Party and Patriotism

 Many posts have discussed patriotism and American exceptionalism.

Ruy Teixeira and Karlyn Bowman at AEI:

The reasons why our politics has been a cold shower for Americans’ patriotism are not hard to discern. One of them is the president. Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by framing the U.S. as a nation in terminal decline, and he has frequently drawn a moral equivalence between the actions of foreign dictators and America’s own foreign policy. In the period since Trump overtook the Republican Party, right-wingers have become much more critical about America as it actually exists. And though Trump regularly expresses patriotism, his pageantry and truculent manner have been more polarizing than unifying. He seems to miss no opportunity to associate love of country with his own personal MAGA brand.

But it’s by no means just the fault of Trump and his party. Democrats have long practiced what we might call a “yes, but” approach to patriotism. The general idea is that patriotism is kind of okay but only if it’s immediately linked to the terrible things that America has done in the past and the injustices that still exist today. Simply being patriotic, full stop, is viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility. And on the party’s ascendant far left, the Democratic Socialists of America—which stands to see a number of their members elected to Congress in November—recently released a platform that called for getting rid of the Constitution altogether.

But you don’t just need to look at the radical left to find Democratic objections to patriotism. Just this week, Fox News reported that Christina Bohannan, an Iowa Democrat trying to swing a critical House seat, called patriotism “sensitive and controversial” in a statement she issued in 2021. And last month, moderate Democratic representative Tom Suozzi of New York bemoaned his party’s aversion to patriotism. “The choice Democrats face is clear,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “We can allow patriotism to become a partisan label, or we can reclaim a tradition that rightly belongs to every American.”