The Democrats embraced patriotism after all

One party is actively trying to leave the 2010s behind. The other is doubling down.

Photo via @KamalaHQ

Anyone watching the Democratic convention in Chicago right now must be struck by the intense patriotism on display. American flags are everywhere. Convention-goers hold up signs saying “USA”. The delegate roll call celebrated every state in turn. A montage showed triumphant scenes from the history of America — the building of the railroads, the conquest of the Great Depression, World War 2 — with flags waving in every scene. The recital of the Pledge of Allegiance was particularly touching:

A lot of Democrats watching the convention have been deeply affected by the patriotic motif. Just a few examples:

If you have any doubts, just watch this video of a recent speech by Harris’ running mate Tim Walz. Walz declares:

Those tens of thousands across this country showed up for the very same reason that you took — you could have been anywhere on a beautiful Nebraska Saturday in late summer, but you chose to be here. For the most beautiful and simple reason — you love this country.

At 1:42 in the video, the crowd breaks into chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”.

I can’t tell you how gratified and happy I am to see this. Almost three years ago, I wrote a post called “Try Patriotism”, in which I pointed out that there was a silent majority of Americans who love their country and who weren’t being particularly well-represented by either party’s vision. I predicted that the first party who embraced patriotic messaging wholeheartedly would reap major electoral benefits:

Try patriotism

Where did I get this idea? As is so often the case, I got it from a Rick Perlstein book. In The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein argues that the bicentennial celebration of 1976 reminded Americans who had become disillusioned after Vietnam, Watergate, and a wave of assassinations that they loved their country after all. The politician who capitalized most effectively on this, of course, was Ronald Reagan. I wrote my post because I wanted the mantle of patriotism to be seized by Democrats this time, instead of waiting around for another Reagan to emerge on the right.

Watching this Democratic convention, I feel like my wish came true.

To say that my post was controversial back in 2021 would be an understatement. Nothing I’ve ever written before or since has provoked such a strong and instantaneous backlash. Many progressives bristled at the notion that any of their rhetoric in the 2010s had been anti-patriotic.

And yet I was right, and it was a message that the entire progressive movement and Democratic party needed to hear. In the 2010s, the notion that America was a nation founded on racism was commonplace in progressive circles. Ibram Kendi’s 2017 book was titled Stamped from the Beginning. The marketing materials for the New York Times’ 1619 Project initially declared that the day the first slave arrived on North American shores was “our true founding” (before later scrubbing that language). One article claimed that the American Revolution was fought in order to protect the institution of slavery, despite academic historians pushing back strongly when hired to fact-check the piece. The belief that Adolf Hitler’s racial ideas came from America became a widely accepted fact among many progressive intellectuals.¹ Rhetoric equating the United States of America with white-nationalism became an applause line on Twitter:

In 2020, protesters toppled statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

This anti-patriotic attitude was a grassroots, bottom-up thing; it never made it into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and every other prominent Democratic leader continued to stand in front of American flags and sing the national anthem and so on. Yet the audience was not going wild like they are in 2024. In the late 2010s, Democrats’ pride in being American, which had been drifting down for years, took an abrupt tumble:

Source: Gallup

I say this not to recriminate against the people who criticized my “Try Patriotism” post back in 2021, or to re-fight the battles of the 2010s. Instead, I simply want to point out the stark contrast between that era and 2024. I want to show how far we’ve come in just a few short years.

As you can see on the graph above, Democrats’ patriotism has begun to rebound since its low in 2019. The tide started to turn early in the Biden years. Op-eds began to appear in the New York Times calling on Democrats to re-embrace patriotism. In 2023, the Hulu documentary version of the 1619 Project emphasized more patriotic themes:

And around the same time, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, declared that “the country conceived in 1776” was founded on “the ideals of liberty and equality”:

Meanwhile Ibram Kendi, the most prominent exponent of the idea that America was founded on racism, has fallen from his position of prestige in progressive circles — ostensibly because of financial mismanagement, but more likely because progressives realized that there was no real future in his message.

Why did this shift happen? It wasn’t because Democrats lost elections and were forced to smack down their progressive base — there were no “Sister Souljah moments” involved. In fact, Dems won in 2020 and did surprisingly well in 2022. Perhaps the pandemic and January 6th had something to do with it — maybe seeing real national challenges made progressives realize that institutional continuity is better than the chaos of revolution. Perhaps the Ukraine war served as a reminder that there are powers out there far more baleful than America.

Or perhaps progressives simply stared into the abyss and blinked.

As Ernst Renan reminds us, all nations have atrocities in their past — all land has been stolen and stolen again, every modern political unit is the successors to an empire conquered by fire and the sword. The preindustrial past was nearly uninterrupted savagery; our cities are all built over graveyards.

The normal mode of liberal criticism is to conceive of the nation as fundamentally good but flawed — to call attention to the nation’s crimes only in order to purify it and draw out its better self. This generally works quite well, at least in America — over time we have become a more inclusive, more just society. But there comes a point where criticism spills over into condemnation — when reformers become so strident that they decide no amount of future progress can make up for past sins. At that point the only options are emigration or revolution.

A lot of conservatives feared that what they were witnessing in the summer of 2020 was the beginning of exactly such a revolution — a “Year Zero” event, where progressives would cast down the America of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and replace it with some new entity founded upon leftist principles. But this fear proved unfounded.

Yes, a few leftists did want to topple the nation — once you pull down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, there’s no version of America you’re prepared to embrace. But they turned out to be both very small in number and completely incompetent at making revolution. The overwhelming majority of people who marched in the George Floyd protests went back to their lives afterwards, and didn’t march again; the small fringe whose devotion to activism reached escape velocity became the Palestine protesters, who used the war in Gaza as a reason to call for the overthrow of America.

