Two Concepts of Patriotism: Nationalist and Civic

media release: This special event with professor Desmond Jagmohan (University of California, Berkeley) is part of  “1776/2026: The Declaration at 250”, a year-long series of campus events and public conversations. It is presented in collaboration with the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice.

This talk reconstructs two competing ideas of patriotism in American thought: a civic, aspirational tradition and a nationalist, adversarial one. The nationalist tradition, dominant among conservatives, rests on a declension narrative, a fall from grace answered by calls to make America great again, and thrives on threats from real or imagined enemies; it has become so dominant that patriotism is now widely seen as nationalism. The civic tradition, by contrast, sees the Founding as an unfulfilled promise, as in Lincoln’s moral reading of the Declaration or Douglass’s reading of the Constitution as antislavery, and calls Americans to struggle for a more perfect union rather than long for a lost golden age.

Desmond Jagmohan is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, with a focus on the politics of the oppressed. His first book, Dark Virtues: The Tragic Realism of Booker T. Washington (Princeton University Press, February 2027), examines the politics of deception under Jim Crow. He is at work on two new projects: Three Traditions of African American Political Thought, an intellectual history spanning 1850 to 1970, and A Duty to Remember: Slavery and the Ethics of Memory. In 2026, Jagmohan received the the University of California, Berkeley’s  Distinguished Teaching Award, the institution’s highest honor for teaching, which only 233 faculty members have received since 1959. Before joining UC Berkeley, Jagmohan was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He also served in the US military before and during his undergraduate at Northeastern Illinois University.   

“1776/2026: The Declaration at 250”: This year-long series of campus events and public conversations offers historical, literary, rhetorical, and political-theoretical interpretations of what this document means a quarter millennium after its signing. Recent 1776/2026 events included a conversation with Colleen Shogan, former Archivist of the United States, on pluralistic democracy in a partisan age, and the Freedom Seekers Symposium, which shared stories of Black liberation in the American Revolutionary era and beyond. 1776/2026 is a program of the Paul Martin Wolff Center Paul Martin Wolff Center for American Thought, Culture, and Society, with additional support from the College of Letters & Science and the Center for the Humanities. Dr. Jagmohan’s visit is additionally part of The Civics Lab, supported by The Wisconsin Exchange program.