Patriotism Today

This is a TFN Bonus Story — you can adjust your settings here if you want to get just the weekday morning newsletter.

Support: Venmo | BuyMeACoffee | PayPal
TFN stuff: Podcast | Merch | Other TFN
Take action: Your representatives

I get it. How can we feel patriotic today? What could that even mean?

The Fourth of July, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence — is overcast not just by the shadow of our own military and secret police on our streets, but by millions of Americans under the thrall of ideologies antithetical to our highest ideals.

I do a newsletter called The Fucking News. I promise I get it.

Seventy-seven million Americans voted for a brazenly un-American vision. Some chose white Christian nationalism, censorship, institutionalized racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia. Some chose nihilism. Some gloried in the promise of vengeance against those who dared to stand up.

(I swear I’m going somewhere with this, but man, I’m even starting to depress myself.)

The dilemma we face now is how to reconcile celebrating America with the stark evidence of its incipient awfulness. When it’s hardly clear how much further some fellow Americans would go.

And yet, past generations of Americans celebrated America on this day when America was far worse and a majority of Americans were fine with it.

Needing Americans to be awesome is a form of essentialism; the belief that things are inherently something. Humans need not be innately good for us to support or celebrate their countries. We’ve never practiced that with other countries.

Can you imagine reconciling with MAGA over the next decade? Because that’s what we did with Germany and Japan after World War II. Germany and Japan and more recently Iraq — and, who knows, maybe Iran — became trading partners and to varying degrees allies. Surely we can do this with our own fellows?

Yes, there are Americans who hate democracy, who hate diversity, who are Nazis or Nazi-curious, Christian supremacist theocrats, racist, misogynistic, you name it. They have always been with us.

Periodically, this minuscule minority gulls millions of Americans with fear and division. These millions fall into that category of the populace characterized so memorably in Blazing Saddles not as evil incarnate, but as something just as dangerous.

Even some Democratic politicians, after all, have embraced the xenophobia of immigrant-bashing. Generation after generation of Americans succumb to it.

We’re not the first generation to put immigrants in cages. To whatever extent hatred motivates those who build our cages, the foundation for that hatred is fear.

In reality, immigrants are more law-abiding than native-born Americans, a net boon to the economy, not a drain.

I always hesitate to cite these facts, because it seems to predicate welcoming immigrants on the benefits America gains from it. But I also see the contributions of immigrants as proof.

“The New Colossus,” the poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, asks the world to send its dregs to America. Wretched refuse.

Why?

Because her name was “Mother of Exiles.” Because:

From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome

The implicit promise of her explicit invitation is that America and the world’s refuse thrive together. Statistics about immigrant prosperity and lawfulness are more than a selfish argument to let them in, they prove the poem’s contention about humanity generally; that anyone can thrive in the glow of world-wide welcome. And that America makes this happen every day.

We’ve been here before. Our history is a pendulum, in which we swing from acting shitty for shitty reasons to recognizing with horror what we’ve done and striving to do better.

Today is not the first time Americans got conned into fearing the stranger. Or believing that the economy is a switch our officials can flip.

Millions actually thought prices would come down on day one. They believe that immigrants are taking jobs and women. They were told to be afraid and instead of remembering we’re the home of the brave, they … forgot.

Some were stupid enough to buy the lie that “Democrats” are a Satanic tribe taking down America. This was accepted unquestioningly, unthinkingly, by people uninterested in history, unequipped to think critically. Y’know … morons.

You can argue that they’re bad people. I won’t disagree. But the left is supposed to reject “evil” as an explanation for human behavior.

And if only one percent of the population ever experience genuine psychopathy, we have to consider the possibility that some of those Americans opposing America aren’t inherently evil but see themselves as the heroes of their own stories, fighting for good.

It may help to think of America not as revealing itself as evil, but as an occupied country, manipulated by un-American thinking. Invaded by the devils of our worst nature.

Whether you think Russia controls U.S. politicians, it’s fairly well established that external propaganda has helped mind-fuck millions of Americans. Maybe they’re revealing their “true” selves. Maybe they’re id-driven idiots who let their brains be captured.

For generations, Americans have on some level craved the kind of test that World War II posed: A defining moment asking profound sacrifice of millions of us in defense of others and of American ideals.

Well, here we are. It isn’t the sexy, pyrotechnic sacrifice of sending our young off to fight and die. But that doesn’t mean we’re not fighting.

Some of us (guilty!) are keyboard warriors, trying to liberate captured minds through the power of words and ideas, weapons that our declaration of independence understood to be our most powerful.

Some of us are organizing. Some donate time or money. Some fight in court. Some stand up at meetings of city councils and school boards. Some protest. Some touch the reflecting pool lining. Some risk tear gas and arrest. Some run for office.

