From the Merriam Webster Dictionary: “Patriotism: love for or devotion to one’s country.”

What does it mean to love one’s country? What does it mean to defend the nation’s most important values, such as democracy and justice? News events during the past week have gotten me thinking about these questions in a more urgent way.

Patriotism is one of those things that you know when you see it, and it comes in different forms.

The other night, my wife and I had a long talk with a young man working this summer as a server at a restaurant here in Lockport, N.Y. He enlisted in the Marines at 21 and now wants to be a deputy sheriff. He told us, “I want to serve the community where I was raised.” That’s patriotism.

Last year, I went to the ceremony that renamed our community’s middle school after Aaron Mossell, a Black brickmaker who led the effort to desegregate our city schools more than a century ago. The people who worked for years to make that renaming happen did that so something brave and noble would be remembered and taught to our children. Working for justice and honoring those who do, that is patriotism as well.

It is acts of genuine patriotism like these that help us see more clearly what patriotism is not.

It is not patriotism, for example, for a former president to cart boxes full of the nation’s top security secrets to his vacation home, where those documents become a threat to national security. It is an act of putting our country’s safety in needless danger.

Nor it is an act of patriotism when members of Congress race in to attack law enforcement officials for doing their job to protect the country. Yet this is exactly what two New York Congresswomen have done recklessly all week. Unwilling to wait even a day to see what investigators actually found in those boxes, they began launching their attacks on the FBI with all the hyped-up anger they could muster.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik called the FBI’s search for highly classified documents, “an actual threat to democracy.” She denounced it as “un-American.”

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney joined in. Speaking in the apocalyptic language that obscure politicians use to get themselves on Fox News, Tenney declared, “Biden’s DOJ (Department of Justice) has been weaponized in an unprecedented way.” She admitted that she made this declaration not based on any evidence, but “based on what I have seen on the Internet.”

The actual evidence — a copy of the court warrant authorizing the search and a list of what was found — was released 48 hours later, but Stefanik and Tenney couldn’t wait, nor did they stop once the evidence was made public. What is important to them is not the facts but to get on TV and whip up the most extreme elements of their party as a way to advance their political careers.

One result of this fact-free attack on the FBI by politicians such as Stefanik and Tenney is that the men and women who serve in the FBI have had to face down armed supporters of Trump, including the gunman who assaulted the FBI office in Ohio last week and a cascade of new threats.

Real patriotism does not put the advancement of your political career over the safety of both the country and the men and women who put their lives on the line to enforce its laws.

The actions of these two New York politicians stand in such contrast to the recent actions of Western New York’s current representative in Congress, Chris Jacobs. Like Tenney and Stefanik, Jacobs is a Republican, a conservative and ambitious. He worked hard to win his first term in Congress two years ago and seemed well on-track to keep that job for many years.

Then, in May, he committed a stunning act of raw political conscience. Two weeks after a white supremacist armed with a military-style assault rifle rampaged through a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, targeting Black shoppers, and days after a similar attack killed 19 students in their Texas elementary school, Jacobs did the politically unthinkable. He announced he would support legislation to ban future sales of military assault weapons such as those used in those massacres.

Within a week, his once-promising political career was over. The most extreme elements of the gun lobby went after him. Republican politicians, including Stefanik, started lining up behind candidates to oppose him. In the current version of the Republican Party an act of conscience following the needless massacre of men, women and children is not a virtue, it is a sin.

Is that patriotism?

“What happened in Buffalo profoundly affected me,” Jacobs said later. He personally knew some of those killed at Tops. He responded to a tragedy as a human being instead of a calculating politician, and he paid a high price.

Real patriotism and fake patriotism. Acts of political conscience and acts of political calculation. If democracy is going to survive in our country we need to be smart enough to spot the difference in those who seek power.