America, the world’s oldest, continuous, modern democracy, will soon celebrate its 250th birthday—mired in conflict and piloted by a belligerent and mercurial nationalist. James Madison designed a system in which power would be balanced by power, like a delicately poised planetarium, but in a Donald Trump presidency, these powers have collapsed. One man’s whim is another nation’s tariff—or another nation’s war.

One response to the chaos of the Trump era has been to fight nationalism with patriotism, and recover “the soul of America” from what is held to be a temporary aberration. Leading historians have advocated this approach, and this was the substance of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. 

But as well-intentioned and alluring as this narrative that patriotism will heal America may be, it is a mistake. Unless patriotism can be conceived as something very different from the orthodox narrative of American exceptionalism, our enduring maladies of racism and militarism will persist. To heal America, we must reimagine what it means to be patriotic.

The limits of, and issues with, patriotism

Contrary to a widespread belief, patriotism tends to inhibit bold solutions to these problems by convincing Americans that they already live in the greatest and freest land in the world. It is patriotism that whispers the idea that Trump is an anomaly and that a healthy turnout in the next election will restore order. It was patriotism, packaged as national security, that signed away constitutional safeguards against executive overreach after 9/11. And when moderates told Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to slow down and stay in his lane in the 1960s, caution was invariably framed as patriotism. This notion that Americans are fundamentally good—the best and healthiest of nations—King once said, “is the illusion of the damned.”

The irony, he wrote in Playboy, was that those who “have given up on America are doing more to improve it than are its professional patriots.”

The patriotism-to-cure-nationalism idea can be traced back to a classic essay by George Orwell, in which the writer characterized nationalism as a disease that grows on the ruins of religious faith and kinder, humbler forms of patriotism. According to Orwell,........

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