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Both mindsets merit rethinking as America celebrates its national birthday Friday.

A new confirms what other polls have shown for some years now: Americans are becoming, by their own definition, a less-patriotic population — but the trend is being driven entirely by recent, deep declines in self-described patriotism on the political left and middle.

At the start of the current century, polls showed that between 80% and 90% each of Republicans, Democrats and independents all described themselves as patriotic. The new Gallup poll, in contrast, finds that today, while 92% of Republicans still say they are “extremely” proud to be Americans, just 53% of independents and a meager 36% of Democrats say the same.

The Trump effect is undoubtedly a factor. The nosedive in self-described patriotism by Democrats coincides with Donald Trump’s emergence on the national stage a decade ago, and has hit its lowest point during his second term.

But there’s more at play here than just partisan backlash to losing the White House. Republicans never dipped below 90% in their professed patriotism throughout the eight years of the Obama administration. They did (for the first time) during the Biden administration, but even then never dropped below 84%.

Are conservatives just more patriotic? If the results of this poll and the many others like it are to be believed, that appears to be the consensus across the political spectrum.

And, yes, that’s a problem.

It’s easy to see how progressives, watching a presidential administration systematically bulldoze what they consider to be bedrock American values with the support of almost half their fellow citizens, could conclude that their nation is not currently worthy of their patriotism.

But if that’s the standard — if agreement with whomever is in the White House is the determining factor for one’s love of country — then patriotism stops being a core aspect of citizenship and becomes just another partisan marker in a deeply divided country.

It is also a capitulation. The constructive response to the feeling that the country is off course is to work toward putting it back on course, not to throw up your arms and retreat to political nihilism.

On the other side of the equation is the question of how to define patriotism in the first place.

Trump and his most enthusiastic supporters have frequently demonstrated that their definition is power-based: tanks on the streets of Washington; federal troops on the streets of L.A.; rhetorical, legal and even physical aggression toward perceived domestic enemies, from low-level government workers to journalists to opposing politicians to, well, pretty much anyone who disagrees with them.

Consider Trump’s all-caps that savaged the tens of millions of Americans who voted against him as “scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country.” The entire message was couched in the language of patriotism — but a belligerent, us-versus-them version of it. No wonder many citizens are rejecting the concept of patriotism, if that’s how it’s being defined.

But why accept that definition? Here are some others to consider:

Patriotism means respecting the principle that we are a nation of laws and of constitutional process. That means accepting the validity of election results we don’t like and court rulings we don’t agree with. That’s not to say those outcomes cannot be challenged, but they must be challenged within those electoral and legal systems, in adherence to the U.S. Constitution.

Patriotism means respecting the constitutional rights of speech and peaceful protest (any other kind invalidates itself) even when we disagree with the sentiments being expressed.

As such, neither the right’s tendency toward suppression of protest (as in L.A. last month) nor the left’s tendency toward “cancellation” of opposing opinions (as in shouting down academic conservatives) is patriotic.

Patriotism means welcoming people from around the world to America, via a system of legal immigration. But it also means extending compassion and due process to those who run afoul of that system out of desperation or through no fault of their own — as with immigrants brought here as children.

Patriotism means promoting and defending democracies around the world as only the world’s sole remaining superpower can do. By that definition, blocking Iran’s development of nuclear weapons was patriotic — and so is defending Ukraine from Russian aggression.

Of course, all those definitions are subjective. Recognizing the right to disagree on what it means to be an American is the most patriotic principle of all.

If our divided country can agree upon nothing else on our national birthday, let’s agree upon that.