Ep. 154: The Problem with “Inclusive Patriotism” - How Radicals Are Retconned into Liberal Champions of the American Project
Added 2022-02-09 20:17:20 +0000 UTC"Why We Need Inclusive Nationalism," the journal Democracy declares. "Inclusion is patriotism of the highest order," cries The Washington Post. "Try patriotism," Bloomberg opinion writer Noah Smith proclaims.
Contemporary liberals repeatedly tell us – amid events that should make us impugn the foundations of the United States, like police killings and the absurd panic over Critical Race Theory – that American patriotism is inherently good, only sullied by "bad apples" and the Hard Right, and that the Center, Center-Left, and sometimes even the Center-Right, must "reclaim" this proud patriotism from the clutches of those who harm its noble reputation. In this framing, everyone, from 19th Century abolitionists to Indigenous land protectors to anti-war protesters, no matter their positions on the American project, is hailed as a "patriot," serving to make America the very best it can be.
Meanwhile, some popular PBS documentaries, NPR broadcasts, and many other forms of ostensibly "progressive" media alter the stories of radical figures and movements in the United States to promote this notion of "inclusive patriotism." Instead of highlighting and elucidating the political principles and goals of indigenous peoples, Communists, anarchists, socialists, anti-colonialists, and other activists, dissidents, and combatants throughout the past, mainline U.S. media offer a revisionist history in which these figures are either invisible or proudly American, Constitution-abiding liberals participating in some imaginary, high-minded national project.
In this episode, we examine how media routinely defang radical political figures as noble patriots in service of reformism and incrementalism; how they erase the power dynamics between oppressor and oppressed; why there can't really be such a thing as "progressive" or "inclusive" patriotism–– and why that's perfectly okay for adults to accept, and how the fiction of inclusive nationalism exist to narrow the confides to what is political possible today.
Our guest is organizer and writer Charlotte Rosen.
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Guest
Charlotte Rosen is an abolitionist organizer and PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University, specializing in post-1960s United States political history and the history of the United States carceral state. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Belt Magazine, The Nation and Truthout.
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Show Notes
Aaron Sorkin’s Inane, Liberal History Lesson
Charlotte Rosen | November 3, 2020 | The Nation
Adam Johnson and Sarah Lazare | September 5, 2021 | The Column
Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912-1936
Patrick Huber | Winter-Spring 2006 | Western Folklore
Adam Johnson and Sarah Lazare | November 22, 2021 | The Column
Files of Nixon White House Show Bid to Control Public Broadcasting
Les Brown | February 24, 1979 | The New York Times
Tom Reston | January 12, 1968 | The Harvard Crimson
President Johnson's Remarks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Lyndon B. Johnson | November 7, 1967 | Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
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References
Noah Smith | November 15, 2021 | Noahpinion
Inclusion is patriotism of the highest order
Darren Walker | July 2, 2021 | The Washington Post
Why We Need Inclusive Nationalism
John Halpin | July 29, 2020 | Democracy
M. Steven Fish, Neil A. Abrams, and Laila M. Aghaie | July 03, 2020 | Slate
National parks – even Mount Rushmore – show that there’s more than one kind of patriotism
Jennifer Ladino | June 29, 2020 | The Conversation
The left shouldn’t fear nationalism. It should embrace it.
Noam Gidron | February 8, 2018 | Vox
Muhammad Ali's Real Legacy: True Patriotism
Ivan Eland | June 6, 2016 | Huffington Post
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Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, go here.
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Comments
I think politicians are bound by a different intellectual arrangement than writers, journalists and historians and I think it's a bit dubious to ask them to take a dump on the American flag. Once one has conceded the premise of engaging in bourgeois democracy it's weird to expect this same person to effectively reject the foundations of that system. Like asking the CFO of JP Morgan be a marxist, kind of a silly premise.
Citations Needed
2022-02-10 15:30:43 +0000 UTCthe santa clause myth is the white washing of slave labor
absoluteboi
2022-02-10 15:06:32 +0000 UTCGreat episode. I learned a bunch of CPB / NPR history that I should've already known. I expect this kind of liberal chauvinist Americana from those outlets, but what I've found more striking lately is that you're hearing it from the likes of Matt Stoller, Corbin Trent, and other ostensibly left-leaning pundits who argue the Left needs to "reclaim patriotism". I find these arguments smarmy and this episode helped me articulate why (beyond the fact that their proponents often overlap with the "populist"-to-alt-right puke funnel). That said, there was a similar argument about the Bernie 2020 campaign, that he should have drawn more heavily from our homegrown history of social-democratic policies and less from those exotic European countries. I'm more sympathetic to this version, and I don't think it necessarily implies jingoism or erases the movements that brought about those reforms -- at least not the way Bernie would tell it. Do you think there is a way to thread this needle rhetorically that could actually benefit the US Left?
Isadore Nabi
2022-02-10 05:10:19 +0000 UTC
