July 4th of this year marks the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and I am bracing myself for an overwhelming effusion of patriotic fervor. Given that Trump loves to wrap himself up in the flag (all while he and his family and cronies are looting the country), we can be sure that event will be even more disgustingly over the top than if someone sane was president.

As an immigrant to the US, I was struck by how so many Americans talk about patriotism and view it as an unalloyed good. Some immigrants become hyper-patriotic, perhaps to show that they really do belong here.

It is not that the concept of patriotismwas foreign to us in Sri Lanka. But it was not as pervasive. I recall that at a time of economic hardship, people were urged in the name of patriotism to grow more food and learn to live with less. As part of this movement to create patriotic feelings, movie theaters started playing the national anthem at the start. I remember feeling the pressure to stand up for it even though such gestures seemed merely performative. I now regret having done so.

I later abandoned the idea of patriotism altogether when I saw how the government used it to promote agendas that served its own interests and not those of the people at large. I now despise the entire concept of patriotism (and have written so many times in the past). I totally agree with Leo Tolstoy who wrote the following:

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power. And as such it is recommended wherever it is preached. Patriotism is slavery.”

But Americans, even those who realize how problematic it can be, still struggle to find a formulation that they can latch on to because to say that one is not patriotic seems unthinkable.

Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ursula K. Le Guin distrusted it. Samuel Johnson called it “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Leo Tolstoy likened it to slavery. Jorge Luis Borges initially felt that “there is no end to the illusions of patriotism,” noting that “Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon.” Years later, perhaps feeling adrift, Borges begged his gods to send someone or something into his life. “They did,” he wrote. “It is my country.”

George Orwell was kinder than most. Patriotism, he wrote, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.” The problem was nationalism, which he maintained was “inseparable from the desire for power.” The line between these terms, however, is porous. Attachment to a parcel of land can easily harden into isolationism, jingoism, and racism. “It is lamentable,” Voltaire observed, “that to be a good patriot one must often become the enemy of the rest of mankind.” More recently, the philosopher Richard Rorty capably defended patriotism, whereas Martha Nussbaum continues to seek its curtailment.

Much as I like Orwell, I think his description is hardly persuasive. To believe that “a particular place and a particular way of life … to be the best in the world” makes no sense since where one is born into is purely due to chance. It seems like a form of vanity to think that one’s arrival into some country suddenly makes that place the best in the world.

Patriotism also depends upon lying about one’s country’s past, imbuing it with grandeur and nobility, and its founders and former leaders with virtues that they did not possess.

Flag-waving patriots may believe otherwise, but our recoverable past isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It never was. The historian David Lowenthal reminds us that America manipulated its archives from the very beginning. When Charles Thomson, the longtime secretary of the Continental Congress, was asked to publish his notes—some thousand pages’ worth—he initially agreed, but then burned them instead. “I shall not undeceive future generations,” he reputedly explained. “I could not tell the truth without giving great offense. Let the world admire our patriots and heroes. Their supposed talents and virtues . . . will serve the cause of patriotism.”

Fortunately, patriotism is on the outs, especially with younger people. Usually wars are the vehicle by which leaders rouse up patriotic fervor but the war with Iran has failed to do that.