North Korea is notorious for its cultish conventions. From a very young age, children must memorize various songs that express their love for their country. Students must swear allegiance to the state every single day, and if they refuse, they could be put into custody or even beaten and assaulted. And this indoctrination works: endorsing the state is practically synonymous with being a good person. You might think all this sounds a little bit familiar, and that’s because it is. This is the United States of America.
Now I am in no way trying to trivialize the horrors that go on inside the borders of North Korea. The penalties for expressing a negative opinion of the state in North Korea are far worse than anything we could imagine in the United States. My purpose in placing these American traditions in North Korea was to view ourselves from an outside perspective, because patriotism is so ingrained in the American psyche. I’m not saying that patriotism is a completely negative thing. Instead, I would like to take an in-depth look into what it is, if it is rational, and if it is beneficial.
What is patriotism? Let’s make a distinction clear first: patriotism is not the same thing as nationalism, although the public tends to confuse them. Nationalism is not just patriotism for people you don’t like. Nationalism is the movement to advance a particular nation, especially through self-governance over a sovereign state called a nation-state. A “nation” itself is not a state, but instead a group of people that are culturally connected. But how are the people in the nation connected? There are two types of nationalism that try to answer this question. ethnonationalism, where shared language, history, and especially ethnicity makes you part of the nation, and civic nationalism, where citizenship and belief in the state’s institutions makes you part of the nation. The prime example of civic nationalism is the United States, since there is a variety of ethnic groups, cultures, and languages, yet we all identify as Americans. Even if we don’t like it.
But don’t go out into the world calling yourself a nationalist. Firstly, the general term of nationalism is used somewhat interchangeably with the ethnonationalist movement inside white supremacy called white nationalism, which seeks a white ethnostate through the removal of other races. White nationalism is found throughout the world, but movements tend to stay isolated inside various countries, like in the United States. But wait, there are already minorities in the United States, so how could a white nationalist possibly get rid of minorities? Hmmm…. Well, you could just ship them off away from their homes and communities, or... you could kill them. I think you can understand why white nationalism, along with many forms of ethnonationalism, is a bad idea.
But secondly, the belief in a nation-state is only one piece of nationalism. The other piece is an aggressive devotion to your nation. In his essay Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell describes nationalism as “inseparable from the desire for power”. When the nation rules the state under a nationalist movement, the state often results in becoming expansionist because of this desire. If you think imperialism is bad, you probably shouldn’t call yourself a nationalist.
Even though nationalism is not the same thing as patriotism, the two are strongly linked. Patriotism is concerned with loving one's country to the extent where you personally identify with it, and in many cases are even willing to die or kill for it. Patriotism is sort of like the devotion of nationalism, but towards a state instead of a nation. I think you can see that major complications can potentially emerge. Firstly, how rational patriotism is depends on the country being discussed. For instance, if the country is a dictatorship or a monarchy, I would argue that patriotism is really just about defending a select few individuals that likely don’t deserve to have these high positions of power. And that isn’t rational.
But I’m more concerned with American patriotism, and as we know, the United States is a democratic republic, at least in theory. So this raises an arguably more important question: can you continually be patriotic even as leadership changes? Well let’s first ignore whether it is rational or not to do this, because the vast majority of American citizens label themselves as patriotic through different administrations. This simple fact reveals that people do not derive their patriotism from the state and its policies. Americans may not derive their patriotism from the state’s policies, but they do use patriotism to form opinions about them. For example, calling a politician, policy, or political party “un-American” is an appeal to patriotism that relies on the claim that “American values are good values”.
But is this claim true? If you consider American values to be the values that this country was founded on, that is definitely not true. Many of our founding fathers were slave owners, and many were especially cruel to their slaves. They believed women were inferior to men and thus were not allowed to vote. They only allowed land-owning men to vote because they believed that the working class were not informed enough to elect a leader. To most people today, these values are not admirable, and you would definitely not want to espouse them as your own. I hope you wouldn’t, anyways. They may be “products of their time”, but that’s because those were the values of the time. We should not idolize the founding fathers specifically for holding some values we like but completely ignore that they held others that we don’t.
Well who cares about what some old white men from the 18th century think anyway? How about the present day? The problem is that trying to determine American values is complicated. Should we derive them from modern day politicians, or should we determine them from the people? Either way, many would definitely still disagree with many of those values, and their “Americanness” is debatable at best. Chances are that many Americans would agree with another country’s “values” more than the United States’, so why be so proud of being an American specifically? We know why, because it is your country.
This is where the second complication comes in: a patriot personally identifies with their country, so, out of an instinct of self-preservation, they will end up forming beliefs about their country differently than how they form beliefs about other countries. An American patriot will begin with the assumption that the United States is good but that other countries are less good or even bad. Not only are these thoughts irrational and unjustified, but, in the name of patriotism, they prevent legitimate criticism of public policy from gathering popular support. Although patriotism isn’t derived from the state’s policies, it will inevitably be used to defend the state and the status quo, even when they arguably shouldn’t be defended. For example, students across the country pledge allegiance to the state every morning, and not doing so is considered by many to not only be unpatriotic, but even treasonous. Perhaps we shouldn’t pledge blind allegiance.
