On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence, more Americans on the right than on the left say they feel patriotic. Recent polls show that most Democrats are only “proud” of the country when their party’s president is in the White House. And many progressives and historians see the founding of the nation as a tragedy for Native Americans and enslaved people rather than the struggle for freedom that conservatives emphasize. Why do you love a country founded on conquest and exploitation that remains unequal today? After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky dismissed patriotism as a way for political elites to tell citizens, “You shut up and obey, and I will relentlessly advance my interests.”
That view is seriously flawed as a way of understanding history, as well as major political mistakes. Indeed, the left has a long tradition of patriotism, using the principles of the nation’s founding as a yardstick to measure how far we have fallen short of a way to articulate the Constitution’s vision of a “more perfect union.” More than ever, the uneasy mix of liberalism and radicalism needs to get back on track.
The war for independence was indeed a morally ambiguous event. Despite Thomas Paine’s famous oath that Americans had the “power to start the world anew,” the leaders of the new nation allowed white citizens to seize Native American lands and resources and expand the institution of human slavery. As the British historian GR Elton to put it“if historians have no doubt, they are nothing.”
However, the Declaration of Independence also proclaimed values that oppose such evil practices. As political theorist Danielle Allen notes, the document “makes a philosophical case for political equality.” Detailing the ways in which King George III had deceived and persecuted the American colonists—”a history of constant injury and usurpation”—it established the principle that governments should protect and promote the welfare of their subjects. The signatories presented the case not only to their fellow Americans but to the “world of truth.” The independence of the 13 colonies was for the benefit of anyone, anywhere, who believed that the only antidote to tyrannical power was for the people to govern themselves.
Allen maintains that the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries regarding slavery does not negate the enduring wisdom of their words. The same passion for equality and freedom that emerges through the Declaration inspired his white grandmother to campaign for the vote with his African American grandfather to get the NAACP chapter in the Jim Crow South.
Throughout our history, the Declaration and Constitution have encouraged reformers and radicals to pursue egalitarian change. In 1852, Frederick Douglass hailed the Constitution as “the glorious document of liberty.” During the Economic Age, Terence Powderly and Samuel Gompers built a labor movement dedicated to the idea that only when workers had a voice at work as they did at the polls would the nation be considered a true democracy. WEB Du Bois and Ida B. Wells exposed the violence of the Jim Crow order that blocked the way to the equality promised by Reconstruction.
In 1895, socialist Eugene Debs addressed a crowd of supporters who had gathered to celebrate his release from prison for leading a national railroad strike that federal judges had ordered. “It is not the law or the administration of the law that I am complaining about,” he declared. “It is a clear violation of the Constitution, a complete nullification of the law and usurpation of judicial and tyrannical power, for which I and my colleagues were put in jail, where I enter my serious protest.”
Other progressives, who wanted to reform the capitalist system rather than destroy it, used the Founders’ contempt for civilization to denounce the “robbers” who ran the big corporations and politicians who served their personal interests. Organizers and organizers wanted to mobilize something similar to a second revolution to remove these elites from power. Although they failed to achieve that ultimate goal, their rhetoric and activism spurred the passage of important constitutional amendments that introduced income tax, direct election of senators and women’s rights, as well as the creation of new laws and regulatory agencies to regulate corporations and protect consumers.
The 1930s and early 1940s were the heyday of patriotism for the broad left. Activists in the industrial workers’ movement, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, compared their dictator to King George III and insisted that every American, native-born or immigrant, had the right to join a union and strike. The Communist Party, then the largest organization on the left, ran the Jefferson School of Social Science, celebrated the commemoration of Paul Revere’s voyage, and declared that, despite its loyalty to Joseph Stalin, the party’s creed was “Twentieth-Century America.” And what about the boy from Oklahoma who wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” a song that millions of Americans instantly knew by heart? At the time he composed the song, in 1940, Woody Guthrie was a regular columnist. People’s WorldCPUSA’s West Coast magazine.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and his fellow New Dealers dressed up their actions in star-studded rhetoric and signs as well. They established the National Archives on Constitution Avenue and displayed original copies of the Declaration and Constitution within its marble walls. They built the Jefferson Memorial, where the Virginia icon is quoted defending freedom of worship and preaching human equality (with only a brief mention of the “tyranny” of slavery). Roosevelt denounced corporate bosses who opposed him as “economic monarchists” who “reached control of the Government itself.” To combat this “tyranny,” he declared, “the common man again faces the problem that faced the Minute Man.”