The Palestine protests have demonstrated that the leftists who actually believe America is an evil empire are a small and largely ineffectual fringe. When they tried to shut down American campuses this spring, university administrators — among the most progressive elites in the country — simply called the cops on them. A small number of Palestine protesters is currently trying to disrupt the Democratic convention in Chicago, and they are being generally ignored.

The revolutionary anti-American viewpoint still has too much appeal and power in the newsrooms of major papers and in the staffer class on Capitol Hill. But the vast majority of progressives simply decided that they’d rather keep their country after all. And once you make that decision, the logical thing to do is to pick up an American flag and start cheering for your own ideal vision of America — to reclaim patriotism and pick up the mantle of reform once again.

Which is exactly what Democrats are doing in Chicago right now. But it’s not just flag-waving and empty rhetoric — Democrats have rapidly moderated on several key policies associated with the idea of having a real durable country. Kamala Harris has promised to get tough on border security — in fact, Biden has already gotten tough, to great effect. Tough border policy is partly a concession to public opinion, but it’s also consistent with the idea that a nation is an exclusive club that collectively chooses who to let in. Harris has also embraced tough-on-crime rhetoric, touting her experience as a prosecutor, showing a recognition that police are a key national institution.

In fact, some of the Harris campaign’s applause lines seem like coded promises to return to the patriotic liberalism of the Obama and Clinton years. “We’re not going back” is obviously a dig at the MAGA reactionaries, but some have interpreted it as also being a promise to leave the radical movements of the late 2010s in the past.² Constantly referring to Trump as a “convicted felon” sends a clear message that the Democrats are not the party of convicted felons. And calling Trump “weird” seems like an implied rejection of the progressive movement’s own weird fringe.

So this is how I interpret the sudden efflorescence of patriotism at the Democratic National Convention and in the Harris campaign in general. It’s partly a genuine love for America that was suppressed for years and is only now finding its voice again. But it’s partly a promise that the progressive movement will return to its traditional approach of calling for America to be its best self, and that Democratic leaders will guide the movement back toward that approach.

Now contrast this with what the Republican party is doing. There is a marked contrast between the positive, uplifting patriotism on display at the DNC and the dark, aggressive rhetoric at the GOP convention a few weeks ago:

Meme by @VoteDarkBrandon

The hope among some Republican intellectuals that Trump would run a sunnier, more Reaganesque campaign this time around have been utterly dashed — when he’s not raging about his desire for personal revenge, Trump is saying dark apocalyptic things about the state of America.

Trump’s supporters are still willing to wave American flags at rallies. But they have a very different idea of what that flag means. In their mind, if new people move to America, it isn’t really America anymore. Their concept of their nation is defined not by institutions or culture, but by heritage.

Of course, that’s a bit absurd, since America has been a multi-religious polyglot country since shortly after its creation, and was explicitly conceived as a nation of immigrants by its founders. But amazingly, some of Trump’s people seem to think even those earlier waves of immigration were a mistake! Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, recently used the movie Gangs of New York — which is about Irish immigrants in the 1800s — to characterize immigration as violent, chaotic, and criminal:

At a campaign appearance at the Milwaukee Police Association on Friday, Vance was asked about his comments in 2021 in which he claimed past waves of immigration led to increased crime, and if he thought mass deportations — a major part of the Trump-Vance campaign platform — would have addressed those issues…

“Has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? That’s what I’m talking about,” Vance said. “We know that when we have these massive ethnic enclaves form in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.”

This is probably not a great look from an electoral standpoint — when you’ve thrown the Irish off the bandwagon, you no longer have a winning coalition. But it also illustrates how the MAGA ideal is of an America that’s constantly shrinking — constantly being purified by excluding more and more groups of people.

I struggle to label that attitude “patriotism” of any kind. In my “Try Patriotism” post back in 2021, I argued that the MAGA right had become as anti-patriotic as the most ardent leftists — bashing nearly every group of Americans and nearly every institution of American life, from the military to corporations to universities. No one is safe from their animosity — they’ve repeatedly gone after Taylor Swift, and now they’re going after Joe Rogan as well. If there’s any part of America that MAGA people still love, other than the single individual of Donald Trump, it’s hard to see what it is.

Ultimately, I think Nikole Hannah-Jones is absolutely right when she says that there are two versions of America at war here. One is absolutely the 1776 version of America, with its ideological commitment to rights and freedoms and opening its arms to the people of the world. That’s the America that Ronald Reagan embraced to end the unrest and chaos of the 1970s, and that’s the America that the Harris campaign seems to be embracing now. As for MAGA’s alternative vision, I’m not sure it was anything invented in 1619, but it definitely seems free of those lofty ideals.

For me, this choice is not a difficult one.

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1. This cocktail-party “fact” was a misinterpretation of the work of legal scholar James Q. Whitman. Whitman wrote a book about how when Hitler and the Nazis were looking for legal precedents for their racist laws in prewar Germany, they claimed America’s Jim Crow laws as one of those precedents. But this is a far cry from the idea that Jim Crow inspired the Nazis’ racist ideas in the first place, nor does it suggest that America inspired the Holocaust or other Nazi wartime atrocities.

2. Meanwhile, some have noted that “woke” language is gradually receding from the Democrats’ lexicon — the 2024 platform apparently doesn’t use the term “BIPOC”, and has gone back from “Indigenous” to the traditional “Native”. The DNC did, however, include a land acknowledgement.