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But Smith is not concerned with the Left alone. He also aims his fire at the ascendant nationalist right. Smith explains that “Nationalism is an excess of patriotism that holds an absolute attachment to one’s own way of life—one’s country, one’s cause, one’s state—as unconditionally good and superior to others.” Nationalism, argues Smith, is exclusionary: “It does not just celebrate uniqueness but turns it into a principle of difference and opposition. Patriotism draws on an entirely different emotional register.” Nationalism is driven by a conception of us vs. Them, while patriotism simply entails a love of us. The patriot does not need an enemy, an “other.” The nationalist does.

American nationalism—and its need for the binaries of “us” and “them”—is uniquely unhelpful and dangerous given our realities of pluralism and diversity. As Smith writes, “pluralism is an inescapable fact of modern political life,” particularly here in the United States. The nationalist mode of thinking is not conducive to dealing with that inescapable fact. Smith concludes: “Nationalism is not patriotism’s exact opposite but a deformation of the patriotic spirit. Patriotism is closer to civic piety—a form of civic bonding over a life in common—than nationalist self-assertion.” Piety entails acceptance but “by no means an uncritical or complacent one.” And this is where Smith’s concept of American, “enlightened patriotism” really comes into view.

If patriotism is a form of loyalty to what is ours, then what is ours as Americans is not only geography, or culture, or language. It is also a set of principles. Hearkening back to Alexander Hamilton’s famous lines in Federalist No. 1 on Americans’ unique opportunity to found a government on “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” Smith writes that “American patriotism requires more than a common ancestry rooted in a common place. It requires reflection on the principles to which our loyalty is given.” After all, “What distinguishes American patriotism from that of Germany or Japan is that America is a creedal nation based on an idea.” Thus, at the core of American patriotism “is this idea of reflection and choice.”

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This exceptionally American, principled patriotism has textual touchstones—namely, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And it is argumentative: What our principles are and their real-world, substantive upshot are matters of dispute. Taking part in these arguments over the meaning of the Constitution,

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