More important than trolling, though, is the replacement of the intellectual right’s stereotyped All-Americanism with a genuinely ambiguous patriotism. Conservatives don’t hate America, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp recently claimed. But they do worry that things they love about it are threatened. Michael Brendan Dougherty argues in National Review that this mood defines nationalism more than any ideological agenda. To the anxious and irritated, patriotism can’t mean simply endorsing the way things are. It requires active measures to defend what’s being lost.

Ambiguous patriotism is not to be dismissed as backward-looking or obtuse, moreover. Progressives find encouragement in the possibility of a perfected future. Conservatives, almost by definition, seek inspiration from a heroic past. Since neither condition really exists, though, there’s less difference between progressive optimism and conservative nostalgia than meets the eye. Both habits are a way of combining hope for change with the reality of continuity.

The same is true of comparisons to foreign countries. If the past and future elude us, other societies demonstrate the range of possibilities that are available in the present. It’s true but also irrelevant that those possibilities can’t be transferred directly from one location to another. Their existence proves another way is possible. And possibility is necessary to distinguish politics from the grim contemplation of accomplished facts.