To the Editor:
“My Love for America Is Unconditional,” by David Brooks (column, Nov. 30), reflects the country that I was born into 80 years ago but, sadly, not the country that young people live in today.
While many social conditions, such as gay rights and career choices for women, have improved, the opportunity to secure financial growth and stability has been seriously hampered.
I was a product of Philadelphia public schools, which in my day prepared me well for college. It was possible to earn enough money to work your way through college. Housing was affordable. You didn’t need two incomes to buy your first home. Companies offered pensions and health insurance. Child care didn’t cancel out the second income. All these things and more are no longer available.
The promise of an American dream has been usurped by broken public education, soaring college debt and unaffordable housing, health insurance and child care. I love my country, but I grieve for the loss of opportunity for average, everyday young people.
Lee Rubin Towson, Md.
To the Editor:
David Brooks has given us dreadful advice as he expresses his pride in these United States. In praising lock-step love and pride for our country, he would have us put on our rose-colored glasses.
He tells us, “From the start, America aroused great dreams, great energies, great ambitions.” He waves away the destructiveness of Elon Musk and, I assume, our current administration, as “occasional recklessness.” I would suggest it is not occasional but a recurring pattern.
Yes, from the outset the United States moved the world forward in democracy, education, science and industry. But we also slaughtered the Native Americans, instituted and tolerated slavery, then Jim Crow. At present, we are targeting Hispanic people, denying science, destroying health care and damaging our leadership in the world and the law-based order that has served us so well for 80 years.
Mr. Brooks is essentially worshiping “striving” as if it has no right to be judged on its moral value. In doing so, he is potentially enabling the worst such striving can achieve.
Bob Benish Kansas City, Mo.
To the Editor:
David Brooks argues for an unconditional patriotism grounded in optimism and hope. It’s a compelling vision. But there is another longstanding tradition that understands love of country differently — one rooted in accountability.
James Joyce gives voice to this idea in his novel “Ulysses,” when the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, arguing against the primacy of Irish nationalism, insists that the dignity of the individual must come before devotion to the nation. In that view, patriotism is not simply loyalty; it is responsibility, a conviction that a country must earn the love of its citizens through justice and opportunity.
Conditional patriotism is not lesser patriotism. In fact, it may be the purest form of national love. As Mr. Brooks himself once wrote, the goal of love is “to enhance the life of another.” Applied to country, love means demanding that our nation enhance the lives of all who call it home.
Unconditional pride can comfort a nation. Conditional love can improve it.
Khalid Azim New York
To the Editor:
David Brooks considers whether America’s “engine that knows no rest” still runs. It does.
My family, Armenians displaced through Lebanon, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and Australia before finally landing here, never doubted it. We came because dreaming bigger wasn’t dangerous here. Mr. Brooks cites Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory in 1980 as proof that American optimism can rebound. I’d offer another example: New York City, November 2025.
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Ugandan-born son of immigrants, just became the city’s first Muslim mayor. A total of two million votes cast, with turnout unseen since 1969.
The Gen Z voters Mr. Brooks fears have abandoned American pride drove those numbers. The engine isn’t sputtering. It just elected someone who looks like the future my family crossed continents for.
Thaline Tarpinian New York
To the Editor:
David Brooks’s unconditional love seems to rest on the aspirational ideals that underpin the American dream. And while he’s disappointed that his unconditionality is not shared today, he posits that it’s likely just a passing mood, as we supposedly experienced as our country passed through the malaise of the 1970s to a more optimistic 1980s.
Surprisingly, Mr. Brooks misses the larger reality of countless Americans living in towns and cities and rural communities throughout this country. These folks, struggling with low-wage work, or no work at all, are not simply feeling a transitory downhearted mood, but are rather terribly challenged by a life besieged by unaffordable housing costs, lack of access to basic health care, and other life necessities some of us privileged enough take for granted.
Just imagine daily making terrible choices between rent and food, or between rent and needed medicines. Or feeling little or no hope for your children’s future.
In the end, to find the unconditional love Mr. Brooks hopes we all experience will require not just a mood change, but real changes to our country’s social fabric, to the structural inequalities that leave so many behind and feeling that the so-called American dream is no more than an empty myth.
Arnold S. Cohen New York The writer is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and a former president of Partnership for the Homeless.
To the Editor:
A country with all the wealth in the world that doesn’t provide health care to all its citizens. A country that cuts off SNAP benefits and makes children go to bed hungry. A country that blows boats out of the water with no proof of anything, killing everyone aboard. A country that denies climate change reality while every other country in the civilized world tries to combat it. A country with a death by gun problem so massive we’ve come to normalize it instead of fixing it.
I could keep going, but it’s too depressing. Proud to be an American I am not!
Scott Jaynes Meriden, N.H.
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