How patriotic is too patriotic?
I asked myself this question last week while reading an article in National Review on the Camarillo High School incident. If you troll the conservative blogosphere, you know what I’m talking about. If, like most Cantabrigians, you don’t, here’s a clip from NR summarizing the event:
Four California high-school students were reportedly suspended for chanting “U.S.A! U.S.A!” and wearing American flag bandanas during a basketball game. While their punishment has since been rescinded, school administrators said “the incident is far from over.”
Oxnard Union School District superintendent Gabe Soumakian told Fox News Radio that … [he] felt that the students’ actions might have had racist undertones since the schools have large Hispanic student populations.
…
But the students deny any racial element to their chants. “We’ve done it always,” one student said. “It’s something we do. It’s the same group of friends. We’re all very patriotic.” The four students gained support from their peers: More than 100 students gathered by the school’s flagpole the following morning to protest in patriotic clothing.
At the time of the incident, conservative commentators unanimously decried the supposed anti-Americanism of Camarillo’s faculty and lauded the “patriotism” of the boys involved. The link above had 11,000 ‘Facebook recommendations’ as of Friday, and one comment on the post claiming that the “liberal anti American cabal has infected our school system” had 750 ‘likes’ alone.
All pundits on the right dismissed the possibility that these chants were motivated by racism, which seems conveniently ignorant of the absurdity of chanting ‘U.S.A.’ at an high school basketball game between two teams from the middle of California. But I’m not interested in divining these students’ intentions. I wasn’t there. Rather, I’d like to know why commentators everywhere were so quick and so passionate about defending a brand of patriotism that seems to me clearly excessive.
To be sure, I don’t think all patriotism is bad. I may be pretty liberal, but contrary to conservative stereotypes I’m also proud of my country. On the Fourth of July, I watch the fireworks, and I eat the cake with the red, white, and blue frosting. Last year, I spent the evening on the National Mall with my roommate and his family, and it was wonderful. On that day, I celebrate the triumph of democracy over arbitrary rule, which – despite many revisionist jabs at the American story – is one of the core narratives of our independence.
My patriotism, which I like to think of as historically informed, is not something with which I was simply born. It’s something I had to intuit, and I celebrate my pride reflectively, realizing there are faults as well as positive qualities to my nation. I don’t, by contrast, submit myself to Eros, wearing American flag bandanas, running into a gym chanting ‘U.S.A.,’ and organizing a supposedly patriotic rally the next morning, all completely out of context. A purely emotional outburst without any object of celebration other than American-ness itself implies an unconditional love for nation, which is not only unnecessary – as there are plenty of pieces of American history worth celebrating – but also dangerous. When loving one’s country becomes instinct and rather than a function of thought, we fail to be self-critical, our reason goes out the window, and, as George Orwell wrote, we “sink [our] own individuality” into the state. In other words, we become less like the patriotic, idealistic, ideas-driven minutemen of 1776 that conservatives so admire and more like the warring Balkan nationalists of the 1990s who accepted their own people’s moral superiority as a given.
So far, I’ve written a pretty haughty article using a pretty petty incident. But this patriotic outburst in California and the surrounding commentary is just a motivating example for a larger problem. How many times have you heard right-wing bloggers decry ‘liberal anti-Americanism,’ or the ‘Pussification of America.’ And why, for that matter, do liberals tend to express their national pride less flagrantly than conservatives? Why are we always the ones pointing out the strange, cultic nature of having Kindergarteners pledge allegiance to the flag well before they know what that even means? Why are the conservative districts the ones mandating that elementary school children, still too young for serious critical thought, learn that American culture is “inherently superior” to all others?
The reason is that too many conservatives, and too many centrist liberals for that matter, have come to embrace a crude, unthinking nationalism – a nationalism that our forbearers would have been ashamed of. The popular reaction to the Camarillo High School incident – the celebration of compulsive pride – is just a modern symptom of this ancient disease.
Image credit: tomwales1.blogspot.com