It has become increasingly in vogue to deride the nation in which most of us live. Or as one of Dany’s students put in, “We shouldn't try to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because America ruins everything.” This, of course, is rubbish. As we reiterate on the pod this week, America is the greatest country in the world, warts and all. But the student neatly encapsulated a growing problem: The decline in national pride, also known as patriotism. Yascha Mounk has a new book on the topic, and had a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal that takes a stab at redefining patriotism for the 21st century.
If you’re a regular reader of the New York Times, you know America is plagued by gun-toting racist homophobes who mourn the end of slavery and are eager to deceive the world (and themselves) about the many dangers confronting us. There’s not much to like in the Times’ America, but the Times doesn’t represent the country or its people. Most of the rest of us recognize the country can do better, should do better, and has periods of history about which we are rightly ashamed. But there is much to be proud of. The question is how to disseminate that national pride, how to shape it, how to describe it?
Mounk tackles the why of patriotism first. He writes,
…the idea of civic patriotism strongly appeals to me. It defines nations by their highest ideals rather than their basest instincts. And it gives citizens a way to take pride in their country without indulging in bigotry or chauvinism.
Exactly. But he goes on to argue that loving the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is the purview of the politically minded, not the average Joe. Maybe. Your pod hosts would argue that that’s an excellent reason to double down on the teaching of civics and the pledge of allegiance and all that good flag waving stuff. Mounk thinks otherwise, and proposes an alternative: cultural patriotism.
[This] love of country is deeply imbued with their appreciation of its everyday sights and smells and sounds and tastes. Their affection is for the things that make up everyday life: their fields and cities, dishes and customs, buildings and cultural scripts.
He insists this cultural patriotism can augment the civic and strengthen, maybe even unify the country. Not sure? We weren’t either, and it led to lively debate. Check out the highlights of Mounk’s interview below, or listen to the whole pod, and join the conversation using the comment button above.
HIGHLIGHTS
Yascha: Look, I'm a German Jew, so patriotism, nationalism did not come naturally to me. In fact, when I was 20 years old, I really hoped that we would be able to embrace the politics in which we overcome the kind of group affinities of which patriotism is one. But of the last couple of decades, I've changed my mind about that for two important reasons. The first is that I think we've seen with the rise of people from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi, to Vladimir Putin how powerful the emotional resonance and the symbolism of nationalism remain.
Yascha: So, that's, I think, one important thing. And what we are seeing today in Ukraine, that patriotism can also be a real force of good. That it can inspire millions of people to risk their lives to defend their country against an unjust onslaught. And so, I now think of patriotism as a kind of half-domesticated animal,
Yascha: …philosophers have traditionally distinguished between those two concepts very carefully, and they've basically said all of the bad things about these national sentiments are nationalism that we should reject, they're dangerous, they lead to wars and exclusion. And then all the good things of patriotism, whatever, it just mean being able to have solidarity with your fellow citizens and standing up for a democratic country, that's patriotism. I get the point of that distinction, but I worry a little bit that it's overly simplistic.
Yascha: There's a second kind of conception which is one that philosophers and well-meaning intellectuals have traditionally emphasized. And that's civic patriotism. A patriotism based on the constitution and in our shared value. Now that's an important part. When I became an American citizen about five years ago, a lot of reason for that is that I love the American constitution and the basic liberties it grants me, and I was proud to swear to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So, we should definitely base our love of country on values.
Yascha: But civic patriotism also have limitations. And in particular it mischaracterizes the nature of the sentiment. Because, most people just don't care about much about politics. Most people can't tell you what's in the seventh amendment. And so when they love their country, it's not very kind of political.
Yascha: So what I do in my new book, The Great Experiment, is to suggest a third kind of patriotism as well. What I call cultural patriotism. Because, I think when most people say they love their country, they're thinking not of some idealized past, but of the dynamics ever changing, pretty divert present day reality of the country. They're thinking of its sounds and smells, size. Thinking about its cities and landscape, they're thinking about as a cultural script, the way we talk to each other, the way we interact with each other. They're thinking about the celebrities, and TikTok stuff. And I think that we can embrace that everyday patriotism much more that we have in the past. Because it's a positive force that unites us and it's forward looking rather than backward looking one.
Yascha: Obviously, every country is rooted in its history. And it should be proud of the glorious part of history, [and] should be upfront about the dark elements of its history. And so, part of America is Benjamin Franklin and all those kinds of things. All of that is wonderful. But I think that if people only felt America and they only love this country on the basis of the understanding of the constitution or on the appreciation for the American past, you would actually have people be much patriotic than they are.
