Why I Feel Particularly Patriotic This Fourth of July

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

This Fourth of July I find myself feeling more patriotic than I have in years. That may strike many people as strange, even tone-deaf, given the political moment we are living through. I understand the reaction. Yet the feeling is genuine, and it rests on two convictions that have only grown stronger over the two decades I have lived in this country.

I arrived in the United States more than twenty years ago as an immigrant drawn by the same things that have drawn millions before me: the promise of American science and technology, and the promise of American freedom. My father, a professor, was a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He regularly told me stories about them, and ones about Jefferson and Edison and George Washington Carver. World War II was another huge interest of my father’s, and he vividly communicated to me the storming of the beaches at Normandy, the dogged resistance at the Bulge, the decency of American GIs in dealing with enemy combatants. Later, when I was in high school and college, I found myself laughing until I cried while reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”. And reading Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” became a turning point. It told the story of brilliant scientists – Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe – who fled fascist Europe and found in America a beacon of freedom and opportunity. Those images were deeply inspiring. America was deeply inspiring.

When I came here to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry, then postdoctoral work, and eventually a career as a scientist, I carried that picture with me. Over time I built a life and a family here. Now, as I teach my own children about the same heroes my father taught me, I also try to give them American history in full – its flaws, its failures, its betrayals, and its stubborn, unfinished promise. Importantly, I tell them that this country is not great because it has no flaws, but that it is great in spite of those flaws – and that the same is true of the men who founded it. There is no contradiction between loving your country and acknowledging its flaws. What is wrong is in believing that those flaws make your country irredeemable and steeped in original sin.

Twenty years later, after everything that has happened in between, I remain as hopeful about this country as I was on the day I arrived.

That hope is not based on any illusion about the current state of our government. We are living through a period in which longstanding norms of institutional restraint have come under significant pressure. There has been a willingness to challenge or circumvent traditional limits on executive authority, including the separation of powers between branches of government. One of the major political parties has increasingly prioritized loyalty to the president over its independent role as a check on power. In addition, several appointments to senior positions have gone to individuals with unusually limited experience in the areas they oversee, or with personal histories that would have made them unlikely choices in previous administrations. These trends stand in contrast to the greater emphasis on institutional guardrails and competence seen under presidents such as Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Truman, and Kennedy.

But the government of a country is not the same thing as its people. The most important reason I remain hopeful is that I continue to encounter a critical mass of citizens who still care deeply about the place, who love it without needing to pretend it is perfect, who are welcoming to newcomers, and who want it to remain both free and capable of progress. Such people have always existed, even in the darkest chapters: during the Revolution itself, through the Civil War, through the excesses of McCarthyism, through Vietnam, through the Iraq War, and through every other period when the country seemed to be testing the limits of its own better nature. This moment is no different in that respect. The vast majority of Americans are decent people who simply want the best for themselves and for their country. I encounter these people every day in all walks of life. I encounter them in California and New York City and the Midwest and the Deep South, where I took a long road trip last year and was enriched by everyone I met, even when I disagreed politically with them. I even encounter them on that much dreaded, supposedly partisan hell – social media. They want to be good neighbors and responsible citizens. The minority that actively works against these ordinary, decent impulses is usually small. What makes it seem larger is that it is vocal and its voice is disproportionately amplified, especially through social media. That is precisely why it matters to hear the quieter sentiments of the majority – and why those of us who belong to that majority should perhaps stop being quite so quiet ourselves.

Even after two hundred and fifty years, the basic architecture of the American experiment remains remarkably compelling. The American Constitution is still the oldest written national constitution in continuous use, and it continues to guarantee freedoms – most notably the freedoms of religion and of speech – that do not exist to the same degree in many other democratic societies even today. Over two hundred and fifty years, it has been the inspiration for several dozen constitutions around the world, both in word and in spirit. Even after being amended and attacked and buffeted by the mighty winds of history, the basic freedoms guaranteed in that remarkable document have stayed intact. It might have temporarily frayed but has never fallen. That foundation alone is worth defending and renewing.

There is a deeper reason for hope and patriotism as well. The present crisis is forcing a renewed confrontation with the founding principles of the republic. The American experiment was born in explicit opposition to concentrated and unchecked power. The men who declared independence and then fought a war against the king did so because they believed that no individual, however powerful, should be permitted to place himself above the law or to treat the institutions of government as instruments of personal will. That argument has not become obsolete. We are, in our own way, reliving a version of the same contest. The weapons this time are not muskets but ballots, courts, state legislatures, and civic institutions. The underlying question – whether a free people can still restrain the concentration of power, whether from within or without – remains the same. If the founders could see what is happening now, I suspect they would recognize the pattern immediately; knowing their beliefs, they might call the coincidence providential. They would see executive power being asserted in ways that bypass institutional checks, a political movement that has largely abandoned its role as an independent check on that power, and a citizenry once again forced to decide whether it will defend the constitutional order against the accumulation of authority in one person. They would also see that the principles they articulated in 1776 and 1787 are being tested rather than abandoned. That test, painful as it is, is itself a reaffirmation that those principles still matter enough for people to fight over them. The story of America is, perhaps more than that of any other nation, a story of renewal, and this is yet another season of that renewal.

Disappointment with the state of the country often comes from an unspoken assumption that the American experiment should have reached some fixed state of perfection by now. But the very word “experiment” signals that this was never the intention. The country was designed as a work in progress – a house that is never finished, whose continued construction and improvement is entrusted to each new generation. The very fact that the Constitution was written to be amended showcases a nation forever in flux. When viewed this way, the fact that we have not arrived at some mythical completed perfection is not a failure. Fighting new fights is what is expected of us; it is simply the nature of the project. The task is not to reach a final destination, but to keep building toward a better state. Perhaps the greatest danger right now is not the political crisis itself, but the temptation to give in to pessimism which has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people decide that the country is already lost, they will stop doing the hard, patient work of defending its institutions and improving its character. The opposite is also true: the belief that progress is still possible can itself turn that progress into reality. As the Preamble puts it, the work of this republic is to form “a more perfect Union.”

For an immigrant who came here because he believed the story of American self-government was still worth believing in, there is something clarifying, even liberating, about living through such a test. It strips away complacency. It makes the stakes visible again and reenergizes us. It makes us feel connected through a long thread to Washington and Jefferson and Adams who now expect their voices to speak through our efforts. And it reminds us that the country was never meant to be a finished product handed down from one generation to the next. We were drawn to it, and we remain drawn to it, not because it represents perfection but because it represents promise.

That ongoing work is why, on this Fourth of July, I feel not resignation but a renewed sense of belonging and excitement. The United States is still the place that drew my father’s admiration and my own youthful ambition, and it continues to be the envy of millions around the world. It is still a place where the fight over its founding principles is worth having. And it is still a place where enough of its people, across every region and background, continue to believe that those principles are worth defending. For those reasons, I remain glad to call myself an American, and glad to be raising my children so that they, and their children, will carry that argument forward. Far from feeling lost on this fourth of July, I feel a sense of elevated pride and patriotism. So, let us continue.