During World War II, FDR proposed an “economic bill of rights” that modeled the programs of Labor and Socialism in Europe. But he did so by using the first 10 amendments to the constitution—calling for universal guarantees of work, housing and “decent” education, and medical care. Every wartime president extolls the virtues of the nation. But in the event, Roosevelt envisioned a secure future that would be built on the principles of the past.
The most prominent leader of the Black freedom movement that shook the nation to its roots in the two decades after World War II raised the Bill of Rights, too. In his speech he gave on the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. he cited the First Amendment as the foundation of his movement and that of every community in America: “Somewhere I read about freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read about freedom of speech. Somewhere I read about freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to march for justice.”
All these developments depended on the ideology of the nation’s founder to enable its citizens to build movements and elect politicians who could reduce or end its inequality. They said they were more committed to turning those values into policies than their right-wing opponents.
And then, many on the left gave up the fight. In their anger against institutionalized racism and the Vietnam War, radical youth in the 1960s and 1970s claimed that patriotism of any kind was an illusion that allowed the nation’s leaders to rule the world and dismiss tyranny at home. They quoted Malcolm X’s line, “I see America through the eyes of a victim. I see no American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
In 1981, Howard Zinn published a book that looked at the nation’s past through a strong anti-nationalist lens. History of the American People it is a narrative about ordinary people who continued to struggle to find a better life but were always defeated by a small group of rulers whose cunning was only surpassed by their greed. For Zinn, the war of independence was a clever device to defeat “potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.” The Civil War, in his view, was just another deep shell game. Confederate soldiers were fooled by a “moral war situation” against slavery that “worked effectively to reduce class prejudices against the rich and powerful and to divert much anger against ‘the enemy.'” Nearly five decades later, the book has sold more than 4 million copies, making it one of the most popular American history books ever published.
By the end of the 20th century, many left-wing scholars had agreed that appeals to the nation’s archangels belied the stark reality that the United States had been built on the bodies of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and poor immigrants. Even loyalty to the nation can be a problem. In 1998, the president of the American Studies Association rejected the very name of the organization he led. Dismissing “the notion of a bounded national territory and an accompanying national identity,” Janice Radway wondered if it made sense to “develop ‘American’ studies” at all. Historian David Hollinger replied, tongue firmly in cheek, ”Historians have less use for America than they once did.”
Returning to Zinn, few modern progressives no longer find it credible or moral to praise American values at all. They see the United States as a “colonial-colonial” nation whose zeal for exploitation and conquest was limited only by military defeats, such as Vietnam and Afghanistan. Others prefer to identify themselves as citizens of the world. That so many Americans continue to be nationalists only demonstrates to these progressives their blindness to, if not complicity in, the evils perpetrated by the men and women who rule the empire.
The left already has such harsh critics on their side. If they want to govern, they will need to win over many Americans who love their country but also believe it needs to change. As the late Todd Gitlin, former leader of the New Left, he wrote one year after the 9/11 attacks: “It’s time for patriotism to help each other, not just token displays, not catechism or compliments. It’s time to bridge the gap between the nation we love and the rights we love too. It’s time for the real America to stand up.”
The “No Kings” protests that have erupted during Donald Trump’s second term signal toward one aspect of the 1776 culture, but it is a negative slogan, not a positive vision of what Americans should believe in and fight to protect and develop. Someone can defeat the president’s party in the midterms without that vision. But it is not enough to convince Americans who want to be proud of their country and, yes, they would like it to be better not in the past but in the future.
In 1887, William James be advised:
The worst enemies of nations are not their foreign enemies; they always stay within their limits. And from these internal enemies civilization always needs to be saved. The most blessed nation of all nations is that which the civil mind of the people makes to save day by day, by deeds without external beauty; by speaking, writing, voting in an appropriate manner; for quick bribery; for good temper between the parties; for the people to know real men when they see them, and to prefer them as leaders to violent warriors or mere rogues. Such nations do not need war to save them.
The philosopher wrote that as a tribute to Robert Gould Shaw, the white abolitionist turned Union officer who commanded Black soldiers during the Civil War in a bloody battle where he died along with hundreds of his men. A left that rejects James’s strong, optimistic, compassionate patriotism is a left that can never win the country over to its side.
