A Patriotic Left

...Love of country was a demotic faith long before September 11, a fact that previous lefts understood and attempted to turn to their advantage...

...The globe, not the flag, is the symbol that's wanted now," scolded Katha Pollitt in the Nation...

...Liberals and radicals are the only people in politics who can insist on closing the gap between America as the apotheosis of democratic strivings and the sordid realities of greed and arrogance that often betray it...

...Neither group of resisters succeeded at the time, but each gained a mass hearing and saw its arguments incorporated into future policies...

...But I persist in drawing stimulation and pride from my American identity...

...At the time, there were certainly ample reasons to consider Americanism a brutal sham...

...It could take credit for spearheading a multicultural, gender-aware revision of the humanities curriculum, but the right set the political agenda, and it did so in part because its partisans spoke forcefully in the name of American principles that knit together disparate groups—anti-union businesspeople, white evangelicals, Jewish neoconservatives—for mutual ends...

...For American leftists, patriotism was indispensable...

...During the Great Depression, the white, conservative skeptic George Santayana observed that "America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences...

...Without empathy for one's neighbors, politics becomes a cold, censorious enterprise indeed...

...Noam Chomsky described patriotic blather as simply the governing elite's way of telling its subjects, "You shut up and be obedient, and I'll relentlessly advance my own interests...

...Perhaps one exception to this rule was Malcolm X, who stated, in 1964, that he was a "victim of Americanism" who could see no "American dream," only "an American nightmare...

...In the meantime, Americans who want to transform the world have to learn how to persuade the nation...

...Union activists in the Gilded Age such as Eugene Debs and Mother Jones accused employers of crushing the individuality and self-respect of workers...

...In the 1960s, liberal presidents bullied their way into Indochina in the name of what Lyndon Johnson called "the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania...

...MICHAEL KAZIN is on the editorial board of Dissent...

...There is really no alternative...

...It made their dissent and rebellion intelligible to their fellow citizens—and located them within the national narrative, fighting to shape a common future...

...In a provocative 1994 essay, philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that patriotism is "morally dangerous" because it encourages Americans to focus on their own concerns and minimize or disregard those of people in other lands...

...But the tolerant alternative, which Gerstle calls "civic nationalism," also inspired many Americans in the modern era to help liberate Europe from fascism and Stalinism and to organize at home for social and economic justice...

...Anti-imperialists opposed the conquest of the Philippines after the war of 1898 by comparing President William McKinley to King George III...

...After World War II, the word itself became the property of the American Legion, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the FBI...

...After all, hope is always more attractive than cynicism, and the gap between promise and fulfillment is narrower for Americanism than it is for other universalist creeds such as communism, Christianity, and Islam...

...Most ordinary citizens understandably distrust a left that condemns military intervention abroad or a crackdown at home but expresses only a pro forma concern for the actual and potential victims of terrorism...

...An earlier version of American patriotism was a forerunner of the modern genre: pride in the first nation organized around a set of social beliefs rather than a shared geography and history...

...Disconnected as they are from any national or local constituency, global leftists now live at risk of being thrust to the margins— abstract sages of equity, operatives of nongovernmental organizations engaged in heroic but Sisyphean tasks, or demonstrators roving from continent to continent in search of bankers to heckle...

...your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery...

...As an ethicist, Nussbaum is certainly on solid ground...

...I realize that patriotism, like any powerful ideology, is a "construction" with multiple uses, some of which I abhor...

...When John Ashcroft denies the right of counsel to a citizen accused of terrorism or a CEO cooks the books to impress Wall Street, they are soiling the flag and ought to be put on the patriotic defensive...

...The movement against the Vietnam War did include activists who preferred A PATRIOTIC LEFT the Vietcong's flag to the American one...

...44 n DISSENT / Fall 2002...

...your boasted liberty, an unholy license...

...In 1970, writer Julius Lester observed, "American radicals are perhaps the first radicals anywhere who have sought to make a revolution in a country which they hate...

