The Left Needs to Rediscover Its Patriotism
· The Atlantic
One the eve of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence, more Americans on the right than on the left say they feel patriotic. Recent polls show that a majority of Democrats are “proud” of the country only when a president of their party is in the White House. And many progressive activists and historians see the founding of the nation as a tragedy for Native Americans and enslaved people instead of the glorious fight for liberty that conservatives insist it was. Why love a country founded in conquest and exploitation that remains deeply unequal today? After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky dismissed patriotism as the political elite’s way of telling citizens ‘‘You shut up and be obedient, and I’ll relentlessly advance my own interests.’’
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That attitude is deeply flawed as a way to understand history, as well as a serious political error. In fact, the left has a long tradition of patriotism, using the nation’s founding ideals as both a benchmark against which to measure how far we have fallen short and a means of articulating the Constitution’s vision of “a more perfect union.” More than ever, the uneasy mix of liberals and radicals needs to return to that approach.
The war for independence was indeed a morally ambiguous event. Despite Thomas Paine’s famous vow that Americans had the “power to begin the world over again,” leaders of the new nation allowed white citizens to grab Indigenous lands and resources and expand the institution of human bondage. As the British historian G. R. Elton put it, “if historians are not sceptical, they are nothing.”
Yet the Declaration of Independence also proclaimed ideals that contradicted those noxious deeds. As the political theorist Danielle Allen argues, the document “makes a cogent philosophical case for political equality.” By detailing the ways in which King George III had lied to and mistreated the American colonists—“a history of repeated injuries and usurpations”—it established the principle that governments should protect and advance the well-being of their citizens. The signers made that case not just to their fellow Americans but to “a candid world.” Independence for the 13 colonies was in the interest of anyone, anywhere, who believed the only remedy for tyrannical authority was for people to govern themselves.
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Allen maintains that the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson and his brother revolutionaries regarding slavery does not negate the enduring wisdom of their words. The same love of equality and freedom that courses through the Declaration motivated her white great-grandmother to campaign for suffrage and her African American grandfather to found a chapter of the NAACP in the Jim Crow South.
Throughout our history, both the Declaration and the Constitution have inspired reformers and radicals to pursue egalitarian change. In 1852, Frederick Douglass hailed the Constitution as a “glorious liberty document.” During the Gilded Age, Terence Powderly and Samuel Gompers built labor movements dedicated to the idea that only when workers had a voice on the job as they did at the polls could the nation be considered a true democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells exposed the violence of a Jim Crow order that stood in the way of achieving the equality promised by the Reconstruction amendments.
In 1895, the socialist Eugene Debs addressed a crowd of supporters gathered to cheer his release from jail for leading a national railroad strike that federal judges had enjoined. “It is not law nor the administration of law of which I complain,” he announced. “It is the flagrant violation of the Constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power, by virtue of which my colleagues and myself were committed to jail, against which I enter my solemn protest.”
Other progressives, who wanted to reform the capitalist order instead of destroying it, employed the Founders’ disdain of aristocracy to condemn the “robber barons” who ran big corporations and the politicians who served their selfish interests. Orators and organizers sought to inspire something akin to a second revolution to drive these elites from power. Although they failed to achieve that ultimate aim, their rhetoric and activism spurred passage of the landmark constitutional amendments that established an income tax, the direct election of senators, and women’s suffrage, as well as the creation of new laws and administrative agencies to regulate corporations and protect consumers.
The 1930s and early 1940s were a heyday of patriotism on the broad left. Activists in the industrial labor movement, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, compared their autocratic bosses to King George III and insisted that every American, native-born or immigrant, had the right to join a union and go on strike. The Communist Party, then the largest organization on the far left, operated a Jefferson School of Social Science, celebrated the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride, and announced that, despite its fealty to Joseph Stalin, the party’s creed was “Twentieth-Century Americanism.” And what about the guy from Oklahoma who wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” the chorus of which millions of Americans once knew by heart? At the time he composed the song, in 1940, Woody Guthrie was a regular columnist for People’s World, the West Coast newspaper of the CPUSA.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and his fellow New Dealers garbed their deeds in star-spangled rhetoric and symbols too. They established the National Archives on Constitution Avenue and displayed original copies of the Declaration and the Constitution within its marble walls. They built the Jefferson Memorial, where the Virginia icon is quoted defending the freedom to worship and preaching the equality of mankind (with just the briefest mention of the “despotism” of slavery). Roosevelt blasted corporate moguls who opposed him as “economic royalists” who “reached out for control over Government itself.” To combat this “despotism,” he announced, “the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”
During the Second World War, FDR proposed an “economic bill of rights” that emulated the programs of Labour and Socialist Parties in Europe. But he did so by drawing on the first 10 constitutional amendments—calling for a universal guarantee to a job, a “decent” home and education, and medical care. Every wartime president extols the nation’s virtues. But on that occasion, Roosevelt looked ahead to a secure future that would build on the principles of the past.
