The Left Has a Patriotism Problem
I love my wife for who she *could* be
I live in Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States and arguably the most influential exporter of liberal culture in the country, if not the world.
Every June, the city comes alive to celebrate Pride. Santa Monica Boulevard, one of the main arteries in the city center, is shut down. There’s a parade and a street festival. Bars are booming with jubilant revelers. Men in drag sport elaborate outfits and makeup that must have taken hours to prepare. Rainbow flags are everywhere, on street corners and painted over crosswalks. Storefronts are plastered with them. Everybody wants in on the action – this year, the strip mall next to my apartment building went so far as to paint their stairs in rainbows and hired a DJ to perform in the courtyard for the entire month.
It’s a joyous celebration filled with, well, pride. Pride in queer identity, an identity that people in LA care about. And the city government responds in kind, pouring energy and resources into helping its residents celebrate this cherished identity.
Pride was no different this year. Then, four days later, came the Fourth of July, and the contrast couldn’t have been more striking.
There was no parade in West Hollywood. No street festival. No celebrity-studded public celebration. I spent the evening at the Soho House in West Hollywood, where aside from the live jazz band, you wouldn’t have known it was Independence Day. At 9PM, there were fireworks in Santa Monica and in the surrounding suburbs, but it felt almost perfunctory. Maybe a quarter of the guests shuffled over to the balcony to watch, but most carried on inside like it was any other night.
The staircase in the strip mall next to my apartment was still sporting its rainbow Pride paint job. The Starbucks across the street had taken down its dozen or so rainbow flags, but hadn’t replaced them with the Star Spangled Banner.
Notably, the only American flags I saw all day were small flags strewn across the casual Mediterranean restaurant in that same strip mall. Ironic, but not surprising, that it was a Middle Eastern (likely) immigrant business owner who was most enthusiastic in celebrating the holiday.
Do left-wing people love America?
They’ll tell you they do. They’ll insist they do, almost defensively. But do they, really?
There are those on the left who openly don’t. Take Ben & Jerry’s, the famously left-wing ice cream company, who “celebrated” the Fourth on Twitter this year by emphasizing what they see as America’s illegal seizure of its land from indigenous tribes. Agree or disagree with the message, it certainly isn’t very patriotic.
Even among patriotic liberals, though, there is a difference in their expression. Their patriotism tends to be intellectual. “I love America because…” followed by descriptions of immigration policy, a founding emphasis on post-Enlightenment ideals over blood or soil, or even citations of economic statistics.
Most damning of all is the other version of this left-wing patriotism. “I love America despite…” followed by hand-wringing over the country’s historical (and contemporary) sins. “I love America for what it can be” is a common refrain among those on the left.
Just think about this for a second. Would you ever say “I love my wife for who she can be”? Not if you want to stay married.
Embedded in these long-winded statements of left-wing patriotism is the implication that love for country must be justified. That implication, in of itself, is self-incrimination. Love for one’s spouse doesn’t need to be justified. Love for one’s favorite sports team doesn’t demand some logical or philosophical grounding.
When you genuinely, passionately love something or someone, you don’t express it with a thesis statement and supporting evidence.
It’s not that those left-wing statements are necessarily wrong. A pluralistic society based on ideals over blood and soil that has achieved unprecedented economic prosperity is, indeed, what makes America exceptional. A long trail of dark sins at the hands of the state and its citizens invites sober reflection. There are contradictions in this nation’s past and present, as well as truly unique and exceptional achievements that set it apart from other nations.
But patriotism is not conditional on those realities and American liberals don’t apply that conditionality to foreigners, anyway. American liberals wouldn’t harangue a patriotic Peruvian for being 87th in GDP per capita or demand to know how his patriotism squares with a colonial past.
Left-wing American patriotism is caveated and rationalized. It’s the cold “I love you” of a sexless marriage. It’s perfunctory and hollow, exposed for what it truly is only when juxtaposed against an identity or a cause that inspires real passion, like Pride.
If I were at a party in Fort Worth, Texas and exclaimed “I love America because it’s the best damn country in the world!” I imagine some guy would yell back “hell yeah, brother!” and hand me a Bud Heavy, or whichever domestic beer has been deemed sufficiently heterosexual at the moment.
If I were at a party in Brooklyn or Silverlake and said the same thing, I’d probably get whisked away to a black site in Portland and spend the rest of my days imprisoned at Abu Granola, forced to watch the cold open to The Newsroom on repeat.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would say these differences are deep-rooted, that liberals and conservatives have different moral frameworks where liberals prioritize fairness and harm reduction while conservatives prioritize loyalty and duty. He’d say that patriotism comes more naturally to conservatives than to liberals.
Maybe so. But nevertheless, I think left-wingers could perform some of the thoughtful reflection they apply to the country to their own feelings about the country. Not least of all because these differences have profound impacts on our social fabric.
Take, for example, the controversy over Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests. It’s true that one of our core freedoms is peaceful protest. Crucially, as Americans, we don’t just have the right to take a knee during the anthem, we can burn our flag if we want.
But did liberals appreciate the gravity of that action to people with different moral frameworks? I don’t think most liberals view the anthem or the flag as particularly sacrosanct, and so taking a knee is an “emotionally low-cost” action that largely just draws attention to the activist message underneath – in Kaepernick’s case, racially-motivated police brutality.
To a conservative, however, the flag and anthem are sacred symbols and the act was far from “emotionally low-cost”. Many could not see past the act to the underlying message because the act itself was considered so extreme.
To wit, would liberals protest, say, Iranian theocratic oppression of women by burning the Quran? I really doubt it. They have the right to do so, but just because they can, I don’t think they would. I think they’d intuit that the act would be perceived to be so extreme as to distract from the underlying message.
My point here isn’t to re-litigate anthem protests but to demonstrate where this division can cause real problems in our culture. But one might say, why chide the left to be more patriotic vs. pester the right to tone it down? Why, exactly, am I saying all this anyway?
Maybe it’s just cathartic. Walking around on a lifeless Fourth of July in one of the country’s biggest and richest cities, filled with some of the nation’s most favored sons and daughters, many of whom are living a life more prosperous than most of the world’s inhabitants could ever dream of, was disappointing. That it happened mere days after a jubilant celebration proving what the city is capable of when it truly cares about something was even more upsetting.
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, a highly anomalous town where patriotism and institutionalism transcend party lines and people left, right, and center wave flags and love the country. There is a unifying social fabric in patriotism. If diversity is to be our strength, we must subordinate all our diverse identities to our common identity – American.
Ultimately, my point is this: whoever you are, you are not “too smart” to be patriotic. The country does not need to earn your patriotism as if it’s a reward. We should love America because we are Americans. Patriotism is an ingredient, not an outcome.
There are 364 days to scrutinize the country’s faults, to demand that it improve, to reflect on its complicated past and fight for the uncertain future that lies ahead.
But there is one day to say to hell with all that – I love the U.S. of A. because it’s the best goddamn country on God’s green earth and anyone who disagrees can kiss my red, white, and blue ass. Pardon my French.
Nihaar Sinha is a screenwriter and media executive. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
This is a great observation, and sorely needed given the downstream effects of liberal non-patriotism, e.g. this: https://themissingdatadepot.substack.com/p/the-militarys-white-democrat-problem
As it happens, I also live in the DC suburbs and agree heartily that patriotism (and church attendance, for that matter) isn't seen as something for conservatives alone. Our small city has the largest Independence Day parade in Virginia, and people of all political stripes come out to watch it.
Absolutely phenomenal piece. Thank you for writing it.