{"id":240,"date":"2026-05-28T10:06:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T10:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=240"},"modified":"2026-05-28T10:06:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T10:06:27","slug":"how-problematic-is-patriotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=240","title":{"rendered":"How Problematic Is Patriotism?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I did not grow up loving America\u2014not because I thought it didn\u2019t deserve love but because I didn\u2019t think about it. America was the Pledge of Allegiance and \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner.\u201d It was \u201cMaverick\u201d and \u201cGunsmoke.\u201d It was Ed Sullivan and high-school dances and big cars with big fins. It was soda fountains and Elvis and stickball. It was Valley Forge and George Washington. It was also white, mostly male, and invincibly middle class, and I hardly gave a thought to race or class or much else for that matter.<\/p>\n

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Depending on where you hail from, America could be the evening sky above Northfield, Connecticut, or the fields of bluebonnets in Ennis, Texas. To a teen-ager living in New York in the nineteen-sixties, America was pretty great. It had saved the world from fascism and now stood as a bulwark against communism. Mickey Mantle, good; Nikita Khrushchev, bad. My memory may be faulty, but I can\u2019t recall anyone I knew declaring a love for America\u2014not, anyway, until I was twenty-five and living in Charleston, South Carolina.<\/p>\n

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It was the winter of 1973, and the words were spoken by a sixty-eight-year-old Brooklyn native named William McKissack Chapman. Tall and narrow, with stiff gray hair and a thin gray mustache, Bill had been a reporter for the long-defunct Brooklyn Eagle<\/em>, an editor at Time-Life, and a founder of Sports Illustrated<\/em>. He\u2019d been too young to fight in the First World War but reported from Europe during the Second. In Paris in 1945, he\u2019d got drunk with Ernest Hemingway, whom he considered a blowhard. Now, nearly thirty years later, in his elegant, slightly shopworn home, at 30 King Street, he was ruminating about Vietnam and Watergate, both of which dominated the news at the time. After a minute or two, he put down his drink and said in a tone at once wistful and firm, \u201cGod, I love this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it took me aback. Bill was old school, not given to airing his feelings, and so I understood that he loved America in a way that was alien to me. If I had once taken the country for granted, I no longer could. The civil-rights struggle, the government\u2019s treatment of Native Americans and the Chinese, McCarthyism and the blacklist, and the stupid, deadly war in Vietnam had seen to that. \u201cLove it or leave it,\u201d hard-nosed patriots urged, and at least sixty thousand young men fled to Canada or Europe to avoid the draft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Vietnam was the first time I thought about patriotism. Military service hadn\u2019t exactly figured in my childhood, but reporting to my draft board in 1969 made an impression. I might die for my country. Suddenly, being an American was no longer an abstraction; it had consequences, and, naturally, I wavered. This wasn\u2019t Pearl Harbor; it was the Gulf of Tonkin. And, like Muhammad Ali, I had \u201cno quarrel with them Vietcong.\u201d Did that make me a bad American? An unpatriotic American? As it happened, I drew a high lottery number in the draft and didn\u2019t have to travel eight thousand miles to stop the spread of communism. Still, I felt a flicker of guilt for missing an experience that would be formative for men of my generation.<\/p>\n

When Bill said that he loved America, he was also expressing his disappointment in it. The Pentagon Papers, released two years earlier, revealed that the government had lied about a war the military knew to be unwinnable as early as 1965. And the Watergate scandal, which broke in 1972, wounded Bill\u2019s generation more deeply than mine. Richard Nixon turned out to be a crook, and Henry Kissinger, I came to believe, had prolonged the war to help Nixon win re\u00eblection. By the time of the Paris Peace Accords, in January, 1973, thousands more American soldiers and untold numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians had been killed. \u201cPeace with Honor\u201d was the bullshit phrase that provided cover for death and maiming beyond any honest accounting. My conscience was clear. No need to feel guilty, no need at all.<\/p>\n

