During the Reagan years, I mostly tuned him out, because I found his message ordinarily boring and repetitive. Consequently, I missed the following speech the first time around. When the man was right, he was really, really right. Having lived the majority of my adult life in immigrant packed cities— New York and Houston— I have nothing but good to say about my personal experiences with immigrants.
"This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."
This isn't new on the left. Orwell wrote about how the left shot itself in the foot by holding moronic ideas that disdained patriotism. Holdign such ideas guarantees that you will piss off a good chunk of the electorate - people don't want to think they live in a cishetropatriarchabelistsupremacist [insert buzzwords as necessary] dumpster. Instead, we get cosmopolitanism and minoritarianism taken to their moronic conclusions - open borders anti-patriotism for the former and the idea that minorities should create incessant agitation for the latter [1]. FDR and Attlee managed to be left wing and visibly patriotic - so are Starmer and Biden (though the former has to deal with numbskulls [2]).
What is new is the right wing version that sees America as a fallen nation corrupted by "wokeness". Usually, right wing parties try to claim patriotism because the left gets queasy around it but in this case they have abandoned it for their own stupid reasons.
For the left, the road to recovery starts by stomping the shit out of their black nationalist wing [3], which (in conjunction with the stupid white wokes who feel incessantly guilty) causes a huge chunk of the anti-patriotic sentiment because of the whole "400 years of oppression" narrative that smoothbrains parrot whenever one objects to their racial patronage programs. Race hustlers such as Hannah-Jones, Kendi, Blow etc shouldn't be platformed - the response should be "get lost, you are a cancer and it is your lot that brought on the GOP backlash in the 80s and 90s by constantly causing problems".
In the spirit of good faith, it would be nice for folks to engage with why anti-patriotism exists on the left and on the right.
The left is not in fact just being petulant and childish; there is an actual critique of US imperial power and the nature of US society there. Why is that not worthy of engagement?
It is also worth it to think about the right-wing variety of anti-patriotism, which wishes for the US to fall so that that movement can better pursue white supremacy and its overall Gilead vision.
Thanks for the repost. I frequently bash the extremes of both parties, but for what it is worth, it is important to remember that many of the "Critical Schools" of thought can serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine. They may not be (frequently are not) correct in a larger sense, but they are great at highlighting inconsistencies and forcing some debates that can make us better as a nation.
I think it's important to have some of these extreme ideas like the critical schools, if only to keep the mainstream honest. However, it is essential to ensure they stay extremes and don't become mainstream (because they are so frequently incorrect and encourage extreme solutions that often cause more harm than good). I think patriotism, when defined as the set of values as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, can help keep us open to the important things we can learn from programs like DEI while framing them in the context of respecting individual agency and liberty. This in turn helps us mine the positive aspects, be less hypocritical but also avoid adopting the most counter-productive impulses of those groups.
I am of the opposite mind from Noah on many things, but I enjoy his posts because he lays out his arguments well and without obvious malice to opposing views when he addresses them. I agree that love of our nation is getting harder to find, but for many I think we are just depressed to see where we are right now, and so many afraid to speak at all for fear of either the left or right mob will come for them - in some cases in person. I have always felt we can be at our loudest at the ballot box. I wouldn't give you a dime for either political party at the moment, so I will have to think long and hard about what my vote will say.
"a majority of Americans are either “extremely proud” or “very proud” of their country"
Noah has figured it out without realizing it. The Right is proud of American history, but the Left is proud of secular liberalism. Each one's source of pride is dismissed as not only irrelevant but hateful by the other side. Essentially, we disagree about te most fundamental definitions of "good" and "evil", and that's a theological problem not a political one.
I have to be honest, considering the warmongering and export of cultural rot we have facilitated in the last 20 years, I could not answer the poll question "America has always been a force for good in the world" in the affirmative today.
Noah is also correct that the MAGA movement has "repudiated Ronald Reagan". Yes it has. Trump destroyed the GOP's 3-legged, fusionist stool (ménage à trois never really work for long) and thus dethroned the Reagan's libertarian sentiments. But the movement has rediscovered Burke's conservative ones at the same time.
Taking pride in being an American seems as silly as being proud to be a hominid. Americans, like hominids, do astonishingly brilliant things and appalling awful things, and much of what Americans and hominids do as groups is unexceptional. Can't we just like the things we like about being Americans, and dislike the things we dislike -- which are, in any event, completely subjective -- and focus our public lives on solving the problems that everyone agrees are problems -- like, say, the ridiculousness of our healthcare system, the lack of affordable housing, the baleful effects of income and wealth inequality, the epidemic of addiction and lifestyle diseases, the increasingly dire effects of climate change (which are quickly rendering large swathes of the country uninsurable and, more slowly, uninhabitable). No one needs to be patriotic or anti-patriotic to solve problems -- you only need to want to make the place where, by accident, you live, better.
Yes, Reagan could deliver a speech; he was a pretty good actor, which paid dividends as a politician, but I never trusted or liked him. He seemed a total fraud with a winning smile and demeanor, and always telling pretty good jokes. Those helped his popularity.
