Patriots in Control
A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.
The “blame America first crowd” that actually exists makes two basic mistakes. The first is in thinking in the first place that the United States is a uniquely malign influence in the world. It isn’t; indeed, America is an unusually benign global hegemon in most ways, although given the direly low bar set by previous hegemons, this is not much of an accomplishment. Ideally the recent practices of some of America’s so-called near peers like China’s treatment of its religious minorities or Russia’s high-on-its-own-supply ideology-poisoned unprovoked invasion of Ukraine would have disabused people of the idea that America is a uniquely abusive world power, and in many cases it has, but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people on the left who have had exactly the opposite reaction. One’s modus potens is another’s modus tollens, and some people are in fact so committed to “America Bad” thinking that they conclude that anything bad-seeming that America’s rivals are doing must be either misreported or not actually bad at all. One can sometimes see Pope Francis obviously and publicly struggling to suppress this line of thinking when he comments on the plight of Ukraine; “NATO is barking at Russia’s door” is an assumption about the situation that it is understandable for a Latin American Catholic prelate to make, given that region’s own history, and in the grand scheme of things the Pope is probably to be commended for resisting the temptation to go all the way down that rabbit hole. I can’t say the same for figures who are American, like Noam Chomsky and the ever-embarrassing Glenn Greenwald, suddenly adopting a naïve pacifism about Russia or even, as Chomsky did at one point, claiming that Donald Trump is “the one Western statesman” who actually wants peace. These people have completely reversed axiom and application, going from “my country is violating its own declared principles” to “violating one’s own declared principles is that which my country does, and if a country opposed to mine appears to be doing that, it must actually not be.”
The second mistake of the anti-American American left is to assume that a country—one’s own country—is reducible to the worst instincts of its political classes and the most broken aspects of its political institutions. American imperialism doesn’t make America bad for the same reason that your cousin from the poor side of town getting busted for drug dealing doesn’t make her bad; people aren’t reducible to the worst decision they’ve ever made and countries aren’t reducible to the worst features of their political cultures or military histories. Some might respond to this by pointing out that the United States’ domestic culture has obvious and universally known pathologies as well—the consumerism, the horrible diets, the hyperdivisive sociocultural politics, the obsession with large and terrifying cars and the built environment that caters to them, the increasing relegation of serious interest in religion and the divine to certain right-wing subcultures that most other Americans reasonably despise. Again, however, if most of us saw a family member or friend mishandling their household affairs in analogous ways, our natural reaction would be to pity them, not to hate them. (I say “our natural reaction,” not necessarily the reaction that we think is in keeping with our political commitments; plenty of American leftists today do also have a problem with jumping awfully quickly to interpersonal shunning of those with messy lives or bad ideas.)
A country is just its people, as a group of individuals and as a collective; this includes the abstractions that emerge out of any mass of people, such as social emotions and cultural practices. America is me, my family, and most (but not all) of my close friends; it is Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the lion’s share of the people who love and hate them most; it is art forms like jazz and comic strips, holiday traditions like unedifying political arguments on Thanksgiving and presents (or Chinese food) on Christmas, and time-honored aspects of workingmen’s and workingwomen’s culture like filling out March Madness brackets at random, stealing small items from one’s workplace, and dying of black lung around the age of sixty. For a leftist to hate America yet claim to fight for the liberation of humanity is for a priest to love God and hate his parishioners, or for a “male feminist ally” to exploit and berate his own mother.
It is imperative, then, that a left-wing patriotism reemerge in the United States, both as a civic value—those who control American public life will always either be or make others perceive them to be those who love America best—and as a moral value—exaggerated contempt for something that is flawed, but is ours, is a flaw of character and virtue on our own part. Left-wing American patriotism should honor—but not revere; reverence for mere mortal men is something that American patriotism in general absolutely does have in excess—left-wing partisan or sectional figures such as Jones, Debs, and Guthrie. Perhaps in our more trollish, bullet-biting, or yes-chad moments we might even add in more ambivalent characters like Jimmy Hoffa. At the same time we should not abandon ecumenical American patriotic figures like Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Rather than rocketing back and forth between denigrating our national heroes as the lowest of the low and unduly praising them to the stars, we should seek to interpret their lives and actions in ways as compatible as possible both with our political and moral values and with historical facts. Whether or not the country deserves our love is not the issue. We deserve to let, or make, ourselves love it.