A very thought-provoking analysis of what is rotten at the core of American ‘exceptionalism’. Patriotism demands loyalty and blindness to the injustices perpetrated domestically and internationally in its name. One could however argue that Trump’s fiascos have shown this exceptionalism to be the figment of imagination that it has always been.
'A total rejection of patriotism, which is a prerequisite for an honest discussion of national affairs,...'
I don't think you can, Comrade Nolan. Every communist lives somewhere, and one of those 'somewheres' is home. It's not our task to become 'national nihilists.' True, it's a problem. In the oppressed nations,we clearly hear Fidel proclaim, 'Patria O Muerte, Venceremos! We cheer his patriotism, raised in defense of his socialist project. For us, of the oppressor nations, we start with 'One divides into two.' There is the American of war, empire and slavery. But there is also the America of peace, solidarity and popular and abolition democracy. Take a deep dive into any period of our history, and you will see them both warring with each other to gain the upper hand.
Our America is the latter, and we uphold it to oppose the other. That still doesn't exclude our final aim of communism and the socialist transition. But even there, we won't find a path without developing and applying a 'Marxism with American characteristics.' Browder to a stab at it, raising the right questions. Stalin attacked him as 'America's Tito,' a badge Browder was proud of. But he still largely came up with pisspoor answers. No matter. Now we know what to avoid, but the task still remains. We can't win without solving it. And we can be 'Woody Guthrie' and 'Langston Hughes' proletarian patriots who hold the scarlet banner high, but without denying the stars and stripes. Imagine the day when 100,000 Union troops, Black and white, carried it while singing 'John Brown's Body' during their victory march in the streets of DC.
I'd rather agree with Lenin who claimed, "the working men have no country". Castro, Mao, Sankara fought peoples wars for national liberation. Their nationalism does not equal the type of patriotism Hamilton writes about here. Equating the two is akin to the fallacy of equating a war of colonial domination with a peoples war of liberation.
I would also argue that we've yet to see 'actual' communism in action. The leaders you mentioned used the the promise of communism to appeal an aggrieved populace, but failed to implement it because actual functional communism, like any political ideology needs to emerge from a set of preconditions...And I believe that Marx even explicitly said that communism would come from the collapse of capitalist industrialism, a precondition that none of the countries that have TRIED communism had met...And final point...Any left wing POLITICAL ideology that is enforced using authoritarian right wing methods, ceases to be a 'left-wing' anything.
Hamilton: I follow a good number of opinion columnists. Yours is the one I look forward to. Your insight and analysis is always spot on (of course, because it resonates with me!) A commenter mentioned communism as it was labeled under Stalin: one thing that always bothers me is that Russia fought as our ally, and suffered greater losses than any other country (as I understand it.) The Marshall Plan rebuilt our enemies, and left Russia out in the cold to the point of being our greatest enemy for the next 75 years. Do you think turning our back on Russia influenced Stalin's actions? And look what we did to Russia after Gorbachev. We equate love of country with love of militarism. Anyway. The subject was patriotism: It makes me gag. Theater for the masses. Hilariously indistinguishable from "The REDS."
What the U S did in Russia after Gorbachev is a largely untold story and likely for good reason. That story might explain, in retrospect, why the shrewd Stalin would have refused U S "aid". A sophisticated citizen doesn't trust the State under any circumstances while supporting that the rule of law is necessary. While we damned the USSR gulags, we were developing the highest per capita incarceration rate in human history.
"The Marshall Plan rebuilt our enemies, and left Russia out in the cold to the point of being our greatest enemy for the next 75 years. Do you think turning our back on Russia influenced Stalin's actions? "
The biggest difference is that we didn't go to war with Russia nor subsequently defeat them. They wouldn't' have been candidates for the Marshall plan...Also, no way Stalin would have allowed US aid because that would have been seen as acquiescence to the West.
This is a brilliant column and perfectly explains why as a leftist/socialist I always try to avoid appeals to patriotism in my arguments and in particular saying that things like crushing dissent, racism etc. are somehow "unamerican" and that's the reason they're bad
Excellent point about patriotism of the normative kinds.
I may have been leaning on patriotism but maybe it’s not of the normative kind—it’s more ‘I love these good things and these good people here.’ You know—the Grand Canyon. The Redwood Forest. The Gulfstream Waters. Also, my people by the relief line. I owe them too. I want to make sure nobody messes with them or their shit or wrecks the lives of their children.
