by Micah E. Weiss
When calculating the cost-benefit analysis of the uses and abuses of patriotism, I found myself coming back, again and again, to the concept of pride. One is a proud New Yorker, or Texan, or proud to be an American, “where at least I know I’m free!” One is also a participant in Pride festivals, parades, or even Month. On the one hand, there is something arbitrary about location and the accident of birth as a source of pride, but nostalgia for the land of one’s upbringing is strong. On the other hand, when the Pride Parade began, it made some sense for that which once brought shame, or the shame once imposed by others, should instead appear to be turned on its head and made a point of pride.
It’s easy to get cynical looking at the modern Pride movement today. This year’s Pride Month was rife with boycotts and corporate overreach. But then, the last few years, when the Pride Parade turned into Pride Day and thence into Pride Month, I was somewhat bemused. Just as conditions for the “community” in question reached acceptance in both law and culture we were being told that need for Pride had increased. In its earlier iterations, I always knew the parade was happening, but Pride Month was something I never noticed, though, like a RomCom love interest, it was “always there.” But I don’t recall much in the way of month-long flag displays and rainbow-boxed cereal in the supermarkets and corporate sponsorships in advertising in celebration of such a month until the last few years. Bill Clinton, despite Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act (here linked for the under 30’s who might read this), did recognize Pride month in 1999. But the Onion, in one of their more inspired articles from 2001, mentions only the parade in a piece so prescient that it included this line that foresaw the ever-increasing alphabet soup of today, which led me to use the term “community” above out of fear of forgetting a letter and giving offense:
The parade, organized by the Los Angeles Gay And Lesbian And Bisexual And Transvestite And Transgender Alliance (LAGALABATATA), was intended to "promote acceptance, tolerance, and equality for the city's gay community."
So it goes. Still, the pride part of Pride originates with the idea that identities and behaviors once shamed by society should, instead, be inverted towards shame’s antithesis, and therefore celebrated as pride. But is that correct? Is the inversion real? Pride itself has a long and sordid history that perhaps the organizers of the first Gay Pride Parade weren’t fully aware of? I suspect they knew that Christianity has always considered pride a sin, but it goes back deeper than that in Western culture, for the Greeks and Romans warned of excessive pride in the form of hubris. Pride going before the fall, pride as self-love rather than love of others, pride being a link with vanity, or perhaps *cough cough* prejudice as well, pride as lacking in the humility necessary for wisdom, pride all the way beyond the Greeks to the Tower of Babel and similar myths from the ancient times. Gilgamesh is filled with pride, and must be humbled before the gods.
Achilles, a gay icon no less, is driven in part by pride towards an end he claims to regret when he is questioned by Odysseus in Hades. Achilles’ sentiment is a resounding rejection of the pride more common in older epics like The Iliad: “I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.”
For anyone in the “community,” I would say that it may be wise to look at our recently un-elected Posturer in Chief for a lesson in the dangers of pride–nowhere is the arrogance bordering on sociopathy that comes from hubris more pronounced than in our former (and from the looks of things, future) President Trump.
Beware of pride, I would advise. For this “community” that has had many recent victories in both civil rights and social triumphs, pride may turn against you. Already, as I warned in a previous essay, the demographics for the “community” are not in its favor, and may have already taken a small toll in terms of public support. The recent full scale consumer assault on Target and Bud Light, near total successes as far as boycotts go, may be a sign of overreach, and from the outside looking in, I would consider that a warning.
The political right, of course, feels a nationalistic hubris that is often as obscene as anything displayed on a Pride Parade float in 1985. It naturally starts with one of my proposed fallacies from over the summer, the Personification Fallacy. America becomes, in the discourse of nationalism, ‘Murica! And ain't we the big swingin’ dick all over this planet! ‘Murica trucks, ‘Murica stickers and decals, ‘Murican eagle t-shirts, etc. The aesthetic is somewhat overwhelming, in some ways as much as the rainbow flags hoisted for Pride month.
And the persistence is new. Apart from an American flag on some homes, the Pride and ‘Murica flags never seem to come down anymore. My older two children are so amused by the sheer variety of flags, they have conceived of a book called “Modern American Political Heraldry'' which would contain all the flags, from both the left and the right, as a reference for those not quite as interested in signaling their tribalism to the world, but wish to know where their neighbors sit. I’ll let you know if they get any interest from publishers (who can contact me at this substack).
I hesitate to use the word patriotism to describe this right wing extremism, because in some ways I want that word back, and I want it to mean something distinct from the word nationalism. They are certainly related. The history of nationalism is quite dark indeed, as you likely know from high school Global or whatever course it was called. 19th century nationalism certainly helped cause both World Wars in the 20th. I can’t remember where I heard this distinction, probably in a West Wing episode, but Patriotism is the feeling that one lives in a great country, whereas Nationalism is the assertion that one lives in the only great country. But of course, where is the line between them? I can’t just make Patriotism the love of country I like, and Nationalism the love of country I don’t like.
