By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
The Winter Olympics had its thrills and spills — and a
deep philosophical divide represented by two American, or American-born,
athletes.
Jack Hughes, the gold-medal-winning American hockey player
for the U.S. team, gave voice to a patriotic reflex in his heartfelt
expressions of love for his country.
Eileen Gu, the gold-medal-winning American-born freestyle
skier competing for China, exemplified a cosmopolitan ideal that floats above
mere nationhood.
This difference — between the bloody-mouthed hockey
player draped in his own country’s flag and the exceptionally talented
part-time model resistant to any questions about national loyalty — drives many
of the divisions in American society.
Is loyalty to country a matter of choice or an
unalterable commitment? Do borders mean anything? Is our common culture
essential or dispensable? Is the appropriate attitude toward America one of
fundamental gratitude or critical distance?
These types of questions are involved in disputes over
immigration policy, over American history and how to teach it in schools, over
the status of the English language, and over how much we should care about
so-called international opinion.
It was a subtext at the Munich Security Conference a
couple of weeks ago when Marco Rubio said that we must fight for Western
civilization, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rendered “Western culture” in
sneer quotes, as if it were a fiction or contemptible concept.
The right is naturally drawn to the patriotic or
nationalistic attitude, whereas the left is more cosmopolitan, tending to
believe that attachment to one’s own is narrow-minded and that patriotic
displays are crude and simplistic.
Cosmopolitanism has a long history. As I note in my book The
Case for Nationalism, the term “cosmopolitan” has its root in the Greek
word kosmopolites, or citizen of the cosmos or world.
The fourth-century b.c. Cynic philosopher Diogenes is the
first recorded person to use what has now become a cosmopolitan cliché: “When
he was asked where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’”
That was a radical, or even senseless, statement, since
the Greeks considered citizenship possible only through the polis, or city.
During the Enlightenment, the cosmopolitan idea was
expressed in the notion of Weltbürger, or world citizen.
This tendency has been given stark expression by the
likes of the novelist Virginia Woolf, who urged the rejection of “pride of
nationality,” and the titanic Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who thought it
“obvious that patriotism as a sentiment is bad and harmful; as a doctrine it is
stupid.”
Cosmopolitanism has always been open to the charge that,
whatever its real or purported idealism, it cultivates a disregard for what’s
near, immediate, and tangible for what’s far off.
Behind cosmopolitanism is what the British writer Paul
Gilroy has called “the principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of
estrangement from one’s own culture and history.”
The problem is that no one is really a citizen of the
world, but rather of particular nations that have formed us in obvious and
subtle ways. Yes, people emigrate, and there are literary and intellectual
exiles, but most of us have an attachment to home that feels natural and
important.
One reason that people were so moved by the U.S. hockey
team was the palpable bonds of the players — to one another, to their country,
to the memory of their tragically deceased former fellow player, Johnny
Gaudreau. These weren’t bonds that were chosen, so much as accepted and
embraced; they were true to their teammates and nation.
In contrast, Eileen Gu claims to be true to herself. If
asked if she is proud of the accomplishments of her countrymen, she might have
to ask, “Which countrymen?”
It is certainly the case that the Olympics bring athletes
around the world together, but the games themselves are a testament to the
enduring power of patriotism. It was, after all, a unique kind of sports joy to
witness the triumph of our boys in red, white, and blue.
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