A Conservative Can Love His Country Without Worshiping the Government

Two sentences. Say them out loud and see if they feel the same.

"I love my country." "I love my government."

Every politician in history has wanted you to treat those as one sentence. Every dictator has insisted on it. Every tyrant who ever wrapped himself in a flag was counting on you to blur the line, so that criticizing him would feel like spitting on your mother's grave. The founders of this country spent a good part of their lives proving that the two sentences are different, and that the first can be true when the second is false. They rebelled against a government they had every reason to be loyal to, and they did it in the name of their country.

So let me draw the line clearly, with history to back it up, because it is about to matter. The nation's 250th birthday, on July 4, 2026, will bring parades, speeches and a great deal of flag-waving, and it is worth knowing what the flag-waving is for.

What a country is

Start with the definition, because arguments go wrong when they start with slogans. A country, as conservatives understand it, is not a government. It is a people, living in a particular place, bound together by a shared inheritance of language, law, memory, customs, faith, and the graves of those who came before. Edmund Burke, in 1790, called the first principle of public affection the love of "the little platoon we belong to in society," the family, the neighborhood, the town. From there, he said, one climbs to the love of country. It is a love that grows outward from home.

George Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796, wrote that the name of American, which belongs to the citizens in their national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any name derived from local differences. He wanted a bond that stretched over regions and parties. But look at what he was asking people to be proud of: the shared identity of a free people, not the personnel of the executive branch. In the same address he warned against the spirit of party, against permanent entangling alliances, and against an overgrown military establishment. A man who loved the country enough to warn it about its own government is a patriot.

Government, by contrast, is a tool. It is the set of institutions a people creates to secure their rights, and under the Declaration it derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. People hold office for a while, and then they go home. If you tie your love of country to the officeholder of the moment, your patriotism will rise and fall with every election, and one of your neighbors will be a traitor every other November.

The oath tells you who we serve

Here is a piece of evidence that gets too little attention. Consider the oaths Americans swear. The President swears, under Article II, Section 1, that he will "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Members of Congress, state officials and judges take an oath under Article VI to support the Constitution. A soldier's oath of enlistment promises to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

To the Constitution. Not to the President, not to a party, not to a person. That is a deliberate choice. In 1934, soldiers in the German armed forces were made to swear a personal oath to Adolf Hitler by name, and a generation of loyal professionals found that they had pledged themselves to a man. The American oath is the reverse: the loyalty is to a set of rules and to the people they protect, and the officials who hold power are bound by them as well. For the broader principle, see Equal Under the Law Means the Rule Applies to the People in Charge.

Lincoln's warning at the Lyceum

If you want the best statement of what patriotism requires, read the speech that a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln gave to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1838. It was called "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions." The occasion was a wave of mob violence in the country, including the killing of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, in November 1837.

Lincoln asked where the danger to the country would come from. "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?" he asked. "I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad." No foreign army, he said, could take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a thousand years. "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Then he said what the remedy was, and it is not what a modern ear expects. He did not call for reverence for rulers. He called for reverence for law. Let reverence for the laws, he said, be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, seminaries and colleges; let it become the political religion of the nation. The thing to be revered was the rules that bind everyone alike, the rule of law, and not the men who might be in office when the rules are tested.

Lincoln also issued a warning to the ambitious. He said that the most dangerous men in a free republic are those with a towering genius who will not be satisfied with a place in the existing order, who thirst for distinction and will find it, "whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen." Patriotism, in his sense, is partly a defense against exactly that type: the citizen who loves the country too well to hand it over to a man who loves himself more.

The Pledge: a short history

Let me use the Pledge of Allegiance as a case study, because everyone knows the words and few know the history.

The Pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a minister and editor who worked for a magazine called The Youth's Companion, to be recited by schoolchildren at the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage. The original text read: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Notice what it pledges to: the flag and the Republic for which it stands. It was a pledge to a form of government, a republic, not to a ruler.

The wording changed over time. In the early 1920s the phrase "the Flag of the United States of America" replaced "my Flag," and Congress gave the Pledge formal recognition in 1942. On June 14, 1954, Flag Day, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a law adding the words "under God" during the Cold War, when America wanted to set itself apart from a government that officially denied any higher authority. The addition has been argued about ever since, and the argument is a fine example of how a free people fights about its symbols without anyone going to jail for it.

