On Patriotism And Starving The Soul Of A Republic

On an October morning in the 11th grade, I was suspended from school for being a libtard. I was very much into punk music that year and used the brown paper cover of my U.S. history textbook to let everyone know. In black Sharpie, I decorated the book cover with drawings of skulls, crosses, and skulls with mohawks, and a clever, if immature, phrase: “Bush? Dick? It sounds like we’re getting fucked.” My teacher, who had a beard and wore elbow patches on his tweed jacket, noticed this inelegance, tore it off the book, threw it in the trash, and sent me home for the day to think about my behavior.

I look back on this with no small amount of cringe, the kind that tickles your back teeth and sends your brain hunting for a delete button. It’s only mild comfort to remember the cliché: if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re older, you have no brain. But the fact remains, as a young man, I looked at the nation and its leader, George W. Bush, and found little to be proud of.

Afghanistan and Iraq ate the man alive. Whatever else he did, whatever he actually got right, never had a chance to break through. What I heard instead was war, and I didn’t have the historical context to place any of it on a spectrum that runs from mildly projecting the imperial security state to fully embracing it. America looked like a project happening overseas, in my name, without my permission, and as a result my patriotism took the hit.

It’s easy to forget how young this country is when you’re standing inside the most powerful one on earth. But look at how we talk about our own greatness, and the age shows. In a 2025 YouGov Poll, Americans were asked to name the greatest American, and the responses were politicians and political activists exclusively. Washington. MLK. Trump. Ask an older country the same question, and you get a different kind of list. England’s version still put a politician on top, Churchill, but ranked highly right behind him were an engineer, a scientist, and a playwright: Brunel, Darwin, Shakespeare. France wasn’t any different. Their 2005 poll crowned de Gaulle, then followed him with a chemist, a slum priest, a physicist, and a comedian who fed the poor: Pasteur, Abbé Pierre, Curie, Coluche, and the novelist Victor Hugo.

We’re young, and maybe we haven’t yet learned how to brag about ourselves in any language but politics. I hope that changes. I also hope we learn to find our pride in our writers and musicians and farmers and scientists instead of whoever’s currently in office. But that isn’t true yet, and that should worry you most when you look at what it’s doing to our young men.

If a nation’s pride runs mostly through its politicians, a politician’s failure becomes the nation’s failure, and no one is feeling that more than the young men who were sold patriotism as loyalty to a man rather than love of a country. It isn’t showing up as a clean party switch, either. A recent Yale Youth Poll found young men are now the most politically unsettled group in the country, splitting close to evenly on the 2026 ballot, with a real share saying neither party has them. Some are drifting toward the Democrats. Some are drifting further Right, into something colder and more online, a politics with even less use for the word “patriotism” than the one they’re leaving. A lot are simply checked out. The generation Trump’s movement counted on most is now the least sure about which side it’s on.

You don’t have to look hard to see why. As the president bumbles from one mistake to the next in Iran, gas, diesel, and groceries are getting more expensive back home. A year ago the conversation was about this country, its borders, its people. Now it’s foreign policy again, and the domestic agenda gets absorbed right into it. What breaks through, unless you’re paying close attention, is the president’s desire to remake Washington in his own image: a ballroom, an Arc de Triomphe. A triumph over what, I’m not sure. But young men have no use for ballrooms.

Last week, Dr. Francis Fukuyama was at Butterworth’s to discuss his latest book, a memoir titled “In the Realm of the Last Man.” Like all great writers, the onstage conversation ended up being more about his greatest work than his latest, and he fielded any number of questions about “The End of History and the Last Man.”

Thirty years ago, Fukuyama worried that liberal democracy might win the argument and still lose something in the process: a place for thymos, the part of a man that wants to be recognized, to struggle, to be greater than the comfortable life a stable, prosperous republic hands him. Satisfy the body, he warned, and starve that part of the soul, and it does not simply go quiet. It goes looking for an outlet, and it is not always particular about which one it finds.

Trump rose to office on thymos. In a stroke of real political genius, he pointed young men’s hunger for struggle straight at the republic’s own oldest aims: peace, prosperity, greatness. He gave them a mission and called it patriotism, and they signed up. They took heat at work for him. They got frozen out of friend groups for him. They stuck by him through it all because they wanted to be patriots, because the country was worth the cost. But two years into his second term, tangled in the same foreign traps that swallowed Bush and Carter and most leaders before him, the mission has gone slack. Into that gap step the Democrats and their Hezbollah-like splinter cell, the DSA, more than happy to point these young men toward a different kind of struggle for their country. Just yesterday, at the U20 mayors summit, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani told the crowd the Left had ceded “quality of life,” “efficiency,” and “fraud and waste” to the Right, a message lifted straight from the president’s own playbook, aimed at exactly the voters who feel Trump’s mission lost the plot.

Forty-two days to the midterms, and things look bleak for the president and his party. Every poll says young men are about to sit this one out. Maybe we’ve earned that, for letting our focus drift once again from republic to empire. I just hope someone is smart enough to read the tea leaves and walk into 2028 with a message about this particular country and its particular, great people. And I hope they mean it. 

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Bart Hutchins is the chef and owner of Butterworth’s in Washington, D.C. He’s on X @whiteguyfieri.

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