On N.S. Lyons and the Love of a Nation

What Liberalism Forgets, What It Remembers, and What It Must Recover

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

Some people have been telling me that I need to read N.S. Lyons. That he is a serious conservative philosopher worth my time. So on a flight back to Los Angeles today, I found myself reading “Love of a Nation.” It's a long piece. And I have thoughts.

Lyons offers a critique of our political moment that contains genuine insight. His primary claim—that today's elites view nations as mere “economic zones” rather than communities deserving love and loyalty—rings true. When Ramaswamy calls for more “math tutoring” and “fewer sleepovers” to make American children competitive in global markets, or when Musk compares America to a “pro sports team that has been winning for a long time,” they reveal a profound misunderstanding of what a nation actually is.

Lyons is right: a nation is neither a corporation nor a sports franchise. It's not primarily an economic unit, and its citizens aren't just human resources to be optimized or replaced based on productivity metrics. The transactional, utilitarian framework that dominates elite discourse does violence to the deeper bonds that make political community possible. When leaders view themselves as managers rather than stewards, something essential is lost.

Here, Lyons and I find some tenuous ideological communion. The market fundamentalists and techno-libertarians are divorced, in my opinion, not just from “love of nation” but “love of humanity” itself. Their reduction of human beings to interchangeable economic units, their willingness to discard communities in service of efficiency, their belief that all value can be expressed in market terms—these represent not just a failure of patriotism but a failure of basic moral imagination.

This reductionism is symptomatic of a broader trend where economic theories begin to bleed into cultural and political domains, with dangerous implications. This is precisely what I criticized in Saifedean Ammous's “The Bitcoin Standard”—a work that begins as monetary theory but evolves into a reactionary political manifesto. Ammous exemplifies the strange fusion happening on the right: market fundamentalism married to cultural reaction. His critique of fiat currency extends into attacks on modern art as "degenerate" (language that, as I've noted, is “far more striking in the original German”), revealing how economic liberalization can paradoxically fuel illiberal politics. Here, the abstract world of economics and finance is made to serve a narrative that undermines cultural richness and diversity, recasting them as threats to a supposedly purer and more streamlined socio-economic order.

The critique of our current leadership class and the hollow technocracy they often represent has considerable force. David Brooks captured something essential about this transformation in “Bobos in Paradise,” his examination of how the children of the Greatest Generation developed a new elite culture that fused bourgeois materialism with bohemian values. This cultural fusion created a leadership class that speaks the language of social justice while practicing ruthless meritocratic competition, that preaches community while embracing geographic mobility and economic disruption, that valorizes authenticity while engaging in endless status signaling. The result is a peculiar form of elite consciousness: highly educated, cosmopolitan in taste, verbally committed to equality, yet fundamentally disconnected from the lives and concerns of ordinary citizens.

What Brooks identified at the cultural level, Lyons translates to the political: our leadership class no longer feels special obligation to the communities from which they emerged. They've replaced the stewardship ethic of earlier generations with a managerial mindset that treats nations as assets to be optimized rather than communities to be served. The technocratic ideal of governance as mere administration, divorced from moral purpose or national loyalty, has failed to generate either prosperity or meaning for most citizens.

So far, Lyons and I share considerable common ground. Where we diverge is in diagnosing how we arrived here and where we should go next.

I should note that I'm not suggesting Lyons is anti-democratic—that would be unfair and unwarranted based on this essay alone. He's clearly anti-liberal, though, positioning liberalism as the source of our cultural and political decay rather than its potential remedy. This distinction matters because it speaks to different understandings of what has gone wrong and how it might be fixed.

I am very much a liberal philosopher, functioning within the liberal tradition that I view as continuous back to the Enlightenment roots of our founding. I have serious romantic notions about this. So, of course, I take great exception to the idea that liberalism can be blamed for hollowing “love of nation” out from the middle of our collective sense of identity. In fact, as I've argued quite forcefully, liberalism itself must rest on a foundational concept of love—a summum bonum of truth, of dignity, of recognition of the bonds that tie us together.

Lyons frames our current condition as the inevitable result of post-war liberalism's “80 year conspiracy against love,” a deliberate project to drain politics of passion following the catastrophes of fascism and world war. In his telling, figures like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno methodically stripped Western societies of their “strong gods”—the shared loves and loyalties that gave life meaning—leaving us with hollow technocracy and universal indifference.