Reagan, perhaps more than anyone else, attacked and crippled government; it became the sum of all evil during his administration. But check out Paul Krugman's 2007 take on him:
"There’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that 'I believe in states’ rights,' he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Indeed, you really do have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as The New York Times reported, The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression 'young buck,' which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.
But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been 'humiliating to the South,' he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.
PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement – it was just an innocent mistake."
Your coda seems incoherent from what you’ve said before: You’ve consistently refuted the idea of the U.S. as a colonizer, yet you give space to this 1619 nonsense as one pole in a struggle for America’s soul?
This doesn’t even go into the sheer nonsense of some of the pieces that compose the project, to the point where one of its heavily quoted academics, Baptist, was rejoindered by academics who’s work he used extensively to “stop making stuff up”
This “broken” era we’re currently in was formed by levels of bullshit on the left that were met with open arms by historians who should know better, from 1619 to the Thirteenthers. And now you suggest we hold these untruths to be self-evident, with the paranoiac NHJ as prophet to warn us away from the phantasm she herself created?
Fuck that. Fuck. That. You had it right the first time, no need to walk any of it back.
Or in different words Elie Mystal can say "The Constitution is trash" in one instant and in another instant write a book expressing faith in the ability of the people to change the Constitution. Patriotism/love of country doesn't mean that all the decisions were made in the sacred past.
To borrow someone else's lingo, how dare POC Beyonce engage in cultural appropriation! Country music is by and for white folks! We should've drawn the line at Ray Charles!
This idea that an unusually positive or negative view of America should be central to one's identity is something that doesn't just click to me about normie politics, leftists politics, or conservative politics. For me my "love" for America is unconditional, the way you would feel love and responsibility for a family member whether they make you proud, or screw up deeply, or do both.
If I were to explain it further, let's say to someone European, I'd say that America is "The Big Time". Largest military, largest economy, largest foreign-born population, center of English-language internet, center of Academia, center of Western tech and AI, etc. It matters what happens in America, even if you don't have any fondness or familiarity with it.
Now someone could say something similar about the European Union, or China, or Future India, or any other geopolitical category they'd like to invent. But actually, this is why I have an obsession with China. Because to me, China is "The Other Big Time", and what happens in China matters, even if you don't have any fondness or familiarity with it.
During the Reagan years, I mostly tuned him out, because I found his message ordinarily boring and repetitive. Consequently, I missed the following speech the first time around. When the man was right, he was really, really right. Having lived the majority of my adult life in immigrant packed cities— New York and Houston— I have nothing but good to say about my personal experiences with immigrants.
"This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."
Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.
Vote Biden. Never Trump
Progressive me says - keep the message simple.
This isn't new on the left. Orwell wrote about how the left shot itself in the foot by holding moronic ideas that disdained patriotism. Holdign such ideas guarantees that you will piss off a good chunk of the electorate - people don't want to think they live in a cishetropatriarchabelistsupremacist [insert buzzwords as necessary] dumpster. Instead, we get cosmopolitanism and minoritarianism taken to their moronic conclusions - open borders anti-patriotism for the former and the idea that minorities should create incessant agitation for the latter [1]. FDR and Attlee managed to be left wing and visibly patriotic - so are Starmer and Biden (though the former has to deal with numbskulls [2]).
What is new is the right wing version that sees America as a fallen nation corrupted by "wokeness". Usually, right wing parties try to claim patriotism because the left gets queasy around it but in this case they have abandoned it for their own stupid reasons.
For the left, the road to recovery starts by stomping the shit out of their black nationalist wing [3], which (in conjunction with the stupid white wokes who feel incessantly guilty) causes a huge chunk of the anti-patriotic sentiment because of the whole "400 years of oppression" narrative that smoothbrains parrot whenever one objects to their racial patronage programs. Race hustlers such as Hannah-Jones, Kendi, Blow etc shouldn't be platformed - the response should be "get lost, you are a cancer and it is your lot that brought on the GOP backlash in the 80s and 90s by constantly causing problems".
[1] https://madogiwazoku.substack.com/p/on-pet-victim-protection
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/30/starmer-faces-discontent-as-labour-mps-criticise-election-flyers-union-jacks
[3] https://josephheath.substack.com/p/americans-need-to-find-some-way-to
Run for President already or, at a minimum, advise Biden. You are talking great sense. Especially on immigration. Thank you.
In the spirit of good faith, it would be nice for folks to engage with why anti-patriotism exists on the left and on the right.
The left is not in fact just being petulant and childish; there is an actual critique of US imperial power and the nature of US society there. Why is that not worthy of engagement?
It is also worth it to think about the right-wing variety of anti-patriotism, which wishes for the US to fall so that that movement can better pursue white supremacy and its overall Gilead vision.
Why not take these viewpoints seriously?
Thanks for the repost. I frequently bash the extremes of both parties, but for what it is worth, it is important to remember that many of the "Critical Schools" of thought can serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine. They may not be (frequently are not) correct in a larger sense, but they are great at highlighting inconsistencies and forcing some debates that can make us better as a nation.