As an American, there is quite a lot to be proud of with our nation. Our history is unique and our culture is one that lends itself to superlatives. America has dominated the world for over a century culturally; economically, politically, militarily, we have no equal; we face no existential threats, no enemies have threatened our gates in over two centuries. As China begins a demographic and economic decline it may not recover from, one wonders when, if at all, the United States of America will face another challenger to our global power. Despite our youth as a culture, our government is one of the oldest on earth, our constitution is a masterpiece of balancing power, our Bill of Rights began as enlightenment philosophy elevated to poetry, and then improved steadily through our history, nudging our systems and institutions to continue to bend towards inclusivity and justice and protection of the minority and the individual. No culture has so successfully incorporated such a variety of disparate peoples, no culture has our diversity. No culture has ever embraced self-criticism as ours, and had so many citizens that fought to embrace change, and all while building wealth on an unprecedented scale. Three successive forms of American music–Jazz, Rock, and Hip-Hop–have come to dominate the world in the last hundred years. Our innovators and inventors have sparked multiple technological revolutions, from electricity to flight to the light bulb to computers, and our universities have created the men and women who have earned the majority of Nobel Prizes and invented the very idea of a research university. American Jews all by themselves make up more than a fifth of Nobel Prize winners. The people of the world long to join us, and astonishingly few choose to leave. We are the envy of the world. And, lest we forget, a small part of the moon!
Perhaps the greatest American cultural gift wasn’t an art, or a scientific discovery, or a technological breakthrough, but a mentality encapsulated by one of our greatest men, Abraham Lincoln, who said: “I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.” The old world default paradigm from Portugal to Kyoto, from Archangel to New Delhi, was one dominated by familial destiny and/or caste. One was born into a life, one did not choose it. But with men like Franklin, and Hamilton, and Grant, and Lincoln himself as our models, and thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau our greatest philosophers, American culture brought to the world a new relationship with the accidents of birth, a new way of seeing fate; and though we have not yet realized it fully, the hope for a meritocracy where the autonomous individual human soul is free to pursue a chosen, rather than inherited, destiny.
And yet, the dark sides are there. I teach them every year in my American Studies class. All too often prejudice and bigotry has gotten in the way of our striving for a truly individual-centered meritocratic system. Slavery stains our history, and the victory to abolish it was besmirched by a hundred years of Jim Crow. The treatment of American Indians, though the population collapse is more a story of disease than genocide, includes an abhorrent reservation system that is little understood by the general public and yet still in dire need of reform. Our government’s many interventions throughout the Americas runs the gamut from appalling to ridiculous to benign and is a history with offenses too numerous to mention. Vietnam all by itself was first ill-advised, then foolish, then absurd, and then a war crime the shame of which we are still reeling from. The Cold War in general was where our country and culture came closest to losing its soul (though a war worth fighting and winning both for capitalism and democracy, and against a truly depraved adversary–the false equivalencies created and argued between the US and the USSR by those on the left in recent years are disgusting to me, but a subject of another essay). Americans were just the authors of a middle chapter in the book of actors that have raped the Congo in the last century and a half, and our government and diplomats certainly had no trouble propping up dictators provided they were anti-communist. McCarthyism, the KKK, Japanese Internment, race massacres in Tulsa and Rosewood, Eugenics, the occupation of the Philippines, the bombing campaigns of WWII, the fact that we can’t get rid of the damned Electoral College already! These are all as much a part of our American story as the list of our culture’s collective accomplishments.
In my past, upon reading Chomsky, or Coates, or Naomi Klien, or other Americans of their ilk, I was persuaded by their distinct form of anti-patriotism. I have since come to see their perspective as one that seems only to remember the dark side of our history, not the light. This collective attitude is also typified by the Personification Fallacy, and when an American accomplishment is remembered, it is only in an attempt to taint or destroy it. I’ve railed against The 1619 Project too much, so I will also now mention the Pilgrims, their harrowing experience, the starvation and death they faced with courage, endurance, and determination; and the actual friendship they shared (if such a thing could exist at all anywhere in the 17th century) with the native Wampanoag tribe. Thanksgiving is coming again, and the Atlantic, or NYT, or WaPo or HuffPo, or some such other left wing publication will trot out another “Well, you know, actually. . .” piece about what the “real” Thanksgiving was about, or that it isn’t important, or “6 reasons why the first Thanksgiving is a myth,” or some such, and some grubby little low-level journalist will try again to earn brownie points with his or her boss, and recognition from his or her friends, by tearing down our history, and reducing it to grievance and darkness. Indeed, it appears to me that a majority of the left from centrists to the fringe have adopted anti-patriotism, abandoning pride to affect shame at our history, our culture, our people, our heroes.
This is the world I was raised in, of course. I am, by birth, a left-wing educated intellectual. And yet. . .the love of country is still there for me.
Recently, I listened to an interview with Lionel Shriver at Unherd. She is a boomer author I have never read, but in recent months she has made some noise out there in the ether for speaking out against “wokeness.” There is a lot worth listening to from the interview–the very idea of a publishing house’s full time Sensitivity Reader was new to me and I was/am shocked and appalled–but it was the discussion around her attitude towards the US during the sixties that really struck me:
I was very proud of being critical of the United States and being ashamed of the United States and being obsessed with all the terrible things we’d done wrong. People these days act as if we only started talking about slavery yesterday. No, we were obsessed with it in the Sixties, slavery and the genocide against the Indians. A lot of the stuff that you hear harped on now, we harped on, and I’ve internalized this stuff, and I was very proud of how ashamed I was.
