Feeling especially anti-patriotic this Independence Day. Nationalism is a fucking cancer. Must be nice to be a blissful MAGAT wearing your Old Navy flag shit, stuffing your face with dead animals raised on a factory farm, thinking USA#1 is the greatest country in the history of the world. We ain’t never killed no one that didn’t deserve it! I had some dumb fuck the other day say “the Indians shoulda fought back if they didn’t want to lose their land!”
USA! USA! USA!
Ok I fell better. Sorry.
Patriotism and Nationalism aren’t the same thing. Patriotism is about wanting to do good for your country and fellow citizens. Nationalism is about thinking other countries suck and are inferior.
Nationalism pretends to be Patriotism all the time but that doesn’t make it so.
At some point I might have said that, but they are the same and suck imo.
Too many people don’t understand this difference.
Nationalism tends to lean towards supporting institutions while patriotism sticks to supporting ideas of moral worth.
Yeah it’s pretty much impossible to be patriotic without being condescending about other people. It just doesn’t happen.
People think it’s the domain of the right, but there are plenty of left patriots and nationalists, even here on this board and it manifests in different ways eg parochialism, unwillingness to travel, disinterest in the rest of the world except where it affects America and even a callous indifference to suffering elsewhere etc which are peculiar characteristics of some on the American left that are rarely in the left elsewhere.
We should be moving away from the idea of the nation state (one of the reasons I was pro membership of the EU). In the age of globalisation and the internet there’s less justification for it than ever before.
I dont like to travel but want all countries borders torn down…
“Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.” Mark Twain
The problem is that you can’t simply assume that a stable political system can be built on top of a pure abstraction. Humans are deeply wired to think of themselves in relation to a particular community. The nation-state is itself parasitic on this idea. At its best, the idea of America is also a subversion of the idea of a tribe or nation where membership is based on allegiance to the idea that all men [sic] are created equal and endowed by their creator [sic] with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
For the kind of person who posts on progressive Internet forums from diverse Western metropoli, it’s easy to conclude that you can simply dispense with the religious nonsense and the parochial linkage between ideals and place/community. But it’s not really demonstrated that a purely intellectual political system can survive. Indeed, the recent years suggest that there’s a substantial fraction of people who won’t buy into the idea that their community isn’t special. In the absence of a positive vision of what that community means and how they are expected to act, those people will buy into much darker visions that center blood and soil rather than liberty and equality as the criteria for membership in the community.
In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
Devil’s dictionary
As if any of that matters. As if the idea of America has had anything to do with how much liberty Americans have had rather than concrete interests. As if nation states are bounded by ideas rather than by people with guns. As if nation states aren’t a cause of blood and soil sentiment.
Mostly it doesn’t matter, these evils happen the same regardless, but every once in a while, starting with their major entrance to the world in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, nation states go around destroying each other, er killing millions of people.
I’m not sure what you understand me to be saying that you disagree with? I thought you would agree that an EU-like project based on abstract principle and not local community ties is not likely to be stable. I think you generally reject the idea that any larger abstraction on top of genuine local community can be anything but evil, but that doesn’t really speak to the practical question of what kind of abstract systems are stable and which are not.
If you’re using the EU as an example of what you mean by this it’s a poor choice, because it has (and frequently exercises) the authority to inject large amounts of capital into local areas without the approval of national governments, and thus satisfies your second sentence.
No easy answer, but one of the things to recognise is that Nationalism’s project was a fusing of state and community. It’s obviously not easy now we’ve had a few hundred years of it, but that’s not a natural given. If we need community then it’s perhaps better to find that somewhere other than the entities which try to regulate our interactions.
Actually I don’t know what you meant. I, and I think all the people liking your post, took it to be “we need a unifying feeling of patriotism lest we fall into worse ideas to unify over” rather than not liking the EU.
But my objection is that we are not unified around “all men are created equal”, that’s a story we’re told. We were unified around something like “You grow the cotton. We’ll turn it into cloth. England doesn’t get a cut”.
And
The unification around “all men are created equal” is pure abstraction. Are you suggesting that patriotic, nationalistic, or whatever America is not a stable political system?
That’s pretty absurd and trollish.
It wasn’t intended as a hostile summary. Perhaps I misunderstand your beliefs or expressed it poorly. I thought your belief was that the state in general was bad, and that the only good way of running things is authentically local communities that govern themselves. From that perspective, I would then think that you would reject any attempt to construct a virtual political community based on abstractions. Maybe characterizing as evil is where I went astray?
As far as the EU goes, weakish global or semi-global organizations are probably good in that they probably decrease the likelihood of war.
Also, some issues are global and need some kind of global agreement.
Also many of us are in favour of continual expansion of the EU to eventually encompass much more of the globe (rename it as needed).
Both in characterizing it as evil and being absolutist.
Freedom is good. Democracy is good. All things should be decided as locally and democratically as practical (down to the level of the individual) so that everyone has the most freedom and direct input over the rules that they live under. Broader organizations are needed to protect things like the environment, but also to protect individual liberty.
I think the biggest problem with the EU is how undemocratic it is. How it is dominated by a small group of politicians and officials with little connection to the member states in the day to day practice and also dominated by Germany. Not sure how hot that take is though. Countries like Greece and Spain end up being treated like, say, the IMF treats the poorest countries in the world, and getting put into debt bondage.
It’s reasonable criticism of an entity still at a relatively embryonic stage in its development, but don’t NY/CA wield a lot more power than some other parts of the US (I’m asking, not stating)?
Having said that, nation states habitually do very similar things to their own uneconomic regions; not debt bondage as such but handcuffed dependence on welfare handouts to whole communities in lieu of the jobs they once had.
Eventually national borders dissolving to be replaced by local areas with a high degree of autonomy determining how best to spend their rebates from the EU or w/e, which focuses its attentions on issues like climate change that could be solved or at least vastly improved by a larger entity.