Out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has encouraged Democrat and progressive politicians to reclaim the language of patriotism and reinvent themselves as champions of working people rather than just pledging to undo the damage of the current president.

“It wasn’t that long ago that progressive patriotism was considered in our country a contradiction in terms,” Buttigieg said. “Patriotism can either be a cudgel that is used to exclude and beat people down, or it can be a way to summon more and more people into a shared national project.”

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“Out with the old,” Buttigieg said while speaking at the Global Progress Action Summit in London (a conference of progressive political thinkers) last Friday, Advocate reported. “‘We’re going to do something about these abuses,’ isn’t enough. The more we are talking about [the president], the less we are talking about you.”

“I think it’s my deepest wish that I hope people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with,” he said, adding that his fellow soldiers during his time as a Navy military officer “learned very quickly to trust each other with our lives even if we had really nothing in common besides the flag.”

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“I did not come here to tell everybody that things are better than they look. They’re not,” Buttigieg added. “They’re probably going to get worse before they get better. And yet I’m optimistic, not because things are better than they look, but because things have reached the point where we will have to fashion something entirely new. We will have to do it on the day, and it will come when Donald Trump is no longer politically active in the United States, which will happen.”

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