Flying your Opponent's Flag

As an analogy: Two armies with the same flag, same armor and same weapons approach each other in civil war. They both claim to be fighting for the same cause and they both approach the field with the same desire to see their side win. What separates these armies? They must have some disagreement, otherwise they wouldn't be fighting each other.
This is how I view the redefining of the word "patriot". If you say "I am working to make a new kind of patriotism," then you are bound to confuse your opponents. Your argument is different than theirs, and to make clear your differences you cannot simply repeat, "I am trying to be my version of a patriot." Instead, you would say something along the lines of, "You think a patriot is someone who supports their country no matter what, and I think a patriot is someone who plays a positive, active role in the development of their country while still admitting to its faults and mistakes." Why then does this sentence have to include "patriot"? It still makes just as much sense without the word, "I think one should support their country's good, justifiable actions and will protest when it does wrong, rather than support it no matter what." The word "patriot", then, has become an interesting mixture of redundancy and uselessness. Our arguments do not have to be summed up using the same vocabulary as our opponents; they can speak for themselves. I agree with Robert Jensen that we can indeed say "goodbye" to patriotism. We can fly a stronger and more straightforward flag than our opponents by emphasizing the differences in our ideals. By removing the word "patriot" from discussion, we get to the root of the actual issue at hand, rather than getting bogged down in different definitions and opposing views of a particular word. Those who believe in community and the core principles of democracy should therefore not feel a need to somehow be "patriotic"; we can easily let the word die along with it's negative connotations, and move forward with this new-found sense of working together for unity in good and dissent in evil.

What makes a "moderate American patriot", meaning someone who will applaud at their country's best and protest at it's worst, any different than a democratic citizen?
(enough so that continuing to use the word "patriot" would assist such a philosophy?)