Patriotism, the concept, if not the word, probably emerged during the formation of the Greek polis in the eighth century B.C. In Plato\u2019s Crito (circa 399 B.C.), Socrates, unjustly condemned to death, decides not to oppose his sentence. Having chosen to live in a civic society, he feels honor bound to abide by its laws. His friend Crito disagrees: if the law is unjust, one may be permitted to disobey it. He thinks Socrates ought to reconsider and get the hell out of Athens. I think so, too.<\/p>\n

Patriotism\u2014from the Greek patris<\/em>, meaning \u201cfatherland\u201d or \u201cnative country\u201d\u2014entered Europe through a skein of political-religious turmoil. During the Thirty Years\u2019 War (1618-48), French Catholics and Protestants did not see one another as compatriotes<\/em>. Indeed, it may not have been until around 1750 that patriote<\/em> was first used in the modern sense, by the Duc de Saint-Simon. By then, the intellectual scaffolding for the term was already taking shape. John Locke\u2019s \u201cTwo Treatises of Government\u201d (1689), Voltaire\u2019s \u201cEssay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations\u201d (1756), and, some years later, Johann Gottfried Herder\u2019s notion of the Geist des Volkes<\/em> all made national pride seem a rational outcome of shared habits, traditions, and language.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Since then, writers have spilled a great deal of ink over patriotism. Mark Twain, H.\u00a0L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ursula K. Le Guin distrusted it. Samuel Johnson called it \u201cthe last refuge of a scoundrel,\u201d and Leo Tolstoy likened it to slavery. Jorge Luis Borges initially felt that \u201cthere is no end to the illusions of patriotism,\u201d noting that \u201cPlutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon.\u201d Years later, perhaps feeling adrift, Borges begged his gods to send someone or something into his life. \u201cThey did,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt is my country.\u201d<\/p>\n

George Orwell was kinder than most. Patriotism, he wrote, is \u201cdevotion 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.\u201d The problem was nationalism, which he maintained was \u201cinseparable from the desire for power.\u201d The line between these terms, however, is porous. Attachment to a parcel of land can easily harden into isolationism, jingoism, and racism. \u201cIt is lamentable,\u201d Voltaire observed, \u201cthat to be a good patriot one must often become the enemy of the rest of mankind.\u201d More recently, the philosopher Richard Rorty capably defended patriotism, whereas Martha Nussbaum continues to seek its curtailment.<\/p>\n

Undeterred, the historian Michael Kammen proposed, in 1991, that American patriotism had long remained \u201ca curiously neglected subject.\u201d His enormous, crowded study, \u201cMystic Chords of Memory,\u201d was intended not to fill that gap but to give substance to Robert Penn Warren\u2019s remark that being an American is not \u201ca matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea\u2014and history is the image of that idea.\u201d If historians are the biographers of a nation, in the grip of their own biases and affections, the notion of \u201cone America\u201d quickly dissolves. A nation that accumulates a history inevitably accumulates histories. For example, those bygone \u201cmint julep\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cA People\u2019s History of the United States\u201d and Paul Johnson\u2019s \u201cA History of the American People,\u201d one calling attention to feet of clay and the other to laurelled heads. Although \u201cwe can speak of a tradition of American patriotism,\u201d Kammen concluded, \u201cit has in fact been a spasmodic tradition characterized by ups and downs.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019re \u201cextremely proud to be American\u201d 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<\/em> published an article with the melancholy headline \u201cWhy Dual Citizenship Is the New American Dream.\u201d Some commentators ascribe this to financial prudence, but the trend dates back at least to 2016 and the election of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Patriotism just isn\u2019t cool anymore. Wokeness, having rightly called attention to racial and gender injustices long endemic to American life, helped chill the left\u2019s 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\u2019t dead; it\u2019s just dressed up differently. Viking helmets, star-dotted shirts, and military-style jackets, not to mention MAGA<\/em> caps, are the preferred patriotic attire. Less an ethos than a brand, it makes it hard for the more quietly dressed to own it.<\/p>\n

