“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain
Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country, argues that there’s a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn’t love their country, Erdozain says. It’s not a good place.
His argument is that American patriotism has the same Puritan root as British imperialism. The idea of a chosen people, a city on the hill, a nation with a special mission is a kind of moral virus. He says it infected America in the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided moral cover for slavery, military aggression abroad, and the denial of rights at home.
So what America needs, he argues, is a new set of foundational myths laid out by progressives like Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. This would establish a new kind of American patriotism which is forward-looking and internationalist rather than nativist or exceptionalist. Erdozain even gives Gandhi a shoutout as a model of American patriotism, although one wonders what the Indian pacifist would have made of this.
So what will the Atlanta-based Erdozain be doing on July 4? Hiding under his bed, perhaps, rather than enjoying the hotdogs and fireworks. In hiding from hundreds of millions of patriotic Americans.
Five Takeaways
• The Puritan Root of American Exceptionalism: The idea of America as a chosen people, a city on a hill with a special mission to the world, was not invented in America. It was inherited from English Puritanism. As it spread through the first and second great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — what some scholars call the New Englandization of America — it became the canopy under which very different kinds of people sheltered. You didn’t have to be a Puritan in any theological sense. You just had to accept the premise that America was righteously exceptional. And once you accepted that, a great deal of scrutiny became unavailable.
• Nationalism Is Immune to Failure: One of Erdozain’s sharpest observations, via historian Lindsey O’Rourke’s work on American interventionism: nationalism can absorb any amount of failure. The defeat in Vietnam, the disaster of Iraq, the failure of Afghanistan — a certain kind of nationalism insulates itself from the lessons these events might teach. It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s always a particular administration’s failure, never the national premise. This makes exceptionalism uniquely resistant to the ordinary mechanism of democratic accountability.
• Randolph Bourne and the Patriotism of the Future: Erdozain’s most original historical recovery: Randolph Bourne, a radical journalist writing during the First World War, who argued that nativism and nationalism were European imports, backward-looking and derivative. Bourne’s phrase: “we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” A patriotism faithful to the diversity of modern America — its bustling pluralism, its immigrant energy — cannot be built by looking backward to the founders. It must be built by looking forward to the founders we have not yet had.
• Alternative Founders: Addams, Douglass, Garrison, King: Erdozain proposes replacing — or at least supplementing — the canonical founders with a different cast. Jane Addams, who said the question is not what can we teach the bewildered immigrant but what can we learn from them. Frederick Douglass, who held America to account for its foundational promises. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. Martin Luther King Jr., who went to India to learn about nonviolence from Gandhi. These are the people, Erdozain argues, who offer a patriotism adequate to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century America.
• JFK’s Strategy of Peace: The Possibility of Reinvention: Erdozain ends the book with Kennedy’s strategy of peace speech at American University in June 1963 — two months before his assassination. By then, Kennedy had come to believe that the impetus for war was coming from within his own country, from his own military and CIA, not from the Soviets. His speech — conceding nothing to communism as an ideology, but immensely generous about the Russian people and about Khrushchev as a leader — is Erdozain’s model for what reinvention looks like. The Bay of Pigs taught him something. By the end, he was talking about Vietnam as not America’s fight. Lessons can be learned, even in office, even at the last moment.
About the Guest
Dominic Erdozain is a historian and writer, graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, and visiting professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America (Crown, June 2, 2026) and One Nation Under Guns. He grew up in Preston, Lancashire, supports Liverpool FC, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
References:
• To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America by Dominic Erdozain (Crown, June 2, 2026).
• Randolph Bourne — radical journalist and critic of American nationalism during the First World War. His phrase “our American cultural tradition lies in the future” is the book’s central provocation.
• Jane Addams — co-founder of Hull House, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Referenced as an alternative founder.
• JFK’s Strategy of Peace speech, American University, June 10, 1963 — the closing argument of the book.
• Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — directly referenced at the opening.
• Episode 2923: Joe Cunningham on Life of the Party — directly referenced at the opening.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
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