Richard V. Reeves is a very smart individual, and I always take his commentary seriously. Still I can't help but find a libertarian skepticism about these sorts of public rituals to be the right attitude. And don't our young people attend a (might as well be forced) citizenship ceremony literally every day in school? Shouldn't that suggest to us that this is barking up the wrong tree?
The ceremony undertaken by new citizens is emotionally meaningful not because it's a ceremony, but because it's a speech act with real consequences. It actually makes new citizens, which means that the genuine article is a rite of passage in the proper anthropological sense of the word. It marks the joining of a community, like taking holy orders, or like performing a ritual test of adulthood.
Whatever feel-good ritual we made for ourselves to increase our patriotism quotient would only at best be a rite of intensification, with much, much less at stake. We would do well to hope that this new ritual became just another empty formality, and we should dread the possibility that it might ever be consequential.