The language of patriotism is, of course, accessible to anyone who feels loyalty to any one place, or places. According to Amy Watson\u2019s recent book, \u201cPatriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763,\u201d 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 \u201cPatriots\u201d managed to keep the upper hand in imperial politics, Watson plausibly argues, North America might never have separated from the British Empire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When the Revolutionary War began, in April, 1775, there was no United States\u2014no Articles of Confederation, no national seal or flag or currency. There were only disgruntled colonists flying their own banners, a few with a rattlesnake and the words \u201cDont Tread on Me.<\/em>\u201d The thousand-mile stretch of land from Georgia to New England was not a nation, and those who marched toward war did so before there was a country to be patriotic about. Did anyone actually hear<\/em> Nathan Hale say, \u201cI only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country\u201d? Many colonists, in fact, would have quailed at the thought. Estimates of those favoring independence hover at around forty per cent, with perhaps twenty per cent remaining loyal to the Crown and the rest undecided. Indeed, the Founders frequently resorted to \u201cpatriotism\u201d to drum the idea of liberty into the heads of the uncommitted.<\/p>\n

When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived here, in 1831, he noticed the \u201cirritable patriotism of the Americans,\u201d which discouraged criticism of the new nation but, all the same, was not an \u201cinstinctive love\u201d of country, since America was woefully short of customs and traditions. And, because the \u201csovereignty of the Union is factitious\u201d and \u201cthat of the States is natural,\u201d a citizen\u2019s affections naturally inclined toward the near at hand: town, region, and state. Visiting the Capitol in 1860, a young Henry Adams noted that secession \u201cwas likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more.\u201d The proof arrived when Confederate forces bombarded the Union-held Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor.<\/p>\n

After my talk with Bill Chapman, I thought about patriotism as much as I thought about dried fruit. Most people, I suspect, don\u2019t bother to mull over patriotism\u2019s finer points. Once the blather of politicians, the clich\u00e9s of pundits, and the pyrotechnics of the Super Bowl die down, it\u2019s just something that hums in the background. Then again, sometimes it gets thrust upon us. The Bicentennial, in 1976\u2014with its stately flotilla of Tall Ships in New York Harbor\u2014was one such moment, and, as I write, another approaches: the nation\u2019s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. According to america250.org, the Semiquincentennial is meant to be \u201cthe largest anniversary observance in our nation\u2019s history.\u201d Whether it will outdo the Bicentennial remains to be seen, but, given the White House\u2019s current occupant, I\u2019m bracing for an excess of foolish excess. I pray only that Sylvester Stallone can be prevailed upon to sing the national anthem.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I think displays of patriotism have no place; I just prefer less noisy, less militarized forms of allegiance. Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, the New York Mets played the Atlanta Braves at Shea Stadium. Like most New Yorkers above the age of three, I watched the game on television. You can still find it on YouTube, and if you do you\u2019ll notice that, after the national anthem, players and coaches from both teams gather between home plate and the pitcher\u2019s mound to exchange hugs and handshakes\u2014something you don\u2019t see every day. Years later, the Braves\u2019 utility infielder, Mark DeRosa, said, \u201cIt was the only game I ever played in from the time I was nine years old I didn\u2019t mind losing.\u201d That, my friend, is patriotism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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What to my mind isn\u2019t patriotism, though it was sometimes couched as such, was the behavior of the assembled throng that, on January 6, 2021, stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election. Awful as it was, it felt less like an insurrection than like an ugly mob bent on destruction and self-display. Didn\u2019t it seem as if the rioters were preening for the cameras and for one another? Many carried American flags, which made them patriots in roughly the way that carrying a loaf of bread makes me a baker. And, when they broke into the Capitol and began looting, it was as though someone had scrawled obscene graffiti on the walls of my home.<\/p>\n

The painful irony is that these self-styled patriots were being profoundly un-American, shredding the Constitution in their effort to block a peaceful transfer of power. The American Nazis who fought in court for the right to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, look, by comparison, more American than the Trump-stoked mob that turned our seat of government into a crime scene. One might na\u00efvely think that attacking the Capitol should not count as a get-out-of-jail-free card, yet Trump, on the first day of his second term, issued pardons for more than fifteen hundred charged or convicted rioters and commuted the sentences of another fourteen.<\/p>\n

