For almost every year of my life, I’ve spent July 4 at what my father calls our ancestral home: a few acres of old farmland bordering a small lake in Wisconsin. In one of our community traditions, neighbors gather on a lawn alongside the lake to listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Veterans wear their uniforms and everyone else dresses in red, white, and blue, down to the earrings. We enjoy a parade, lawn games, grilled bratwurst, and fireworks over the lake after sunset.
This annual pilgrimage brings me face to face with a question that may seem harder to answer in these turbulent times: What does it mean to love your country?
When your country’s leaders, courts, and residents take actions that you agree with, love comes easily. But when the military is deployed in the streets, state legislatures restrict our health care and parental rights, our national parks and natural resources lose funding, and families are divided over politics, that love can feel more challenging. For some, the distress goes deeper than current events; they struggle with loving the United States because of the country’s history of slavery, genocide, displacement of Native Americans, and oppression.
In another tradition this coming weekend, one of our neighbors will play the National Anthem on the trumpet while everyone sings along. Thinking about the line: “The land of the free and the home of the brave,” I recall that three of my friends have already or are preparing to move their families to Europe because of recent restrictions on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) and reproductive rights here. They are looking for that freedom outside America.
Conflicted feelings can be consistent with loving your country—indeed, they can be a sign of deep love, according to Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at New York University. “When my country does noble things, I feel pride, and when my country does ignoble things, I feel shame,” says Appiah. Because we identify as Americans, we feel that our country’s accomplishments reflect on us—and when the country falls short of our ideals, we experience that dishonor personally.
Indeed, national pride stands at a record low, according to polling that Gallup released on Monday. Only 58% surveyed say they are extremely or very proud to be Americans, a measure that’s been trending downward since 2015. As recently as 2004, as many as 91% felt extremely or very proud to be American. We’re not alone in losing the love: Only 41% of young Britons are proud to be British, a steep decline from about 80% in 2004, according to a poll by YouGov. On average, Americans feel less free than other developed countries, according to a different Gallup poll.
As we look to overcome division and work together across differences, we can draw on core principles of social psychology and political history to point the way forward. By understanding how others’ different upbringings, experiences, and current environments shape their views, we can start to envision and create a future where we work together to build a safe and prosperous land where everyone is truly free—and love flows for our country.
Defining love of country
How do we first develop a sense of national identity?
All over the world, modern nations have displaced—and often destroyed—Indigenous people who occupied the land before monarchs, constitutions, governments, or elections. The United States began as 13 separate colonies inhabited by people who considered themselves British. The borders and territory of some countries have shifted multiple times in the 20th century. We don’t love our country based on lines on a map. We love our shared ideals and values, even if we feel they’re not perfectly realized yet.
“It is a country bound together by the shared experience of trying to make a set of ideas real, ideas like liberty, justice, equality,” says Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University, a nonprofit that trains and facilitates people to engage in civic life.
We experience a national identity in a way similar to how we identify by, for example, gender and race, because our brains are hardwired to sort other people into groups—often, friends and foes. This us-versus-them instinct can be seen in experiments like the series of studies by psychologist Rebecca S. Bigler and her colleagues that divided preschool students into groups by the color of their assigned T-shirts. After only four weeks, children displayed bias in favor of their own T-shirt group. By defining ourselves as Americans and expressing love for our country, we necessarily create an ingroup, a shared social identity.
This can be a good thing. Shared love for a country builds ties among its residents and makes them more likely to sacrifice for the country, engage in civic life, and help fellow Americans. “If you think about the function of patriotism, here we are, 350 million of us. We’re doing this thing together. We’re the co-managers of the republic,” Appiah says. “You can’t do that unless you have some sense of collective identity.”
Research across 26 countries by the Global Identity Leadership Development Project found, in a sample of nearly 7,000 people, those who perceived their leaders as creating a shared sense of “we” behaved more positively toward each other and the collective. “If we are members of the same country, I’m more likely to trust you,” says Lucas Monzani, the Troost Professor of Leadership at Ivey Business School, Western University, in London, Canada, and a coauthor of the study. “I’m more willing to help you or to help my nation.”
