The State of Patriotism

The State of the Union highlighted two incompatible visions of what it means to serve your country

Last night’s State of the Union should be remembered for what it honored.

President Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to one of the servicemembers who captured Maduro. He gave the Legion of Merit to a Coast Guard rescue swimmer who pulled Americans from floodwaters in Texas. He honored the family of Iryna Zarutska. He presented the Purple Heart to the National Guardsman attacked in D.C. And he concluded by placing these individual acts of courage within a civilizational narrative stretching from our founding to the present day.

The speech painted the picture that the national project is the sum of individual productive ambitions directed toward something greater than the self. The servicemember, the Olympian, the rescuer, the worker—these are the people who built “thirteen humble colonies into the pinnacle of human civilization and human freedom.” Their patriotism is doing hard things well.

This is the most interesting thing the Republican Party has said in a long time.

Trump did not argue that America is great because it holds the right opinions, he argued that America is great because Americans “ventured out across a daunting and dangerous continent,” “mastered the world’s mightiest industries,” “shattered history’s monstrous tyrannies,” and “lifted humanity into the skies on the wings of aluminum and steel.” Achievement is the unifying idea. It is the claim that productive contribution to the national enterprise is itself the highest form of civic life.

Then came: “For years, they were forgotten, betrayed, and cast aside. But that great betrayal is over.” The previous regime’s failure was not incompetence or bad governance but a failure of honor. Refusing to recognize the people who actually build and sustain the country unless they bought in to the ideological ponzi scheme.

Under the Republican framework presented Tuesday night, you are a patriot if your individual excellence serves the nation. The soldier, the astronaut, the factory worker, the rescuer—these people are honored for what they do and what they accomplish. Their productive ambition is the substance of American greatness. The national project is built, brick by brick, with their hard work.

What we have seen from the left for many years is a conditional patriotism. Though you may accomplish extraordinary things, your reputation depends on your alignment with a specific set of political commitments. The activist is elevated above the builder and the correct opinion outranks the accomplishment. You are welcome in the national project only insofar as you are subservient to its current ideological demands, and those demands shift frequently enough that compliance may be never quite achieved.

You need not take my word for it. The proof arrived mere hours before the speech from our dear friends at The Athletic, the New York Times’ national sports arm.

Twenty members of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team—fresh off a gold medal victory that had, for one brief afternoon, united America by beating the perfidious Canadians at their own game—accepted an invitation to attend the State of the Union. They had just won for the United States on the world stage, the most patriotic thing an athlete can do. Hours later, The Athletic ran a column arguing that the players had been reckless in choosing to stand in the House Chamber next to the wrong president.

The article conceded the gold medal was real and the victory was thrilling. But it argued the players had “handed over the power of unity” and become “pawns” by celebrating in proximity to Trump. Their historic triumph, readers were informed, now “must compete for attention with their reckless after-party.” The piece asserted that athletes must understand that “who’s celebrating you, and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it, matters more” than the achievement itself.

This is the left’s model of patriotism: You won gold for your country, but you celebrated with the wrong people, so your civic standing is diminished. The victory only matters if you maintain proper ideological distance from the president. The president! You were supposed to be a symbol of unity, but unity of what? Unity in their ideology, apparently.

We see in all of this a disagreement about whether the country is built by people who do things or by people who believe things.

Maybe productive individualism alone does not generate the solidarity a nation needs, or “be excellent and the country benefits” is thin for a governing philosophy. But notice that everyone Trump honored was someone whose individual excellence was directed outward: toward fellow citizens in an emergency, toward soldiers on a battlefield, toward a country that needed defending. It is a post-libertarian conservatism that focuses on the honor of useful work for your fellow citizens.

Think about the two visions for America on display last night. One party showed you servicemembers, Olympians, and rescue swimmers and said: this is what matters. The other party says that what matters is saying the right things.