By Kevin Frazier

It’s hard to be a global citizen if you’ve never left the country. It’s impractical to champion a continent-wide community when its inhabitants share little, besides geography, in common. What’s left is patriotism — a nation is the broadest jurisdiction capable of creating a sense of community, even among strangers. Only those with the privilege of traveling like global citizens, reading like global citizens, and guiding global businesses are likely to second guess the merits of patriotism. For the rest (and majority) of Americans, the nation will remain the most proximate and most powerful source of loyalty, and, consequently, action.

Absent reviving a sense of patriotism, the American Experiment is destined to fail. Though patriotism operates at the national level, it’s our best shot of solving national as well as global problems.

If you care about climate change, you should promote a strong, nationwide community that’s willing to collectively sacrifice for the good of the entire country (and, by secondary effects, the world). If you care about income inequality, the odds of redistributive policies passing are much greater if elites feel a common bond and share common goals with the likely recipients of government support. Finally, if you care about the health of our democracy, then patriotism can make possible bold, nationwide, democracy-building projects like creating an expected national service program.

Yet, rather than celebrate patriotism as a tool to wield, many have come to associate any sense of allegiance to their fellow Americans as a show of moral recklessness and historical ignorance. To wear the American flag is to support white supremacy. To honor the members of the Armed Services is to condone imperialism, past, present, and future. To participate in the Pledge of Allegiance is to submit to a “Hunger Games”-esque ritual that reinforces a flawed and fundamentally unacceptable government.

The perception of an attack on patriotism is widespread. Take, for example, The New York Times 1619 project. While motivated by an understandable desire to correct omissions in our understanding of the role of race in the founding of America, the perceived use of the project as a governor on anyone, at any age, developing patriotic feelings is problematic. The project contains several examples of what’s flawed with the nation’s founding; as with any nation, there are lots of them — especially, in the American case, egregious mistreatment of enslaved individuals. The fatal flaw of the project, according to its detractors, is citing those founding flaws as reason to forever perceive America as a nation unworthy of the public’s patriotism. For some proponents of the project, its best interpretation is that no amount of progress can overcome the nation’s early years and continued struggles with racial equality. In either case, the project has contributed to a troubling partisan skew to patriotism.

The unnecessary move from historical analysis to modern attack on patriotism is not only driving certain liberal families away from American affinity, it’s also accelerating conservative affinity for the state as their primary political community. Texas, presumably in response to attacks on patriotism, has opted to reinforce ties to the state. The state recently adopted a new pledge to the Texas state flag: “Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.”

The more liberal elites push for global citizenship (which is unrealistic and uncommon — though people may say they see themselves as global citizens that belief will rarely compel meaningful action) or citizenship by identity (be it racial, sexual preference, gender conception), the more conservatives will push for even narrower conceptions of citizenship (in the best cases, at the level of the state, and, in the worst cases, by race). As a result, neither of our two major political communities will be capable of activating the broadest community at our disposal — the nation. Instead, the best each party can hope for is to move small fractions of the public to take even more extreme steps toward partisan goals.

Attacks of patriotism generally suffer from a fatal flaw: assuming that patriotism means total and unequivocal support for a nation’s history and current actions. Patriotism, though, is more akin to your relationship with your parents. Lord knows they aren’t perfect (neither are you), but you persist in talking with them, learning from them, and sharing with them. Their flaws are painful and often detrimental to your own well-being, but you don’t give up on them. The good they’ve done has made possible the opportunities available to you today, so you remain thankful for the positives, while still acknowledging that negatives exist.

It’s true that new symbols, new heroes, and new stories may be necessary to make patriotism as positive and powerful as possible. The old means of encouraging love of country among Americans have grown tired and have been exposed as less unifying than previously imagined (or acknowledged). So rather than abandon patriotism, progressives should help develop new means of tying all Americans together under our national umbrella.

I’m committed to joining the U.S. Air Force Reserves not because of familial ties to the Armed Services nor because of some idea of American exceptionalism. I joined because there’s something uniquely powerful about working with people of all races, incomes, backgrounds, and beliefs who share a common goal and a common willingness to sacrifice to reach that goal. Progressive policy outcomes will never be realized until the power of patriotism is revived and channeled toward the myriad issues confronting the American Experiment.

Kevin Frazier was born and raised in Oregon and is attending the UC Berkeley School of Law. In his spare time he runs The Oregon Way, a statewide, nonpartisan blog.