Does reflective patriotism depend on a positive assessment of one’s country’s history?

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The Educating for American Democracy roadmap asks all educators (and policymakers–and perhaps students) to address this challenge:

“How can we offer an account of U.S. constitutional democracy that is simultaneously honest about the wrongs of the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding of the United States without tipping into adulation?”

I suppose my personal assessment of America’s record would lean toward the critical side, emphasizing the centrality of conquest and slavery in the American story and the oscillation of liberation and subjugation in our history. For example, I would want students seriously to consider “the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”

That does not mean that my view is entirely negative. I once tried to capture my conflicted take in a palindrome:

America, you Jerusalem reborn!
No profligate, old-world, ruined people, you.
Behold: peace. You’re principle without pain and dishonor.
Dishonor and pain without principle: your peace.
Behold, you people: ruined world!
Old, profligate. No reborn Jerusalem you, America.

How to assess America is an appropriate topic for disagreement and debate. Educating for American Democracy invites students to debates of this kind. The Tocquevillan concept of “reflective patriotism” is broad enough to encompass various responses to America’s overall record.

But my question expands to three related ones.

First, the value-judgment itself: How should we reason about America’s record? How should we think about progress and failure, sin and redemption, promissory notes and accumulated balances? Is it helpful to evaluate the US in comparison to other countries, including the one from which we won independence or the former British colony just to our north? Should we still tremble for our country when we reflect that God is just?

Second, a normative/conceptual issue: Should patriotism depend on a positive assessment of a country’s history? I believe that I am a patriot, and I view my work on topics like civics as an everyday example of patriotism. I’ve described my motivations for visiting Kyiv and Nablus in 2025–in opposition to my government’s policies–as patriotic. But I do not base my commitment to my national community on a positive view its past. That seems too contingent to me, like loving one’s children because they’re so well behaved.

Besides, I would advocate constitutional patriotism as a virtue for people whose national histories are clearly problematic, such as citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Like other forms of love, love of country is about concern and sacrifice, not about giving the object a high rating.

Finally, an empirical question: Would teaching students to hold a more favorable view of America cause them to act more patriotically?

As with most empirical questions, the answer is probably: It depends. One set of variables involves the inputs: requirements, assignments, pedagogical methods, and teachers who are prepared for the subject in various ways. Another set of variables involves the students, who vary in age, background assumptions, and experiences with our polity. (For instance, it is likely that America should be presented differently to kindergarteners and teenagers.) And a third set of variables measures the outcomes, which may include beliefs, habits, and dispositions.

I have not found compelling empirical research on this topic. One body of evidence that is gaining attention involves measuring two different psychological constructs. One construct is identifying with one’s country, measured with items like “Being an American is an important part of my self-image” and “In general I’m glad to be an American.” The other construct is national narcissism, an internationally replicated scale that captures a feeling that one’s country has superior qualities that are being disparaged, particularly by foreigners (Cichocka & Cislak 2020). While national identification correlates with support for constitutional democracy, national narcissism predicts authoritarian populist views (Marchlewska et al 2022).

This cross-sectional evidence does not tell us whether schools can promote national identification, nor whether they can do so without enhancing national narcissism. I would favor patriotism without narcissism if schools can accomplish that. But I think that one of the most serious threats to our republic is national narcissism, and I would guard vigilantly against it.

The palindrome is distantly inspired by Yehuda Alharizi’s “Palindrome for a Patron” [12th or 13th century] as translated by Peter Cole and cited by Harold Bloom in “The Lost Jewish Culture,” The New York Review of Books, June 28, 2007. Other sources: Aleksandra Cichocka, & Aleksandra Cislak. “Nationalism as collective narcissism.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020): 69-74; Marchlewska, Marta, Aleksandra Cichocka, Aleksandra Furman, and Aleksandra Cislak. “Who respects the will of the people? Support for democracy is linked to high secure national identity but low national narcissism.” British Journal of Social Psychology 61, no. 2 (2022): 599-621. See also: American exceptionalism, revisited; anxieties about American exceptionalism; Teaching Civics in Kyiv; more on teaching patriotism (2006); a pluralistic 250th and a palindrome (2007).

on translation as spiritual practice

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“The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.” — Wittgenstein

The Spanish word quedar can be translated as to remain, to stay, to meet, to fit, to suit (as in Ese color te queda bien), to be located, to end up, to agree, or to be left with (as in Me quedan 20 euros).

