Sam Haselby

Sam Haselby is a historian and a Senior Editor at Aeon. A Columbia PhD, he was a postdoc at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a faculty member at the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo. His The Origins of American Religious Nationalism came out in paperback in 2016 and has been widely reviewed. 

These Should Be the End Times for American Patriotism

Exceptionalism has always been core to American patriotism, and American exceptionalism is no longer tenable.

Sam Haselby
By Sam Haselby
Alice Butler-Short, a supporter of Virginia Republican Senate candidate Ed Gillespie displays her American flag shoes while she waits for poll results at the election night party at Embassy Suites hotel in Springfield, Va., Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Patriotism is the organising passion of modern political life in the United States yet its vitality defies obvious explanation. The country has no national education system. There’s neither compulsory military nor civil service. No government agency distributes the ubiquitous US flags, nor enforces observance of the rituals to country performed at

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