Who loves America?

There’s a reason Democrats have reclaimed patriotism

On one side, the Democratic National Convention was a celebration of America. On the other side, the Republican nominee for president once again praised Vladimir Putin, suggested that he is OK with Russian aggression in Crimea and urged the Russians to spy on his behalf. And no, it wasn’t a joke.

Some Republicans feel as if they’ve fallen through the looking glass. They’re the ones who chant “USA! USA! USA!” And they’ve spent years suggesting that Barack and Michelle Obama hate America? How did Democrats end up looking like the patriots?

The parties aren’t really experiencing a role reversal. When President Obama declared Wednesday that “what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican,” he was fibbing. It was very Republican. For the “fanning of resentment” that Mr. Obama decried didn’t begin with Donald Trump, and most GOP flagwaving never had much to do with true patriotism.

What does it mean to love America? Surely it means loving the country we actually have. I don’t know about you, but whenever I return from a trip abroad, my heart swells to see the sheer variety of my fellow citizens, so different in appearance, cultural heritage and personal stories, yet all of them — all of us — are Americans.

That love of country shouldn’t be uncritical. But the critiques you offer should be about the ways in which we don’t live up to our ideals. If what bothers you about America is, instead, the fact that it doesn’t look exactly the way it did in the past (or the way you imagine it looked in the past), then you don’t love your country — you care only about your tribe. All too many influential figures on the right are tribalists, not patriots.

We got a graphic demonstration of that after Ms. Obama’s speech, when she spoke of the wonder of watching her daughters play on the lawn of “a house that was built by slaves.” It was an uplifting and, yes, patriotic image, a celebration of a nation that is always seeking to become better, to transcend its flaws.

But all that many people on the right heard was a knock on white people. “They can’t stop talking about slavery,” complained Rush Limbaugh. The slaves had it good, insisted Bill O’Reilly: “They were well fed and had decent lodgings.” Translation: Whites are their tribe and must never be criticized.

This same tribal urge underlies a lot of the right’s rhetoric about national security. Why are Republicans so fixated on the president avoiding the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” when experts on terrorism agree that doing so would hurt national security by helping to alienate peaceful Muslims?

The answer is that the alienation isn’t a side effect they’re disregarding; it’s the point. It’s all about drawing a line between us (white Christians) and them (everyone else), and national security has nothing to do with it.

Which brings us back to the Vlad-Donald bromance. Mr. Trump’s willingness to cast aside our nation’s hardearned reputation as a reliable ally is remarkable. So is the odd specificity of his support for Mr. Putin’s priorities, which stands in stark contrast to the vagueness of everything else he’s said about policy. And he evades questions about his business ties to Putin-linked oligarchs.

But what strikes me most is the silence of so many leading Republicans in the face of behavior they would have denounced as treason coming from a Democrat — not to mention the active support for Mr. Trump’s stance among many in the base.

What this tells you is that all the flag-waving and hawkish posturing had nothing to do with patriotism. It was about using alleged Democratic weakness on national security as a club with which to beat down domestic opponents and serve the tribe.

Now comes Mr. Trump, inviting a foreign power to intervene in our politics — and that’s OK, because it also serves the tribe.

So, if it seems strange that Democrats now sound patriotic while Republicans don’t, you weren’t paying attention. The people who now seem to love America always did; the people who suddenly no longer sound like patriots never were.