Yascha: Most people can't tell you that much about Benjamin Franklin and they can't tell you that much about the founders, and they can't tell you that much about the nature of our constitution. That’s part of the problem, and I have to be in favor of more civic education and more emphasis and all of those things. But I actually think that's also something what straightforward which is important.
Yascha: When you see the extent to which people when they are born in this country are proud to identify with it, even though their parents are from elsewhere, that speaks, in part … to the nature of our constitution. But it also speaks a lot to just the power on that everyday culture. You know what? If that everyday culture, it consists in part of the Kardashians and on silly influences on TikTok, so that is what makes sure that people who are 20 years old feel about they share something even though they might come from a different country, even though they might have different color of the skin, even though they might have different religious beliefs. I'll take it.
Yascha: If you say, look we are nation-based from an idea of self-government, of liberty, then we have the reason to be friendly with other nations that actually share the same idea as well. So I completely agree with you on that. I do think though that that can't fully explain, why people have a specific love of the United States.
Yascha: So, for me, an accurate description of what it is to love America today, is absolutely the appreciation for the constitution, absolutely an appreciation for civic value. That is one of the reasons why protesting against injustice and protesting against wars perpetrated by your own country can be the highest form of patriotism, because they're saying, I'm standing up to this, precisely because it does not accord with the deepest values to which we have bound ourselves together.
Yascha: But it is also this other elements, it is also loving New York City, or Washington DC, or San Francisco. It is also sharing culture that actually unites us in this country, a culture that's dynamic, a culture that's ever changing, a culture that has the marks of the influence of all these different groups that now live together, in the United States. But, a culture that's is actually very strong, and the strength you feel, the moment you step outside of United States. And you'll remember how different other parts of the world are.
Yascha: To the metaphor of melting pot, I think it's complicated, because a lot of the time it seems to imply that you should really give up your culture entirely, They're the marks of all the influences of different people that we all become indistinguishable from each other. And I don't think that's actually what it looks like. I think people can become part of America and at the same time be proud of the various kinds of origins that they have, and sustain the culture in a meaningful way and so that's great
Yascha: There's this weird thing about language for example, where some people on the right really fear that immigrants aren't learning the language, that even the second and third generation they will prefer to speak Spanish, or Mandarin or some other language, to speaking English and that one day we no longer to have a lingua franca, a language that everybody in United States can understand. Then, on the left, there's sometimes this ideas that forcing people to speak English and saying that they should be a country in which English is really the language of exchange is somehow xenophobic or racist. And if there's going to be based and proportion of population that doesn't speak English anymore, then well then so be it.
Yascha: I think both of those ideas actually completely missed the sociological reality. Which is the people that are learning the language very very quickly. …the grandchildren of immigrants, it's only about a one percent of them that's still speak the language of the grandparents, more than a couple of phrases. Actually, that part of it might be a loss. It would be nice that they still can speak a little bit more of a grandparent language, so that shows the incredible integrative force of the society, and that's not the constitution, that's not the love of the first amendment. That is the fact that this lift changing diverse integrating American culture which has this amazing force.
Yascha: Now I think you're right that because America for all of its historical flaws, has always been a country of immigration, this work especially well in United States. And as an immigrant to the United State myself, I certainly feel that. But we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which that also holds in Europe. That some serious problems with integration in other countries, but actually the children and grandchildren of immigrants in the great majority integrated successful in the society as well, have rapid socioeconomic economic progress. Are actually more likely to pass the educational rank, and the economic rank than similarly positioned children that are born to non-immigrant parents, non-immigrant grandparents, and certainly acquire the language in exactly the same way as they do in United States.
Yascha: Most German versus Swedes versus Italian now say, somebody who has parents immigrated from Africa, or from Asia, or from Middle East, from Turkey, they can be a real German, they can be a real Swede. And those societies, we underestimate how diverse they have become very very quickly. to the number of people born outside of Germany who lives in the country now, is about the same, and they're quoting some statistics higher than it is in the United States. As many of them certainly consider themselves Germans. And I consider German. …A lot of other countries actually come to resemble America in that particular respect and that's a positive thing.
Yascha: There is no contradiction between being true to your heritage and valuing it, and continuing to honor it in important ways, and also being as American as apple pie. And I think that though the metaphor of the melting pot and these competing metaphors of a salad bowl, or a mosaic can't express that in the right way. That power of America is its ideals, its ability to continue to be true to whatever your group identity might be, but also it's power to turn people into kids that are as American as apple pie all at the same.
Find the whole transcript here.
No shownotes this week…