\u201cA body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody,\u201d Thomas Paine warned two hundred and thirty-five years ago. Trump and his underlings make Nixon and his henchmen seem like amateurs. In Trumpworld, America has been given a bad rap, yet Trump has spent years slandering the country himself. In March, he issued an executive order asserting that a \u201crevisionist movement\u201d has sought to rewrite American history, portraying our \u201cunparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness\u201d as \u201cinherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not so fast, Mr. President. Ours is a complicated history, made more tortuous by race. Some five hundred Indigenous nations lived here before the first enslaved Africans arrived, in 1619\u2014a year before the first Pilgrims. That, too, is American history, along with Reconstruction, Jim Crow, segregation, the Great Migration, Black anger, Black humor, and Black culture. This isn\u2019t wokeness; it\u2019s fact.<\/p>\n

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Trump\u2019s America has the virtue of simplicity: no initial divisions; no loyalists and patriots, or Native peoples and settlers, or Federalists and Anti-Federalists. He\u2019s not bothered by labor unrest, unfair imprisonment, white-nationalist undercurrents. Imperfection is for losers, and America is a winner. It had to have been great in the past\u2014otherwise, how could Trump make it great again? After returning to office, he swiftly reinstated the 1776 Commission, to cleanse schools of \u201canti-American ideologies\u201d through \u201cpatriotic education measures\u201d that will instill \u201ca patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation.\u201d In practice, this essentially means learning to forget.<\/p>\n

When the bipartisan Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, in 2024, proposed designs for three two-hundred-and-fiftieth-anniversary quarters commemorating the abolition of slavery, women\u2019s suffrage, and the civil-rights movement, the Treasury Secretary ultimately brushed them aside. Of course he did. Trump is selling an alternative America, with the messiest chapters abridged or excluded. Give him enough leeway and we\u2019ll soon see a return of the mint-julep histories popular a century ago, which found no room for the Black Americans who\u2019d fought for this country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Patriotism for Black Americans is its own fraught subject. Although Crispus Attucks, a freed Black man, was the first person to die in the Boston Massacre, in 1770, General George Washington initially opposed recruiting Black troops. Some colonists evidently recoiled at the sight of enslaved men bearing arms; others worried that their \u201cproperty\u201d might be damaged or lost. Only when Washington learned that the British were promising freedom to enslaved people who joined their ranks did he reverse course. Between seven and nine thousand Black Americans served in the Continental Army and Navy, but three times that number fought alongside the British. After the war, some Black Continental soldiers were manumitted; many, however, were not.<\/p>\n

How did Black Americans regard independence? Frederick Douglass\u2019s powerful 1852 speech \u201cWhat to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?\u201d provides one answer:<\/p>\n

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To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nine years later, Douglass watched two of his sons go off to fight in a war in which Unionists and Confederates alike claimed the mantle of patriotism. Could the same be said of the free or enslaved Black Americans who enlisted? After all, they were not deemed fully \u201cAmerican.\u201d The 1857 Dred Scott decision held that people of color were not \u201cpart of the people\u201d who\u2019d declared independence, and therefore could not be citizens or sue the government for their freedom. Yet, by the Civil War\u2019s end, some hundred and seventy-nine thousand Black men had joined the Union Army, with another nineteen thousand signing up for the Navy. White Union soldiers earned thirteen dollars a month; Black soldiers, until June, 1864, were paid seven.<\/p>\n

Military service has long offered both purpose and a paycheck. Black men enlisted during and after Reconstruction and fought in two World Wars, serving, of course, in segregated units. Was patriotism the motive? In Southern states\u2014and in border states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware\u2014Jim Crow prevailed; lynchings were common in the Deep South, and punishment for them was rare. It seems likely that many enlisted in the hope that service might advance their prospects and those of their race, and their ambivalence about the nation runs through Black literature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In \u201cAmerica,\u201d a 1921 poem by the Jamaican-born Harlem poet Claude McKay, race goes unmentioned but imbues every line:<\/p>\n

