I’m a Liberal, and I’m Tired of Pretending Patriotism Is Cringe

A fourth of July of mine.

I live in rural America. The smallness of this place often allows Ely to become a perfect dissection of American discourse. Historically, our community and region have been pretty evenly divided between political ideologies, but as the extremes become more extreme, we are seeing divisions that once could be softened by neighborly interaction harden into separate intercommunities.

This is a town steeped in history, generational lineage, and cultural norms. A place where you are not local unless you are in the graveyard and have a street named after you. Its seasonal polarity often reveals what sits just beneath the surface: a town whose economic lifeblood depends on outsiders, but whose instincts often resist them. If you are not like us, you are not one of us. It is the unspoken code written into the city. Though people are trying to push the boulder of change up the hill, this culture is ingrained deep in the primordial mountain range that used to exist here.

This community also has a reputation for having one of the highest concentrations of service members per capita in U.S. history during the major wars of the 1900s. Patriotism runs in our veins the way iron ore veins run through our hills. In their time, patriotism meant going to war to protect what you believed in. It meant putting yourself at great personal risk for your kin, your community, and future generations so they could enjoy the promise of America.

That has always been apparent to me.

Then it shifted.

Patriotism mutated, whether we liked it or not.

In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Ely’s canceled Fourth of July parade was replaced with a “Patriotic March.” I do not know that this was the intention of the people who organized it, and I can believe that for many it was simply an attempt to preserve a community tradition in a year when normalcy felt badly needed. But in that political climate, it was hard not to read it, for me, as something more than a simple civic celebration. What had once felt like a shared ritual of community suddenly felt narrower, more coded, and more politically charged. In that shift, patriotism stopped feeling like a communal inheritance and started feeling like a political possession. What had once belonged to everyone began to feel like it belonged only to those willing to perform loyalty in a very specific way. What should have felt like “we the people” instead felt like “us the people.” That was a turning point for me.

Having grown up on the Iron Range as a fourth-generation Slovenian immigrant, I grew up hearing the stories of my great-grandparents coming to this country for a better life, and how my grandfather and great-uncles fought for this country, not just to defend what it was, but to protect what they believed it could be.

A land of the free, a home for the brave.

That promise was never meant for only some of us.

We have rights this country claims to hold sacred.

All of us.

What I inherited was a belief that patriotism meant sacrifice in service of a shared promise.   What I saw in 2020, and what I continue to see today, is something else entirely. A version of patriotism that tried to make those rights feel conditional, exclusive, and reserved for only a chosen few.

That is not patriotism.

And I refuse to surrender it to people who would make it smaller than the country itself.

In many liberal spaces, one of the first things I hear on an almost daily basis is a deep disillusionment with this country. People do not feel “proud to be an American.” I understand that. These times are trying for all of us, and for many people, national pride feels compromised. This comes up whenever patriotism enters the conversation, whether it is hanging a flag, singing the national anthem, or even celebrating the Fourth of July. For many on the left, patriotism has become inseparable from nationalism, because in too many public spaces, that is exactly what it has become.

The “patriotism” filling our country right now is often not patriotism at all. It is nationalism dressed in patriotic language, rooted in exclusion, white Christian dominance, and the belief that America belongs more fully to some people than others. This mindset, like the community I live in, is often suspicious of difference, resistant to change, and quick to treat the stranger as a threat instead of a neighbor. It has become the wedge between liberals and conservatives. One side has tried to weaponize patriotism into a test of loyalty. The other, too often, has responded by walking away from it entirely.

A simple way to frame the difference is this:

Nationalism says this country is for people like me.

Patriotism says this country belongs to all of us, and we are responsible for what it becomes.

When patriotism becomes shorthand for exclusion, of course people on the left want nothing to do with it. But that does not mean we should abandon it. It means we should reclaim it. If shared symbols are surrendered the moment they are abused, then only the people abusing them are left holding them.

