As Americans prepare to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, what it means to love one’s country has become as important as who should lead it. Love of country is fundamentally connected to identity, since our sense of self is often intertwined with how we understand our country’s past, respond to its present, and imagine its future. Yet, the challenge today is not whether to love our country, but how to love it in a way that strengthens rather than divides us.
No matter where I live, South Florida will always feel like home. Whenever I return to visit family or friends, I make a point of walking along Hollywood Beach. It’s not because it is objectively better than Fort Lauderdale Beach or South Beach. If anything, this stretch of beach has escaped much of the redevelopment that has transformed the rest of South Florida. It still has the same old shops, the familiar scent of the ocean, and the recognizable breeze coming off the water. Over the past 25 years, time and other people’s lives have reshaped the South Florida I grew up in. Yet on those walks, I can still find a remnant of the place I once knew and, with it, a connection to the place and the life that shaped who I am today.
In The Four Loves (a book far less well known than The Chronicles of Narnia), C.S. Lewis quotes an ancient Greek saying: “No man loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.” The word “his” is not possessive. We don’t own our cities any more than we own our families. Rather, the city is “ours” because it helped make us who we are. Its customs, language, and rhythms have shaped how we understand life, what we value, and how we relate to others. Its local cuisine became the food of our childhood, its dialect our first language, its architecture and art our earliest sense of beauty, or at least familiarity. Even if life later introduces new places, cultures, and experiences, the city of one’s youth—much like one’s family—remains the foundation on which identity is built.
Belonging Without Exclusivity
For this reason, someone who loves a city because it is theirs often comes to believe it is great simply because it is theirs, even as they grow with a more critical eye toward what they once took for granted. When they seek to change their hometown, they do so because they believe it is worth changing. They see their city through loving eyes and, therefore, think about the city and its potential differently than if they were a cold, detached observer.
Love for your hometown, and for your country, can develop in perhaps two very different directions. It may turn into patriotism or into nationalism.
Nationalism seeks to preserve a people's cultural, linguistic, or ethnic purity. It distorts Lewis’s notion of “my country” by replacing belonging with ownership and shared identity with exclusivity. The nationalist roots identity in an idealized vision of a place and a people and often views outsiders or change as threats to that identity.
The patriot loves their country because it is theirs, without comparison or sense of superiority to other countries. The patriot continues to see “mine” as a term of relationship rather than of possession. What makes the country worth loving, and worth improving, is the kind of life it makes possible for both its citizens and newcomers alike. Civic institutions, shared traditions, and freedoms create the conditions for people from different backgrounds to live together, contribute to the common good, and create their own sense of “home.”
Political theorist Maurizio Viroli captures this distinction well in For Love of Country, “Patriots and nationalists have not only recommended different ideals as objects of our love... they have also endeavored to instill or strengthen in us different types of love: a charitable and generous love in the case of patriotism, an unconditional loyalty or an exclusive attachment in the case of the nationalists.” Patriotism says, “I love this country because it has shaped who I am.” Nationalism says, “I love this country because it is mine and not yours.” One begins with gratitude; the other begins with comparison.
Belonging for Newcomers
This distinction between nationalism and patriotism reframes what it means to belong. Patriotism recognizes that we do not lose our country when others arrive. It creates the conditions for newcomers to develop the same kind of attachment that long-time citizens have, not by inheriting our memories, but by building their own.
It also changes how we respond to political disagreement. If love of country is rooted in gratitude rather than superiority, then acknowledging a country’s shortcomings is not an act of disloyalty. Nor should disagreement over the country’s future be mistaken for betrayal. People who love the same home may sincerely disagree about how to care for it. As with families and other loving relationships, genuine patriotism calls us to recognize flaws, strengthen what is good, and improve the communities and institutions that have helped shape us.
Identity Essential Reads
Like my love for the South Florida of my childhood and for what it has become in my absence, patriotism is ultimately grounded in gratitude, not comparison. Gratitude for the places, traditions, and civic institutions that have shaped our lives allows us to cultivate the openness captured in Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty and to develop a love of country that is brave enough to become a home for those “yearning to breathe free.”