Why are Americans losing their patriotism? And what’s the answer to regaining it? 

National pride dipped to a new low this week. Just 58% of Americans said in a June Gallup poll that they are either “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American. While the record plummet is largely due to a drop in pride among Democrats from last year, numbers among younger citizens are dropping as well. Generation Z’s (those born between 1997 and 2012) responses hit a new 41% low.  

According to Yoram Hazony, Americans are raised to scorn their heritage and their responsibilities to it. The solution lies in the faction of conservatism called “national conservatism” and its ordering of individuals’ principles and duties. 

The president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Society, Hazony is a prominent political theorist and biblical scholar. In a conversation with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Hazony discussed the landscape of American loyalty and its urgent need for resurrection.  

“Nationalism is a political theory. It’s a theory of political order … about how the world would best be governed,” Hazony said. “The nationalist movements across the West [are about] returning [to] the idea of national independence, national sovereignty; the freedom of peoples to live according to their own traditions, their own religious understanding, but also their constitutional traditions and their own political and economic interests.” 

“If you’re an American conservative, then nationalism is at the very founding,” Hazony insisted. “Conservatism in America should just always be nationalist, and you shouldn’t have to say it.”  

The need for a clarification by pairing nationalist with conservative, however, arises from a vast confusion among Americans who have adopted the ideals of liberalism, which Hazony calls conservatism’s enemy. 

“Liberalism has been about abandoning everything but the freedom, everything but individual liberties, everything but equality,” said Hazony. “The only value, or … the supreme value, is the liberty of the individual. … It’s liberty from tradition; it’s liberty from being a conservative. It’s liberty from having to give honor to your own traditions—and in America, Christianity and especially giving honor to the constitutional founding.” 

Hazony added, “There are so many people today who say this is not relevant anymore. And the reason they think that it’s not worth conserving is because we’ve raised them as liberals.” 

The antidote to that liberalism, suggests Hazony, is honor, which is rooted in a denial of the “radical equality” liberals will sell. Though it sounds radical, Americans must realize the special honor owed to certain persons precisely because they are not one’s equal. 

That honor begins in the home and should be taught in the family. “Conservation and transmission is a skill,” Hazony said. “And what’s happened is that that skill has itself evaporated.” 

“Liberalism [is] a theory of, ‘Let’s tolerate other people and not persecute them. Everyone is absolutely equal. Everyone’s perfectly equal.’” Hazony criticized that way of thinking: “You teach all the kids from the time they’re small: ‘No, you’re perfectly equal to everybody. So, then they start saying, ‘Okay, so I’m perfectly equal to my parents.’” 

Hazony painted the ideal: an honor bound in the religious traditions of the family and education begun and maintained by the parents and rooted in close-knit, proximate communities where tradition is alive. 

Ending with a rallying cry for marriage and the joy of children, Hazony said, “I don’t know how to express this to you, that the payoff for investing in giving honor, going to church, getting married within the church [is] that you’ll bloom and flower in old age. … The reality is beyond what you can imagine.” 

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