This narrative not only misconstrues liberalism's essence; it inverts its very nature. The liberal tradition isn't about the elimination of passionate attachment—it's about elevating that attachment beyond mere tribalism into principled commitment. From Madison to Mill, from Locke to Lincoln, liberalism has never been about draining meaning from public life but about creating conditions where meaning can flourish without collapsing into tyranny or faction.

Lyons' portrayal of Popper and Adorno as architects of some “anti-humanitarian propaganda” campaign against love of nation fundamentally misunderstands their project. When Karl Popper wrote “The Open Society and Its Enemies” in 1945, he wasn't launching an attack on meaning or community—he was responding to the catastrophic consequences of totalitarian ideologies that had just engulfed the world in unprecedented violence.

Popper's critique was not aimed at love itself, but at what he called “closed societies”—systems that claimed access to absolute truth and demanded unconditional loyalty. His defense of the “open society” wasn't a call for bloodless technocracy or moral indifference but a framework for balancing our deep need for connection and meaning with the dangers of absolutism. The “openness” Popper advocated wasn't an empty proceduralism but a commitment to maintaining the conditions under which human creativity and solidarity could flourish without collapsing into tribalism or totalitarianism.

Similarly, Adorno's analysis of the “authoritarian personality” wasn't a rejection of attachment to family or nation, but an attempt to understand how normal human bonds could be weaponized by demagogues. Having witnessed how the Nazis transformed German cultural identity into an engine of genocide, Adorno wasn't attacking love—he was analyzing how love could be perverted into hate. His concern wasn't with loyalty itself but with how unquestioning loyalty could be manipulated to serve destructive ends.

Both thinkers were addressing a profound question: how can we maintain deep bonds of community and meaning while preventing those bonds from becoming vehicles for dehumanization and violence? This is not a conspiracy against love but an attempt to protect love from its own darkest potentials.

This brings us to a deeper problem with Lyons' framing: his conception of national love itself. What kind of love is he actually advocating? When Lyons describes nations as “much like a family” characterized by “strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual,” he's reaching for a particular kind of political affection—one that prioritizes boundedness, distinctiveness, and obligation to one's own above all else.

This is not love as I understand it. In “A Treatise on Love,” I argued that love “allows contradictions to exist simultaneously without destroying each other.” It “holds opposites in productive tension” rather than demanding uniformity. True love doesn't simply privilege “our own” over others—it creates conditions where difference can flourish without destroying unity.

The danger in Lyons' conception isn't that he values community or solidarity—it's that his model of love requires exclusion to function. Like many forms of reactionary thought, it defines itself primarily against perceived threats. It cannot love the present unless it resembles an imagined past. It cannot embrace complexity or change without seeing them as corruption.

This isn't merely a theoretical concern. When Lyons declares that “much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children's lives and wellbeing ahead of others', a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first,” he's making a move from familial love to political exclusion that has historically justified terrible things. The family metaphor, while powerful in highlighting the inadequacy of purely contractual relations, becomes dangerous when extended too directly to national policy.

The family is bound by biology, intimacy, and direct care. Nations encompass millions of diverse individuals with conflicting values and complex histories. When we transpose familial ethics directly onto national policy without mediating institutions or universal principles, we risk creating societies where belonging is based on blood rather than shared commitment, where difference becomes threat, where love of one's own justifies indifference or cruelty toward others.

What makes this critique particularly important is that Lyons isn't simply calling for better leadership—he's advocating a fundamental shift in how we understand political authority itself. His vision isn't just about better stewardship of existing institutions; it's about restoring a pre-liberal model of sovereignty where nations function as moral entities with thick, binding traditions.

This distinction between stewardship and sovereignty gets to the heart of the liberal project. Liberal governance is fundamentally about stewardship—the temporary, accountable exercise of authority for the benefit of the governed. It recognizes that power must be constrained, distributed, and regularly renewed through democratic processes. It understands authority as instrumental rather than intrinsic, as serving human flourishing rather than embodying metaphysical truth.

The model Lyons advocates moves in a different direction. By framing the nation as a family and political authority as flowing from love rather than consent, he shifts from stewardship toward sovereignty—toward a conception of authority as representing something beyond the individuals who compose the political community. This is why he can write that “common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life” as if these loves exist prior to and independent of the diverse individuals who make up the nation.

This vision of politics as expressing pre-existing moral unity rather than negotiating ongoing moral diversity represents a fundamental challenge to the liberal project. It promises depth and meaning but at the cost of the very pluralism that makes liberal societies work. It offers the comfort of belonging but risks making that belonging conditional on conformity to dominant traditions and identities.

