Over at the Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru asks:

Are you maintaining that to be an American patriot you have to believe that the U.S. is superior to all other countries? I loved my mother not because I truly believed that she was in some objective sense "the greatest mother in the world"...although I think I may have gotten her a coffee mug to that effect...but because she was mine. Can't we love our country the same way?

Well, no, not really. here we step into the question of American Exceptionalism, in which people like me suggest that American patriotism is fundamentally of a different class than all other patriotisms, because (I repeat tiresomely) it is not founded on a place, nor on a heritage, but on a set of ideas, to which any may freely subscribe.

I'll suggest that there are two components to American patriotism - one much like any other, which involves 'purple mountains majesty' and great Americans who contributed to making the place what it is today - and other, wholly unique, which goes to the undeletable, permanent notion that we are none of us subjects, and instead all citizens. Other nations have reached for this, and contributed to our understanding of it. In the future, I trust that others will carry it forward from us.

But today, it is fundamentally ours and it ought to be that set of ideas that we all celebrate on the 4th and that we are all learning from every day.