One Nation After Trump by E.J. Dionne Jr

Author:E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Eight

Yearning to Breathe Free

Discovering a New Patriotism

Patriots’ Day is formally celebrated only in Massachusetts and Maine (which was part of the Bay State until 1820), though Wisconsin and Florida pay it some honor as well. The holiday commemorates the rebels at Lexington and Concord who fired the shot heard ’round the world on April 19, 1775.

For tragic reasons, the holiday commanded the nation’s attention on April 15, 2013. Two homemade bombs exploded 12 seconds apart at 2:49 p.m. near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring nearly 300.

Boston will never forget the dead and severely hurt. And it will always remember the heroism of its citizens, including the first responders and medical professionals who saved countless lives. A sense of solidarity arising from the love of a place and its people gave birth to the slogan “Boston Strong.” The worst Patriots’ Day in history produced an outpouring of local patriotism.

But in the Trump era, another impulse jostles with patriotism as the definition of dedication to country. Nationalism, it’s true, runs deep in American history, as the brilliant and ideologically idiosyncratic writer Michael Lind often reminds us. It’s not just a President Trump or Steve Bannon import. It was, after all, Theodore Roosevelt, a hero to many progressives, whose forward-looking program was memorialized as the New Nationalism. As Lind’s work has reminded us, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln can all, in a sense, be seen as nationalists as well as patriots, since all believed in the idea of the United States as one nation.

Yet nationalism rankles, partly because of its association with the evils of Nazism and fascism, and partly because its claims are so sweeping. As George Orwell wrote, patriotism stems from “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life.” Nationalism, by contrast, “is inseparable from the desire for power.”1

Even patriotism makes some people uncomfortable. They see it in the same light as chauvinism, which is defined as “excessive or prejudiced loyalty or support for one’s own cause, group or gender.” They worry as well that patriotism is an excuse to sweep the less wholesome parts of our past and present under the rug.

It’s a mistake, however, to view patriotism as nothing but chauvinism in bright colors. American patriotism is special not only because the United States has proven itself to be a nation with an exceptional capacity for self-correction—from slavery to freedom, from segregation to equal rights, from the Gilded Age to the New Deal—but also because ours is not a loyalty to blood or soil. It is an embrace of a series of powerful propositions, beginning with “all men are created equal” and a Constitution that opens with the words “We the People.” At a foreign policy conference in April 2017, the gifted young political theorist Yascha Mounk told his audience of recently becoming a U.S. citizen. He did not discount his new country’s problems, particularly the costs of a “racial hierarchy.” But he saw the

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