By Jon Guze

I’ve been trying for some time to explain what appears to be a paradox. On the one hand, political polarization has become increasingly intense. On the other, policy differences between Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly muddled, and politicians have been increasingly willing to move from one party to the other.

The explanation, I’ve decided, is that Americans are no longer primarily divided by political ideology, party affiliation, or even along racial, religious, and ethnic lines. Instead, what divides us at the most fundamental level is how we feel about our country. Some of us hate America and think it needs to be radically reconstructed. Others love America and want it to flourish.

We didn’t always disagree about such things. When I was growing up in Missouri in the 1950s and ’60s, patriotism was like the air we breathed. It was all around us, and we took it for granted. We saluted the flag and sang patriotic songs at school and the national anthem before sporting events. We flew the flag proudly outside our homes, businesses and institutions, and we treated it with respect. We listened to patriotic music; we read patriotic books and comics; and we watched patriotic movies and television shows. Yes, there were bitter and sometimes violent conflicts over race, religion and ethnicity, but whatever else we were, we were all Americans and proud of it.

It came as a shock, therefore, when I got to Harvard in 1968 and discovered that, far from being proud to be Americans, many of my fellow students, and even some of my professors, took a distinctly hostile view of our country. At first, I thought they simply objected to certain aspects of American culture and American policy, particularly the war in Vietnam, which was raging at the time. However, I soon realized it was more than that. They didn’t just think the Vietnam war was a mistake. They were rooting for the other side.

Lots of students hung posters of Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung on their dorm-room walls and dropped references to neo-Marxist theorists like Herbert Marcuse into their conversation. One of my professors, a world-famous philosopher, could sometimes be seen handing out Marxist tracts in Harvard Square. One classmate left for Cuba to help with the sugarcane harvest. Another disrupted our graduation by jumping out in front of the podium waving a Viet Cong flag.

I eventually realized that all these people had internalized the Bolshevik theory of history that had been promoted by the Soviet Union for many years. They saw the world and everything that happened in it as a struggle between good and evil, i.e., between the progressive and liberatory forces of socialism led by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and the oppressive and imperialistic forces of capitalism led by the United States.

To be fair, only a minority of the people I met at Harvard were fully committed Marxist revolutionaries. Committed or not, however, almost everyone I met took it for granted that socialism was inherently good; that capitalism was inherently bad; and that America was, on balance, a force for evil in the world.

I suppose they can be forgiven for buying into such nonsense at that time. After all, the book that opened my eyes to reality of life under communism, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, had only been published in 1968.

It’s much harder to forgive the educated elite for continuing to embrace important parts of that nonsense even as the Soviet Union collapsed; China abandoned socialism and welcomed western corporate investors; and the world learned the full extent of the crimes against humanity committed under Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. While they stopped valorizing the USSR and the PRC, they continued to disparage America’s history, culture, traditions and institutions. They also continued to encourage people to think of themselves, not as Americans, but as members of oppressed racial, ethnic and sexual groups.

By the time of Barak Obama’s second term, anti-Americanism had become the dominant way of looking at the world, not just in academia, but in the media, in the big corporations, and — of course — within the Democratic Party.

What few realized at the time what that anti-Americanism had not become the dominant view elsewhere in the country. Millions of ordinary Americans who hadn’t attended elite universities and who didn’t reside in big coastal cities remained stubbornly patriotic. To his credit, Donald Trump did realize it. Hence the slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and hence his success in 2016 and again last year.

At least some on the left seem to have woken up to the new political reality. In last year’s election, the Harris campaign tried to distance her from the anti-Americanism that she and the rest of her party had embraced for so long. From her point of view, it was too little, too late, but it may be that the Democrats will continue to move in that direction in the years to come.

I don’t suppose we’ll ever return to the ubiquitous, casual patriotism that prevailed when I was a boy. But maybe we can at least agree that America is, on balance, a great country and work together to make it an even greater country in the years to come.