What is it about patriotism in the United States? Conservatives tend to declare their fealty proudly and denounce, even persecute, those who do not likewise pay tribute to country, especially during wartime and presidential elections. Liberals tend to work tirelessly to rescue patriotism from serial abuse and offer a sanitized, healthy version of it. Neither seems ignorant of the dangers involved. Conservatives actually embrace and convert these dangers into strengths, or at least crudely effective political weapons; liberals think they can be minimized or skirted altogether. Conservatives insist that politics suffers from patriotism's dearth (or enemies); liberals believe that politics suffers from the wrong kind of patriotism. For both, however, patriotism is the (or part of the) answer to the manifold problems liberal democratic orders face.

Jan-Werner Müller enters the patriotism arena to offer a constitutional version, carefully positioning it as a third way between liberal nationalism and cosmopolitanism (pp. 8–9). The task is daunting. In an age characterized by the movement of vast numbers of people across borders for economic and political reasons, social formations from the United States to the European Union confront difficult issues stemming from increasing complexity and diversity. The stakes could not be greater; political stability and civic empowerment are implicated, and integration hangs in the balance.

Constitutional Patriotism will not be ignored. While Müller concedes that constitutional patriotism engenders doubt and detraction, he deals with the principal objection, that it is too abstract and thus “bloodless,” deftly. This is not to say that constitutional patriotism lacks faults—far from it. Müller affirms that it is nothing if not Janus-faced. His theoretical triumph, however, may prove, in the end, to be curiously nominal.

The author locates the “origins” of constitutional patriotism in West Germany, though it is a theory that can “travel.” It involves, first and foremost, attachment to “the norms, values and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal democratic constitution” (p. 1). What makes Müller's effort compelling—an effort indebted to Rudolf Smend, Dolf Sternberger, Karl Loewenstein, and Jürgen Habermas, among others—is its reflexive ambivalence (p. 61): “Constitutional patriotism itself has occasionally to be revised and refined in light of further development and refinement of the principles at the heart of our constitutional regime” (p. 61). The political project is thus “always open and incomplete” (p. 61). Moreover, constitutional patriotism can avoid the shortcomings of liberal nationalism and traditional modes of patriotism, since it serves as a source of “civic empowerment, dissent, and—at the limit and as a kind of litmus test—as a justification for civil disobedience” (p. 49). Constitutional patriotism, then, finds its distinctive voice not in relation to the state and its veneration but in civil society and its protean capacities for transparency, engagement, contestation, and self-overcoming.

As to constitutional patriotism's ability to animate and inspire citizens with necessary affect, no need to worry. It combines universal political principles with what Patchen Markell terms “supplements of particularity” (p. 10). That is, the universal can take shape only in specific historical settings, with particular institutions and practices (p. 65), all of which it needs for local inflection. We become attached and thus “loyal” to a polity through a history of political involvement, support, approval, criticism, and revision. We shape and are in turn shaped by a constitutional culture. Constitutional patriotism involves more than rational attachment, but also more than simple pride. It encompasses a range of emotions, including anger, shame, indignation, guilt, and spiritedness (p. 62). It is interesting to note that love, usually the very heart of patriotism, finds no presence here. Still, one West German version of constitutional patriotism features a potent combination of memory and militancy. This coupling makes sense given Germany's political history. Remembrance of the Holocaust would serve as a negative example of the dangers of nationalisms and patriotisms past, which must never be repeated. Militancy would entail active policing of democracy's enemies so that they cannot use democratic means for decidedly nondemocratic ends and turn democracy into a suicide pact.

Militancy concerns Müller even as he recognizes the dubious history of liberal constitutional regimes. The United States certainly has a past. State and society have waged persistent wars, since the first Adams administration, against forms of speech and action deemed subversive, dangerous, foreign, untimely, or un-American. Müller cites McCarthyism as but one example. Can this kind of troubling specter be definitively exorcised from constitutional patriotism? No; that would be demanding too much. Questions of loyalty are always fraught, and even a liberal constitutional polity and culture can turn illiberal. Besides, as Rousseau once remarked, if the people are determined to harm themselves, who has the right to stop them? Nevertheless, constitutional patriotism represents the best response to the ills that might accompany it. This may be its cardinal virtue. Thus, the author is not unduly troubled by the possibility of “political witch-hunts” (p. 66) for those deemed somehow lacking in the right civic stuff. After all, what do those who raise this historical phenomenon as a counterpoint expect from politics? His constitutional patriotism is a wager (and he makes it an attractive one), not an insurance policy: “Democratic politics is risky” (p. 85).

Insofar as Müller's theoretical project flirts with risk, one might wonder why he insists on using the mantle of patriotism to adorn his robust political vision of life in a liberal democratic society (or, in the alternative, why he does not pursue a tragic line of thought, like Simon Stow). After all, Müller's reflexive constitutional culture and politics succeed on their own terms. He aspires to a vision of democratic citizenship at its participatory agonistic best, a vision that does not need the language of patriotism, to say nothing of its admitted burdens, to carry it along. Unless, that is, he is determined to prove that reflexive democrats are all constitutional patriots now, or at least should be, whether they know it or not or whether they choose to describe themselves as such or not. In one form or another, it is as if there can be no meaningful political life without patriotism. Respectfully, I disagree.