You have to love America to save it

Liberals need to find their way back to patriotism.

A visitor examines a constitutional amendment document on September 23, 2025 at the National Archives in Washington. (Photo by Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard characterized the United States as “neither dream nor reality”; instead, he argued, it is “a hyperreality … a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams.”

American identity is at once descriptive and aspirational. As a result, the gap between reality and rhetoric has been leveraged into a process of continuous reinvention and progress. This process is so integral to our national identity that we’ve created an entire genre of speech for it: the American jeremiad.

As the academic Sacvan Bercovitch explained, the American jeremiad is “an adversarial celebration of America,” one that “castigate[s] the defects of the present so as to give voice to the abiding national identity.”

Bercovitch was an immigrant, which gave him the perspective to describe the uniquely American tradition of dissenting from some core aspect of national policy or practice while simultaneously affirming core aspects of the national identity. As he put it, “the remedy for American abuses was the American promise.”

The American jeremiad has three essential parts, not necessarily in the following order:

First, the speaker establishes the covenant — an ideal vision that will resonate with his listeners. The blueprint for an American jeremiad is John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he entreats his followers to “be as a city upon a hill.”

Second, the speaker spends much of his remarks warning about the failings of the nation and describing the hypocrisy his listeners are complicit in. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech argues that Black Americans have been cheated of their rightful inheritance.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

And finally, the speaker gives the people a way out of the darkness. Disaster can be averted! Faith in the compact can be renewed! Redemption is possible!

In the waning months of the Civil War, then-president Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address charted just such a path: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

As Bercovitch documented, while the overall structure of the speech remained the same, “the objects of lament, from slavery to corporate greed, were shifting forms of derangement: aberrations of the values and principles that had united the states from the start and accounted for the greatness of the Union.”

The end result is an audience recommitted to the original covenant and given a clear path to achieving the ideal.

The jeremiad is how American patriotism is renewed even at its darkest moments.¹ And it is a useful tool for those who wish to resolve the cognitive dissonance of an unstable national identity. Making the public conscious of the ways in which we are failing to meet our stated moral, political, or religious commitments can move us toward resolving those contradictions in the direction of progress.

But this is a process that requires political and moral leaders to believe in — or at least espouse — a commitment to the American project. In recent decades, liberals have become increasingly uncomfortable with patriotism, ceding it to the right. The last great liberal practitioner of the jeremiad was Barack Obama, and since then, the tradition has been upheld not by progressives and liberals, but by MAGA and, increasingly, the postliberal right.

The last gasps of liberal patriotism

“This union may never be perfect,” Obama conceded in a 2008 speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, “but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”