Defining that shared national identity requires us to ask who belongs in the country—who is part of the ingroup. Are we counting anyone who lives in America, or only those who are citizens? What about non-citizens who contribute to the Social Security fund and pay taxes or are on a path to citizenship? Or those who don’t speak English? A global survey of who belongs in a country found that more people felt speaking the local language was key to national identity, as compared with being born there, following local customs, or sharing the dominant religion.
The founding fathers limited full citizenship, including voting rights, to white male landowners. As the United States government sought to expand and claim more territory, it defined citizenship more broadly to support this aim, and eventually expanded rights to women, people of color, and more groups who previously had been excluded, explains Pennsylvania State University professor Mary E. Stuckey in Defining Americans. But President Donald J. Trump is “reminiscent of some of our early presidents,” writes Stuckey, “Trump’s treatment of African Americans, of immigrants, and of women all harken back to a harsher kind of disciplinary project of citizenship.”
Indeed, history shows that humans’ ingroup instinct can lead to dark places. Leaders can harness love for country in service of evil, as in Germany under the Third Reich, or mass murders including the Armenian genocide, Russian revolution, and cultural revolution in China, Appiah notes. While patriotism expresses and defines a shared set of positive values and trust in each other, nationalism defines the people who belong by cultivating superiority and even hatred of others.
“Both nationalism and patriotism refer to a sense of national identity, but nationalism does so by signaling the difference with other groups and saying we are better than them,” Monzani says.
How to love your country well
Love between two people can comprise more than a transient feeling—it involves a commitment to keep the relationship strong and work for the other’s well-being. The same holds true for love of country. When people say, “My country, right or wrong,” that shouldn’t mean glossing over the negative, suggest the researchers and thinkers I interviewed.
“My love requires that I not just sit there and think how awesome we are, but that I commit to acts, to deeds,” Liu says. “The deepest love is open-eyed about the flaws, the conflicts, the tensions, the contradictions.”
When we love our country, we accept the responsibility to hold the country to its purported ideals and values. We shoulder the hard work of being in conversation with our fellow Americans about what those values are and how they should be realized. Even the drafters of the U.S. Constitution saw their work as in progress, as they sought a “more perfect union”—not a completed and perfected one.
“We’re always in this process of trying to perfect those ideals,” says Lisa Yun Lee, the executive director and chief curator of the National Public Housing Museum, which created a toolkit for civic love. “To love those ideals is to also acknowledge that we haven’t yet achieved them, and it’s going to be a constant process.”
Part of that process is acknowledging that the lens through which we view our country and patriotism is continually shifting. The United States is a rare county governed by its original constitution, says Appiah. He compares us to Ghana—on its third constitution since independence—and even France, which has had 10 distinct constitutional orders since their revolution.
What we consider patriotic acts or patriotism is dynamic, as well. “Some of the people we consider the greatest patriots, whether that’s Paul Revere or Harriet Tubman, were all seen as outlaws and as traitors to some other set of ideals at the time,” Lee notes. “They were actually the ones radically willing to challenge the status quo and to ask questions about how we make this country better, how we make our lives with one another more just, more equitable.”
Looking 20, 50, or 250 years into the future, Lee asks, how do we want future generations of Americans to describe the current moment and the actions we took? “Every single day is an opportunity for us to commit ourselves and one another to the project of freedom and liberation,” she says.
The civic love toolkit guides pairs of people through 36 questions that help them understand each other’s history, upbringing, values, and experiences that shaped their current views. The goal is to create a foundation from which to agree on what equality looks like, how to secure our inalienable rights, and together build a better country. The deep divisions in the U.S. now show how dearly we need these debates in order to build that more perfect union. We can only bridge the gap if we understand our fellow citizens’ perspectives and how they came to interpret American values so differently.
That’s what I will be doing this Independence Day: rubbing elbows with neighbors who share my views—and those who don’t—as I seek to understand their perspective and envision a common understanding of how our country’s ideals should be expressed in the modern era.
No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, I encourage you to take the opportunity to open your mind, listen to understand, and find a small way to move forward—rather than labeling people as MAGA or fascists, socialists or gender ideologists, stupid or evil. If we can infuse activism with love, rather than hate, perhaps together we can build a country not only worthy of love, but respect and honor, as well.
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