Donald Trump declared his inauguration a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion” and left-wing Twitter went into a frenzy about how creepily quasi-fascist this was.
Right-wing Twitter went into a frenzy pointing out that Barack Obama had declared his own inauguration a “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation.” Left-wing Twitter angrily responded that those things are completely different, implying that if you couldn’t see the difference between a beautiful and healing day of renewal and reconciliation, and a disgusting celebration of atavistic nationalism, you might be something of a fascist.
And I, bordering on something perilously close to despair, thought, “Guys, this is why Red America hates us.”
It used to be a trope on the right that the left thought patriotism was a bad word — a charge the left angrily denied. Now here we have a surprisingly large number of people arguing that patriotism is a bad word, and wildly inappropriate when issued from the Oval Office. Or at least, more than a bit uncouth.
Now, I’m not saying you can’t be patriotic and also left wing. (Just ask arch-jingoist Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) But left-wing political beliefs cannot substitute for patriotism any more than a belief in tax cuts and smaller government can.
Patriotism is the primal love of your country which pre-exists any particular notion about how its political affairs should be arranged. You can espouse a single-payer health care program (or smaller government) as a loyal citizen of Denmark. You cannot, however, be an American patriot in that same position, though you may be a most excellent Dane. True patriotism does not require us to choose between the many constituent identities that every individual has. But it does require you to decide where your first loyalties lie.
Ideals are dangerous things with a tendency to run amok, but no society can live without them. And I submit that no nation can live long without a pretty healthy patriotism — a powerful symbolic identity that transcends the frictions and disagreements that otherwise make it impossible to unite for any common purpose.
Love it because it is yours
This by no means suggests that to be patriotic you need to support, say, aggressive foreign wars, or a large military, or any of the other things often associated with patriotism in our political culture.
What it does mean is that you should be able to say, without irony or reservation, “I love my country more than any other country,” and understand that adults around the world won’t hear this as an insult against their own land, but as the moral equivalent of “I love my wife more than any other woman.” You don’t love your country best because all the others are rotten places full of awful people; you love it best because it’s yours.
Whatever else Red America is wrong about, they are right about this. Patriotism doesn’t imply reverencing any leader or any particular political program, but it does require reverence for your nation and your fellow citizens.
You can celebrate a day of patriotic devotion and then go to the Women’s March to protest the man who proclaimed it.
For one of the things most worth loving about this magnificent, flawed country of ours is a heritage that says there’s no contradiction between those two things.
Megan McArdle is a columnist for Bloomberg View. E-mail: mmcardle3@bloomberg.net.
