In this article, I contend that the nation’s seemingly exclusive claim to citizens’ patriotism significantly shields the federal government from the competitive forces that the Framers believed would restrain Congress’s and the President’s ability to govern in objectionable ways. I argue that, because America is a nation-state built upon certain core convictions about public life, there are strong connections in this country between the entity about which people feel patriotic and the sovereign that people would like to govern many—perhaps even most—of their important public affairs. I argue that American patriotism was constructed in a manner that led nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans to shift a vast amount of their regulatory business to the federal government and that now leads many Americans to be averse to shifting significant power back to the states, even when they believe the nation’s leaders are governing irresponsibly. With respect to the intended competition between the states and the federal government, therefore, our patriotism has become strikingly anti-competitive.