The Grand Canyon is not better than Barrancas del Cobre or anything. I owe people in Mexico, I owe people in Haiti. It’s all very arbitrary where a person ends up. It’s particular attachment but it doesn’t erase the general morality. I love the grouchy couple at the shoe repair store but if I lived in Mongolia, I would be attached to some shoe repair people there. Nobody here is more important. There’s an arbitrariness to how I became attached to them—I may feel shame or pride and more intense distress or horror or despair about what the people here do and not so much what people in Mongolia do— but that’s happenstance.
My own fate is tied up with what the people here do.
It also seems like bad faith to set myself apart. The arbitrariness of it all means that ‘we’ killed the people of Iraq, even if I fought to stop the war, even if I had much more of a sense of belonging to a community of people who believe in human rights, and the people in Iraq like that than I ever did with the people running the US government. I got yoked to those human rights violators and a lot follows from it even if I did not choose it, would stop it, and their values are alien to me whereas I shared the values of the bloggers I read from Iraq.
That’s not patriotism perhaps. Not sure what to call it. The way that we’re stuck here together means all kinds of different things. We have to fight for each other but also fight each other when someone uses the wealth and power of this apparatus we’re yoked to to harm other people.
Somehow or other this brought to mind a paraphrase of something Mark Twain wrote in, I believe, 1905: Loyalty to the country, always; loyalty to the government, when it deserves it.
Thank you Hamilton Nolan. I did live in the US for 23yrs and saw the same as you..........this word "Patriotism does seem to me keeping the people behind.
I agree that patriotism is a dubious virtue, and that the requirement that prominent figures mouth false platitudes about America as the land of freedom, altruistic leader of the benighted lesser nations of the world does us no good.
But a couple of points. First, re: communism, when Murrow was fighting McCarthy, communism was embodied by Stalinist Russia; even American communists looked to the USSR for guidance and leadership. That turned out to be a mistake - communism as such was a murderous, totalitarian entity. Claiming that it was working in the service of egalitarianism is as false as saying America is a beacon of freedom.
Second, at this moment we are staring down a fascist dictator. We need everyone who realizes Trump is a problem to join hands and fight him on whichever part of the front they find themselves. Can't stand his tariffs? Fight! Can't stand his treatment of non-citizens? Fight! Can't stand his assault on civil liberties? Fight!
Trying to make sophisticated arguments about American history and the problems that have long afflicted this country is not what we need right now (though it should certainly be part of the project if we manage to restore even our imperfect former democracy). There are lots of people who call themselves patriots AND who realize Trump has to go. Declaiming the problems with patriotism would be a mistake for anyone hoping to end this regime. We need everyone we can get in this fight.
I would argue that what was practiced in Russia wasn't anything remotely resembling communism. It recently dawned on me how much of a lie that was. Does anyone really feel as though Russians owned the means of production? I mean that is the cornerstone of communism, and yet there is absolutely no sense of that kind of power and control of said production. When workers control the means of production they have a voice. If Russian workers had controlled the means of production, they would've dragged Stalin out by the ankles into the street and beaten him to death with their fists. It's ironic. Despite what little power unions have in the United States they are still closer to actual "communism" than the Soviet Union ever achieved
A novel I read long ago had the hero arguing that love of nation was too often just the nostalgic defense of the foods eaten in childhood. Do we use this crisis to grow into actually honoring our constitutional principles or does the bad-faith pablum - and worse - so neatly described here triumph?
This gives verse to the feeling I always have when I see the flag displayed. It’s a symbol. One that’s supposed to rally people around the country. I believe it’s a great country. Not because it’s always right or perfect, but because it strives for ideals even if the ideals are always just beyond reach. Thank you for this post because patriotism needs to be seen for what it is.
What is great about Amerikkka when it allows its citizens to die for lack of health care?
What is great about Amerikkka when the majority of working people live paycheck to paycheck?
What is great about Amerikkka when we produce 25% of the world’s carbon emissions?
What is great about Amerikkka when we have allowed a foreign quasi-nation to completely control our government, resulting in our weapons genociding a people?
What is great about Amerikkka when people go hungry while the Pentagon guzzles?
What are those “ideals” that Amerikkka is supposedly striving for?