Point being, we’re showing up. We’re fighting for America. We’re passing the test history has given us. We’re winning.

By every metric you can think of, America is beating the invaders. Their standard-bearers are seeing their support slipping away. Their mental traps are failing as reality is revealed. Their champions can’t rally supporters to their speeches and spectacles. Their only forced conscripts are billionaires held hostage by their wealth.

The inevitable failure of their ideologies and incompetency parades across even their own propaganda platforms.

Their inadequacy is revealed at every step, from inept attempts to practice law to pathetic parties.

The arsenals of democracy remain stocked. The institutions of opposition still stand.

The dynamics of political primaries have incentivized Congress to reject at least some un-American proposals. Courts are striking down un-American policies and practices. Our culture speaks out every day in song and script and satire.

Votes still count and are being counted because states and counties and public officials have refused to lie down because we the people support them.

This is what maximal patriotism looks like when the enemy isn’t invading armies but bad ideas. The hole in our defenses wasn’t an unguarded flank, but memory.

We neglected to guard the body politic against shitty thinking. For decades, people across the political spectrum elevated feelings over facts. Vaccine denialism, let us not forget, arose on the left.

Well-intentioned challenges to authority mistakenly overreached and swept up science and logic and empiricism. These things had been used against the people, who rejected them as the tools of oppressors instead of wielding them in the fight.

Through this vital gap were smuggled terrible ideas. Anti-science. Anti-intellectualism. It was the precise invasion that our founders and dystopian writers foretold as the greatest threat to America. The invasion from within. Flags and crosses.

That we are fighting this prophesied battle should inspire us to new heights of patriotism. Because it’s not merely physical safety we’re called to defend; it’s literally a battle of ideas.

In every other invasion scenario you could imagine, against external invaders, America’s freedom fighters would be suffused with patriotism. They would taste it in every breath.

The despair we may feel — the desperation to read and post and educate and support good candidates and rail against wrongdoing in our name — that’s patriotism. You’re already feeling it.

The trick is to feel it in a way that’s not crushing but elevating, energizing, inspiring. We achieve that, I believe, by acknowledging our own patriotism along with all that we can see around us if we choose to.

If it helps, keep in mind that our moment is what the declaration was created to address. We’re living the fight America was created to fight. Not with armies, but with brains and integrity and discipline and fortitude, with a bravery different and arguably more rare than that which steels soldiers on fields of battle.

This is the generational test some of us craved. What we do right now is how we’ll be remembered.

What an honor. What a privilege.

We’re fighting the same fight that animated the war for independence and the signers 250 years ago today.

We don’t get to fight this fight with cool rebel military actions. But we’re defending what the founders defended with the arsenal they created for us to do so.

We’re fighting like Thomas Paine did, if not with inspiring pamphlets then with posts. Manifesting love for country and humanity. Girded in battle dress consisting of furry costumes that shout unflagging commitment to joy. Armed with faith that the craven autonomy of “freedom” pales in the light of true freedom — collective action to maximize individual potential — the freedom to do more because we’ve made more possible.

We can see all of this if we choose to and if we’re mindful of it. Sure, we all know who I mean when I say, “He,” but I haven’t named him today because I choose to celebrate the unconquered America. My freedoms still live, and they include the right to curate the America I celebrate today:

Nor we do have to think the founders were great men to celebrate today. We’re not celebrating their morality any more than the future will celebrate ours, what with our climate changing and incarcerating. But like the founders, we’re trying to be better.

That mutual desire is what we celebrate. And the survival of our machinery to achieve that desire.

We celebrate the strange notion of America that fighting amongst ourselves — separating powers to ensure perpetual conflict — is the only thing that can make us better.

The achievement of the founders was not perfection but the creation of a system to pursue it. Not unity, but the harnessing of natural divisions, competing constituencies.

Eternal competition — cities vs. states vs. the nation vs. courts vs. Congress vs. the chief executive — is the only machine that can produce improvement, a more perfect union.

This still survives. The pluribus abides.

This is why future generations will annoy the shit out of us old folks with demands for freedoms and justice we never imagined when we were busy tormenting our own elders with our demands for freedoms and justice they never imagined.

This is why it’s so important to see what we fucked up in the past and are fucking up now. Erasing our failings is unpatriotic because it diminishes the progress made since, wipes away the the blood spilled to remedy our failings. Rewriting history robs us of our sacrifices.

True patriotism obliges us to see past American failings that others would blind us to. Loving parents don’t ignore their child’s failings. By the same light, seeing America’s failings today is a necessary part of being patriotic today.

That doesn’t oblige us to wallow in misery. It frees us to choose a patriotism of joy.

TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.