They should teach patriotism in schools

Public schools have an important civic purpose beyond reading and math.

Children at a Boston public school recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the day. (Photo by Boston Globe/Contributor via Getty Images)

I was at a couple of education events in the spring that all featured very smart, very achievement-oriented people talking about how to address the national crisis in basic reading and math attainment. A common lament was that politicians and pundits are simply not focused enough on the question of whether kids are learning the basics, preferring to fire off hot takes about culture war topics.

This is a view that I very much sympathize with and have articulated over the years.

That said, I’ve also been in a bunch of conversations about things like Noah Smith’s essay on the need for a revival of American liberal nationalism or Jerusalem Demsas’s take about how you have to love America in order to save it.

I broadly agree with these takes. But I also find that they’re a little bit lacking in specificity.

I know that Rob Sand, who’s running for governor in Iowa, does things like open town halls by having everyone sing “America the Beautiful.” A friend described Sand as the Daniel Day-Lewis of politics: He understood quite some time ago that trends in Democratic Party politics were going one way and political trends in Iowa were going another, and he fully committed to a hyper-distinctive post-partisan Iowa-as-fuck persona. He never breaks character, and he not only performs the patriotic ritual, he makes it seem natural.

But if liberals want to embrace American patriotism, that has to mean more than just clicking “like” and “share” on columns that express a second-order thesis that it would be desirable to see more liberal patriotism.