One of those meanings is “to agree.” That English verb can be translated back into Spanish as estar de acuerdo, acordar, convenir, coincidir, aceptar, or, again, quedar.

One of those meanings is acordar. Rendered back in English, that verb can mean to agree, decide, or make an arrangement, or–if it’s in a reflexive form–to remember. In turn, “to decide” could be conveyed in Spanish by decidir (or decidirse), resolver, acordar or determinar.

I chose quedar because it has a famously wide range of meanings, a bit like rendre or tenir in French. But notice that each of the words that I’ve mentioned connects to a unique list of words in the other language. This is typical. Putting two languages together creates a pattern of intertwined connections, like an arabesque design.

When you study a language, you memorize foreign words as sets of distinct words in your home language. In a given context, quedar means one thing, such as “to stay” or else “to agree.” A translator should know–or look up–the full list of meanings for each word and must pick the best one for each sentence. Sometimes there is no single best choice.

But once you know the language reasonably well, a word no longer decomposes into several words in a different language. Now it covers its own space. Presumably (I don’t have good enough Spanish to know) each use of quedar carries an implicit trace of its whole range of meanings.

Todo pasa y todo queda, 
pero lo nuestro es pasar, 
pasar haciendo caminos, 
caminos sobre el mar. 

Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be. 
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea. 

Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912): XLIV

Here I’ve rendered the first line with the verbs “to pass” and “to stay,” but I had other choices. Pasar could mean to go through, to happen (¿que pasa?), to spend time, etc. And we have already seen the range of meanings for quedar. Its other senses are missing in the English word “stay,” but that verb has its own range of meanings, including to visit and to prevent something from happening. Those are absent in Machado’s original.

I chose “to pass” for several reasons, including the sonic resemblance to pasar as well as some vague sense of English allusions, such as “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes). I chose “to stay” as a single syllable that was a near-rhyme for “ways.” Translation is not only about matching words but also about syntax, rhythm, and sound.

Artificial Intelligence is good at translating prose. It generally chooses an appropriate equivalent for each word. Thanks to AI tools, I have been able to read articles in languages, such as Japanese, of which I know nothing. I have also developed a careful practice of asking Claude to list all the dictionary definitions of words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali, that interest me. I hope that viewing these lists gives me some sense of how the words work in their original languages, although I must look through that glass darkly.

What AI cannot do is give a person the experience of parsing the whole world a bit differently by beginning to think in a different language. In turn, that experience teaches us that anyone’s model of the world is limited and contingent, and much always remains beyond anyone’s grasp.

A language is a whole system of meanings. It allows us to work with the world, yet it coexists with other systems that present the world differently. Those other systems include not only human languages (which are, after all, rather similar and interconnected), but also other consciousnesses. To glimpse this plurality is to see our own world as if from beyond it.

In the detail from a 13th-century Persian mihrab that accompanies this post, each arabesque field could stand for a pair of intertwined human languages, but there are also fields across the boundaries formed by the Quranic calligraphy. And the whole mihrab is a threshold to the beyond.

Wittgenstein writes, “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische” (Tractatus 6:45). Acknowledging that this sentence could be translated in many ways, I will render it: “The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.”

It’s another way of saying that we make our highways on the sea.

See also: Machado’s Glory is Never What I’ve Sought and Highways on the Sea; paradigms of attention; why the humanities could never be automated; and thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition. Photo credit: detail of a mihrab from Kashan (1226) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons.

Universities Must Start Graduating More Good Citizens, by Anna Saavedra and Peter Levine

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This post is by Anna Saavedra, Director of the Center for Civic Society at the USC Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service, and me. I am currently a Nonresident Senior Scholar at the Schaeffer Institute as well as the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life.

Seven in 10 adults feel the U.S. higher education system is going in the wrong direction, and half say American democracy is functioning poorly, or very poorly. One proposed solution could tackle both problems simultaneously: American colleges and universities could require civics curricula for all freshmen.

Students often arrive on campus without the insights, skills, and dispositions that are essential to the kind of civic behavior that sustains a democratic republic. Universities have a clear role to play in helping them become engaged, knowledgeable citizens, and to do so with academic rigor.

Most recently, a faculty panel at Yale urged the creation of a civic education initiative that would reach every freshman. Institutions considering such a step will face challenges, including how to staff a university-wide mandated curriculum. Presuming that practical problems could be overcome, any university would still have to address another hard question: What should a civics curriculum teach?

