To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.

This month, America staggered through an underwhelming, contentious semiquincentennial fraught with existential questions. The country could not even agree on how to throw its own birthday party: A bipartisan commission established by Congress a decade in advance found itself competing with a White House task force running a rival celebration, each telling a different story about what, precisely, was being commemorated. In a sign of the times, one of these celebrations was marred by prominently displayed Confederate flags. The fireworks may be over, but the dispute they illuminated is not.

The exact meaning of the word “country” is a constant question in American political life today: Can you claim to love your country, but hate the federal government (or the “deep state”)? What is the essence of a country — its laws, government, land, populace, culture or some combination? Philosophers debate the definition of a nation, often portraying it as an ongoing project or a “spiritual” or “historical” community. But the more important observation is that not everyone is equally invested in this communal project, and those who are deeply invested are often pulling in opposite directions. In fact, the truest characterization might be that no two people have the same relationship to their country.

This is in part because it is impossible to observe the state from a rational distance: Citizens can vote for and against their government, are taxed, protected and policed by it, and can be conscripted, jailed and even killed by it. It is perhaps the most consequential and continuous involuntary relationship in the world. Like any relationship, it can be healthy or dysfunctional — and there is a growing body of evidence on the side of dysfunction, often revolving around the misalignment between a person’s ethics and a country’s actions.

Confronted with a historical record that cannot always be squared with the country’s stated ideals, Americans tend to default to avoidance or despair. The problem with avoidance is that the wrongs are too profound and too numerous to be minimized, erased or explained away; the problem with despair is that an endless excavation of guilt is unproductive and, at times, makes things worse. There is a third possible response: doubling down on one’s investment in the civic life of a country with the intention of steering the ship in a moral and just direction for the future.

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

— Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, 1852.

It is self-evident that, while all people may be created equal, America has not treated them equally. From the Three-Fifths Compromise to the Trail of Tears to the Marshall Islands nuclear tests, there is plenty to be ashamed of. But shame is both too passive and too unbearable at scale, causing people to retreat from either the truth of the atrocities or the country that perpetrated them. It can even push people into a kind of twisted revenge against the original injured party for being the perceived source of these bad feelings.

In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff coined the term “safetyism” — the cultural instinct to shield people from discomfort rather than build their capacity to tolerate it. These cognitive habits have migrated into political life. Binary thinking is continually reinforced by America’s two-party system, which requires voters to expend extra effort to consider more than two sides of any issue. At the end of the day, a citizenry that has spent a decade being socially and algorithmically trained into black-and-white thinking will be willing to pass a similarly binary and absolute judgment on floundering democracies, and be more willing to declare one a lost cause.

In interpersonal relationships, sometimes the right path is the exit — some relationships are toxic, and there is no virtue in staying or continuing to try. But Reddit’s ubiquitous prescription, “just leave,” is tougher to apply to the person-state relationship. There is nowhere you can go to not be governed, and while some do renounce one citizenship and take up another, that is just trading between two social contracts, each of which comes with its own catalog of flaws.

My country, right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right.

— Senator Carl Schurz, in a speech on the Senate floor, 1872. 

Democratic disengagement is not the inevitable outcome of a national moral failure, no matter how complete. Germany confronted a near-absolute chasm between value and action, but did not collapse into collective helplessness; it has built, slowly and imperfectly, a functioning democracy with a public practice of responsibility. When faced with such a failure, society needs a process for metabolizing it. Germany built one — through changes to the law, school curricula, visible public memorials, yearly rituals — which is still ongoing. A truism is that we don’t rise to the level of our goals; we sink to the level of our systems, and Germany built systems.

Germans distinguish between the concepts of shame and Verantwortung (the willingness to answer for something), perhaps best translated as accountability. Their example proves that an accountable population which is willing to pull together in the same direction can build something, regardless of a shared dark past. In contrast, America currently demonstrates a propensity to relitigate its moral lapses rather than process them, leaving everyone so engaged in the debate over what happened and how bad it really was that there is no opportunity to learn from it and grow beyond it. 

