In Defense of Trump’s ‘Day of Patriotic Devotion’

Megan McArdle:

So Donald Trump declared his inauguration a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.” Left-wing Twitter went into a frenzy about how creepily quasi-fascist this was. Right-wing Twitter went into a frenzy pointing out that Barack Obama had declared his own inauguration a “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation.” Left-wing Twitter angrily responded that those things are completely different, implying that if you couldn’t see the difference between a beautiful and healing day of renewal and reconciliation, and a disgusting celebration of atavistic nationalism, you might be something of a fascist. And I, bordering on something perilously close to despair, thought, “Guys, this is why Red America hates us.”

It used to be a trope on the right that the left thought patriotism was a bad word — a charge the left angrily denied. Now here we have a surprisingly large number of people arguing that … patriotism is a bad word, and wildly inappropriate when issued from the Oval Office. Or at least, more than a bit uncouth.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t be patriotic and also left-wing. (Try telling that to arch-jingoist Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) But left-wing political beliefs cannot substitute for patriotism any more than a belief in tax cuts and smaller government can. Patriotism is the primal love of your country which pre-exists any particular notion about how its political affairs should be arranged. You can espouse a single-payer health care program (or smaller government) as a loyal citizen of Denmark. You cannot, however, be an an American patriot in that same position, though you may be a most excellent Dane. True patriotism does not require us to choose between the many constituent identities that every individual has. But it does require you to decide where your first loyalties lie.

Your patriotism may indeed lead you to advocate various changes in the government, in the belief that this will make it a better place, just as your love of your spouse may cause you to urge them to give up their soul-sucking job in corporate law and pursue the nonprofit career they’ve always dreamed of. But your love of your spouse does not, one hopes, consist primarily of plans for their future or hopes for their improvement. (If it does, you aren’t their spouse; you’re their agent). Patriotism is similar. It can survive substantial disagreement about the reasons for that love, or the sacrifices that love should entail. It can’t survive one half of the partnership declaring that they will only start loving their country after it has perfected itself. As in a marriage, that would be a very long wait.

But shouldn’t we scorn patriotism, which drives us to war and so many other awful things? No more than we should scorn the progressive ideals that have led to so much good social change, and also so much human suffering under various left-wing regimes. Ideals are dangerous things with a tendency to run amok, but no society can live without them. And I submit that no nation can live long without a pretty healthy patriotism — a powerful symbolic identity that transcends the frictions and disagreements which otherwise make it impossible to unite for any common purpose.

As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued for years, doing things in groups is really hard, and the larger the group, the harder it gets. Moral values like group loyalty — an  instinctive group loyalty, not some dry intellectual thing carefully reasoned from first principles and self-interest — make it possible for us to do this very difficult thing. And the reason you can’t simply rely on a more intellectually attractive, well-reasoned version is that other people will not trust it. Your reasoning could change, or your self-interest could dictate that you betray them. Bedrock emotions are stickier. This makes them problematic, but it also makes them necessary.

This by no means suggests that to be patriotic you need to support, say, aggressive foreign wars, or a large military, or any of the other things often associated with patriotism in our political culture. (Note that in the 1930s, the most strongly patriotic folks were often virulently anti-interventionist, at least until Pearl Harbor.) What it does mean is that you should be able to say, without irony or reservation, “I love my country more than any other country,” and understand that adults around the world won’t hear this as an insult against their own land, but as the moral equivalent of “I love my wife more than any other woman.” You don’t love your country best because all the others are rotten places full of awful people; you love it best because it’s yours.

This sits badly with the cosmopolitan values of wide swathes of the country, because this sort of particular love closes off other options. But as I’ve noted before, the idea of being a “citizen of the world” is nonsense. If you get into trouble in a foreign country, it’s the U.S. embassy that’s required to swoop in to bail you out, not “the world.” Don’t get me wrong; there are many fine people abroad, and many of them may help you. But the U.S. government is the only one that hasto, and that makes all the difference.

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