The most prominent leader of the Black freedom movement that shook the nation to its roots in the two decades after World War II evoked the Bill of Rights, too. In the speech he delivered the night before his murder, Martin Luther King Jr. cited the First Amendment as the bedrock of his and every social movement in the U.S.: “Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”
All of these progressives depended on the founding ideals of the nation to empower its citizens to build movements and elect politicians who could lessen or abolish its inequities. They argued they had a more sincere commitment to turning those ideals into policy than did their adversaries on the right.
And then, many on the left gave up the fight. In their anger against institutional racism and the war in Vietnam, young radicals in the 1960s and ’70s claimed that patriotism of any kind was a sham that allowed the nation’s leaders to dominate the world and dismiss injustice at home. They quoted Malcolm X’s line, “I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
In 1981, Howard Zinn published a book that viewed the nation’s past through a sharp antipatriotic lens. A People’s History of the United States is a narrative about ordinary folks who kept struggling to achieve a better life yet were always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose craftiness was exceeded only by their greed. For Zinn, the war for independence was a clever device to defeat “potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.” The Civil War, in his view, was another elaborate shell game. Union soldiers got duped by “an aura of moral crusade” against slavery that “worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful and turn much of the anger against ‘the enemy.’” Nearly five decades later, the book has sold more than 4 million copies, making it one of the most popular works of American history ever published.
By the end of the 20th century, many left-wing intellectuals had come to agree that appeals to the better angels of the nation’s past denied the harsh truth that the United States had been built on the bodies of Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and poor immigrants. Even allegiance to the nation might be a problem. In 1998, the president of the American Studies Association rejected the very name of the organization she headed. Dismissing the ‘‘notion of a bounded national territory and a concomitant national identity,’’ Janice Radway wondered whether it made sense to ‘‘perpetuate a specifically ‘American’ studies’’ at all. The historian David Hollinger responded, tongue held firmly in cheek, ‘‘Historians have less use for the United States than they once did.’’
Echoing Zinn, quite a few contemporary progressives no longer find it credible or moral to praise American ideals at all. They view the United States as a “settler-colonial” nation whose zeal for exploitation and conquest were checked only by military defeat, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Some prefer to identify as citizens of the world. That most Americans continue to be patriotic only demonstrates to these progressives their blindness to, if not complicity in, evils wrought by the men and women who rule the imperial state.
[Jonathan Chait: How liberal America came to its senses]
Leftists already have such harsh critics on their side. If they wish to govern, though, they will need to win over the majority of Americans who love their country but also believe that it needs to change. As the late Todd Gitlin, an erstwhile leader of the New Left, wrote a year after the attacks of 9/11: “It is time for the patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays, not catechisms or self-congratulation. It is time to diminish the gap between the nation we love and the justice we also love. It is time for the real America to stand up.”
The ”No Kings” demonstrations that have erupted during Donald Trump’s second term gesture toward one aspect of the tradition of 1776, but it’s a negative slogan, not a positive vision of what Americans should believe and fight to protect and advance. One can defeat the president’s party in the midterms without such a vision. But it is far from sufficient to persuade Americans who want to be proud of their country and, yes, would like it to be great not as in the past but in the future.
In 1887, William James counseled:
The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them.
The philosopher wrote that as a tribute to Robert Gould Shaw, the white abolitionist turned Union officer who commanded Black soldiers during the Civil War in a bloody battle in which he died along with hundreds of his men. A left that rejects James’s vigorous, hopeful, empathetic breed of patriotism is a left that can never win the country to its side.