To Love a Country

On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary comes a groundbreaking history of patriotism and the question of how to love a country.

American patriotism is a love that kills. From the nation’s earliest days, it has been used to justify innumerable horrors: slavery, the displacement of Native peoples, the War on Terror, and America’s continuing economic and militaristic imperialism. When left unchecked, it is a dangerous force that rests beneath a mask of innocent and righteous love for country, while sowing division and distorting the very ideals that it attempts to uphold.

In To Love a Country, writer and historian Dominic Erdozain pulls back the veil from this history of American patriotism, exposing the country’s fierce and long-standing tension between its ideals and its realities—contradictions that have for so long obstructed America’s fulfillments of its foundational promises: patriotism vs. justice; manifest destiny vs. shared and equal liberty; isolationism vs. collaborative self-realization. Through strikingly candid storytelling and rigorous research, he reveals how myths like American exceptionalism have led directly to destructive militarism abroad, political repression at home, and the decline of civil discourse and freedom everywhere. He boldly pushes us to reckon with the question of how to be a patriot even when one’s country betrays the very principles on which it is built.

Yet more than an illuminating examination of the past, To Love a Country is also a story of hope for the future. It is a moving reflection on how to maintain faith in the American promise and the responsibility we all share in reimagining a country’s mores through the lens of global solidarity and cultural exchange. By learning from movements that have transcended borders and ideologies—and by listening to the voices of reformers like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi—Erdozain leads the way to a renewed commitment to the values of equality, liberty, justice, and love for one’s country.