Reclaiming Left's Patriotism

Who can claim to be 'patriotic' while hating and exploiting the mass of the population? It is always the position of the pro-capitalist parties that 'patriotism' means supporting successful thieves.
 
When I was younger it appeared that the English government was going to go on with its work of destroying our language and all our communities, so I decided to emigrate to 'Israel' (many of my ancestors looked 'Jewish', which they weren't). Fortunately I learned what Zionism was, and stayed home. We fought till the language was made official and we had our own government, however limited, so that we could get on with it. That's what patriotism means, trying to save your people and their culture. In very few big states does such a problem exist except for minorities, so 'patriotism' is about supporting sports teams and singing national anthems when sufficiently drunk. What else could it be about?
 
In late 18th century America the Patriots supported revolution, the Loyalists opposed it, and a significant minority wished both would STFU. In terms of people and culture they were nearly all WASPs.

Btw, the BBC had Welsh language programs in the 1950s. How old are you, iolo? :)
 
Tranquillus in Exile said:
In late 18th century America the Patriots supported revolution, the Loyalists opposed it, and a significant minority wished both would STFU. In terms of people and culture they were nearly all WASPs.

Btw, the BBC had Welsh language programs in the 1950s. How old are you, iolo? :)
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The BBC had programmes, but Cymraeg was entirely unofficial, whereas it is now one of the two national languages. I'm older than most hills: they call me 'Sir'.
 
noise said:
The resurgence of blood-and-soil nationalism around the world seems to prove that appeals to nationhood are too racist, too tribal and too dangerous to be of value. Yet surrendering patriotism to champions of the ethno-state abdicates the fight for the soul and meaning of the American project.

The American left, from the center of the Democratic Party to its insurgent challengers, needs a dose of national vision. One of the core lessons of Trumpian politics is that Americans are starved for a meaningful politics of what it means to be American. Getting rid of the vainglorious Trump administration is only a partial solution. The causes of his rise remain.

Call what is needed a reinvigoration of “civic nationalism” or “civic republicanism” (a reference to the ancient political ideal, not the party). This is a revival of the “bond of common faith,” the “bond of common goal,” as Robert Kennedy once put it, which needs constructive outlets if what is left of American democracy is to survive.

In recent decades, progressive forces in the United States have split between two positions, both of which surrender a robust and hopeful sense of national citizenship. On one track can be found a cosmopolitan economic elite that embrace a multicultural world order shaped largely by the politics of corporate globalization. On the other track are radical critics of the racism and imperialism of the American state who often support local community and transnational solidarity but maintain a deep cynicism, even despair, about the American project. Both groups have abdicated the national story to their shared political enemies. What remains is a fervent hybrid of nationalism and anti-statism, an echo of the rebel yell.

The American past, according to the historian Gary Gerstle in his book “American Crucible,” can be understood as a struggle between “two powerful and contradictory ideals” — a civic and racialized national vision. Yet the dissolution of a progressive civic dimension has left us with an unchallenged ethno-racial nationalism.

Globalization has further complicated the problem. In a dizzying world of oppressive economic and political inequality, global trade, immigration and technological disruption, voters seek grounding not in technocratic detail but in place, in time, in tradition and, above all, in the shared fate, history and meaning of the nation.

The unhealed wounds of the 2008 financial crisis may have laid the way for Donald Trump, but the full mosaic of the American working class has long been looking desperately for routes to make America great again. As globalization expanded, it pounded foreign cars with sledge hammers, sponsored protective tariffs, promoted “Buy American” campaigns, tried to defeat Nafta, tried to organize unions and fought against undocumented migrant labor. But the plants closed anyway, domestic and foreign capital moved around, mass migrations happened, attacks on worker protections proceeded at a relentless pace, and the increasingly complicated world of national politics seemed more focused on Davos than Peoria.

