The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with... — Herbert Croly

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

Author: Herbert Croly

Insight: There's a useful tension buried in this idea about what it means to actually love your country. It's not just looking backward at what made America work—the institutions, the documents, the hard-won freedoms that came before us. But it's also not just dreaming up some perfect version that doesn't exist yet. Real patriotism, in this view, holds both at once: respect for what's been built and tested, paired with honest imagination about what could be better. Most of us feel this pull without naming it. You might be proud of your town's actual history while also believing its schools could be genuinely excellent, or that your community could actually live up to its stated values. That's harder than pure nostalgia or pure idealism. It requires you to say, "I see where we came from and I believe in that foundation, AND I think we're capable of more than this." This balance explains why the best criticism of institutions often comes from people who actually believe in them. They're not trying to burn things down or pretend the past didn't matter. They're holding up a mirror and asking: what would it look like if we actually meant what we said we were about?

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Honoring the past while imagining better

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

Herbert Croly

There's a useful tension buried in this idea about what it means to actually love your country. It's not just looking backward at what made America work—the institutions, the documents, the hard-won freedoms that came before us. But it's also not just dreaming up some perfect version that doesn't exist yet. Real patriotism, in this view, holds both at once: respect for what's been built and tested, paired with honest imagination about what could be better.

Most of us feel this pull without naming it. You might be proud of your town's actual history while also believing its schools could be genuinely excellent, or that your community could actually live up to its stated values. That's harder than pure nostalgia or pure idealism. It requires you to say, "I see where we came from and I believe in that foundation, AND I think we're capable of more than this."

This balance explains why the best criticism of institutions often comes from people who actually believe in them. They're not trying to burn things down or pretend the past didn't matter. They're holding up a mirror and asking: what would it look like if we actually meant what we said we were about?

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Herbert Croly

Herbert Croly was an American journalist and political theorist, best known for being a key figure in the Progressive movement in the early 20th century. He co-founded the influential magazine "The New Republic" in 1914 and authored the seminal work "The Promise of American Life" in 1909, advocating for a more active role of government in economic and social reform. Croly's ideas greatly shaped modern liberal thought and influenced subsequent political discourse in the United States.

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