The USA of 1814 is a small country in a war with a great power that has recently occupied and largely demolished its capital city, stuck on the edge of a continent that hasn't been incorporated into a new Empire, where the first American nations were still mostly free. The America of this song is an underdog nation, struggling gamely to survive.

That's what is attractive about the song. Now it gets seen through the distorting lense of a history which has turned that vulnerable little country into an imperial superpower, with the propensity for swaggering arrogance that all imperial superpowers from Rome on tend to adopt. Sung in the right spirit it doesn't have to be an expression of that arrogance, but a reminder of what could have been, and maybe still could be.