Before the 1960s, dissenting and progressive movements regularly invoked nationalist and patriotic themes. The 19th-century Knights of Labor — one of the more inclusive labor organizations in American history — couldn’t get enough of the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence. Teddy Roosevelt advocated his “New Nationalism” as a counterbalance to the seemingly unchecked power of the robber barons. The socialist leader Eugene V. Debs drew on American traditions to frame his radical critiques of corporate power. The labor upheavals of the 1930s openly expressed faith in a “working-class Americanism.” Even the American Communist Party cloaked itself in “Americanism” and the words and visage of Abraham Lincoln. In Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to reconfigure class power, he did not attempt to speak for workers or the poor but simply said that tax on the rich was “the American thing to do.”

In the midst of the Cold War, when Paul Robeson was questioned by House Committee on Un-American Activities about his association with the African-American radical Ben Davis, he replied, “I say that he is as patriotic an American as there can be, and you gentlemen belong with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and you are the nonpatriots, and you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Reviving this older stream of dissenting rests on the active interests and lost authority of its citizens and its fading democratic values. This would replace “my country right or wrong” with the centuries-long struggle, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “to be true to what you said on paper.” This is the position from which voting rights, civil rights, immigrant rights and economic rights can be fought: with a vision of what is acceptably American and what is not. Decent people will rise to the challenge.

The nation is the only “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson put, where everything from mass transit to health care to wealth distribution to a green economy can find traction. A rejuvenated national vision would transcend the backward-looking — and often reactionary — search for an America in arrested decay that has too often informed politics since Ronald Reagan first promised to make America great again.

Civic patriotism must also be an aspirational story of struggle and inclusion. The narcissistic and racist politics of right-wing nationalism must be challenged with an expansive and inclusive civic vision about hope and potential. It’s what Barack Obama spoke of at the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. Standing before the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he asked, “What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”

To be sure, the rhetoric of nationalism can be dangerous in a place with a history of settler colonialism, slavery, anti-immigrant hysteria and territorial expansion. Any civic framing risks fomenting exclusion by drawing lines between those who are in and those who are out — an especially profound problem in an era of mass migration. Yet when the American left abandons any vision of social patriotism because of the racist ugliness it has come to symbolize, it concedes the American story to the voices of exclusion and avarice.

The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty made many of these arguments 20 years ago in a book, “Achieving Our Country.” That book became famous after the 2016 election for having predicted the rise of a “strongman” to fill the void in national politics. He feared that indulging in cultural politics rather than emphasizing the material interests of American working people, and surrendering the struggle to shape the national vision where that can happen, would lead to such a catastrophe. While his nightmare of the nationalist demagogue has come to pass, few people are talking about the foundation of his predictions.

Patriotism may well be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but as a pragmatist like Mr. Rorty would tell you, it is too powerful and too important to leave to the scoundrels. Voters are in search of a place of vision for average Americans, a place of idealism in an age of cynicism, a place of unity in a time of fracture and a place where policy can be embedded in something greater than technocracy.

While commentators are getting worked up over the revival of “socialism,” an increasing number of insurgent blue-collar Democrats across the country are looking to recapture a sense of nation. The dark-horse candidate from Kansas, the Army veteran James Thompson, for instance, promises to “Fight for America.”

As we approach midterm elections, we urgently need to hear these messages in good faith and rise to their challenge.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/...tml?rref=collection/sectioncollection/opinion
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Ah…...THE SILLY SEASON IS UPON US AGAIN...…...TIME FOR 24/7 LEFT WING PROPAGANDA.
 
iolo said:
It is interesting to see how, like our tories, the trumpers can claim to be patriotic while hating all normal Americans and constantly attempting to destroy their historical values.
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Define if you dare "normal American" and "historical values." You never did know what the hell you were talking about, commie!
 
Robo said:
Define if you dare "normal American" and "historical values." You never did know what the hell you were talking about, commie!
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Law. for a start, nazi shit. Decency (you never heard of that - you were out lynching), Liberty (You were obeying your masters at the time, your beloved bullies) the Right to an Opinion (Heil Trump!). You never heard of any decent values did you, racist scumbags?
 
