CHICAGO — President Joe Biden is a patriot, in any conventional sense of the word. He ended his valedictory speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night with a refrain he’s delivered possibly hundreds of times since he began running for president again in 2019: “We just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. And there is nothing we cannot do when we do it together.”
But Biden’s rhetoric never made the Democratic Party wave the flag as much as it has in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris took over as the party’s nominee. And as she prepares to deliver the most important speech of her life on Thursday night, her version of patriotism — based more on individuals and possibilities than on the strength of American institutions — could help save her party’s presidential campaign.
The liberal patriotism wave started at the rally, where she introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, when she noted two “middle-class” kids from the Bay Area and Nebraska could be president and vice president.
“Only in America,” she said, repeating the phrase three more times.
The story Harris told was not about the strength of American institutions and the need to protect the Constitution, a warning Biden and other Democrats have issued over and over again. It was, as aides previewing Harris’ convention speech for reporters promised, about “her faith in the American people” and “the promise of America.”
This is what seems to separate the patriotism of Harris, and of former President Barack Obama, from the patriotism of Biden. Biden, who has spent more than five decades at the center of the American political establishment and frequently reminisced about the good ol’ bipartisan U.S. Senate of the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to base his faith in America as much in its unpopular political institutions as in its people.
The Harris-Obama version of patriotism seems to be much more politically effective, at least at this moment. It fits into a long history of arguing that inclusivity, acceptance and helping your neighbor are at the heart of being an American. And it’s playing a key role in fighting off GOP attacks on Harris, a Black woman and daughter of immigrants, as somehow foreign.
“There’s something a little extra about Kamala leaning into it because of the way Republicans try to other her as less than American, and that builds a permission structure for people who might otherwise not be the type of person to chant ‘U-S-A’ to lean into it,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist.
While most Democrats would inherently bristle at the idea that they are less patriotic than the GOP, a YouGov poll from earlier this year found that 53% of Americans thought Republicans were very or somewhat patriotic, while only 45% said the same of the Democrats. And polling has often shown Democrats are less likely, for instance, to say America is the greatest country in the world.
Republicans often try to claim patriotism as exclusive to themselves, with flag-waving bordering on ostentatious even as Trump runs down the country and its citizens more often and with more ferocity than any other political figure in recent memory.
“I use the term, oftentimes in closing, ‘We are a nation in decline. We are a failed nation,’” Trump said last week at a rally in Pennsylvania. “And I think it’s a beautiful phrase, though I don’t like the topic very much.”
That provides a clear opening for Harris, Longwell noted: “He’s saying America is a bad place, a third-world country, and the like. And so it is both strategic and fundamentally true for her to push back and say: ‘No, America’s a great place, let me tell you a quintessentially American story.’”
Parts of the left, of course, have long been harshly critical of the U.S., either for its racism or for what they see as its overly militaristic foreign policy. During Trump’s presidency, those critiques grew as liberals searched for explanations for Trump’s victory and behavior. Left-wing protesters outside the convention burned at least one American flag this week, though mainstream Democrats — including Harris earlier in the campaign — have typically condemned flag-burning.
Much of the schedule at the Democratic National Convention seems designed to combat the perception that Democrats and the flag-burning protesters could ever be on the same page. Party officials eagerly shared images contrasting the “USA” signs handed out to convention delegates on Monday night to the “Mass Deportation Now!” signs handed out at the Republican National Convention last month.
On Wednesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) led the delegates in a chant of “I believe in America!” as he crafted an inclusive image of the country. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) pitched a border safety bill he helped negotiate while also portraying accepting immigration as an essential part of the American character. Republicans Geoff Duncan and Olivia Troye portrayed voting for Harris as a patriotic requirement.
But the peak moment of liberal patriotism may have been when Oprah Winfrey generated thunderous “U! S! A!” after saying that electing a daughter of immigrants to the presidency would be “the best of America.”
But if the patriotism pitch from Harris and other Democrats is too cosmopolitan for your tastes, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the party’s vice presidential nominee, presented a distinctly provincial vision of loving your country in his acceptance speech when he recalled growing up in a Nebraska town with a population in the hundreds.
“I’ll tell you what: Growing up in a small town like that, you learn to take care of each other,” he said. “That family down the road — they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them, and they look out for you. Everybody belongs, and everybody has a responsibility to contribute.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are eating it up, thrilled they are finally getting a chance to counter what they see as Trump’s “bastardization” of patriotism, as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore put it.
“We have not just an appetite, but an eagerness to push back,” Moore, a former Army officer who fought in Afghanistan, told HuffPost. “I love this flag so much that I was willing to put my life on the line to protect it. And so I just refused to allow someone who is going to wrap themselves in the flag on the idea that the definition of patriotism means telling people who belongs and who does not belong in the American mosaic.”
On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke to Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, who served seven years in prison in his 20s on a federal drug charge before becoming successful in law and business after getting out. When I asked him about liberal patriotism, his response was more than a bit enthusiastic.
“Where else but America can a person like me, raised by a single mom with six kids, who went to federal prison, came out, worked my ass off, took the Virginia Bar 20 years after law school, passed it, became a partner in a large law firm, run for office, win and then freaking become speaker of the House?” Scott asked.
“Hell yeah, I love America,” he said. “I’d be a fool not to.”