The case that proves the point: Barnette

Here is the part that conservatives, of all people, ought to cherish. In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, the Supreme Court decided West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. The West Virginia board had required public school students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge, and expelled the children of Jehovah's Witnesses who refused on religious grounds. The Court, in an opinion by Justice Robert Jackson on June 14, 1943, struck the rule down.

Jackson wrote: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." That is the heart of it. A state that forces patriotism has missed the point of patriotism. Love cannot be compelled, and a pledge extracted at the price of expulsion is not a pledge. We tell the full story in West Virginia v. Barnette and the Flag Case That Protects Every Parent.

This is the very thing that separates a free country from the other kind. In a free country, you can refuse the salute and remain a citizen. In an authoritarian one, the salute is the test of whether you are one.

Patriotism and nationalism: how conservatives draw the line

You will hear the words "patriot" and "nationalist" used as synonyms or as insults. Conservatives who think carefully distinguish them, and George Orwell, no conservative, gave the best-known formulation in his 1945 essay "Notes on Nationalism." Patriotism, he wrote, is devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people; it is defensive by nature. Nationalism, by contrast, is inseparable from the desire for power. The patriot wants to defend home. The nationalist wants his group to win, to dominate, and to be proved right whatever the facts.

I would put it in three tests:

1. Is the object of loyalty a thing you can love, or a thing you must obey? The patriot loves a place and a people. The statist worships the apparatus.
2. Can you admit a fault? The patriot can say we got it wrong and we must make it right. The nationalist treats every criticism as treason.
3. Does it need an enemy? A healthy patriotism can celebrate home without hating the neighbors. A bad nationalism needs someone to hate in order to feel anything.

Note that these are tests of an attitude, not of a party. Both the right and the left produce people who confuse the country with their favorite part of the government. The conservative tradition, at its best, resists that temptation.

The objection: doesn't patriotism excuse national sins?

This is the strongest objection, and the honest way to meet it is to admit the history. A country that loved itself uncritically once defended slavery. A country that waved the flag enforced segregation. If patriotism means "my country, right or wrong," then the patriot is the first to look away.

But that is not the patriotism I am describing. Senator Carl Schurz said it best in a Senate speech in 1872: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." The great American critics were patriots. Frederick Douglass stood up in Rochester on July 5, 1852, and asked what the Fourth of July meant to the American slave, and it was one of the most searing indictments of the country ever delivered, but he delivered it as a man who held that the principles of the Declaration were true and the country was betraying them. Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, spoke of slavery as an offense for which the nation was bearing divine judgment. Martin Luther King Jr., in August 1963, told the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial that the founders had written a promissory note, and that America had given its Black citizens a bad check. Each of them loved the country enough to demand that it live up to itself.

That is the answer to the objection. A patriot who cannot criticize is not a patriot. He is a flatterer. And the love that criticizes honestly, using the country's own standards, is the kind that actually changes things. See Douglass Called the Constitution a Glorious Liberty Document and Meant It for how Douglass came to that position, and Civil Discourse Is Not Surrender, and Lincoln and Scalia Prove It for how to argue in that spirit.

What it means for your Fourth of July

As the 250th anniversary approaches, here is the conservative approach. Fly the flag. Sing the anthem. Take your kids to the parade, and teach them the stories of the people who made the place. And then, on the walk home, teach them the distinction: we honor the country, we respect the law, and we hold every officeholder, of any party, to the oath he swore. That is not disloyalty. It is exactly what loyalty looks like in a republic. A good complement is The Founding Ideas in Order, From Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, and for the document that says why we cannot be ordered to love anything, see Where Rights Come From, and Why the Declaration Says So First. Eisenhower's own parting caution in Eisenhower's farewell address gave two warnings and Republicans remember one comes from the same tradition.

The bottom line

• Love of country is loyalty to a people, a place and an inheritance. Loyalty to a government is conditional on that government keeping its oath.
• Americans swear their oaths to the Constitution, not to a leader. Lincoln's Lyceum Address named the remedy for decline as reverence for law, not for rulers.
• The Pledge began in 1892 as a pledge to the Republic, was revised in the following decades, and in Barnette in 1943 the Court held that nobody may be forced to say it.
• Test your own patriotism: can you love the country and criticize the government, admit a fault, and celebrate home without needing an enemy?
• Fly the flag on July 4 and hold your officials to their oath on July 5. Both are patriotic acts.