The irony here is profound: Lyons correctly identifies the hollowness of technocratic governance but proposes a remedy that would undermine the very conditions that make diverse societies possible. His critique of elites who view citizens as interchangeable economic units is powerful, but his alternative risks treating them as interchangeable cultural units instead—valued only insofar as they reflect and reinforce a unitary national identity.

So what would a liberal love of country look like? Not the hollow technocracy Lyons rightly criticizes, but also not the exclusionary solidarity he proposes. I believe it would be a love defined by three characteristics: it would be principled rather than tribal, aspirational rather than nostalgic, and inclusive rather than exclusive.

By principled, I mean love attached to ideals rather than mere identity. When Lincoln invoked “the mystic chords of memory” and appealed to “the better angels of our nature,” he wasn't simply celebrating American identity but calling the nation to live up to its highest principles. His love for America included criticism, challenge, and a vision of what the country could become. This is love as ethical attachment rather than unconditional loyalty—love that can say no to nationalism when it contradicts deeper values.

By aspirational, I mean love oriented toward future possibility rather than past perfection. Liberal patriotism doesn't locate national greatness in some mythological golden age but in the ongoing project of creating a more just, more equal, more free society. It doesn't ask us to recover what was lost but to build what has never fully existed. It finds meaning not in preservation but in transformation—in the hard, messy work of making our shared political life more fully aligned with our highest values.

By inclusive, I mean love that expands rather than contracts the circle of belonging. Liberal patriotism doesn't require an enemy to define itself against. It doesn't measure national strength by how effectively it excludes or dominates others. Instead, it finds meaning in creating conditions where more people can flourish, where differences enrich rather than threaten the common life, where loyalty to nation enhances rather than contradicts our obligations to humanity.

This kind of love isn't weaker than what Lyons proposes—it's more demanding. It asks us to love our country not just for what it is but for what it aspires to be. It requires us to hold tensions rather than collapse them, to embrace complexity rather than retreat into simplicity. It finds depth not in homogeneity but in the difficult, ongoing work of creating unity amid diversity.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And liberalism, properly understood, is not the enemy of meaning but its necessary condition in diverse societies. What Lyons mistakes for liberalism's essence is actually its corruption—its reduction to market mechanisms and procedural technocracy, stripped of moral purpose and passionate commitment.

True liberalism has always been fueled by love—love of truth, love of justice, love of human possibility, and yes, love of country. But it understands that in complex, diverse societies, this love must take a particular form. It must be capacious enough to embrace difference without dissolution, principled enough to guide without dominating, humble enough to acknowledge its own limitations.

The challenge facing liberalism today isn't to abandon its commitment to openness in favor of reactionary closure. It's to recover the moral and spiritual resources that make openness meaningful rather than empty, that make freedom about flourishing rather than mere choice, that make diversity enriching rather than fragmenting.

Lyons is right that our current leadership class has failed in this task. He's right that the reduction of nations to economic zones and citizens to human resources represents a profound moral failure. But his diagnosis of liberalism as the cause rather than the casualty of this failure misses something crucial: that the hollowing out of meaning he laments isn't the fulfillment of the liberal project but its betrayal.

What we need isn't less liberalism but more—not the thin, procedural liberalism of the marketplace, but the thick, substantive liberalism of Madison and Mill, Lincoln and King. A liberalism that understands that freedom without purpose becomes empty, that rights without responsibilities become hollow, that democracy without civic virtue becomes dysfunctional.

This is the liberalism I defend—not as a mechanism for managing diversity or a framework for maximizing choice, but as a moral project worthy of our deepest commitments. A liberalism that creates the conditions for meaning to flourish without imposing it from above. A liberalism capable of loving the nation not despite its flaws and fractures but through them—seeing in its ongoing struggle to live up to its ideals the very source of its claim on our affections.

In the end, the question isn't whether we should love our country. It's what kind of love our country needs—love that constrains or love that liberates, love that excludes or love that embraces, love that fears difference or love that finds in difference the very source of our strength. Lyons and I agree that our current moment demands a recovery of love in political life. Where we differ is in understanding what that love should look like and how it should operate in a diverse, dynamic society.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. And in that construction, liberalism offers not an obstacle but an opportunity—the chance to build forms of solidarity that don't require uniformity, forms of belonging that don't demand conformity, forms of love that expand rather than contract the circle of our concern.

That is the love of nation worth fighting for. It’s a nation I am fighting for. Every minute of every day.