During the 1980s, Republican President Ronald Reagan and liberal House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-Massachusetts) had plenty of political disagreements yet were genuinely fond of one another. Reagan sometimes criticized O'Neill from a policy standpoint; other times, they found common ground. Yet Reagan never questioned O'Neill's patriotism.
In a think piece published by the conservative website The Bulwark on Monday, retired U.S. Army Gen. Mark Hertling — a scathing critic of President Donald Trump — lays out the contrasts between the "patriotism" of 2025 and Reagan's view of "patriotism." And he warns that today's "patriotism" is a tribalist perversion of what Reagan considered patriotic during the 1980s.
"When Ronald Reagan delivered his farewell address in January 1989," Hertling explains, "the nation expected a reflection on the Cold War's end or on the conservative movement he had shaped. Instead, he focused on civic memory — on America's tendency to forget its own story. Patriotism, he said, had to be 'informed,' grounded in a clear understanding of what America represents in the long history of the world. Without that grounding, the country would lose its way."
The former U.S. Army Europe commander continues, "More than three decades later, that warning feels less like a rhetorical flourish and more like an unheeded alarm. Patriotism in today's America often bears little resemblance to what Reagan described. While our citizens still express deep patriotic feeling, many cannot explain the ideas that give those feelings meaning."
Reagan, Hertling recalls, "viewed patriotism as resting on memory, humility, and shared civic purpose."
"In this understanding," Hertling argues, "love of country requires knowledge of country, the nation's triumphs must be recognized alongside its failures, and democratic citizenship is not inherited but learned. That understanding cannot be transmitted through slogans or symbols alone. It requires deliberate, sustained, and honest teaching and related learning — about the documents, struggles, sacrifices, and aspirations that define the United States."
Hertling emphasizes that far-right rhetoric about who is and isn't a "real American" is a perversion of old-school Reagan conservatism.
"The values that once served as a unifying expression of civic behavior often become a means of dividing 'real Americans' from everyone else, masking personal grievance under the banner of national pride, or disconnecting patriotism from civic responsibility," Hertling laments. "This version demands no understanding of our history, no exhibition of humility, and no grounding in the values that first shaped the nation and guided our actions. It rewards noise over knowledge, identity over ideals, and show over principle…. Informed patriotism is not the easiest path, but it is the only one that will lead us back to the country we claim to be."
Former U.S. Army Europe Commander Mark Hertling's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.