One of the conceits of American patriotism – that it is a salubrious version of the pernicious nationalism that other countries have – has helped to protect it from critical questioning of almost any type. The kinds of 20th-century Leftist political movements that in principle opposed nationalism fared poorly in the US, and this might be why popular justifications for the country’s patriotism tend to be shallow. They are often based on appeals to treasured details of family or community life: patriotism is Little League baseball on a warm summer day, the courtesy of the small-town merchant, a neighbourhood rebuilding together after a destructive storm. All nationalisms make sentimental appeal to intimate but generic experience, and the effects can help to raise armies and start wars. They carry, in other words, formidable political force. But they are not any kind of serious moral or intellectual case for patriotism. [...]
American patriotism has always depended on conjuring alleged conspiracies from migrants or outsiders bearing existential threats: foreign devils all. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, it was Catholicism. The Anglo establishment held Catholics to be unreasoning and beholden to priestly power, unfit for the obligations of citizenship. That’s why people who take the oath to become citizens must renounce allegiance to any foreign ‘potentate’, that is, the Pope. Then the Cold War made it communism: like Catholicism, a nebulous and formidable global power, yet also moving invisibly in the hearts and minds of immigrants, to undermine the country from within. Now rival camps differ as to whether the existential threat is sharia or Russia. [...]
This core component of American patriotism – the popular conviction in a world-historical role for the US – is unlikely to continue. First, it is increasingly difficult not to notice that in many basic matters of government and society, including healthcare, public education, gender equity, social mobility and prosperity, economic fairness, childcare, environment and more, the US has fallen behind most of the developed world. The US’s world-historical ambitions have simply not kept pace with world history. Secondly, the wars. Wars are nation-making events, but they can also be unmaking ones. If your patriotism is linked to pretensions of a world-historical role, what do you do when the world chooses not to emulate you, or when it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) doesn’t want your Americanisation project? Mere military supremacy, especially when it proves ineffective at achieving its goals, is unlikely to be enough to sustain the exceptionalist heart of American patriotism.
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