To be a patriot in Donald Trump’s America is like sitting through a loved one’s trial for some gruesome crime. Day after day your shame deepens as the horrifying testimony piles up, until you wonder how you can still care about this person. Shouldn’t you just accept that your beloved is beyond redemption? And yet you keep showing up, exchanging smiles and waves, hoping for some mitigating evidence to emerge—trying to believe in your country’s essential decency.

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Patriotism is as various and complex as the feeling of attachment to one’s own family. It can be unconditional and unquestioning, or else move—even die—with the fluctuations in a nation’s moral character. It can flow from a hearth, a grave, a landscape, a bloodline, a shared history, an ethnic or religious identity, a community of like-minded people, a set of ideas. During his travels through the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville saw American patriotism as different from that of tradition-bound, hierarchical Europe, where an “instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling” connects “the affections of man with his birthplace.” In the young republic, Tocqueville found “a patriotism of reflection”—less a passion than a rational civic pursuit: “It is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen.”

For Tocqueville, this democratic patriotism depends on a belief in equality, inalienable rights, and the consent of the governed—in effect, on the beliefs and actions found in the Declaration of Independence. But that universal creed can’t exist solely in abstract nouns. To mean anything—to survive at all—it requires the participation of the governed as citizens. The purpose of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was to remind Americans that self-government would not endure without the efforts of patriots on its behalf. When ancestry defines national identity, patriotism requires nothing other than allegiance. But the blood of the Union dead and the soil of the cemetery that Lincoln had come to dedicate bore a larger meaning: the liberty and equality of all human beings. Patriotism was the devotion of Americans to these principles, and to preserving them through self-government.

Following the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Stephen A. Douglas tried to limit the truth that “all men are created equal” to one lineage—the original British colonists and their descendants. His Americanism excluded not just the enslaved but the foreign-born. During the 1858 U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois, Lincoln mocked Douglas for defacing the Declaration and excluding half the country’s citizens—immigrants from other lands, whose connection to the United States came not through a bloodline but through the founding itself: “They have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are,” Lincoln said. “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

The words of the Declaration shaped Lincoln’s patriotism and justified his politics.