How many times has someone brought the curtain down on a conversation about U.S. politics with: “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” Countless times, in my case.
This admonition always comes in response to an unfavorable opinion of U.S. policy or of worrisome declines in any number of measures of American morality, standard of living, competitiveness, standing in the world.
You hear it at protests: “Leave if you don’t like it.” And then there’s the president, accusing everyone whose reporting he doesn’t like of being an “enemy of the people”.
This always leaves me wondering: Am I, a U.S. citizen and a lifelong believer in our national aspiration, doing this wrong? Am I required to love America in some way that I don’t, to be part of the political conversation? What does “loving America” mean, anyway?
There are many things I love about the United States, but we all know that the nation is profoundly and woefully imperfect, like the citizens who have and continue to shape it, a civic enterprise in constant evolution. The Founders knew that — some might say that the Constitution they penned somehow foresaw this — and anyone who is paying attention knows it.
America is a working theory. Along the way, some elements are proving successful, and some — I think it’s clear — are not.
I love this country for our diversity and public lands — from the Grand Canyon to Hither Hills. I love it for its glorious patchwork of uniquely American cultures — from Gullah to Creole, Lakota to Bonac. I love it for the writing and the art — from Salter to Didion, Wyeth to Katz. I love our music — from Doc Watson to Miles Davis.
I love America for recognizing and addressing its tortured history. I love it, as Emma Lazarus’s poem so beautifully says on the Statue of Liberty, for opening its arms to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” I love it because by opening its arms, America bristles with innovation, industry, entrepreneurship, ambition, creativity and potential. I cherish the stories of Red Cloud and Black Elk as I love the words of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ll root for the USA in sports most of the time. And I still cling — cling is the word — to a belief in the arc of history and the yearning for improvement.
But none of that means I love America above all or above constant and serious reproach. Our belief and confidence in the fairness and potential of America, but also our deep disappointment and anger, fuel the drive as citizens and patriots.
Not everyone has to see America in the same way. Being a critic is good for the nation, only, of course, if you also show up by voting, by serving, by volunteering in our communities, by protesting, by speaking up — in other words, by whatever means you are able.
Over the next few days, we will frequently hear, likely from the president himself, that “we are the greatest nation in the world,” or some version of this. Why do we say this in America? Is this the expression of the love that I am missing?
One would think that this would only be bugled from the soapboxes of a nation where a college education and healthcare come with citizenship, where upward economic mobility (also known as the American Dream) is surging, where national budgets are running in balance, where countless toxins — common in the American food system and environment — are banned, where infant mortality rates are lower, where racism and transphobia and homophobia are fading, and so on. But that is not America — yet it is true of many other nations.
America’s greatness, like all greatness, lies in a desire to constantly improve, to recognize shortcomings and continue to grow. Not in blind enthusiasm for a flawed nation.
Behind everything that’s wrong about America, there is something noble and beautiful. Our history is punctuated by huge acts of true greatness. The United States was the first large-scale constitutional republic with laws to protect individual liberties. We Americans declared the then-radical moral premise — and truthfully only aspirational at that racist, patriarchal time — that all people are “created equal” with “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our troops were pivotal in defeating the Nazis and the Japanese Empire, and the U.S. government, backed by American citizens, organized and financed the massive and historic economic recovery of Western Europe after the war.
Stirring and pivotal, America morally corrected its historical, racist flaws and aligned its legal system with the foundational promise of the Declaration of Independence during the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s.
Those were all great acts of unquestionable humanity. But they do not make us the greatest. To believe so is to stifle the immense work that needs doing still. It is precisely because we know our tortured history and we can see how we are failing still that so many hear the unquestionably patriotic call to make America kinder, more generous, more thoughtful, more ennobling.
The Constitution itself is a reflection of our flaws and greatness, a document both brilliant and imperfect, even as it laid out our guiding principles 238 years ago. As the essayist Arthur Krystal wrote recently, “Is the Constitution perfect? Far from it. ‘We the People …’ meant the signers — not women, not the poor, not the uneducated, not the enslaved. In 1788, political standing belonged entirely to white men with property, money or schooling. Nonetheless … the Founders did something remarkable. They gave us the framework intended to ‘form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.’”
We Americans disagree on so much, fiercely and, in some terrible cases, violently. For many of us, it is a bewildering moment for rah-rah 250th Independence Day patriotism: a seemingly senseless war; deep cuts to basic human needs — education, health, food assistance — here in America and in American aid abroad; a fierce turn away from protecting our natural world; a deliberate and unnecessary whitewashing of our racist, violent history and present. There is more.
All of which makes it so important to look back now at this historic juncture with full honesty. To see America through the eyes of the descendants of slaves and Indigenous peoples, of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, of Africans and Central and South Americans fleeing despots, desperation and warfare, and everyone else — the Irish and Italian and Poles and all the other Europeans and Asians and South Asians and eastern Europeans — who landed here with nothing but hope.
So, yes, we love America. But we love it, recalling always that we have been high and we have been low, and we have emerged and learned and risen from all of it.
We all belong here. We all deserve to dream.
— Biddle Duke The Southampton Press, East Hampton Press, Sag Harbor Express, July 4, 2026