A lot will depend on how a university and its faculty views the major weaknesses and threats to the republic. For example, a course focused on America’s 250-year history might improve knowledge and appreciation of the Constitution and political traditions. One that encourages dialogues and discussions involving diverse perspectives could be a counterweight to polarization and social media trolling. Global challenges, such as climate change and disruptive technologies, could be the topic of a class that encourages students to develop solutions, perhaps with a large dose of scientific literacy.

The drive to improve civic education will not yield a single national template, nor should it. A civics course built around the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence looks different from one anchored in diverse political and economic theories, or from a program centered on community-based service, or from a practicum in public policy.

Each approach develops different competencies, and there is no reason to expect—or demand—convergence. Diversity of curricula is inevitable and desirable. Institutions need to articulate the skills, knowledge, and values they believe citizenship requires, and design programs deliberately aimed at those goals.

Skeptics worry that such a curriculum risks becoming either superficial or politicized. A course that reduces citizenship to a fact checklist will fail to inspire; one that substitutes advocacy for analysis will also fall short. Avoiding these pitfalls requires intellectual humility, institutional discipline, and a genuine commitment to pluralism—to engaging students across lines of disagreement rather than confirming the views they already hold.

Fortunately, universities need not start from scratch. Existing efforts offer resources, frameworks, and communities of practice. The states of Florida and Arizona already require a civics course for all public university students, and some private institutions have adopted requirements of various types. Tulane University, for example, requires all undergraduates to spend two semesters in courses that involve service in their community.

The greatest risk is inaction. For too long, many universities have assumed students arrive with, or will passively acquire, the aptitude and knowledge necessary for democratic life. Civic ignorance is widespread, confidence is uneven, and engagement is often shallow or polarized. Higher education cannot solve these problems alone, but it can no longer disclaim responsibility.

The Yale committee is right to insist universities take the goal of citizenship development seriously. Doing so will require resources, creativity, and, above all, a willingness to engage difficult questions about what it means to be a U.S. citizen in the 21st century. Today’s undergraduates are tomorrow’s voters, jurors, public servants, and community leaders. The quality of their civic education will shape their own lives and the health of the republic itself.

See also: “a civic common reading program“

a civic common reading program

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In the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, we say:

Civic education should be a shared intellectual activity, grounded in texts, aimed at building a practical capacity for listening to and acting together with others, including those of differing beliefs.

I believe that citizenship or civic engagement is about more than texts and spoken words. It is also about work–and sometimes, sacrifice. We can learn to be effective citizens by serving or fighting or working instead of talking. Acts of citizenship can literally be silent.

Still, authentic words are scarce today. Despite the torrent of gigabytes of characters and sounds that human beings–and now also machines–circulate every second, we are at risk of losing considered words, the words of embodied human beings who have memories and hopes and the capacity to suffer and who speak or write to engage other people. Hence I believe that today’s civic education should emphasize slow, attentive reading and the creation of new words.

In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen recalls teaching working-class students in night school in Chicago. She writes,

To my embarrassment, however, I never read the Declaration slowly, the way I had been taught to read, until I did so with my night students. It’s a cliché to say that we fell in love, but we did. Its words became necessary for us; they became our Declaration. Through reading them slowly, we came into our inheritance: an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.

Here is a proposal for a program that could be adopted across a college or university as part of its civic mission. It builds on existing “common read” or “common book” programs, but it is a bit different. Those programs tend to encourage every student–or every incoming student–to read a recent book. Often, the author visits, and the book is incorporated in various courses and special events.

There is suggestive evidence that these programs bring academic and psychological benefits (Soria 2015). But they would not necessarily enhance civic learning. And I am skeptical that most students will actually read and discuss an assigned book, especially post-COVID and in the era of AI.

I would propose the following tweaks:

The chosen text should be concise yet very rich, so that it is possible to read it (possibly aloud) before discussing it and producing a response–all in real time.

It should address the core civic question, the question of collective agency. In other words, the text should be about groups discussing “What should we do?” and acting accordingly.

The text should generally be old enough that it has generated criticism and creative responses or echoes from various perspectives. These responses can be recommended along with the main assigned text.

Students would produce their own responses to the text in the form of words (written or spoken), images, music, or performances, either as individuals or in teams. With exceptions, such as the use of recording devices, they would make these products without the assistance of machines.

This program would include all students, from incoming undergraduates to residents in a medical school. Whether to require or merely encourage participation would depend on the institution’s rules and culture, and might vary within an institution.

The institution would produce a discussion guide and offer professional development opportunities for teachers, but instructors and facilitators could approach the text in their own ways, grounded in their own disciplines, professions, methods, and interests.

