Patriotism and Nationalism, Again

Peter Beinart, he of the heavy-duty Time topic of Patriotism With America At A (Nother) Crossroads, wants to be an equal-opportunity chastiser. What could be more bipartisan and transcendent? But nothing can justify the transcendence of wisdom behind his cheap shot on ‘right-wing’ patriotism:

[…] in America, where most people hail from somewhere else […] blood-and-soil patriotism makes no sense. There is something vaguely farcical about conservative panic over Mexican flags in Los Angeles when Irish flags have long festooned Boston’s streets on St. Patrick’s Day. [My bold] Linking patriotism too closely to a reverence for inherited tradition contradicts one of America’s most powerful traditions: that our future shouldn’t be dictated by our past.

By defining Americanism too narrowly and backwardly, conservative patriotism risks becoming clubby. And by celebrating America too unabashedly–without sufficient regard for America’s sins–it risks degenerating from patriotism into nationalism, a self-righteous, chest-thumping ideology that celebrates America at the expense of the rest of the world.

You want farcical? How about failing to confess that “conservative panic” over Mexican flags reflects the not-so-vague difference between a horde of legal Irish immigrants and a horde of illegal Mexican ones? The only clubbiness that’s risked by this sort of distinction is the one where the membership roll is set by (gasp) citizenship. Ah, but that’s the bone in the throat of my brilliant nemesis Martha Nussbaum, among others:

Eminent thinkers, from Tolstoy to contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb, have denounced patriotism on exactly those grounds: that it’s wrong to prefer one’s countrymen and -women to people in other lands. Patriotism, in Kateb’s words, is illiberal; it “is an attack on the Enlightenment.” There’s a lot of truth in that. Liberals may love America in part because it aspires to certain ideals, but if they love it only because it aspires to those ideals, then what they really love is the ideals, not America. Conservatives are right. To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours.

Ay carumba. The key to patriotism rightly understood is NOT to water down Heidegger’s demento vision of the volk with a collective hallucination about the lovableness of ‘our ideals.’ Citizens are nothing like family members, and your country — ‘Uncle Sam’ to the contrary — is not at all like a real uncle or a father or a mother. Patriotism does not have to mean ‘loving’ your country. I’m not even sure how one goes about loving one’s country. I know how to greatly respect and appreciate and prize and honor and how to be proud of one’s country, which is a disembodied thing rather than a bodily person. If that’s not good enough for patriotism, I’m not sure what is.

So yes, I am implicitly pooping on the etymology of patria-tism. But wait. What if the patria involved here is less Soil and more Blood — meaning the blood, bodies, and souls of our actual fathers and mothers? Consider that Rieff may be right in saying:

Authority is always of the past and finds the living to recognize the voting rights — the true democracy of the greatest number — of the dead.

Yet wait. Authority is not power, and politics is, finally about power — the power to exclude. (Contrast with Schmitt’s incorrect definition: the power to decide the exception.) Authority, following Rieff, is that which makes us powerless to exclude, that which asserts itself as a non-negotiable presence in our midst. Citizenship, by contrast, is a joint and several assertion of exclusivity. So there is a tension here — one European countries, for instance, have been unable to resolve. The genius of the United States of America (if I may be so patriotic) is not in its very easy-to-clear bar to entry, but in the nature of that bar: you have to do more than just show up. You have to buy in. Simple, if you really want to and put forth the effort. So citizenship in America stands in a singular and complex relation to the authority of the forefathers. The task of politics, when it comes to new citizens, is to reject potential entrants who reject that relation or have no interest in continuing it (i.e. merely migrant laborers). This makes for a certain amount of confusion for typical moderns who want everything to be simple, clear, obvious, transparent, a creed that fits on a post-it note. It results in great confusion for those who think all conservatives upset about Mexicanization are racist or even culture-ist. (Although obviously there are some of these, their passion would deflate, I strongly wager, if illegal immigration was really halted.)

Patriotism is less about love of country than it is stewardship of the goods of citizenship — of a share in exclusive, even if very welcoming, sovereignty. The love metaphor drags us, as usual, into a sea of sloppy seconds, and not just seconds — confusing love of family with love of friends, love of intimates with love of strangers, love of people with love of ideas. A big Rousseauvian group grope around the maypole of re-enchantment. Politics doesn’t need enchantment. That’s what the authority of the forefathers provides — a presiding presence in which we cannot but place faith, and place ourselves within it. The problem with patriotism talk on the right and the left is that, as the authority of the forefathers decays, civic-minded good people seek to replace true patria-tism with patriot-ism — to have politics step into a breach it can never fill. For the Obama-aligned this means that politics can transcend politics through a message of hope and healing delivered from the podium-pulpit. For the McCain-aligned, it means ditto through a message of sacrifice and honor. Hope, healing, sacrifice, and honor are all words it’s okay to utter in politics — but not as a substitute for the passions, interests, remembrances, and practices of life outside citizenship.

(Thru Andrew.)