Patriotism is a term that can cover a vast range of attitudes and behaviors. At its best, patriotism can embody love for one's nation, without being blinded to the nation's flaws.  At its worst, patriotism can become the excuse for jingoism masquerading as high-minded national loyalty. Perhaps most importantly, patriotism is more about the image of the nation that each individual has, rather than any objective reality. For Americans, this often means that outward expressions of patriotism and their inward feelings can differ radically from those of their fellow citizens.

You will find few Americans who do not claim to love their nation, even if they feel that it has fallen short of its full promise. Americans commonly display flags and other symbols of their national heritage and to accuse someone of being unpatriotic, regardless of their political orientation, is seen as a severe insult.

The vast majority of Americans accept the idea of "American exceptionalism" as a simple and self-evident fact, a sign of the superiority of the US system of government over the rest of the world. Many Americans flaunt symbols of their national affiliation, from flags on cars to movies that put the US on an untouchable pedestal.

Unfortunately, while the love of your own nation is praiseworthy, patriotism can have a darker influence on the nation, often seeing the nation becoming xenophobic or even turning against itself. For example, President Barack Obama's "Buy American" stance in 2009, played well with many states that had seen the loss of manufacturing jobs, but caused tension between the US and some of its closest allies.

In other cases, claims that the US is losing jobs to foreign competition are merely an attempt to play on patriotic themes to save an industry that is facing economic and technological obsolescence. In both of these cases, focusing on whether or not the actions in question were "patriotic" missed the fact that far more complex economic, scientific and political issues were at play that were not open to a simple solution.

But perhaps the most dangerous aspect of patriotism can be seen in our increasingly polarized society. While appeals to patriotism have traditionally been used as a way to reduce domestic social and political tensions, that has largely not been a successful approach in recent US history.

Here, the problem is that political factions are increasingly seeing each other as the enemy, with foreign concerns being only incidental to the real fight.  The facts about the Benghazi incident are almost irrelevant today compared to the political need to discredit Hillary Clinton or her GOP accusers. Increasingly, patriotism in the US is being twisted toward the view of seeing other Americans, who do not share the individual's political stances, as the enemy.  They are not truly American, not like the individual and his or her  allies, and thus are viewed as legitimate targets for a new and corrosive US nationalism.

Patriotism among the nation's people can serve to ease domestic social tension, especially if it reminds the citizens that they are all heirs to a shared history and culture.  However, patriotism, especially patriotism that exalts a certain political viewpoint as a way of telling if an individual is a "true" patriot, can have the opposite effect, turning even minor political debates into divisive cultural wars.

This is especially true given the nature of modern US foreign policy, which lacks the single unifying opponent that the USSR so conveniently provided during the Cold War. The modern world has no lack of conflicts, but they are far more complex and thus harder to tie to the simple type of patriotism that can easily unify the population. Especially when combined with the US' growing domestic divides over issues such as race and sexual orientation, appeals to patriotism may, if anything, be counterproductive from the viewpoint of unifying the US people.

Because so many people see being patriotic as central to their self-identity as Americans, patriotism can be a dangerous thing to exalt. Politicians and the US people alike should remember that to be a unifying theme, love for one's nation must accept the right of other Americans to express their own forms of patriotism without being accused of disloyalty.

The author is a freelance writer based in Corona, California. charlesgray109@gmail.com