The most fervent participants in this debate demonstrate masochistic epistemology — a framework in which suffering, discomfort or emotional pain is treated as an obligatory component of authentic truth. 

Under this framework, there is no incentive to look for historical high points among the historical lows; there is only an incentive to dig deeper, and deeper still, at the bottom of the chasms, searching for an even worse truth. One runs the risk of forgetting to tend to the survivors, and the civic work of building a society in which they can flourish — unfortunately, the skills of digging at wounds are not transferable to the consensus-building of politically viable policy work in democracies.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955.

While still young in “country years,” America is old enough to expect a settled sense of identity, yet it conspicuously lacks one. There is no unified American ethnicity, culture or language, so American identity hinges primarily on creed: a set of propositions that a country can fall short of. This makes the nation’s ideology a single point of failure: It carries weight that would otherwise be distributed across a multitude of factors that bind a people together. The loftier the ideal — say, full equality among citizens within the political system — the easier it is to fall short of it.

Each individual must grapple with how to respond to the bad behavior of others — what to do when lines are crossed. One of the most accessible and obvious responses is criticism. However, like anything, this can be taken to extremes, and anything in extraordinary quantities is a poison. When the nation’s creed is a linchpin, there are real consequences to swinging at it blithely.

Another problem with endless, reflexive criticism is that our brains are wired to entrench patterns, and a state of perpetual negativity can lead to defeatism and withdrawal. Disengagement is already a significant problem for the American political system: In the last five decades, the high point of voter turnout was 62.8% of the voting-aged population. Political apathy is the term for the state of non-participation in one’s democracy on the belief that the ship cannot be righted by any action on your part, and it is therefore futile to try. Beliefs about democracy correlate with democratic participation, and our beliefs are formed in part by how we engage with our world.

Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.

— Elie Wiesel, in a speech at the White House, 1999.

A person must be both invested in the outcome and believe they can affect it to reliably continue participating in a democracy. But abstention from the flawed workings of a democracy is still a position within it. Withdrawal buys nothing. Declining to participate does not confer moral cleanliness or absolve anyone of the moral burdens of the outcome.

Interestingly, this apathy is rarely as organic as it seems. For a hostile state engaging in information operations, democratic passivity is a cheaper goal than active support for authoritarianism — it is much easier to convince someone that their system is hopelessly broken than to convince them that an alternative is truly better. Adversaries like Russia play up the most extreme elements of both sides, polarizing the conversation. By drowning out nuance and wearing down the sense of agency that underpins civic life in a democracy, they create a positive reinforcement loop, compounding the brokenness of the system and the apathy of the population. 

But history shows that it is possible to develop collective agency and the popular will to fight for democracy in even the most hostile environments. In fact, passion for democracy is more palpable in some Eastern European countries whose democracies are far younger and more fragile than America’s. In Ukraine, more than 100,000 have already died fighting for their democracy, despite having suffered many years of Soviet anti-democratic repression.

I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers…

— David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water,” 2009

A nation, as the kids might say, is “cooked” (finished) when loving it is viewed as the identity of last resort — the low rung on the social totem pole, the final stop on a train running in the wrong direction. In his famous essay “This Is Water,” writer David Foster Wallace argued that the most important kind of freedom is the ability to choose how you think about and interpret everyday life. His unguarded thoughts are revealing in ways he may not have intended.

In plenty of circles, patriotism has become nearly synonymous with moral turpitude. Many ask whether patriotism can — or should — be redeemed. Why be proud of a country when it has done so much wrong?

Both the left and the right have conditional views on the issue of pride, hinging upon what someone is proud of. It is important to note that today, the source of German pride is bike paths, beer and recycling systems, not “German history” or “German heritage.” The urge to minimize, erase or deny historical wrongs is keeping America locked in an emotionally stunted place; we all know what a Confederate flag symbolizes, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. The country’s inability to get on the same page about this is just one of many battles over historical pride that are sapping energy from the process of building a future that makes us all proud.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.