And that is exactly how patriotism became smaller than the country itself.

In these liberal spaces, the language often used is that people dislike or hate this country. I understand the anger, but I think we need to be more precise.

When you say you hate this country, stop and think about what you are actually saying.

Do you hate the redwoods?

The Great Lakes?

The people who live here?

The town you call home?

They are the country you are claiming to hate.

The country is not just a government or a state. It is the land, the people, and the communities that make it real.

You can hate the current administration. You can hate the party in power. You can find blatant nationalism disgusting. I often do.

But we too often confuse the failures of the current political system with the country itself, and that confusion makes it easier to surrender shared symbols, shared rituals, and shared belonging.

If the Constitution gives us anything worth reclaiming, it is not proof that America has always been just. It is the language of an unfinished promise: “We the People,” “a more perfect Union,” and the obligation to keep widening who those words are allowed to include.

At its simplest, our country is a place for all people. It is a place where all people should have protections and rights that allow them to become more fully themselves and pursue a better life.

Now, the current system does not live up to that. But that is the dream.

What unsettles people most is not difference itself.  It  is the promise that difference is allowed. That someone whose life, identity, or beliefs look nothing like yours still has the same claim to this country that you do. That is what the founding documents, at their best, were trying to protect. Not sameness. Not comfort. The freedom to be fully yourself in the same space as someone who is fully themselves. That is what communities like this one have always struggled to hold. And that is exactly what real patriotism asks us to make room for. 

At their best, our founding documents do not ask us to erase those differences. They ask us to protect the freedom to live with them.

I believe that is why these documents gave us rights, and those rights do not disappear simply because someone’s life, identity, or beliefs make us uncomfortable. They end only when they infringe on the rights of others.

You do not have to love what America is right now.

You do not have to love the government.

You do not have to ignore the violence, hypocrisy, or failures the current system empowers.

You can choose to love the promise of America while grieving the reality of what it is right now.

I think we need to be able to hold the tension of loving the country while hating what is happening within it.

We have to be able to love it and hate it at the same time.

We have to allow ourselves the grace to hold an ugly truth and a beautiful truth about the same thing.

That is not hypocrisy.

That is maturity.

That is what real patriotism requires.

We have to be able to speak truth to what is happening and still claim this space as ours.

We have to acknowledge the harm and learn from our mistakes.

If we refuse to tell the truth about what this country is doing, we have no chance of becoming what this country claims to be.

We cannot romanticize it. We cannot put on the star-spangled glasses. We cannot look away from what is really happening.

This country and its legacy belong to all of us.

Its promise belongs to all of us.

We have inherited the responsibility to move forward, to widen who “we the people” actually means, and to keep building a more perfect union.

Patriotism is not possession.

It is stewardship.

It is not a wall around who belongs here. It is the responsibility to widen the gate.

It is not pretending America has always been just. It is believing justice is still worth insisting on.

This country does not belong to the people who wave the biggest flag, speak the loudest about loyalty, or try to turn “we the people” into a private club.

It belongs to all of us.

To the people who have been here for generations.

To the people who just arrived.

To the people who are angry.

To the people who are grieving.

To the people who are exhausted.

To the people who still believe there is something here worth fighting for.

That is patriotism.

Not performance.

Not purity.

Not possession.

Stewardship.

Care.

Responsibility.

The work of making the country larger than the people who want to make it small.

So no, I do not think patriotism belongs to the right.

And no, I do not think liberals should keep pretending it is cringe to love a country enough to demand more from it.

Love without honesty is propaganda.

But critique without claim can become surrender.

I do not want to surrender this country, its symbols, or its promise to people who have confused domination with devotion.

I want “we the people” to mean what it should have meant all along.

All of us.

Note: After publishing, I slightly clarified the section about Ely’s 2020 Fourth of July “Patriotic March” to better distinguish between my personal perception of the event at the time and the possible intentions of those involved. The core argument of the piece remains the same.