...When Debs became a socialist, he described his new vision in the American idiom, as "the equal rights of all to manage and control" society...

...But fewer commentators note that when, at the end of his speech, Douglass predicted slavery's demise, he drew his "encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions," as well as from a spirit of enlightenment that he believed was growing on both sides of the Atlantic...

...In the United States, Karl Marx's dictum that the workers have no country has been refuted time and again...

...Congress promised independence to the Philippines sooner than colonial officials favored...

...It has been not wage earners but the upper classes—from New England gentry on the Grand Tour a century ago to globe-trotting executives and cybertech professionals today—who view America with an ambivalent shrug, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's line, "America is my country, Paris is my hometown...

...yET THE HISTORY of the last thirty years has also exposed the outsized flaw in such thinking...

...But three years after bursting into the headlines from the streets of Seattle, that project seems stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea that lies between rhetorical desire and political exigency...

...There's no need to mouth the Pledge of Allegiance or affix a flag pin to your lapel or handbag...

...And, challenged by such antiwar voices as Debs, Robert LaFollette, and William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed national self-determination to be the core principle of a new world order...

...After emancipation, Douglass never stopped condemning the hy42 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 pocrisy of white Americans— or continuing to base his hopes for equality on traditions he and they held in common...

...Radical environmentalists and anti-IMF crusaders seek to revive the old dream of internationalism in a version indebted more to John Lennon's "Imagine" than to V. I. Lenin's Comintern...

...Soon after Malcolm's death, many on the left, of all races, began to scorn patriotic talk and, instead, to celebrate ethnic and sexual differences...

...But Malcolm was primarily a spokesman for black anger and pride, not a builder of movements or a catalyst of reforms to benefit his people...

...Having abandoned patriotism, the left lost the ability to pose convincing alternatives for the nation as a whole...

...We should regard our deliberations," she wrote, "as, first and foremost, deliberations about human problems of people in particular concrete situations, not problems growing out of a national identity that is altogether unlike that of others...

...In 1917, a mass movement led by socialists and pacifists called for a popular referendum on the question of going to war...

...Antiwar activists view patriotism as a smokescreen for U.S...

...Echoing her words, activists and intellectuals talk of challenging global exploitation with some form of global citizenship...

...It led some white Americans to justify exterminating Indians, others to hold slaves, and still others to bar immigrants who did not possess "Anglo-Saxon" genes...

...Americans ought to take a massacre in Africa as seriously as one that takes place in lower Manhattan and demand that their government move rapidly to halt it...

...Regrettably, this is not a popular sentiment on the contemporary left...

...Of course, these purposes were not always noble ones...

...But the antiwar insurgency grew powerful only toward the end of the 1960s, when it drew in people who looked for leadership to liberal patriots such as King, Walter Reuther, and Eugene McCarthy rather than to Abbie Hoffman and the Weathermen...

...intervention in World War I demanded to know why Americans should die to defend European monarchs and their colonies in Africa and Asia...

...A good deal that we cherish about contemporary America was thus accomplished by social movements of the left, speaking out for national ideals...

...At minimum, this means putting pressure on the national government, organizing coalitions of people from different regions and backgrounds, and debating citizens who think their tax money ought to be spent only at home...

...One can, like Pollitt and Chomsky, curse as jingoistic all those "United We Stand" and "God Bless America" signs and hope somehow to transcend patriotism in the name of global harmony...

...hegemony, while radical academics mock the notion of "American exceptionalism" as a relic of the cold war, a triumphal myth we should quickly outgrow...

...Both views betray an ignorance of American history, as well as a quixotic desire to leap from a distasteful present to a gauzy future liberated from the fetters of nationalism...

...In the wake of September 11, the stakes have been raised for the American left...

...I particularly cherish its civic ideals—social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy—and the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice...

