The Danger of Patriotism Detached From American Ideals
And how Ronald Reagan’s notion of ‘informed patriotism’ offers a path out of our political dysfunction.
WHEN RONALD REAGAN delivered his farewell address in January 1989, the nation expected a reflection on the Cold War’s end or on the conservative movement he had shaped. Instead, he focused on civic memory—on America’s tendency to forget its own story. Patriotism, he said, had to be “informed,” grounded in a clear understanding of what America represents in the long history of the world. Without that grounding, the country would lose its way. More than three decades later, that warning feels less like a rhetorical flourish and more like an unheeded alarm.
Patriotism in today’s America often bears little resemblance to what Reagan described. While our citizens still express deep patriotic feeling, many cannot explain the ideas that give those feelings meaning. Surveys paint a complicated picture of civic knowledge; the overall trend is one of declining familiarity with constitutional principles and of the workings of our democracy and the ideas underpinning it. As the distance between emotion and understanding has widened, into that void has rushed a version of patriotism that is louder, angrier, performative, and far less anchored to the very values that have guided the republic since its founding.
Reagan viewed patriotism as resting on memory, humility, and shared civic purpose. In this understanding, love of country requires knowledge of country, the nation’s triumphs must be recognized alongside its failures, and democratic citizenship is not inherited but learned. That understanding cannot be transmitted through slogans or symbols alone. It requires deliberate, sustained, and honest teaching and related learning—about the documents, struggles, sacrifices, and aspirations that define the United States.
Yet the practice of teaching and understanding our values, whether civic, professional, or personal, has withered. Even in leadership classrooms, I’ve found that students often struggle to name their own values or the guiding principles of their organizations. When public figures invoke “American values,” the phrase frequently hangs unsupported, used as decoration for whatever argument they want to make. The moral vocabulary remains potent, but the comprehension behind it has grown fragile.
The business world offers a useful lens. Many voters insist that electing a “businessman” to public office is the cure for political dysfunction, as if private-sector success naturally translates to leadership of a democratic government. Yet I’ve learned that business leadership as taught in accredited programs in American higher education is grounded not in instinct, charisma, or grievance, but in formal ethical frameworks promulgated by professional organizations such as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. These programs typically emphasize such foundational principles as accountability, honesty, care and respect, healthy competition, loyalty to the institution, transparency, and respect for the rule of law. These are not optional traits, but rather agreed-upon business ethics. They are the minimum standards for anyone entrusted with authority over people and resources.
By those standards, the conduct regularly excused in public life would be disqualifying in any major firm. As just one example, consider a male executive who, within a period of a few weeks, publicly insults multiple women—colleagues, partners, subordinates—with each incident marked by contempt or gendered hostility. In most of corporate America, three such episodes in quick succession would trigger an immediate HR investigation, mandatory counseling or intervention, erosion of trust among peers and subordinates, and likely termination. Corporate boards typically do not tolerate repeated violations of respect, integrity, and professionalism because ethical behavior and respect for others are requirements, not luxuries. Yet in politics, leaders increasingly receive a pass for their lowering or ignoring of the standards demanded of professionals in every other field.
This lack of respect for others is just one example of how the lowering of expectations contributes to patriotism becoming a costume for some and a cudgel in the hands of too many. The values that once served as a unifying expression of civic behavior often become a means of dividing “real Americans” from everyone else, masking personal grievance under the banner of national pride, or disconnecting patriotism from civic responsibility. This version demands no understanding of our history, no exhibition of humility, and no grounding in the values that first shaped the nation and guided our actions. It rewards noise over knowledge, identity over ideals, and show over principle.
REAGAN UNDERSTOOD the consequences of this shift. He believed patriotism had to be rooted in honest teaching about what America stands for and sustained by a willingness to learn from failures while remaining steadfast in shared ideals. “Informed patriotism” expects leaders in every profession—public, private, and military—to adhere to ethical standards. It insists that patriotism reflect the values of a republic, not the personality of a man. It calls for replacing grievance and spectacle with humility, civic knowledge, and responsibility. Love of country cannot be measured by decibel level. It must be reflected in the character and conduct of its citizens. Patriotism is proven not by volume but by understanding; it is found not in slogans but in values lived out in the open.
America’s real values are clear and accessible, even though their applications and limitations will rightly always be the subject of lively debate. They appear in the Declaration of Independence, with its insistence on equality, inherent rights, and liberty. They are found in the Constitution, with its plan for the rule of law, separation of powers, due process, and protections for freedom and equality. We see them in Lincoln’s appeals for unity, sacrifice, and moral responsibility. They resonate through Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, through Martin Luther King Jr.’s demand for racial equality and human dignity, and through Reagan’s conviction that memory, civic education, and informed patriotism are essential to freedom’s survival. These ideals carried the nation through war, depression, division, and transformation. And they remain the benchmarks by which leaders and citizens alike should be judged.
Built into those ideals, from the Founders forward, is a recognition that the principles of liberty apply not only to those born on American soil but also to those who arrive seeking a stake in its promise. The Declaration states that all people possess inherent rights; it is a universal, not a selective, claim. Lincoln made the point unmistakably in 1858 when he reminded new immigrants that the moral principle of the Declaration gives them a claim to the nation’s ideals “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.” Reagan carried that same torch in his farewell address, envisioning America as a shining city whose “doors were open anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Put another way, patriotism is strongest not when it narrows who belongs, but when it honors the universal ideals that first defined our nation.
I THINK OF OUR POLITICAL VALUES as performing much the same function in our national life as the values of any profession: They shape moral judgment long before a crisis arrives or before a difficult decision has to be made. They guide decision-making, especially in a crisis. They help to keep things steady—especially when emotions run high or when leaders are tempted by expedience. And they are reminders that our joint enterprise depends on people not just enjoying the benefits but meeting obligations as well. In the case of our nation, that means that our citizenship carries duties as well as rights, and that the nation’s future depends on more than symbolic gestures or partisan loyalties.
Reagan’s farewell address was a plea to recover that understanding. His message was not nostalgic but prescriptive: Democracies do not survive on instinct or identity. They survive because citizens know what their country stands for, they expect their leaders to embody those values, and they accept a personal responsibility for preserving them. Informed patriotism is not sentimentality. It is stewardship—of the ideas that make the United States worth loving and the values that make it worth defending.
Recovering that foundation will not be easy. It will require us to teach the next generation what America represents. Tell the truth about our failures without surrendering our ideals. Demand ethical standards from leaders in every sphere. Resist the lure of grievance and the theatrics of division. And remember that love of country is measured not by how fiercely and loudly it is proclaimed, but by how faithfully it is practiced.
Informed patriotism is not the easiest path, but it is the only one that will lead us back to the country we claim to be.