wow. You certainly got the polarities there. I think when I hear Trump speaking like that, I just think of George Orwell talking about transferred nationalism. This is one of the more toxic forms of nationalism where this national pride is funneled into some ideology or a party that presumes to speak for the nation.

And part of it is that the nationalist, doesn’t, cannot hear criticism. It’s not just that they’re unconcerned by the atrocities committed by their side. They don’t even see them, and that disaffirming evidence just bounces off their consciousness, that there is this sort of narrowness.

And I think someone like Peter Viereck, the conservative writer, lamenting the way red-baiting transferred into liberal-baiting without pausing for breath. It’s the same kind of anti-communism that gets applied to your political opponents at home, and the liberal or the Democrat is an un-American.

So that’s the toxic side of it. I love that speech by Obama, and of course, he was criticized for that. But yeah, he pulls out John Lewis, another great Atlanta shout-out, as the supreme patriot and someone who doesn’t base his patriotism on the past. There isn’t some sort of, he’s not on his knees worshiping the founders. He’s actually being hit round the head, making the nation that has oppressed him and marginalized him, but he’s remaking it. And that, I think is probably the highest form of patriotism.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. In your book, you write that patriotism, when expressed as unconditional love, I should have mentioned this earlier that love of country, right or wrong, you say that’s a love that kills.

There are healthier forms of love of country, as we’ve talked about today, and I’m just guessing, in our last minute or so, as we’re just, we’re now, what, three-ish weeks from the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and many listeners, many people, many Americans, just thinking back to how we started this show, are really taking stock of this country right now, and what they see around them and whether or not it is worthy of their love.

I’m just wondering, what advice you might have for them about marking this moment in a way that is the healthy patriot’s way.

ERDOZAIN: I think for me it’s about getting back to that idea of Randolph Bourne, that the country is the people and that we’re not defined. I happen to play tennis with people from across the political spectrum, and we try and avoid too many conversations that get us into deep water.

But I think that it’s embracing the country and not the ideology of a party and not, for me it’s not about the flag, it’s about the traditions and the culture and the openness and the energy. So that’s on a personal level. I think looking more historically, I just think there are so many great examples, and I finish my book with JFK speaking at the American University in June 1963.

There he is in the billowing gown of a professor just saying, “Look, the Russians could be our friends. And we’re not perfect. We’re looking to solve the problems in our own country and we can be friends.” He says, he talks about making the world safe for diversity rather than imposing our own view of the world.

And to just to hear that speech is a reminder of a tradition that exists and that can be reignited, I hope. And I would say that, like if you said patriotism is not love of government, but love of country and people, I would say the people of this country are worthy of all of our love.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.