(1) Stalinism, post-WWII Soviet expansion, and the repeated cycle of communist crimes and betrayals of revolutionary promises once in power? I genuinely mean this as "yes and" to much of this analysis, and I understand that it would take another article or more to address my points, but is there nothing to "the implication that communism is a threat to American [or ideally universal] values”?
(2) Ideas for how to get Americans to accept a radical lowering of their standard of living?
1. It's important when we talk about ideas to be clear about what we're talking about-- Stalinism is certainly not the same thing as "communism" in the minds of many people who embraced communist values. Of course in electoral politics everything gets conflated to maximize rhetorical advantage.
Reiterating this second point! This "lower" standard of living will come as a result of unchecked climate change, full stop. The question is, can we collectively organize ourselves outside the stricture of capitalism to hold onto the truly vital elements of the 20th century so that everyone has essentials? I'm thinking of the vast improvements to medical care, hygiene, transit, food production, etc., along with freedom in body and mind to enjoy these good things in security. That's not possible under a liberal order, especially when artificially circumscribed by ideas like patriotism. We're all doomed unless we embrace universal human rights and a just distribution of our collective wealth.
A great book that you might really like called "testimony ". It's the autobiography of Dmitri Shostakovich. Fantastic side view into Russia under Stalin.
I agree with you on #2. On #1, right, but in the 1950s (and beyond), it was a Stalinist form of "communism" that was dominant among the "communist" parties and in the USSR, eastern Europe, and China, and that contested the US for global hegemony. And that I would argue threatened the liberal values of freedom and equality that (in my reading of Marx) capitalism promulgates while making a mockery of them and communism SHOULD have fulfilled rather than trampled on. This is why I balked at imagining a principled liberal rejecting "the implication that communism is a threat to American values" (which I'm reading in this context as "liberal values").
What an arrow straight to the bullseye of the target.
Even a fifth grader could understand these direct arguments.
A very thought-provoking analysis of what is rotten at the core of American ‘exceptionalism’. Patriotism demands loyalty and blindness to the injustices perpetrated domestically and internationally in its name. One could however argue that Trump’s fiascos have shown this exceptionalism to be the figment of imagination that it has always been.
'A total rejection of patriotism, which is a prerequisite for an honest discussion of national affairs,...'
I don't think you can, Comrade Nolan. Every communist lives somewhere, and one of those 'somewheres' is home. It's not our task to become 'national nihilists.' True, it's a problem. In the oppressed nations,we clearly hear Fidel proclaim, 'Patria O Muerte, Venceremos! We cheer his patriotism, raised in defense of his socialist project. For us, of the oppressor nations, we start with 'One divides into two.' There is the American of war, empire and slavery. But there is also the America of peace, solidarity and popular and abolition democracy. Take a deep dive into any period of our history, and you will see them both warring with each other to gain the upper hand.
Our America is the latter, and we uphold it to oppose the other. That still doesn't exclude our final aim of communism and the socialist transition. But even there, we won't find a path without developing and applying a 'Marxism with American characteristics.' Browder to a stab at it, raising the right questions. Stalin attacked him as 'America's Tito,' a badge Browder was proud of. But he still largely came up with pisspoor answers. No matter. Now we know what to avoid, but the task still remains. We can't win without solving it. And we can be 'Woody Guthrie' and 'Langston Hughes' proletarian patriots who hold the scarlet banner high, but without denying the stars and stripes. Imagine the day when 100,000 Union troops, Black and white, carried it while singing 'John Brown's Body' during their victory march in the streets of DC.
I'd rather agree with Lenin who claimed, "the working men have no country". Castro, Mao, Sankara fought peoples wars for national liberation. Their nationalism does not equal the type of patriotism Hamilton writes about here. Equating the two is akin to the fallacy of equating a war of colonial domination with a peoples war of liberation.
I agree
I would also argue that we've yet to see 'actual' communism in action. The leaders you mentioned used the the promise of communism to appeal an aggrieved populace, but failed to implement it because actual functional communism, like any political ideology needs to emerge from a set of preconditions...And I believe that Marx even explicitly said that communism would come from the collapse of capitalist industrialism, a precondition that none of the countries that have TRIED communism had met...And final point...Any left wing POLITICAL ideology that is enforced using authoritarian right wing methods, ceases to be a 'left-wing' anything.