...But leftists made what progress they did by demanding that the nation live up to its stated principles, rather than dismissing them as fatally compromised by the racism of the founders or the abusiveness of flag-waving vigilantes...

...His latest book, co-authored with Maurice Isserman, is America Divided: The Civil War of the I 960s...

...Elizabeth Cady Stanton issued a "Woman's Declaration of Rights" on the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and argued that denying the vote to women was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment...

...Tom Paine praised his adopted homeland as an "asylum for manDISSENT / Fall 2002 n 4 I A PATRIOTIC LEFT kind"—which gave him a forum to denounce regressive taxes and propose free public education...

...On Independence Day, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave an angry, eloquent address that asked, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July...

...politics and policy...

...your national greatness, swelling vanity...

...Our effort must be to resist the influence and improve the opportunity...

...In daily life, cultural cosmopolitanism is mostly reserved to the rich and famous...

...In its novelty, Americanism gave citizens of the new republic both a way to understand and to stand for purposes that transcended their self-interest...

...But to rail against patriotic symbols is to wage a losing battle—and one that demeans us and sets us against the overwhelming majority of Americans for no worthwhile moral or political purpose...

...Fierce love for one's identity group— whether black, Latino, Asian, Native American, or gay or lesbian—seemed morally superior to the master narrative that had justified war abroad and racial exclusion at home...

...Instead, leftists should again claim, without pretense or apology, an honorable place in the long narrative of those who demanded that American ideals apply to all and opposed the efforts of those who tried to reserve them for favored groups...

...ASELF-CRITICAL conception of patriotism also led Americans on the left to oppose their leaders' aggressive policies abroad...

...But she offers no guidance for how global leftists can get the power to achieve their laudable objectives...

...It may be, as the idiosyncratic Trotskyist Leon Samson argued in 1935, that Americanism served as a substitute for socialism, an ideology of self-emancipation through equal opportunity that inoculated most citizens against the class-conscious alternative...

...Half a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr., told his fellow bus boycotters, "If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong" and proclaimed that "the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right...

...your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence...

...Even if the "war against terrorism" doesn't continue to overshadow all other issues, it will inevitably force activists of every stripe to make clear how they would achieve security for individual citizens and for the nation...

...your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless...

...All the rallying around the flag after September 11 increased the disdain many leftists feel for the sentiment that lies behind it...

...One could easily list analogous statements from such pioneering reformers as Jane Addams and Betty Friedan, unionists Sidney Hillman and Cesar Chavez, and the gay liberationist Harvey Milk...

...Throughout our history, and still today, the most effective way to love the country is to fight like hell to change it...

...He was, however, a prophetic figure...

...0, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be...

...As historian Gary Gerstle points out in his recent book American Crucible, "racial nationalism" dominated much of American life through the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth...

...Even slavery couldn't extinguish the promise radicals found in the American creed...

...Or one can empathize with the communal spirit that animates them, embracing the ideals of the nation and learning from past efforts to put them into practice in the service of far-reaching reform...

...In the face of such evidence, many leftists would respond that civic idealism should not be confined within national borders...

...Every account quotes the fugitive-turned-abolitionist speaking truth to white power: "Your celebration is a sham...

...In hope of a revival, left patriots might draw inspiration from two voices from disparate points on the demographic and ideological spectrum...

...It's difficult to think of any radical or reformer who repudiated the national belief system and still had a major impact on U.S...

...How can one seriously engage in this conversation about protecting America if America holds no privileged place in DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 43 A PATRIOTIC LEFT one's heart...

...Foes of U.S...

...A planetary government is hardly on the horizon, and rich nations would no doubt hog its agenda if it were...

...Without patriotic appeals, the great social movements that attacked inequalities of class, gender, and race in the United States—and spread their messianic rhetoric around the world—would never have gotten off the ground...

...At the same time, Langston Hughes—black, homosexual, and communist sympathizer—expressed a parallel vision: Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above...