Beyond Political Thought:

Culturing a Love of Place and People

By Aaron Zubia
May 6, 2026

This essay is part of a symposium answering the question: “What is patriotic education?”

Liberal education points students toward the love of truth. Patriotic education points students toward the love of country. We may love several aspects of both the truth and our country. We may love both the abstract truths of math and philosophy and the particular truths of history and botany. We may love our country both in terms of its abstract principles and in terms of its particular past, places, and people. Attention to both the abstract and the particular is necessary to a patriotic education.

Too often, the study of America in our colleges and university emphasizes the abstract at the expense of the particular. Even in the hands of educators who are themselves patriotic, such education occludes part of the truth and can prove anti-patriotic in effect. Educators should therefore provide students with models of Americans whose writings and careers testify to love of place and love of the American people in their particularity, which allows us to both see America more clearly and love it more completely.

Sir Herbert Butterfield wisely stated that men “make gods now, not out of wood and stone, which though a waste of time is a fairly innocent proceeding, but out of their abstract nouns, which are the most treacherous and explosive things in the world.” When we reduce American life and American history to abstract nouns, such as equality, freedom, and social justice, we tend to heighten passions, exacerbate polarization, and promote intolerance, by encouraging students to villainize the opponents of their preferred cause.

We can do better than this. Russell Kirk said that “abstractions” are “valueless, or else positively harmful, unless they are defined and related to particular persons and institutions.” Patriotic education should begin where the Constitution begins: with “We the People.” It should begin with particular people inhabiting a particular place and seeking to govern themselves, justly, before God.

Too often, however, a typical class on American political thought might begin with the abstractions contained in the Declaration of Independence, move on to Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass, and culminate with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This narrative tends to focus on the abstraction “equality” as the goal of American life. More often than not, this narrative will train students not to cherish their constitutional order, but to seek to transform it by engaging in activism to achieve their favored goal.

To see how, consider a course on American political thought for which I served as a teaching assistant at Columbia University, a dozen years ago. The professor was a self-proclaimed “unreformed Marxist.” On the first day of class, he told the students they would read all primary documents, and filter all American history, through the frame of “immanent critique.” That critique would deploy that abstract principle of equality to reveal the internal contradictions within the American system and show how America could only achieve her ideals by being transformed.

The syllabus read like this: White American males vs. natives; White American males vs. blacks; White American males vs. women; White American males vs. immigrants. The logic was evident: America can only fulfil its stated ideals when it overcomes its inegalitarian history of racism, sexism, and imperialism.

One student approached me after that first day of class. He said he did not want to take a class that would make him hate America. I told the student I had no control over the content of the syllabus, but that I loved America. And I would be there every class period. That was not enough. He left. Among the students who stayed, I will never forget, was one who during the final review session said that he had lost hope in America when he discovered that Abraham Lincoln himself was racist.

To remedy this, a patriotic education should balance the overreliance on abstraction and immanent critique by directing students towards those individuals who loved their particular homes, regions, and communities so dearly that they worked, wrote, and sacrificed to enhance the moral, spiritual, and political health of their country. These figures can teach us what it means to join a shared enterprise of self-government. They can teach us what success in self-government looks like. And they can inspire us to join such a venture.

This American story of self-governance actually begins with the Puritans, long before the Declaration of Independence, as Tocqueville observed. Patriotic education should devote ample teaching time to early American documents, such as colonial charters, and the writings of John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Roger Williams, and William Penn. Patriotic education should also extend the timeline of the American story beyond the 1960s to incorporate more recent thinkers, including Robert Bellah and Christopher Lasch, who do not fit neatly onto the left-right political spectrum and who blend an appreciation of America’s past with a thoroughgoing respect for her people and her culture.

Patriotic education should inspire students to emulate Americans who, by their writings and examples, cherished their country. Jane Addams, for example, loved Chicago and devoted herself to the people who lived there. The novelist Willa Cather’s love for the American Midwest and Southwest seeps through each of her sentences. The Southern agrarians loved their region and its rich civilizational heritage. The same applies to Walker Percy and Louisiana, Wendell Berry and Kentucky, and, going back in time, Nathaniel Hawthorne and New England. Martin Luther King, Jr., roused the black church and appealed to the conscience of all Americans to take “the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers.” These writers produced stories, speeches, and essays that explored what it means to be American in particularly American places. These writers thus deserve a central place in patriotic education.

Such writers can help us broaden our conception of civic education beyond political thought, which so often emphasizes abstraction. When choosing whom to teach, we should prioritize authors who are distinguished by their studied dedication to place and people, not just those who focus on ideas, such as the idea of rights, which is part of our tradition, but not nearly the sum of it.

Like the love of truth, patriotism is an attitude. It is love of an inherited order—the ongoing adventure of a particular people with the abstract principles it holds dear, as well as the concrete attachments to places and persons we would never wish to see reduced to abstractions.

The brilliant American novelist Henry James lived most of his adult life in England. But he wrote to a friend: “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful side.”  One cannot come to understand a country by using its own principles to make it look ugly. When we see a country as place and people with many particular beauties themselves worthy of our attachment, we can hold our abstract principles as they ought to be held – as one aspect of a complex story that we are fortunate to continue.