Somewhere on the internet right now, a politician is wrapping themselves in the flag. The timing is always the same—poll numbers dropping, a scandal breaking, the public’s attention drifting elsewhere. Suddenly there’s a speech about national greatness, a pivot to some grand patriotic narrative, a carefully framed photo with a hand over the heart. We recognize it instantly. We feel something like nausea. And if we’re the type who keeps old quotes in our back pocket, we reach for the one about scoundrels and their last refuge.
But here’s the thing about that quote—it doesn’t actually come from Samuel Johnson, the brilliant, acerbic lexicographer who compiled the first great English dictionary and spent his life observing human nature with surgical precision. It comes from James Boswell, Johnson’s younger friend and devoted biographer. And that matters more than you might think.
Boswell was a messy man. He was ambitious, insecure, hungry for recognition, and he drank too much. He kept exhaustive journals—thousands of pages of them—recording conversations with Johnson with a kind of obsessive devotion that speaks to both his genuine admiration and his anxious need to capture something that might validate his own existence. He wanted to be remembered. He wanted to be close to brilliance. He wanted people to know he was the kind of person Johnson would talk to at length about important things. This wasn’t a disinterested observer. This was a man documenting his own proximity to greatness.
On April 7, 1775, Johnson and Boswell were discussing patriotism. The conversation arrived at one of those moments where someone says something so sharp and true that it lands differently depending on who’s listening. Johnson, according to Boswell’s account, suddenly declared with “a strong determined tone” that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. Boswell felt the need to immediately contextualize it—to explain that Johnson didn’t mean genuine, generous love of country, but rather the pretended kind that people use as camouflage for their own interests. Johnson then offered a stinging qualification about an eminent public figure they both admired, suggesting that political conduct alone tells you nothing about a person’s honesty.
This is crucial. The quote doesn’t live in isolation. It’s embedded in a conversation, in a moment, in a relationship between two men where one is constantly interpreting the other for posterity. Boswell made the choice to record it, to preserve it, to frame it with his own clarifications. He was the editor of his own experience, the curator of Johnson’s wisdom. We encounter the quote only through his pen.
What Johnson actually meant seems clearer when you sit with the full context: he was attacking false patriotism specifically—the kind of patriotic performance that masks selfishness and corruption. Not patriotism itself, but the counterfeit version. The pose. The performance. It’s a distinction that gets flattened as the quote travels through history, gets shortened, gets repurposed. By 1826, when it appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, the word “pretended” had already begun its fade from the front of the statement. The nuance was starting to erode.
What’s interesting is how the quote evolved even as people tried to pin it down. Some shortened it to “patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel”—inverting the temporal logic, suggesting that scoundrels reach for patriotism first, before anything else. Others tried to restore the “pretended” that Johnson (or was it Boswell?) had originally emphasized. The quote became a shape-shifter, useful for different arguments, adaptable to different political moments. A bishop used it in 1955. Politicians have invoked it across centuries. It shows up on Twitter at least once a week, usually when someone wants to seem intellectually serious while condemning their opponents.
But what does it actually mean, beneath the rhetoric? It’s a claim about human psychology and the tools we reach for when we’re desperate. A scoundrel—someone pursuing power or money or status at the expense of ethics—can’t simply admit that. The direct plea doesn’t work anymore. “Vote for me because I want money and influence” doesn’t win elections. But “Vote for me because I love my country” does. Patriotism becomes useful precisely because it’s universally valued, because it’s hard to argue against, because it can wrap base motives in noble language. It’s camouflage. It’s the last refuge when everything else fails—when competence fails, when honesty fails, when actual merit fails.
The genius of the observation isn’t that it condemns patriotism itself. It’s that it suggests something darker about the human capacity for self-deception and manipulation. We are creatures who need narratives that make us feel good about ourselves. Even—especially—when we’re doing something wrong. Patriotism is one of the most powerful and resonant narratives available. That’s what makes it so useful as camouflage.
The quote has persisted because it names something we all recognize but rarely say out loud. We’ve all seen it. The leader whose policies harm ordinary people suddenly becomes a defender of national character. The corporation that exports jobs wraps itself in flags. The movement built on resentment rebrands as patriotic. It happens at every level of society, across every political tradition. And every time we see it, somewhere in our minds, Johnson’s words echo—or Boswell’s record of them, which amounts to the same thing now.
The irony is that Boswell himself was guilty of a kind of posturing. He was performing intimacy with Johnson for the record, framing conversations to show himself in a certain light, shaping the historical record to his own purposes. He was, in his way, using his proximity to greatness as a kind of refuge—a way of becoming significant by association. He was doing exactly the thing Johnson was warning against, just with intellectual rather than patriotic camouflage.
Maybe that’s why the quote endures. It’s not because it’s profound—plenty of profound observations disappear. It endures because it catches us in the act. It makes us uncomfortable in a productive way. Every time we hear it, we have to ask ourselves: am I doing this? Am I hiding something real behind something noble? The next time you hear someone appeal to patriotism, the next time you feel your own patriotic impulses rising, it’s worth sitting with that discomfort for a moment. It’s worth asking what conversation is being avoided, what failure is being masked, what genuine problem is being replaced with a stirring narrative about national character.
Two men in eighteenth-century London discussed something true about human nature, and one of them wrote it down. The exact words matter less than we usually think. The spirit of the observation—the insistence that we look beneath the noble rhetoric, that we question our own motives and those of our leaders—that spirit is what has kept the quote alive. It survives because we need it. We need reminding that patriotism, like any powerful thing, can be corrupted. We need to be suspicious of it. And perhaps most importantly, we need to suspect ourselves.