The New Yorker’s Memorial Day essay asked whether patriotism had become problematic. The question answers itself — once you notice who was never asked to justify theirs.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Analysis | Dead Reckoning
Last Memorial Day weekend — the one weekend each year when the country pauses to acknowledge that its liberties were purchased with lives — The New Yorker published an essay by longtime contributor Arthur Krystal titled “How Problematic Is Patriotism?” The piece’s promotional tweet framed the question plainly: “Patriotism just isn’t cool anymore,” Krystal writes, blaming the decline on Viking helmets, star-dotted shirts, and military-style jackets — “not to mention the MAGA cap” — for reducing national pride to a brand rather than an ethos.
The timing was deliberate. So was the framing. And both deserve the scrutiny Krystal reserved only for the people he disagrees with.
This is not primarily a piece about Arthur Krystal. He is a skilled essayist who has written thoughtfully about literature and culture for decades, and the full piece — gated behind The New Yorker‘s paywall — likely contains more nuance than its marketing suggests. What deserves examination is the pattern the publication chose to perform in public, on that particular date, with that particular hook. The tweet is the argument on the marquee. It is the thing the editors chose to lead with. So let us follow it.
The central conceit of the New Yorker‘s framing is that patriotism has become culturally suspect because of how certain Americans express it. The MAGA cap is the designated exhibit. The implication is that love of country has been contaminated — made gaudy and tribal — by its association with the wrong people wearing the wrong gear.
This is a recognizable argument structure. It doesn’t attack patriotism directly; it pathologizes the patriot. The flag is fine. The flags those people wave are the problem.
But the argument carries a buried premise that the magazine’s editors apparently did not feel required examination: that the aesthetic and political expressions of other Americans — the Obama-era stickers, the campaign hats, the “Hope” iconography plastered on every surface from 2008 to 2016 — were never subjected to the same analysis. Nobody ran a Memorial Day essay asking whether pride in a president had replaced pride in a country. Nobody at Condé Nast ran the numbers on how much civic identity had been outsourced to a single figure when that figure happened to be popular in Manhattan.
The argument doesn’t attack patriotism directly; it pathologizes the patriot. The flag is fine. The flags those people wave are the problem.
That is not a complaint about hypocrisy in the partisan sense. It is an observation about the selective application of a critical standard. When the analysis only activates for one side’s symbols, it is not cultural criticism. It is cultural taxonomy — sorting the acceptable Americans from the problematic ones and dressing the exercise in the vocabulary of political philosophy.
Dead Reckoning, as a column, is interested in the gap between stated principle and revealed preference. The principle here, as articulated in the tweet, is that performative national pride has debased patriotism into a brand. Fair enough as a concern. Brands can hollow out genuine feeling. Spectacle can substitute for substance.
But watch the revealed preference: the problem, per The New Yorker‘s framing, appears precisely when the wrong class of Americans does the performing. When patriotism looks like a flyover-state county fair, it is pageantry. When it looked like a 200,000-person rally on the National Mall in 2009, it was a movement. When it looks like a MAGA cap in 2026, it is a “brand.” When it looked like Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster on every dorm room wall in 2008, it was art.
The distinction being drawn is not between genuine patriotism and performed patriotism. It is between patriotism performed by people The New Yorker approves of and patriotism performed by people it does not. The analytical category is class and culture, not authenticity.
This is worth naming because the magazine has cultivated an identity as a publication that holds standards others are too lazy or too commercial to maintain. The institutional self-image is discernment. What the Memorial Day tweet revealed, however unintentionally, is that the discernment has a zip code.
There is a specific and uncomfortable irony embedded in the piece’s timing. The men and women whose service Memorial Day commemorates were disproportionately from the communities — rural, working-class, red-state America — whose patriotic expressions The New Yorker finds most aesthetically objectionable. The same people who allegedly debased love of country into a brand by wearing certain headgear are the people most likely to have a grandfather, a father, a sibling, or a child who was handed a folded flag at a graveside.
Krystal’s essay, as excerpted and publicized, asks whether patriotism is worth salvaging “given the White House’s current occupant.” That is a coherent political position. It is not, however, a coherent analytical framework — unless one is prepared to apply it symmetrically, which the same magazine demonstrably was not prepared to do in 2010 or 2014 or any year the occupant was more to its editors’ liking.
The rule being applied is: patriotism is an ethos when we embrace it; patriotism is a brand when they do. The rule is contingent on the antecedent. A principle that flips depending on who holds power is not a principle. It is a preference with footnotes.
None of this requires defending every political use of patriotic imagery, or pretending that symbols cannot be weaponized, or arguing that love of country is above criticism. It can be all of those things. Honest journalism requires maintaining that standard regardless of which coalition is waving the flag.
What it does require is a consistent application of scrutiny. If the question is whether mass-marketed, personality-adjacent patriotism hollows out civic identity, that is a legitimate and interesting question in 2026. It was also a legitimate and interesting question in 2009. The fact that only one of those years prompted a Memorial Day essay on the problematic nature of pride tells you something the essay itself never will.
The pattern here is not difficult to read. When the people performing patriotism are the ones a certain class of editors and writers recognize as their own — educated, urban, credentialed, aesthetically aligned — the performance is invisible as performance. It registers as genuine feeling, civic engagement, the proper expression of national identity. When the performance comes from outside that class, it becomes visible. It becomes analyzable. It becomes, per the tweet, a brand.
That is not a cultural observation. That is a mirror.
A principle that flips depending on who holds power is not a principle. It is a preference with footnotes.
The New Yorker is one of the great institutions of American journalism. Its best work is some of the best journalism produced anywhere. That is precisely why it is worth holding to the standard it claims. Institutions that exempt themselves from the scrutiny they apply to others do not hold standards. They enforce hierarchies.
Memorial Day weekend has passed. But with nearly a million people clicking through a tweet asking whether patriotism has become problematic, the question worth asking is the one nobody in that editorial meeting apparently paused to raise: By whose measure?
The answer, visible in the tweet itself, was always the same: By ours. And that is the whole problem.
Sources & Reference: Arthur Krystal, “How Problematic Is Patriotism?” (The New Yorker, June 1, 2026 issue, published online May 29, 2026). Promotional tweet from @NewYorker, May 29, 2026, 1:00 PM ET. Emmy Griffin, “Why Do Leftists Find Patriotism Problematic?” (The Patriot Post, May 27, 2026). Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics/Morning Consult survey on national patriotism trends, published May 10, 2026. Arthur Krystal biographical data via Wikipedia.
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