By David Harsanyi
Friday, January 27, 2017
Politicians have no business directing or defining
patriotism, especially when their rhetoric sounds like 1950s-era Soviet
sloganeering.
It was creepy when Barack Obama declared his first
Inauguration Day as “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation” and called
upon us to find “common purpose of remaking this nation for our new century.”
And it’s creepy when President Donald Trump declares his Inauguration Day a
“National Day of Patriotic Devotion,” one in which “a new national pride stirs
the American soul and inspires the American heart.”
This kind of self-aggrandizement is what you see under
cults of personality, not American republicanism. Far be it from me to lecture
anyone on how to love their country, but if your devotion to America is
contingent upon the party or the person in office, you’re probably not doing it
quite like the Founding Fathers envisioned. It’s bad enough that these
inaugurations are treated as coronations; it can’t be patriotic to treat
politicians like quasi-religious figures. Moreover, this kind of devotional
ties patriotism — either implicitly or, in some cases, rather explicitly — to a
preferred set of policy initiatives or a political office.
We just survived eight years of a messianic presidency
with a finger-wagging, patriotism-appropriating administration lecturing us on
how to be proper Americans. If you didn’t support the administration’s point of
view, Vice President Joe Biden might accuse you of “betting against America.”
“What we need as a nation,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew
wrote to Congress in 2014, echoing the president, “is a new sense of economic
patriotism, where we all rise or fall together.” Was Lew talking about our
unalienable right of free expression? No, he was talking about punishing
America-based companies that were trying to lower their tax burden, which
happens to be one of the highest rates in the free world.
By the way, if we’re going to play this game, avoiding
excessive taxation is also one of the most American things we can do.
So it was creepy when Obama was trying to replace
American idealism with progressivism and calling it “economic patriotism,” and
it’s creepy when Trump does basically the same thing under the guise of
economic nationalism.
Now, judging from the campaign rhetoric, failing to
support tariffs or other counterproductive “buy American” economic policies
will have you branded seditious over the next four years. Trump’s chief
strategist, Steve Bannon, who probably had something to do with the “devotion”
executive order, has referred to himself as an “economic nationalist,” a loaded
term that means you love your country only if you support mercantilism.
Economic nationalists rely on a populism that lays blame
on others — Mexico, China, whoever — for American problems. It’s a philosophy,
if we trust Bannon or Trump, that values power over most principles, including
liberty. It’s a philosophy that sounds like many things, none of them American
patriotism.
The idea is amorphous, but patriotism, especially in this
country, is driven by idealism rather than chauvinism, ethnicity, or “power.”
As George Orwell famously noted, nationalism isn’t the same as patriotism. In
the American sense, patriotism is fidelity to a place and the Constitution and
is by nature “defensive, both militarily and culturally.” Nationalism, on the
other hand, “is inseparable from the desire for power.” A devotional to our
“new national pride” strongly hints at the latter.
You can hate your president and love your country. You
can hope your president fails and still be patriotic. We don’t always have a
shared purpose. That’s because presidents are not only commanders-in-chief but
also politicians with agendas. And sometimes those agendas clash with your
worldview. Let’s not have devotionals venerating their ascendency every four
years.
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