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Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger\u2019s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fifteen years later, Langston Hughes, in \u201cLet America Be America Again,\u201d confided that \u201cAmerica never was America to me.\u201d By \u201cme,\u201d he meant \u201cthe Negro bearing slavery\u2019s scars\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. the red man driven from the land\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. the immigrant clutching the hope I seek\u2014 \/ And finding only the same old stupid plan \/ Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.\u201d There was no reason that Hughes should have felt differently. Uncle Sam wasn\u2019t his<\/em> uncle. He was \u201cthe Man\u201d who barred Black Americans from the ballot box and then ordered them overseas to fight in Vietnam. Muhammad Ali should not have had to claim exemption on religious grounds. History had made his case for him.<\/p>\n

In the preface to \u201cLeaves of Grass,\u201d from 1855, Walt Whitman had used the plural: \u201cThe United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.\u201d Thirty-three years later, the \u201cpoem,\u201d in Whitman\u2019s eyes, had coalesced into a \u201cgrand, sane, towering, seated Mother.\u201d But aside from the Founding Fathers, the Alamo, the Gettysburg Address, Custer\u2019s Last Stand, and westward expansion, what was there to be patriotic about? This isn\u2019t a frivolous question. People loved their country largely because they loved the part of it they called home. Regional music, local newspapers, daguerreotypes, and the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Louisa May Alcott were around, but most of the songs, stories, and iconic images that now shout \u201cAmerica\u201d simply didn\u2019t exist yet. Although \u201cAmerica the Beautiful,\u201d which married the words of a feminist and lesbian poet to the melody of a New Jersey organist, became popular after 1910, our national anthem did not become official until 1931.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until the emergence of film and radio that a broader sense of national unity began to materialize. Although the Great American Songbook still lay ahead in the nineteen-twenties, people everywhere could hear the tunes of Tin Pan Alley and, starting in 1933, Franklin\u00a0D. Roosevelt\u2019s fireside chats. Hollywood also did its part, releasing a slew of movies\u2014\u201cYoung Mr. Lincoln\u201d (1939), \u201cMr. Smith Goes to Washington\u201d (1939), \u201cMeet John Doe\u201d (1941)\u2014that bathed America in a patriotic light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Maybe that\u2019s how love of country enters the bloodstream\u2014not through clauses and declarations but through melodies and tableaux. Had you asked me in 1969 why I might agree to kill a total stranger for my country, the Bill of Rights would not have sprung to mind. Instead, it would have been a scene from the movie version of Thornton Wilder\u2019s \u201cOur Town,\u201d or a bombardier crew goofing around in a B-17, or the high-school dance in \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life.\u201d When Robert Penn Warren said that being an American is \u201ca matter of an idea,\u201d he was referring to the shifting imagery haloing that idea. F.\u00a0Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s story \u201cThe Swimmers\u201d also tries to convey this, when its protagonist looks back at America\u2019s receding coastline and reflects, somewhat unfairly:<\/p>\n

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France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter\u2014it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am now ten years older than Bill Chapman was when, shaken by the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, he said, \u201cGod, I love this country.\u201d I feel that I ought to be able to say the words, too, but they do not come easily. Yet I also think there is something exceptional about America, something noble and beautiful. Exceptionalism, though, has a different connotation when linked to protectionism and isolationism. The MAGA<\/em> movement, which wants America to be more \u201cAmerican,\u201d idolizes an imaginary past, before affirmative action, feminism, diversity, and immigration \u201cruined\u201d things. Not all of its adherents envision a racially sanitized America, but they sincerely believe that Trump is good for America and his critics bad for it. The truth is, they have no real appreciation for what Trump, even when he gets things right, stands for.<\/p>\n

