Liberal Patriotism Is Not About Flag-Waving

The distinction between patriotism and nationalism is not a new or semantic one, but many on the left have always been unpersuaded by it. As Katha Pollitt wrote in Dissent in 2010, “How different are they really?” Aren’t both credos, she asked, “saying a version of the same thing: America is superior because I was born there?” In this view, pride in country—no matter how measured or qualified—blinds us to our flaws, drags us into war, and enables “America First” demagogues like Donald Trump. On this Fourth of July, more than a decade later, this sentiment remains intractable—especially among members of my generation, the least patriotic in American history.

The leftist denial of the patriotism-nationalism distinction flies in the face of numerous recent efforts on the part of prominent liberal thinkers to clarify it. As Jill Lepore wrote in 2019’s This America: The Case for the Nation, a book largely dedicated to such an effort, “Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.” Or, as Adam Gopnik wrote in 2016, “Patriotism needs no enemy, but nationalism demands one.” To both writers, patriotism tells a story about appreciating one’s place, while nationalism tells one about losing it at the hands of some demonized “others”—often people who don’t belong to an ethnic, religious, or racial majority. It is important to understand that the relationship between the two is fluid, and that patriotism can easily curdle into nationalism. But telling them apart should be no great difficulty. Says Lepore: “To confuse one for the other is to pretend that hate is love and fear is courage.”

Even Trump himself has invested—to his great success—in the power of the distinction: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned—it’s called a ‘nationalist,’” he said at a 2018 Houston rally. “And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!”

And certainly, the pragmatic liberal thinks, we should. For not only is it easy to differentiate between the feral, whitewashing nationalism of the right and the clear-eyed liberal patriotism of our greatest social leaders—from Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr., the latter two of whom identified as socialists—it is also essential to understanding how liberalism succeeds. As historian Michael Kazin pointed out, it is difficult to name “any American radical or reformer who repudiated the national belief system and still had a major impact on U.S. politics and policy.” So the argument goes: To close the gap between the American reality and the American promise requires something more than indifference to the nation. If the left wants to overcome nationalism, it will have to do a better job embracing some form of patriotism. Otherwise, nationalism will eat it. Liberalism is a far weaker opponent when it scoffs at expressions of national pride and far stronger when it embraces them.

Many progressives still seem to underrate how essential that embrace of pride was to Obama’s success. There is a storied liberal tradition of casting progressive struggles in an Americanist light, describing them as challenges to the nation to live up to its most laudable founding ideals, and Obama stepped into that tradition with inspiring confidence and eloquence. His speech at the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches is perhaps the best example of this; it’s telling that the first applause break comes after the line “there’s nothing more American than what happened here.” (You can hear a clear echo of King in his “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech: “Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right,” he said.)

Most of us are familiar with these kinds of patriotic formulations. And yet to many young people, they don’t quite register. Because many of us in Gen Z gained political consciousness just after the Obama years, we don’t actually know what a compelling liberal patriotism sounds like. Indeed, when we listen to the current presidential candidates, we don’t know what a compelling anything sounds like. Patriotism found no voice on last week’s debate stage, amidst the bungled statistics, wild lies, and general incomprehensibility. How, we ask, could anyone feel patriotic after that?

To many of us college students, the word itself reeks of antiquity, stuffiness, colonialism—even of political incorrectness, as Gore Vidal wrote in The Nation in 1991: “Patria-pater-father. So where is Mom? Didn’t she help Dad turn the American wilderness into a cement desert bright with golden arches?” Plus, when many of the most daunting problems we face threaten not just the nation but the globe, it seems our solutions should be articulated not in patriotic terms but in planetary ones. The word seems to have no use for us anymore. It is empty, the tool of politicians, the joke the Howard Zinn reader gets. You can’t trick us with your grand gesturing, we think. Paul Revere belongs to your nostalgia, not ours. America the Beautiful? Please. We’ve been to Europe on our semesters abroad, and the lifestyle is very much elevated.

Pollitt asked, in that same essay, “What has flag-waving ever done for us in the end?” If flag-waving refers to the insurrectionist impulse or Kid Rock concerts or the new wave of self-declared Christian Nationalists like Charlie Kirk, then Pollitt is of course correct. But if flag-waving means appealing to the American creed in service of justice or peace or equality—criticizing the country while calling on its “better angels”—then the question seems to belittle everything from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” to Jimi Hendrix’s infamous Woodstock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (For an example of patriotic protest that involves a Gen Z artist, see Olivia Rodrigo’s unapologetic response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.) Reasonable people would not equate all the above examples, nor would they doubt the basic sincerity of Douglass when he spoke of the “great principles” of the Declaration, or of Hendrix when he said that he thought his rendition was “beautiful” in response to claims that it was offensive.

So yes, there is a difference between nationalism and patriotism. There are high forms of patriotism and low forms. There is an aspirational, grateful pride and a blind, chauvinistic one—and there are many things in between. The question is whether we reject all distinctions, thus allowing patriotism to be defined by the people who wave the flag most, or choose instead to engage them. The fight over what or who is patriotic can seem tedious. But that fight also constitutes the history of the nation—in one sense, that fight is the nation. As Greil Marcus wrote: “There’s a way in which you can see every American story as a version of the Declaration of Independence: every story an attempt to make it true, to prove it a lie.”

I wonder, in this time of incredible disillusionment and cynicism, if we can come to understand liberal patriotism as a kind of localized optimism—if that is really what it has represented, at its best, all along: a belief that not all is lost; that progress can be made; that promises, one day, might be achieved. Out of another of the darkest moments in American history, the Great Depression, Langston Hughes conjured these words to describe our country: “The land that has never been yet— / And yet must be.” What a simple, galvanizing summation of the American experiment. How willing are we to embrace it? And what will happen if we don’t, and we leave such imaginings to Donald Trump and his sycophants?