At the end of the day, patriotism amounts to an institutionalized version of tribalism. It’s more of an instinct than a rational belief. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating some values that happen to be described as “American”, but “American values” are not necessarily good ones, and vice versa. It’s important to remember that happening to espouse some “American values” doesn't mean you’re patriotic. Patriotism, as I said before, requires that you personally identify yourself with your country, and this is what leads to irrational thinking.
But even if patriotism is irrational, perhaps it can bring us together to do great things. American patriotism is more extreme than other developed countries, not just because the United States is further right-wing, but also because of our origins. Unlike many European countries, which were mainly formed from ethnic groups that have stayed in those regions for hundreds of years, the United States is a nation of immigrants. When the colonies came together to fight the British in the Revolutionary War, the colonists didn’t know what it meant to be an American. Perhaps you were a Virginian or a New Yorker or a Georgian, but even those labels had little meaning. And then, in 1776, there’s this new country called the United States of America that has little guiding identity.
If you know a little bit about American history, you know that the Constitution was not our first founding document. That title goes to the Articles of Confederation, which centered around the concept of an extremely small national government and larger state governments. But this national government was dysfunctional, and the founding fathers came back to create a more unified country with the Constitution. The United States needed to centralize in order to survive, and this meant the public needed to adopt an American identity. American nationalism, and patriotism as a result, was created out of necessity.
So patriotism did play a role in the United States’s dominant role in global politics today, but perhaps it has outlived its welcome. It is detrimental to us today by preventing us from making necessary change. For example, changes to the Constitution have been largely pushed out of acceptable discourse because of this idea that it is un-American to alter our founding documents. But our government is flawed in many ways, like how the head of state can be elected without the popular vote or how voting districts can legally be drawn, or gerrymandered, to overrepresent one political party. Since the idea of our nation is tied to our history and not as much a unified ethnicity or culture, many Americans don’t want to change these founding documents. So, ironically, the same movement that allowed us to adapt in the 1700s is holding us in place today.
What does this mean for you? I can’t exactly tell you how to live, but honestly, these national celebrations are getting a little old. I mean, I love fireworks as much as the next guy, but I was never big on the whole America part of these celebrations. With the Black Lives Matter protests, which--for a lot of white people--exposed many flaws of various areas of the United States government, there were a lot of questions about the ways we should celebrate the Fourth of July. The pandemic made a lot of those choices this year, but in the upcoming years, I’m curious if the holiday will persist in its current form. I predict that as we face uncomfortable truths about the history, present, and future of our country, our nation will reevaluate our hyper-patriotism, and, hopefully, begin to reject it. Goodbye internet.
A question that truly puzzled me is why conservatives, at least in the United States, appear to be more patriotic than liberals, even during Democratic administrations.
Conservatives aim to preserve tradition and a hierarchy by their nature, as discussed in my previous video “Left or Right”. The moral foundations theory, proposed by Jonathan Haidt, suggests that they value these things because the foundations of their morality are actually different from the foundations of liberals’ morality. An interesting finding from Haidt’s theory, and what’s relevant to this discussion, is that conservatives tend to value loyalty more than liberals. And you could consider patriotism as loyalty to your country. When you suggest that patriotism may not be a great thing, many conservatives see this as a moral affront. But you can value loyalty while also recognizing that patriotism can be illogical.
Of course this reasoning for why conservatives exhibit more patriotic behaviors is just a theory of mine, but I think it makes sense.
When I began the process of writing the script for this video, I was originally going to discuss the idea of national pride and if being proud of something you cannot control makes any sense. I decided that focusing on the consequences of patriotism is a more convincing argument, but I still think that this discussion is fascinating.
Pride can either be inwardly or outwardly directed. In other words: you can be proud of yourself or of others. I would argue that to be proud of something that you aren’t responsible for is illogical, and instead you should be focusing on your earned accomplishments. But should you be proud of your race, gender, or sexual identity if you cannot choose those characteristics? Personally, I believe you should be proud of your choices to express the culture associated with those characteristics confidently, as long as that expression is genuine, in the face of oppression or bigotry. That’s why the idea of white pride, for example, is so offensive. Most white people don’t face oppression for being white or expressing their culture, so being proud of a white identity is mostly a reactionary move to racial minorities expressing their own cultures.
So, should you be proud of your national identity? Well, your citizenship is something that people don’t choose to be born into--unless you’re an immigrant- so if you are a naturalized citizen, perhaps you should just be proud of expressing your country’s culture. Maybe. Let's just focus on the United States: is there really any oppression against Americans? If anything, Americans are usually the oppressors. So is there a defiance of bigotry or oppression to be proud of?
This isn’t to say Americans shouldn’t express their culture. There isn’t a good reason not to, but being proud of your culture doesn’t make sense. That’s also not to say that you should be ashamed to express American culture. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, at least in general.