Since the advent of television, American presidents have used their farewell addresses to deliver messages that can only come from a chief executive preparing to depart the White House for the final time. These speeches typically seek to recapitulate in the best light the previous four or eight years and use the bully pulpit one last time to conclude a presidency on a note of optimism.
But these farewell addresses frequently contain a word of warning as well. Dwight Eisenhower famously used his valediction to warn of the rise of “a military-industrial complex.” Jimmy Carter spent much of his address reiterating the live threat of a nuclear war. And Ronald Reagan warned that the current “resurgence of national pride” would not last long without what he called “informed patriotism.”
Today is President Reagan’s 115th birthday, which provides an opportunity to take stock of the state of this informed patriotism.
The phrase “informed patriotism” was a considered one: President Reagan’s call was not for cheap jingoism but for love of country “grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge” and informed by an “appreciation of its institutions.” This is consistent with his lifelong view of American exceptionalism as something materially different from American superiority; our exceptionalism stems from the righteousness of our cause and integrity of our institutions, not anything inherent in the American soil.
Regrettably, the national pride of Reagan’s era has dimmed considerably. In 2025, the percentage who said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans dipped to an all-time low in the 25 years that Gallup has been asking this question. A third of Americans told pollsters that seeing the American flag makes them feel bad. The patriotic recession is acute among the young: One in three of those under 35 report they are only a little or not at all proud of their country, and Millennials and Zoomers are far less likely than their elders to believe that America is exceptional among nations.
Nor are Americans particularly well informed. A 2024 survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found majorities of undergraduates ignorant of such basic questions as when the Constitution was written, the substance of the First Amendment, and what’s included in the Gettysburg Address. Last year, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study found that Americans could only answer about half of a battery of basic civics questions. A 2018 report found that most American adults lacked basic knowledge of American history from the Revolution through World War II.
How did we get here? Much of the fault for today’s waning patriotism can be placed at the feet of the American left. A generation ago, the left generally advocated a “warts and all” approach to teaching American history and inculcating informed patriotism; teaching the treatment of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, nativism, and empire was inherent to teaching the story of America. This narrative spent more time dwelling on America’s blemishes than conservatives would prefer, but it placed those deficiencies in the context of a creedal (though few on the left would say covenantal) nation with great aspirations.
A decade into the 21st century, this position has been superseded on the American left by a view of the country as born of an original sin (indeed, many sins) that can never truly be extirpated. The partisan and ahistorical 1619 Project was the apotheosis of this endeavor, though it was hardly sui generis. The goal was not “better-informed patriotism” — it was to salt the earth to make once-fecund ground inhospitable to any patriotic narratives. A misinformed anti-patriotism is the result.
The right is not blameless either. The past decade has seen a resurgence of conservative nationalism (in contradistinction to patriotism) opposing the Reaganite vision, according to which America is not a shining city on a hill and a light unto the nations but a fortress to be judged solely by its strength and ability to bend other countries to its will.
Even more troubling, some influencers of the right — Tucker Carlson being a leading but by no means only exponent — have developed a reactionary gloss on the left-wing view of America as irredeemably lost. Various strains of national conservatism and the dissident right, in adopting the left’s national self-loathing, effectively reject the premise of informed patriotism entirely.
We see these antipatriotic pathologies on the left and right playing out at the fringes of today’s immigration debate. Eight days after his farewell address, on his final full day as president, Reagan famously argued that America was unique among the nations because “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Many on the right who reject informed patriotism seek to redefine Americanness on ethnonationalist lines, denying the idea of a creedal nation; identity-obsessed right-wing discourse about “heritage Americans” aims to create tiers of Americanness. Many on the left are at best equivocal to that creed; some reject or want to destroy it.
In such an environment, what hope is there for the informed patriotism that President Reagan advocated?
More than might appear at first blush. For one, conservatives can reject the bad actors optimizing for social media clicks and payouts and commit instead to reviving the old American civil religion that the majority of our fellow citizens broadly share. Our civil religion thrives under examination, debate, and contestation; this is vital to preventing it from becoming what John Stuart Mill called “dead dogma.” Conservatives should welcome informed and respectful debate not as a challenge to doctrine but as an opportunity to engage a new generation.
Second, we should recognize that aesthetics matter and respond accordingly. Friedrich Hayek wrote, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations”; to the conceptual we can add the symbological. Some patriotic symbols and motifs are timeless; many others are relics of a specific era and read in 2026 as forced, cheesy, or out of touch. The epistemic, linguistic, and hermeneutic institutions of our culture are changing rapidly, which makes the presentation of ideas vastly more important than even a decade ago.
And finally, we will need to develop new institutions to teach informed patriotism, make it an active research project for scholars and intellectuals, and invite Americans of all walks of life into the conversation. The Hamilton School for Civic and Classical Education is perhaps first among many tens of such institutions in the academy developed in recent years; still more projects are operating outside of universities. Some of these may not even be legible as “institutions” to those of us born too early to be true digital natives. We should still applaud them, even if we do not understand exactly what we are applauding.
There is no golden age of informed patriotism to which we can return (and, for his part, President Reagan was in such matters focused on the future). Today and in the coming years, there is much we can do to build an informed patriotism for our future that rejects both triumphalism and self-abnegation.
American patriotism will continue to evolve in its signs, symbols, and stories. This is to the good: It invites a new generation into an ongoing quarter-millennium conversation.
In his farewell address, President Reagan concluded his remarks on patriotism by encouraging children to call out their parents if they weren’t learning at home what it means to be an American: “Let ’em know and nail ’em on it.”
“That,” the president concluded, “would be a very American thing to do.”
This piece was originally published by the National Review on February 6, 2026.