Please can people on the left stop trying to make “progressive patriotism” happen?
Or rather, if the furthest horizon of your politics is statist social democracy, conceived of as an essentially national-popular project to which class struggle isn’t particularly central, and might even be a hindrance, fine. Go for it. “Patriotism” makes sense in that context.
But if you’re trying to build a class politics, patriotism simply doesn’t fit. Whether you put a qualifying adjective in front of it or not, patriotism relies on the idea of a national community bound together on some level by common *national* interests.
The boilerplate idea of international socialism - that workers everywhere have more in common with each other than we do with bosses who share our nationality; that our shared interests are as part of a global class - is not compatible with promoting “patriotism” as a good thing.
Most of us have some sense of “pride” in some aspect of the history or cultural heritage of where we “come from”, whether that’s a city, a country, or an immigrant diaspora. I’m “proud” to be Jewish. But it’s not an adequate basis for a set of politics.
The argument that, if the left doesn’t advance “our own” conception of patriotism, or even nationalism, then people will go for the right-wing version instead doesn’t cut it. These are not neutral concepts that the left can simply repurpose.
Faced with the obvious reality that there is a very deep seam of nationalism in domestic and global politics, and that many working-class people are genuinely convinced by nationalist ideas, the notion that we might be able to repurpose or redirect all that somehow is appelaing.
But if we want a horizon beyond statist social democracy, beyond a cross-class politics of national welfarism with a bit of state ownership, we have got to take the longer and harder road of building an internationalist class consciousness in our workplaces and communities.
TL/DR: “Progressive patriotism” is a dead end; class-struggle socialists shouldn’t collude in attempts to suggest otherwise; the working class has no country.
