On July 4, I wrote about Ezra Klein’s conversation with Bryan Stevenson, and what it means to love America despite its faults.
Stevenson’s statements at the close of the conversation have stayed with me.
Klein: So — what does it mean to love America? To believe in it? To choose it?
Stevenson: I — in some ways, I think it’s, for me at least, kind of the wrong question. “Do you love America?” — it feels like a question created as a kind of litmus test.
I can understand that reaction, and even without knowing Stevenson, I’m sure it’s authentic.
But their conversation was about reclaiming American narrative. That’s a political project, and politically, that litmus test absolutely exists. Love of country has always been important to Americans, and for many it’s a real factor in choosing leaders. MAGA, and the party it swallowed, has claimed it — in performance, though certainly not in action. They’ve bound their base together in a belief that the other side doesn’t love the country, and they’ve reaped the electoral benefits.
There’s a perennial tension in democracy: focused leadership in the midst of disagreement. Getting things done takes direction and sustained effort, but how is that possible when everyone has a mind and voice of their own? Deep persuasion happens on a scale of decades while elections happen every few years, and consensus is (and should be) rare in a free society.
The moderate solution is to seek compromise and sacrifice ambition. That can keep the peace and get things done for a while, but it can’t deliver breakthrough progress. Eventually, people get tired of sensible stagnation.
The ideological solution is to refuse compromise and even persuasion. Often, that leads to electoral irrelevance, but when the stars align for ideologues to make it into office (e.g., when people get tired of moderates), they can alienate some portion of the public, deepen divisions, and rarely make sustained gains.
Sometimes, ideologues turn into moderates once they get into office. Sometimes, they become autocrats. And of course, the autocratic solution is to repress dissent.
One way or another, none of these solutions is really a solution. They create cascades of dysfunction, division, and stasis, and that’s precisely what America has had throughout this century.
There is another, more difficult solution: visionary leadership. With ambition and action, leaders can bring along those who disagree — not immediately persuading them, but getting their permission to advance an agenda. Inspiration can stand in for persuasion, at least for a time.
But of course, visionary leadership is extraordinary, and not one in a hundred leaders can do it. It takes the imagination to see the world we could have, the eloquence to make the public want it, and the tenacity and resourcefulness to navigate the obstacles that history always places before progress. I haven’t seen it in my lifetime.
That is the context in which I hear that conversation and Stevenson’s comment, because reclaiming narrative is essential to the visionary leadership we need.
I think about this moment from The West Wing sometimes:
One of the President’s reelection strategists polls on where the first family should have Thanksgiving dinner, and the President upbraids him for politicizing a private family matter. The advisor counters that he will never miss a chance to pick up even the smallest bit of momentum, particularly when it costs nothing.
We are in a fight to recapture the nation’s imagination, if not to persuade everyone today then to inspire them to give us the space to lead. And the job ahead is enormous: not merely to stop the MAGA rampage, nor even to reverse the damage, but to get to work preparing the country for the century ahead. We have to mobilize the nation to finally take climate action and drive an energy transition, to advance civil rights at home, to expand our economic capacity and put it to work taking care of our people, and more. We can’t make sustained progress by retreating into our base. We have to bring the whole country along, and in that we cannot afford to lose, as the advisor puts it, even half a knot of boat speed.
And so we cannot afford to elegantly evade the question of patriotism. We can see it as an inappropriate litmus test, but failing it is a self-inflicted wound. We sap democratic energy from our work by leaving doubts about our patriotism, instead of turning the question back on people who weaken the nation at every turn.
That’s not to say we should pretend. Patriotism can’t be merely instrumental. I don’t want anyone to profess a love of country they don’t feel. What I want is leaders who truly feel love of country, who recognize it as compatible with and even essential to the progress they want to make, and are willing to fight to claim this narrative ground.