Ironic detachment isn’t high on my list of worrisome problems the United States faces. But those who worry about such things ought to identify the real culprits. They shouldn't blame the zeitgeist, or the education system, or the modern media.

They ought to blame patriotism-baiters, or those who try to gain an illegitimate advantage in political debates, electoral campaigns, and legislative fights by acting as though the side one takes indicates how much one loves the United States. In recent history, the most glaring example of this dishonorable tactic was the governing majority’s decision to label controversial changes in national security policy passed after the September 11 terrorist attacks “the USA Patriot Act.” Lots of people who love the United States regard the Patriot Act as an abomination. I regard certain of its provisions as a stark betrayal of America’s founding ideals. (I think Thomas Jefferson would sooner burn an American flag than endorse it.) As the word “patriot” came to be associated with the Patriot Act, the word’s connotation changed, yet conservatives aren’t upset with the patriotism-baiters who are responsible. They favored the legislation, so they were happy to exploit the concept of patriotism to pass it and benefit politically from doing so.

The passage of the Patriot Act is hardly the only instance justifying cynicism about those who irrationally invoke patriotism in political debates. Longtime readers of National Review will recall an infamous column by a prominent Iraq War supporter that charged opponents of an invasion of acting from unpatriotic motives. Nor are conservatives alone in patriotism-baiting. Here’s a Daily Kos contributor arguing that conservatives are unpatriotic in part because some of them opposed federalizing airport security. Stepping back, American and world history is rife with examples of bad actors distorting and exploiting the patriotic impulses of the masses. Unthinking patriotism has contributed to millions of horrific deaths. The impulse to temper it with skepticism is a healthy one, and going too far in that direction has never resulted in any calamity.

A final reason for the backlash against uncritical patriotism is the tendency of those who invoke American exceptionalism to blind themselves to U.S. misdeeds. It is one thing to believe that America’s history and founding principles are exceptional, and another thing—deluded and profoundly unconservative—to believe that the U.S. is inoculated against acting badly, or is justified in doing things that Americans would condemn if anyone else did them.

Throughout its history, millions of Americans have betrayed the ideals of the Declaration in various ways. Almost always, those bad actors did so while waving the flag, posing as patriots, or viciously impugning the patriotism of their critics. Most Americans are perfectly willing to concede that description applies to champions of slavery, advocates of genocide against Native Americans, the shameful internment of Japanese Americans, Jim Crow defenders, and McCarthyists. They cannot and do not deny unsavory parts of U.S. history, and even celebrate contemporaneous critics of those policies as patriots. As they see it, Martin Luther King, to take one example, was a great American patriot.