Tyranny, as we know, advances through scapegoating and the promise of quick fixes. It\u2019s why tyrants love the uneducated. Hannah Arendt understood this. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, she shrewdly observed, \u201cThis republic, the democracy in which we live\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. is not and never will be perfect because the standard of perfection does not apply here.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. If you try to \u2018make America more American\u2019\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. you only destroy it. Your methods, finally, are the justified methods of the police, and only of the police.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly sixty years ago, my government was willing to risk my life on its behalf. Not because North Vietnam posed a threat to a Maine fisherman or an Indiana farmer but because the President and members of Congress didn\u2019t mind sacrificing the lives of teen-agers in order to achieve peace with honor. The question I should have asked myself then is: Can someone be a patriot and not love his country but simply be glad that it exists? I like to think the answer is yes. Some may find this attitude unworthy, even ungrateful. But, just as obsessive love in a relationship can warp intimacy, so excessive national pride can debase the nation that one is trying to protect.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The impulse to come to the aid of one\u2019s country ought to match the justice and urgency of the call. Does it make sense to risk life and limb because a President asks you to? Since 1973, we have relied on a volunteer army, which made our forays into Afghanistan and Iraq matters of conscience and choice. Sure, patriotism is essential to the national defense, but it should never blind us to the human toll of warfare. The British poet Wilfred Owen, who died a week before the First World War ended, knew its horrors well. His poem \u201cDulce et Decorum Est\u201d asks us to imagine the visceral aftermath of combat. If we could only see, hear, smell, and touch what happens to the human body, we \u201cwould not tell with such high zest \/ To children ardent for some desperate glory, \/ The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est<\/em> \/ Pro patria mori<\/em>\u201d\u2014an invocation of the Roman poet Horace\u2019s line \u201cIt is sweet and fitting to die for one\u2019s country.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s never sweet, but it is sometimes fitting, and, should you decide to fight for your country, you ought to know what you\u2019re fighting for. Flag-waving patriots may believe otherwise, but our recoverable past isn\u2019t all it\u2019s cracked up to be. It never was. The historian David Lowenthal reminds us that America manipulated its archives from the very beginning. When Charles Thomson, the longtime secretary of the Continental Congress, was asked to publish his notes\u2014some thousand pages\u2019 worth\u2014he initially agreed, but then burned them instead. \u201cI shall not undeceive future generations,\u201d he reputedly explained. \u201cI could not tell the truth without giving great offense. Let the world admire our patriots and heroes. Their supposed talents and virtues\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. will serve the cause of patriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our first would-be historian did his<\/em> patriotic duty by destroying evidence, installing a narrative designed to endure, whether or not it matched the facts. Maybe our first President was not \u201cfirst in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,\u201d but, for Thomson, Washington had to be seen that way because, whatever else the original patriots did or failed to do, they devised a constitution that championed the division of powers, due process, religious liberty, and a free press.<\/p>\n

Not everyone has to see America the same way, but amnesia about its history makes us easy prey for people who trade in ignorance. Is the Constitution perfect? Far from it. \u201cWe the People\u201d meant the signers\u2014not women, not the poor, not the uneducated, not the enslaved. In 1788, political standing belonged almost entirely to white men with property, money, or schooling. Nonetheless, within the context and the limits of their moment, the Founders did something remarkable. They gave us a framework intended \u201cto form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.\u201d Forget the word \u201cpatriotism.\u201d Read the Framers\u2019 words a few times and be grateful that they\u2019ve succeeded as well as they have.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more What the Pope Said About A.I.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arthur Krystal explores what it means to be patriotic when American patriotism has become associated with diehard, Trump-inspired nationalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Problematic Is Patriotism? - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=240\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Problematic Is Patriotism? - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Arthur Krystal explores what it means to be patriotic when American patriotism has become associated with diehard, Trump-inspired nationalism.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=240\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-28T10:06:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"24 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"How Problematic Is Patriotism?\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-28T10:06:27+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240\"},\"wordCount\":4714,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/cf86f2e8d91c4e61554ff91b8ebbabfd.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Reflections\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=240\",\"name\":\"How Problematic Is Patriotism? 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