I had never yet considered the relationship between pride and shame before hearing her say that. This is where Uncle Iroh from above is absolutely correct. Shame, in its most common and performative form, is actually not shame at all, but pride. The left isn’t ashamed of America, it is proud of being ashamed of America. It’s no wonder that the Pride movement so easily “inverted” the shame of divergent sexual desires–the feelings are aspects of the same flaw. And flaw it most certainly is. A flaw in one’s character, not identity! We indulge our shames and puff up our pride. When the lefty scold snottily reminds us “we stole” Indian land, or lists the coups the CIA helped support, or makes a false-equivalency between McCarthyism and the Soviet systematic suppression of civil liberties, that person doesn’t actually care. By and large, he or she isn’t running a campaign to buy back the land for the local tribes, or giving aid to some central American charity, or helping the descendants of the handful of people who got black-listed in the 50’s. No, taking real responsibility for those crimes would be indicative of actual care. He or she is expressing to their social audience a pride at being properly informed, and implying that he or she wouldn’t be so depraved as to make the same decisions. These cynical poses are personal pride, and the knowing nods of the audience are collective vanity.
Let’s take a concrete example, the “land acknowledgement statement.” The Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Massachusetts is a $60k boarding school for Horse Girls. Bucolic in setting, ancient in history (by American standards), and a “named school” in the boarding school world, SBS has a very active and proud DEI program, including a Land Acknowledgement Statement page that reads in part:
This land is forever connected to indigenous worship and heritage; to steal this land and erase indigenous legacies and voices is- [sic] the ultimate disrespect to the history of their rich cultures. In acknowledgment of that erasure, we are here to passionately communicate with the utmost respect, an acknowledgment of the indigenous land that our school sits on.
The school itself owns 30 horses, each one costing somewhere between 5-10 thousand dollars a year to care for, sits on 100 acres of prime real estate right on the I91 corridor, and has over $10 million in assets. Dare I ask SBS why they haven’t given the land back, at least in part? The Nipmuc tribal council has a website. Maybe just half of those hundred acres would legitimize and alter the attempt to induce shame with that statement, that now I see actually drips with vanity and pride.
Pride, once again, is the villain of the story, as I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked to find. So I had to go back and examine what it was in my emotional patriotism that I could have left? What was its content? Do I abandon it completely? Do I treat it as something to grow out of? My love of place, my attachment to New York, my childhood, my adopted state of New Hampshire, even the joy I had putting my first New Hampshire license plate that reads “Live Free or Die” on my car ten years ago. One of my first acts as a homeowner was to put up my American flag near the front door. These are powerful, but possibly childish aspects of my character that I could abandon intellectually and work to excise from my heart should I so choose. Is there nothing to redeem my attachment to my place, my nation, my culture, and, I hesitate to admit it, my identity as an American, outside pride? Nothing more noble?
At the end of the day, I am, as I said, born into a left-wing intellectual family. But of course, being American, that doesn’t have to mean a thing to me as an individual. I have choice, and luckily at this point in our history, many, many freedoms. I have worked hard to accomplish what I have thus far, and I have found few barriers beyond my own will to work. I have raised a family in peace, have some expectation that my children can rise based on their merits, have every reason to expect that their rights will be protected, and have seen my countrymen and women thrive ever more in my lifetime, regardless of race, color, creed, etc., by nearly every quantifiable measure, improving from the time I was born to today. In the last few years, I have seen frightening trends and declines in aspects of our society like life expectancy for the first time in our history, and I have and will write about those problems, and consider them in the round.
However, my cause for hope is still that which makes me an American. That we have solved so many of our problems in the past means we can face the problems of the present and the future. That we have worked to improve on the promise of our founding with nearly every successive generation means we can continue that evolution as a culture. That we have and continue to be the envy of the world means that we earned it once, and we can lead once again. For all of this I try to tamp down my pride: it is dangerous and will do little to help my country continue to evolve for the better. But the feeling that rushes through me as I write these words when I consider these cultural gifts given to me by these United States may be the true root of positive patriotism, patriotism without nationalism, patriotism shorn of jingoism and xenophobia. That feeling is the cure for the Rights’ hubris, and the Left’s faux-shame. That feeling is gratitude.
I can easily remember the evils of our past without shame, and feel gratitude for the gifts of our culture without guilt. Gratitude instills humility and enables responsibility. Gratitude externalizes love, making it look outward. I love my country, not because of what “we” have accomplished, but because of what other Americans have accomplished resulting from being American, and those accomplishments have contributed to my good fortune being born American. My responsibility to my country, and my fellow countrymen and women, is also related to that gratitude. If my patriotism were based on pride, I would be offended and shamed by other Americans who didn’t feel that same pride. But since gratitude is the source of my patriotism, I want to make America as magical a place for everyone in it as it always has been for me.
Challenge accepted.