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noise said:
I was lucky and missed the draft for Vietnam. Military isn't the only patriotism.
Hoping for an impeachment is most definately not patriotism.

Article is from NYTimes
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The draft wasn't necessary for one to enlist, however, it was to get the cowardly to enlist. And even then it missed the likes of Trump, and Clinton.

As to impeachment, the Founders certainly thought impeachment was patriotic in order to rid the country of despots like Trump.
 
noise said:
I was lucky and missed the draft for Vietnam. Military isn't the only patriotism.
Hoping for an impeachment is most definately not patriotism.

Article is from NYTimes
Click to expand...
If the President being impeached is a felon, it sure is patriotic.
 
“Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.”
― Leo Tolstoy


"I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked.
What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory and inflated phrases."
― Leo Tolstoy
 
Cypress said:
“Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.”
― Leo Tolstoy


"I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked.
What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory and inflated phrases."
― Leo Tolstoy
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Michael Parenti describes the false patriotism as Uber patriotism.
 
Phantasmal said:
Michael Parenti describes the false patriotism as Uber patriotism.
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That sounds like a good characterization.

To me, love of community and loyalty to your nation is not quite the same thing as the false patriotism we saw in the run up to the Iraq War, or to the xenophobic schemes to build walls around our nation, or to the soulless nationalism that tells middle eastern war refugees to fuck off.
 
I have no problem with patriotism. What does it mean to me?

Uphold and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Appreciate and protect the nation for what it is, the homeland, the connection of a vast number of inherently bonded people coordinating their efforts together for mutual benefit. To desire for this great combination of ideas and cultures to endure. Here, I make my stand.

Here is a very patriotic statement: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Patriotism becomes very easy when one moves beyond hatred. I may disagree with someone else who flies the American flag as I proudly fly my own American flag. And that's OK. Since we both fly the same flag, we have something in common, too. Patriotism.
 
PoliTalker said:
I have no problem with patriotism. What does it mean to me?

Uphold and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Appreciate and protect the nation for what it is, the homeland, the connection of a vast number of inherently bonded people coordinating their efforts together for mutual benefit. To desire for this great combination of ideas and cultures to endure. Here, I make my stand.

Here is a very patriotic statement: "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Patriotism becomes very easy when one moves beyond hatred. I may disagree with someone else who flies the American flag as I proudly fly my own American flag. And that's OK. Since we both fly the same flag, we have something in common, too. Patriotism.
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You have to hate people who are not like you. you have to swear undying fealty to Trump. You have to take pleasure oit minoriy=ties dying or getting hurt. You must love Mother Russia.
 
Hello Nordberg,

Nordberg said:
You have to hate people who are not like you. you have to swear undying fealty to Trump. You have to take pleasure oit minoriy=ties dying or getting hurt. You must love Mother Russia.
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LOL!

JFK was right. Ever since the advent of television we have had a different kind of politics. Simply making sense on policy is not enough to be president. One has to also be visually entertaining. And what's more entertaining than shamelessly attacking somebody?

Now we have a president who gets all his information from TV.

I wish people would think for themselves.

Placated voters who want to blame others for all their problems.

TV is so great at creating division we are now as polarized as ever.

If the divisions in this nation were drawn along physical boundaries we would already be at civil war.

Part of the problem is that commercial media turns controversy, whether real or manufactured, into profit.

I prefer PBS News.

And I don't hate anybody.

Being informed is not about learning who to hate.
 
Hey OP ..... Blow hard much ?

The left has never been " patriotic " .... It's always been about me me me with them.

Remember ..... " Obama gonna pay my rent " .

You aren't fooling anyone !
 
noise said:
I was lucky and missed the draft for Vietnam. Military isn't the only patriotism.
Hoping for an impeachment is most definately not patriotism.

Article is from NYTimes
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When a president is acting for personal aggrandizement instead of working for the people, it is patriotic to fight him. Wanting an incompetent president impeached is patriotic. It definitely is.
 
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