Politics & Power Quote by Sinclair Lewis

A patriot’s confession, delivered with the scalpel of a novelist who made his career slicing American self-regard. Sinclair Lewis sets up a neat paradox - “intellectually” versus “emotionally” - not to reconcile it, but to expose how national identity actually operates. Reason can tally sins and virtues on a comparative spreadsheet; feeling refuses the audit. The line works because it admits the contradiction most public rhetoric tries to bury: even the sharpest mind is not immune to the seductions of belonging.

Lewis’s specific intent is double-edged. On the surface, he grants cosmopolitan skepticism: America is “no better” than any other country. Underneath, he indicts the irrepressible romanticism that keeps exceptionalism alive even among the educated. By personifying the nation as “she,” he smuggles in intimacy and loyalty; the pronoun turns a geopolitical entity into someone you’re predisposed to defend, forgive, and idealize. It’s less an argument than an act of self-reporting, a candid admission that patriotism often functions like love: irrational, stubborn, and resistant to evidence.

Context matters because Lewis wasn’t writing from starry-eyed boosterism. This is the author of Main Street and Babbitt, books that lampooned small-town conformity and middle-class complacency. Coming out of the early 20th century - a period of industrial might, rising mass culture, and recurring waves of nativism - Lewis understood the American habit of calling its desires “destiny.” The quote doesn’t celebrate that habit so much as reveal its wiring: the brain can relativize, but the heart still wants a homeland that feels singular.