Since a new text would be chosen each year, a student in a multi-year academic program would experience a diversity of texts. Here are some illustrative examples:

Addams, Jane, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements”
Arendt, Hannah, “Prologue” to The Human Condition
Auden, W.H, “September 1, 1939”
Brecht, Bertolt, “To Future Generations”
Brooks, Gwendolyn, “The Lovers of the Poor”
Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems, chapter 5 (selection)
Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Du Bois, W.E.B., “The General Strike,” chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction in America (selection)
Hall, Prince, “A Charge, delivered to the African Lodge”
Heaney, Seamus, “From the Republic of Conscience”
King, Martin Luther, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026)
Lincoln, Abraham, The Second Inaugural
Lord, Audre, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, The Book of Nehemiah
Reagan, Ronald, Speech at Pointe du Hoc, France (June 6, 1984)
Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue, from The Peloponnesian War (5.84-116)
Tocqueville, Alexis de, “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations In Civil Life”
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy’s Great Binding Law
The Declaration of Independence
The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Civic Studies in the Rust Belt: on the tempos of change

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I’m heading home from Dayton, OH. Tomorrow, we’ll go to my hometown, Syracuse, NY for a visit. Each city has lost about half of its peak population of about a quarter of a million people since the later 1900s. The main cause in both cases has been deindustrialization; hardly any factory jobs remain in either city. In both cases, Interstate highways were deliberately built on top of a thriving Black business district (although Syracuse is now finally working on replacing its elevated stretch of I-81). These cities once offered large department stores, opera theaters, and crowded downtown streets. Today, both communities, with their many resilient and creative people, show some green shoots of civic revival.

I was in Dayton for a Summer Institute of Civic Studies that was graciously hosted by the Kettering Foundation; I played a supporting role. This was the 17th Civic Studies institute that I have led or co-led or supported since 2009, They have taken place in many locations, from Ukraine to Mexico. My most recent one was in Kyiv last May. (Among these 17 institutes, I am not counting a one-day class that I offered in Nablus, the West Bank, last November, nor many semesters of teaching similar material to undergraduates ay Tufts.)

The Dayton Summer Institute was one of my favorites, in part because of the location and the fact that our cohort combined several activists from Dayton’s civil society with visitors from far away. Thanks to our Kettering Foundation hosts, we mixed seminar-style discussions of demanding texts with a city tour, a meal in a host family’s home, and other local experiences. And we held relatively sustained conversations about examples of civic action from Dayton, including a food coop and political reforms.

These rich conversations made me think about the many tempos of social and political change.

There is the slow drip of de-industrialization, which removed about 2,500 people from Dayton each year for decades. Many changes happen that way–gradually and then suddenly, as Hemingway said of bankruptcy.

There is an oscillation of progress and regression. Consider Dayton’s history in the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the segregation of many of its institutions, the 1966 riot/uprising, the election of a first Black mayor in 1970, the disappearance of investment and jobs, and even the Trump Administration’s attacks on Haitians in nearby Springfield.

There is the tempo of national and global politics. It is a cliché that change happens rapidly in modern times. Actually, I would describe the political and social order of the USA from 1970-2016 as quite stable, more so than in previous eras. But the last few years have seen dizzying changes, from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump; from Tea Party to MAGA to Black Lives Matter to MAGA to the resistance in Minnesota; and in and out of a global pandemic–with Artificial Intelligence now threatening to change everything again.

There are the life trajectories of human beings, some of whom grow into leaders and elders over many decades.

And the trajectories of organizations. We were honored to visit Dayton’s former 5th Street YMCA. Black men with limited means founded this organization in 1928, at a time when Dayton’s downtown Y allowed only limited and segregated access to Blacks. (They could only swim on Thursday evenings, for example). These men raised the money to construct a fine building that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, with a facade that bears the names of the Daytonian poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and William A. Hunton, a Black man who worked in the national YMCA at the time and helped to authorize this branch.

In those days, Fifth Street was a busy urban corridor of Black business, including two movie theaters and many professional offices. Now it is bisected by an Interstate and largely depopulated, with quite a lot of grass on plots from which the buildings have been removed. But the well-restored former YMCA building belongs to a significant nonprofit organization, Miami Valley Housing Opportunities.

Somehow, we must reserve some of our energy and attention for long, slow processes–helping young people grow into leaders, building organizations, restoring landmarks from previous struggles, and making our communities more inviting–even as we react effectively to the rhythm of daily crises.