Oh. Well said! Thank you, Hamilton, for this site and all you do for workers and working in the U.S. Stronger together, always
Hamilton: I follow a good number of opinion columnists. Yours is the one I look forward to. Your insight and analysis is always spot on (of course, because it resonates with me!) A commenter mentioned communism as it was labeled under Stalin: one thing that always bothers me is that Russia fought as our ally, and suffered greater losses than any other country (as I understand it.) The Marshall Plan rebuilt our enemies, and left Russia out in the cold to the point of being our greatest enemy for the next 75 years. Do you think turning our back on Russia influenced Stalin's actions? And look what we did to Russia after Gorbachev. We equate love of country with love of militarism. Anyway. The subject was patriotism: It makes me gag. Theater for the masses. Hilariously indistinguishable from "The REDS."
What the U S did in Russia after Gorbachev is a largely untold story and likely for good reason. That story might explain, in retrospect, why the shrewd Stalin would have refused U S "aid". A sophisticated citizen doesn't trust the State under any circumstances while supporting that the rule of law is necessary. While we damned the USSR gulags, we were developing the highest per capita incarceration rate in human history.
Miss Anne, when he was asked: How do you know when you’re right? W H Auden said: Whenever my friends agree with me.
"The Marshall Plan rebuilt our enemies, and left Russia out in the cold to the point of being our greatest enemy for the next 75 years. Do you think turning our back on Russia influenced Stalin's actions? "
The biggest difference is that we didn't go to war with Russia nor subsequently defeat them. They wouldn't' have been candidates for the Marshall plan...Also, no way Stalin would have allowed US aid because that would have been seen as acquiescence to the West.
This is a brilliant column and perfectly explains why as a leftist/socialist I always try to avoid appeals to patriotism in my arguments and in particular saying that things like crushing dissent, racism etc. are somehow "unamerican" and that's the reason they're bad
patriotism is grotesque and performative. The people who wave the flag the hardest are the ones who most strongly oppose what IS good about the US.
Hi Belfryo
I’m wracking my brain attempting to come up with what’s “good” about the US, other than the wonders created by nature.
We've had some pretty great music over the last century or so...
The intentions set out by the constitution...per the current crisis: lack of due process
“It is the heart of U.S. policy to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to save democracy from communism.” — Michael Parenti
Excellent point about patriotism of the normative kinds.
I may have been leaning on patriotism but maybe it’s not of the normative kind—it’s more ‘I love these good things and these good people here.’ You know—the Grand Canyon. The Redwood Forest. The Gulfstream Waters. Also, my people by the relief line. I owe them too. I want to make sure nobody messes with them or their shit or wrecks the lives of their children.
The Grand Canyon is not better than Barrancas del Cobre or anything. I owe people in Mexico, I owe people in Haiti. It’s all very arbitrary where a person ends up. It’s particular attachment but it doesn’t erase the general morality. I love the grouchy couple at the shoe repair store but if I lived in Mongolia, I would be attached to some shoe repair people there. Nobody here is more important. There’s an arbitrariness to how I became attached to them—I may feel shame or pride and more intense distress or horror or despair about what the people here do and not so much what people in Mongolia do— but that’s happenstance.
My own fate is tied up with what the people here do.
It also seems like bad faith to set myself apart. The arbitrariness of it all means that ‘we’ killed the people of Iraq, even if I fought to stop the war, even if I had much more of a sense of belonging to a community of people who believe in human rights, and the people in Iraq like that than I ever did with the people running the US government. I got yoked to those human rights violators and a lot follows from it even if I did not choose it, would stop it, and their values are alien to me whereas I shared the values of the bloggers I read from Iraq.
That’s not patriotism perhaps. Not sure what to call it. The way that we’re stuck here together means all kinds of different things. We have to fight for each other but also fight each other when someone uses the wealth and power of this apparatus we’re yoked to to harm other people.
Somehow or other this brought to mind a paraphrase of something Mark Twain wrote in, I believe, 1905: Loyalty to the country, always; loyalty to the government, when it deserves it.
Excellent article, by the way!
Damn. Right on the mark. Thank you.
Thank you Hamilton Nolan. I did live in the US for 23yrs and saw the same as you..........this word "Patriotism does seem to me keeping the people behind.
I agree that patriotism is a dubious virtue, and that the requirement that prominent figures mouth false platitudes about America as the land of freedom, altruistic leader of the benighted lesser nations of the world does us no good.
