How Problematic Is Patriotism?

Since then, writers have spilled a great deal of ink over patriotism. Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ursula K. Le Guin distrusted it. Samuel Johnson called it “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Leo Tolstoy likened it to slavery. Jorge Luis Borges initially felt that “there is no end to the illusions of patriotism,” noting that “Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon.” Years later, perhaps feeling adrift, Borges begged his gods to send someone or something into his life. “They did,” he wrote. “It is my country.”

George Orwell was kinder than most. Patriotism, he wrote, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.” The problem was nationalism, which he maintained was “inseparable from the desire for power.” The line between these terms, however, is porous. Attachment to a parcel of land can easily harden into isolationism, jingoism, and racism. “It is lamentable,” Voltaire observed, “that to be a good patriot one must often become the enemy of the rest of mankind.” More recently, the philosopher Richard Rorty capably defended patriotism, whereas Martha Nussbaum continues to seek its curtailment.

Undeterred, the historian Michael Kammen proposed, in 1991, that American patriotism had long remained “a curiously neglected subject.” His enormous, crowded study, “Mystic Chords of Memory,” was intended not to fill that gap but to give substance to Robert Penn Warren’s remark that being an American is not “a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea—and history is the image of that idea.” If historians are the biographers of a nation, in the grip of their own biases and affections, the notion of “one America” quickly dissolves. A nation that accumulates a history inevitably accumulates histories. For example, those bygone “mint julep” textbooks that circulated south of the Mason-Dixon Line and recast the Civil War as a valiant struggle to preserve a way of life in which enslaved people were said to be well cared for by benevolent white owners.

An avowed objectivity, to be sure, is no guarantee of truth. A hefty body of literature focusses on the dichotomy between American ideals and American realities, but are such accounts to be trusted simply because they expose what other histories suppress? Two incompatible Americas emerge, for instance, in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and Paul Johnson’s “A History of the American People,” one calling attention to feet of clay and the other to laurelled heads. Although “we can speak of a tradition of American patriotism,” Kammen concluded, “it has in fact been a spasmodic tradition characterized by ups and downs.”

We seem to be in a down moment. A Gallup poll found that, in the past dozen years, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that they’re “extremely proud to be American” has plunged by sixteen points. A recent Harris poll noted that roughly four in ten Americans have considered relocating outside the country, with younger Americans even more inclined. Last May, Newsweek published an article with the melancholy headline “Why Dual Citizenship Is the New American Dream.” Some commentators ascribe this to financial prudence, but the trend dates back at least to 2src16 and the election of Donald Trump.

Patriotism just isn’t cool anymore. Wokeness, having rightly called attention to racial and gender injustices long endemic to American life, helped chill the left’s admiration for the nation, while its clumsier performances (cancellations, cultural-appropriation scolds, and other exercises in finger-wagging) pushed centrists to the right. Patriotism, you might say, isn’t dead; it’s just dressed up differently. Viking helmets, star-dotted shirts, and military-style jackets, not to mention MAGA caps, are the preferred patriotic attire. Less an ethos than a brand, it makes it hard for the more quietly dressed to own it.

The language of patriotism is, of course, accessible to anyone who feels loyalty to any one place, or places. According to Amy Watson’s recent book, “Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763,” reform-minded politicians in Britain claimed the word as a rallying cry for a kinder, fairer empire, in which Colonial legislatures and courts held greater sway and citizens on both sides of the Atlantic enjoyed stronger constitutional liberties. Had British “Patriots” managed to keep the upper hand in imperial politics, Watson plausibly argues, North America might never have separated from the British Empire.