There are many reasons one might come to love one’s country.

It first appears in the connection to place, a bond to a physical location, usually associated with where one grew up. It extends from parents and family to home and hearth, school and church, neighborhood, community and town.

These are the familiar places that define civil society, which form what Alexis de Tocqueville called “les habitudes de coeur,” the habits of the heart.

In the same vein, Edmund Burke wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

What made a country lovely on the surface were its physical features, but Burke was referring to the habits and manners that form a natural affinity and inspire loyalty toward one’s homeland.

Love of country is an extension of these affections, this love of a place, its people and its way of life.

But such attachments are personal and can easily become superficial unless they are transformed into firm commitments with real substance.

This deepened attachment occurs when connections reach beyond ourselves, to extended family, to those of other generations, to ancestors unknown.

Links to those before us broaden our perspective, provide us with a sense of place in time and make us part of a larger narrative and a shared experience.

We begin to sense a tradition worth preserving and passing along to those who come after us.

Tocqueville made this point in “Democracy in America” by distinguishing between instinctive patriotism, rooted in custom and a sense of belonging based on place and personal loyalty, and reflective patriotism, based more on the opinions of free citizens, who understand their common liberties and their shared responsibilities with their fellow citizens.

This latter, more thoughtful form of patriotism, Tocqueville argued, is shaped by the exercise of individual rights within republican institutions and by what Tocqueville called “self-interest well understood.”

Indeed, one of the reasons Tocqueville admired America so much was that it bred both types of patriotism, a spirited attachment to American self-government as well as a reasoned devotion to the general principles of natural right and human liberty.

Tocqueville concluded that a patriotism in which particular loyalties and universal purposes reinforce each other was the source of the community bond and national cohesion needed to perpetuate democratic societies.

Without patriotism — instinctive patriotism for sure, but especially reflective patriotism — democratic peoples would become preoccupied with narrow, private concerns and come to neglect their civic........

© New York Post