On patriotism

Nations are, no more than persons, infallible, nor is criticism hatred, nor does ‘love of country’ require obedience and assent.

The only patriotism we need is the recognition that citizens of a republic should care for its well-being and that of their fellow citizens and residents. 

The demand of patriotism is always a demand for loyalty, and therefore obedience. The loyalty demanded is always to a specific government and its specific policies.

Some patriots are proud of their moral luck. Their country. they will insist, is a greatly good one that has done mainly greatly good things. On the hand, they claim to love their country because it satisfies the contingent condition of being greatly good. On the other hand, everyone should love their country, which is right to them because it must be, whether what it does is right or wrong.

In this moral luck lies the only real difference between the love of its citizens for a national government whose actions are manifestly evil and those which are greatly good. These people would behave the same way no matter where they lived. Their moral luck provides their main argument because without it their position would be manifest nonsense or an apology for the worst injustices.

Patriots are less concerned to oppose any injustice than to deny that it is even possible for it to exist. They act like they are personally insulted if you criticize anything that their country does. The object of the concerned citizen’s political activity is always some specific thing that is or might be done. The object to the patriot is to assert the value of their identity. Nationalism is identity politics. The person or collective identity who is a presumptively virtuous one could not do much that is morally bad. To even imagine that as possible is to outrage the person’s identity.

Patriotism is frequently a weapon used against opponents of a nation’s policies, actions, or wars. Instead of defending those policies as just, when they manifestly may appear unjust, they claim that the critics merely hate the country.

If my nation is invaded by a foreign power, and its people put to the sword, I shall want to fly its flag, and fight its battles. If my nation’s army invades a foreign nation, and puts its people to the sword, and it lack a sufficient argument, I shall not fly its flag while it does so, and will not fight these battles, but will cry out against them and the people running this show.

Whoever wields authority in a place ought to be in the right, but is not so necessarily. What is done or said, no matter by whom, and no matter how their power is based, is and remains a claim. What is instituted may be presumed to be so correctly—until it comes to focus as something that can be questioned. What can be questioned should be.

Patriotism is a style. It is a rhetoric. It is the maintenance of certain mandatory affects. It legitimates judgments about objects of the national entity’s actions that could only be justified if they are, but are instead treated as proofs that a person loves or hates something powerful that is also, necessarily, good.

Patriots treat the nation as a family, and one that consists of patriarchs and matriarchs whose implicit claim is they have a right to be loved, and only can be by being unquestioningly obeyed. Thus, the root of patriotism is authoritarianism.

Patriotism is not democratic or republican; it is tacitly monarchical. The national government rules by divine right, as the representative of God.

The object of patriotism is the nation as idol. Patriotism is the greatest political idolatry.

Thus, “religion,” and an idea of it that is based on obedience, is often linked to ideas of the nation, and the family. This may also mean, and usually does, the local boss in charge of the economy or household management operative where one is.

The dominant religions in the West maintain that the world was created complete and perfected, and is ruled by the same God absolutely, so that if anything goes wrong, it may be the fault of the person experiencing that. Yet, as the name given to the descendants of the Patriarchs in fact means one who struggles with what is divine and human, then it could be that the true patriot does not just believe in his country and loyally obey its rulers, but struggles with it, with them, and with what it and they should and may want to be, which necessarily means, sometimes, against what they are doing or seem to be like. Politics is struggle. It involves conflicts, while mere governance allows only consensus. Patriotism is always a love of the governance in the place, averse to its divisions. Yet the one who truly loves his country cares for its welfare, loving its good and not just its glory.

Does ‘God’ make the world just and happy, or does he just make it want to be? And which of these is a better thing to believe? In an imperfect world, it is better to always wonder “what is the matter?” more than whether we, or someone else, is virtuous or vicious, to be praised or condemned, saved or damned. Since you have already occasion to doubt, something somewhere is probably the matter. Do we want to solve problems or anoint heroes? Identities are nice things to have perhaps, but what is to be done?