But a couple of points. First, re: communism, when Murrow was fighting McCarthy, communism was embodied by Stalinist Russia; even American communists looked to the USSR for guidance and leadership. That turned out to be a mistake - communism as such was a murderous, totalitarian entity. Claiming that it was working in the service of egalitarianism is as false as saying America is a beacon of freedom.
Second, at this moment we are staring down a fascist dictator. We need everyone who realizes Trump is a problem to join hands and fight him on whichever part of the front they find themselves. Can't stand his tariffs? Fight! Can't stand his treatment of non-citizens? Fight! Can't stand his assault on civil liberties? Fight!
Trying to make sophisticated arguments about American history and the problems that have long afflicted this country is not what we need right now (though it should certainly be part of the project if we manage to restore even our imperfect former democracy). There are lots of people who call themselves patriots AND who realize Trump has to go. Declaiming the problems with patriotism would be a mistake for anyone hoping to end this regime. We need everyone we can get in this fight.
I would argue that what was practiced in Russia wasn't anything remotely resembling communism. It recently dawned on me how much of a lie that was. Does anyone really feel as though Russians owned the means of production? I mean that is the cornerstone of communism, and yet there is absolutely no sense of that kind of power and control of said production. When workers control the means of production they have a voice. If Russian workers had controlled the means of production, they would've dragged Stalin out by the ankles into the street and beaten him to death with their fists. It's ironic. Despite what little power unions have in the United States they are still closer to actual "communism" than the Soviet Union ever achieved
A novel I read long ago had the hero arguing that love of nation was too often just the nostalgic defense of the foods eaten in childhood. Do we use this crisis to grow into actually honoring our constitutional principles or does the bad-faith pablum - and worse - so neatly described here triumph?
You spell it out for everyone to be able to understand, if they want to understand.❤️🌿
To not understand it would be deliberate.
This gives verse to the feeling I always have when I see the flag displayed. It’s a symbol. One that’s supposed to rally people around the country. I believe it’s a great country. Not because it’s always right or perfect, but because it strives for ideals even if the ideals are always just beyond reach. Thank you for this post because patriotism needs to be seen for what it is.
I find your post very naive.
What is great about Amerikkka when it allows its citizens to die for lack of health care?
What is great about Amerikkka when the majority of working people live paycheck to paycheck?
What is great about Amerikkka when we produce 25% of the world’s carbon emissions?
What is great about Amerikkka when we have allowed a foreign quasi-nation to completely control our government, resulting in our weapons genociding a people?
What is great about Amerikkka when people go hungry while the Pentagon guzzles?
What are those “ideals” that Amerikkka is supposedly striving for?
Thank you for this.
Yes, and ...
(1) Stalinism, post-WWII Soviet expansion, and the repeated cycle of communist crimes and betrayals of revolutionary promises once in power? I genuinely mean this as "yes and" to much of this analysis, and I understand that it would take another article or more to address my points, but is there nothing to "the implication that communism is a threat to American [or ideally universal] values”?
(2) Ideas for how to get Americans to accept a radical lowering of their standard of living?
1. It's important when we talk about ideas to be clear about what we're talking about-- Stalinism is certainly not the same thing as "communism" in the minds of many people who embraced communist values. Of course in electoral politics everything gets conflated to maximize rhetorical advantage.
2. No, reality will probably just force it on us.
Reiterating this second point! This "lower" standard of living will come as a result of unchecked climate change, full stop. The question is, can we collectively organize ourselves outside the stricture of capitalism to hold onto the truly vital elements of the 20th century so that everyone has essentials? I'm thinking of the vast improvements to medical care, hygiene, transit, food production, etc., along with freedom in body and mind to enjoy these good things in security. That's not possible under a liberal order, especially when artificially circumscribed by ideas like patriotism. We're all doomed unless we embrace universal human rights and a just distribution of our collective wealth.
A great book that you might really like called "testimony ". It's the autobiography of Dmitri Shostakovich. Fantastic side view into Russia under Stalin.
I agree with you on #2. On #1, right, but in the 1950s (and beyond), it was a Stalinist form of "communism" that was dominant among the "communist" parties and in the USSR, eastern Europe, and China, and that contested the US for global hegemony. And that I would argue threatened the liberal values of freedom and equality that (in my reading of Marx) capitalism promulgates while making a mockery of them and communism SHOULD have fulfilled rather than trampled on. This is why I balked at imagining a principled liberal rejecting "the implication that communism is a threat to American values" (which I'm reading in this context as "liberal values").