Americans have come to know the inaugural address as a patriotic standard, where incoming presidents hold court on civic virtue and set forth a vision of American exceptionalism. From Lincoln’s summoning of “the better angels of our nature” to FDR’s intonation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” to Kennedy’s call to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” the inaugural has functioned simultaneously as an edifying articulation of Americanism and a presidential sermon on democratic citizenship. We look to the address not for policy or ideology but for national self-understanding, an insight into the patriotism that undergirds our democracy.
In the MAGA era of American politics, Democrats staked much of their opposition to Trumpism on the grounds of this patriotism-democracy dyad. President Biden’s 2020 address centered on the imperative to “restore the soul” of America to reclaim our national character, while also defending democracy. The two aims were framed as indistinguishable.
Like Lincoln, FDR and Kennedy before him, Biden used his inaugural address to entwine national mythology and democratic commitments, offering patriotic counsel to “open our souls instead of hardening hearts” following the Jan. 6, 2021 riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
In her campaign for the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris modeled this idiom, indicting Trump for denigrating America, all the while enmeshing patriotic and democratic commitments. “We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” Harris professed in her DNC speech, casting American citizenship as “the greatest privilege on Earth.”
Among the reckonings necessary in the wake of Trump’s reelection is the jettisoning of this notion that patriotism and democracy are synergistic.
It is not just that the Biden-Harris conception of patriotism failed to persuade voters in the 2024 election cycle. More crucially, Trump’s iteration of patriotism — one severed from democratic commitments — is more historically resonant. We admire ennobling narratives of American nationhood, but our admiration is misplaced. Defending democracy going forward requires wrestling with the ways in which patriotism is indifferent to democracy. Unwittingly, perhaps, Trump got American patriotism right.
America’s patriotism has a Puritanical provenance that lends it restive energy and moral animus. Many recall President Ronald Reagan’s invocation of the Puritan John Winthrop’s 1630 prophecy that America can be a “shining city upon a hill” in his 1989 farewell address. In this address, Reagan lamented the atrophying of patriotism among America’s youth. He worried that Americans under 35 had not come of age with teachers who care to impart the wisdom of founding fathers. He offered a stern rebuke of Hollywood screenwriters who, after the upheavals of the 1960s, no longer tell Americans inspiring stories of their country.
Against these educational and cultural elites, Reagan implores decent American families to renew patriotism through “civic ritual” at the dinner table. Reagan’s knack for sunny optimism notwithstanding, the address was foreboding, replete with a fear of national degeneration.
The Winthrop sermon from which Reagan drew, titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” seared American patriotism with unrelenting premonition. Winthrop understood the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for which he served as governor, to have enacted a covenant with God. God chose Puritan settlers for an “errand in the wilderness” that would bring God’s grace and Protestant virtues to bear on the New World.
Before there was an independent United States of America in 1776, the public theology of Puritan settlers had set Americans apart as an elect people with a providential mission. This biblical notion of peoplehood — Puritans modeled themselves on the ancient Hebrews — bound America to moral righteousness. A new Jerusalem and unique among nations, American patriotism was never merely a matter of love for political ideals or loyalty to political institutions. Rather, patriotism raised the question of fidelity to God.
Puritan origins gave American patriotism anti-democratic dimensions that reverberate in MAGA politics today. Winthrop’s covenant with God necessitated incessant consternation about the membership and morality of the body politic. He decreed that no one be admitted to the polity except church members and true believers. Massachusetts Bay needed to be on guard against adulteration from without. Just as important, though, was warding off God’s ire, which was sure to strike when the community’s moral rectitude inevitably lapsed. Thus, Massachusetts Bay also needed to direct its scrupulous gaze inward, in search of the wayward in its midst.
Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign modeled these sensibilities. MAGA’s panic about immigration, for example, always exceeded legal and policy concerns, conveying a venom toward immigrants as people who place an undue burden on the character of American society. And the Trump campaign’s laser-like focus on transgender people exhibited all the hallmarks of the Puritan penchant to identify moral rot within. Even “Make America Great Again” — the axiom of Trump’s patriotism, first used by Reagan — announces a renewal project Winthrop would be familiar with.
Many observers were put off by the darkness of Trump’s First inaugural address, flummoxed by his assertion of “American carnage,” a departure from the hopeful, soaring notes struck by previous presidents. But “American carnage” is of a piece with Winthrop’s eschatology, wherein a perennial contending with decay is the first step toward redemption.
In the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign, Harris held rallies with Liz Cheney, explaining their shared patriotism as love for the Constitution and the rule of law. But the rudimentary elements of liberal democracy Harris and Cheney sought to defend owe their existence to a distinct political lineage — one incommensurate with patriotism.
The social contract at the basis of liberal democracy, first developed by modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, makes universal rights, not moral character, the crux of membership in the polity. Thus, it conceives of political community as institutionalized cooperation, not as the practice of collective fealty. Indeed, the very concept of civil liberties, which liberal democracies alone nurture, presupposes a civic doubt that is fatal to Winthrop’s project — doubt that my God, my morality, my speech, or my country is uniquely righteous.
What facilitated this ill-conceived fusion of odes to American exceptionalism and pronouncements of democratic principle? We’ve been able to skate by on faulty premises only because America has steadily — albeit through fits and starts — democratized itself since the Civil War. But now, the success of Trump and MAGA has exposed what were always divergent political logics.
While we shouldn’t expect politicians to stop offering paeans to patriotism, we might do more to force the history of democratization into our arid discourse about democracy’s defense. From abolition onward, through antiwar agitation and civil rights struggles, America’s democratizing movements have found it necessary to contest conventional framings of democratic life, like that which understands democracy as an outgrowth of patriotism.
Our discourse on democracy’s defense undercuts its own rationale if it fails to draw insights from the movements that facilitated its achievement.
Maxwell G. Burkey, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at Kean University.
