So, a follow up to my Fourth of July tweetstorm on this column: washingtonpost.com/opinions/ameri…
A lot of people have offered some response along the lines of "*Real* patriotism is X ..." where "X" consists of "doing something I think is ideologically important".
A lot of people have offered some response along the lines of "*Real* patriotism is X ..." where "X" consists of "doing something I think is ideologically important".
Bruce Baugh's tweetstorm is probably the most fully fleshed out version of the genre, but he's far from the only person to make some version of this argument.
This response may take a while, so bear with me. But it starts with "Guys, you're kind of missing my point".
Saying "Real patriotism is all this stuff I want to do for other reasons" is like that person you date who won't say "I love you", but gosh, they bought you tickets to the concert they're dying to see!
Can all these things be expressions of patriotism? Absolutely. What will not work is to redefine patriotism as "all the things my political co-ideologists wish done, and nothing else".
The left rightly got pretty angry when conservatives said that to be a patriot, you had to support invading Iraq. You can love your country intensely, and not agree on any particular policy course.
For the record, you can be a patriot and disagree with me about how strongly first-amendment rights should be applied when they conflict with equal protection, how big the welfare state should be, how much liberty the second amendment grants, etc. etc. etc.
Those things aren't patriotism. They are opinions. We should not confuse the two.
Neither is it patriotism when a conservative tithes to their church, even if the church uses the money to help their fellow Americans.
Neither is it patriotism when a conservative tithes to their church, even if the church uses the money to help their fellow Americans.
These attempts to hijack patriotism to win one side of an ideological fight do not work. They are utterly transparent, and therefore, worthless.
Which is exactly why I am calling for more patriotic expressions that aren't associated with some ideological program.
Which is exactly why I am calling for more patriotic expressions that aren't associated with some ideological program.
Now, I AM trying to say that making such expressions may help you win your ideological fights. Because celebrating some common point of identity or interest with another person generates trust. And when people trust you, they are more likely to listen to your ideas.
But first you have to express the common identity. "I would totally be patriotic if America just followed my 90 point program" is the equivalent of saying "I will say I love you if you lose thirty pounds, make more money, and learn to play the lute."
Yes, you can totally call on someone's love to get them to change, even with threat of withdrawing it. But that only works if there was, you know, some love there. "Change these twenty things and I totally might love you" only works on desperate adolescents.
I'd also ask of the left (since they're the ones who took issue): why did the mere thought of singing the national anthem and waving a flag send you into incandescent rage? As these things go, this is a pretty low-cost activity.
I understand that some people thought this was a cryptic critique of the kneeling football players, so to be clear: it's not. As I made explicit in the column.
It's a critique of the idea that we should just do away with the patriotic displays entirely.
It's a critique of the idea that we should just do away with the patriotic displays entirely.
On a practical level, I tend to think there are more effective forms of protest than kneeling for the national anthem. But I have no quarrel or criticism for the players for wanting to do it; I just think maybe it's counterproductive, an empirical question upon which I am open.
But that wasn't the general tenor of the response. The general tenor of the response was something along the lines of "If you fly too many flags, you get Nazis". Which is ... not true. The Nazis didn't even fly the German flag; they replaced it with the swastika.
So in fact, intense loyalty to the German flag might well have been an effective counter-Nazi technique.
More broadly, the idea that it's a short step from singing the national anthem at a sporting event to everyone goosestepping north to Canada is a little bit crazy. More than a little bit.
I'll close by reiterating something I said in the column: a welfare state is a fundamentally nationalist enterprise. It makes a claim on taxpayers to support their fellow citizens. If you want a big welfare state, you want "my fellow citizens" to mean something big and important.
Otherwise, when you go to your fellow citizens to ask them for more money, they will say "Why would I give my money to those people? I don't even know them!"
Which is why Denmark plasters its flag all over the welfare state.
Or so I was told; I have never personally applied for welfare in Denmark.
And look, you and I will probably argue about how big the welfare state should be. That's okay. But we should both be arguing about what's best for our country, not prosecuting a tribal political war.
Which is why "real patriotism is what my side of that political war is doing or wants to do" is not an adequate rejoinder to my column. If you want people to believe that patriotism requires those things of them, first you will have to demonstrate that you believe in patriotism.