I think it's important to have some of these extreme ideas like the critical schools, if only to keep the mainstream honest. However, it is essential to ensure they stay extremes and don't become mainstream (because they are so frequently incorrect and encourage extreme solutions that often cause more harm than good). I think patriotism, when defined as the set of values as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, can help keep us open to the important things we can learn from programs like DEI while framing them in the context of respecting individual agency and liberty. This in turn helps us mine the positive aspects, be less hypocritical but also avoid adopting the most counter-productive impulses of those groups.
In re patriotism, Putin picked a fight with the wrong people:
https://theathletic.com/5375905/2024/03/31/ihor-verys-ultramarathon-ukraine-barkley/
I am of the opposite mind from Noah on many things, but I enjoy his posts because he lays out his arguments well and without obvious malice to opposing views when he addresses them. I agree that love of our nation is getting harder to find, but for many I think we are just depressed to see where we are right now, and so many afraid to speak at all for fear of either the left or right mob will come for them - in some cases in person. I have always felt we can be at our loudest at the ballot box. I wouldn't give you a dime for either political party at the moment, so I will have to think long and hard about what my vote will say.
Smart. I’ll work on it.
"a majority of Americans are either “extremely proud” or “very proud” of their country"
Noah has figured it out without realizing it. The Right is proud of American history, but the Left is proud of secular liberalism. Each one's source of pride is dismissed as not only irrelevant but hateful by the other side. Essentially, we disagree about te most fundamental definitions of "good" and "evil", and that's a theological problem not a political one.
I have to be honest, considering the warmongering and export of cultural rot we have facilitated in the last 20 years, I could not answer the poll question "America has always been a force for good in the world" in the affirmative today.
Noah is also correct that the MAGA movement has "repudiated Ronald Reagan". Yes it has. Trump destroyed the GOP's 3-legged, fusionist stool (ménage à trois never really work for long) and thus dethroned the Reagan's libertarian sentiments. But the movement has rediscovered Burke's conservative ones at the same time.
Taking pride in being an American seems as silly as being proud to be a hominid. Americans, like hominids, do astonishingly brilliant things and appalling awful things, and much of what Americans and hominids do as groups is unexceptional. Can't we just like the things we like about being Americans, and dislike the things we dislike -- which are, in any event, completely subjective -- and focus our public lives on solving the problems that everyone agrees are problems -- like, say, the ridiculousness of our healthcare system, the lack of affordable housing, the baleful effects of income and wealth inequality, the epidemic of addiction and lifestyle diseases, the increasingly dire effects of climate change (which are quickly rendering large swathes of the country uninsurable and, more slowly, uninhabitable). No one needs to be patriotic or anti-patriotic to solve problems -- you only need to want to make the place where, by accident, you live, better.
Yes, Reagan could deliver a speech; he was a pretty good actor, which paid dividends as a politician, but I never trusted or liked him. He seemed a total fraud with a winning smile and demeanor, and always telling pretty good jokes. Those helped his popularity.
Reagan, perhaps more than anyone else, attacked and crippled government; it became the sum of all evil during his administration. But check out Paul Krugman's 2007 take on him:
"There’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that 'I believe in states’ rights,' he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Indeed, you really do have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as The New York Times reported, The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression 'young buck,' which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.
But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been 'humiliating to the South,' he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.
PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement – it was just an innocent mistake."
Your coda seems incoherent from what you’ve said before: You’ve consistently refuted the idea of the U.S. as a colonizer, yet you give space to this 1619 nonsense as one pole in a struggle for America’s soul?
This doesn’t even go into the sheer nonsense of some of the pieces that compose the project, to the point where one of its heavily quoted academics, Baptist, was rejoindered by academics who’s work he used extensively to “stop making stuff up”
This “broken” era we’re currently in was formed by levels of bullshit on the left that were met with open arms by historians who should know better, from 1619 to the Thirteenthers. And now you suggest we hold these untruths to be self-evident, with the paranoiac NHJ as prophet to warn us away from the phantasm she herself created?
Fuck that. Fuck. That. You had it right the first time, no need to walk any of it back.
Or in different words Elie Mystal can say "The Constitution is trash" in one instant and in another instant write a book expressing faith in the ability of the people to change the Constitution. Patriotism/love of country doesn't mean that all the decisions were made in the sacred past.
To borrow someone else's lingo, how dare POC Beyonce engage in cultural appropriation! Country music is by and for white folks! We should've drawn the line at Ray Charles!
BTW my outrage is purely faux.
This idea that an unusually positive or negative view of America should be central to one's identity is something that doesn't just click to me about normie politics, leftists politics, or conservative politics. For me my "love" for America is unconditional, the way you would feel love and responsibility for a family member whether they make you proud, or screw up deeply, or do both.
If I were to explain it further, let's say to someone European, I'd say that America is "The Big Time". Largest military, largest economy, largest foreign-born population, center of English-language internet, center of Academia, center of Western tech and AI, etc. It matters what happens in America, even if you don't have any fondness or familiarity with it.
Now someone could say something similar about the European Union, or China, or Future India, or any other geopolitical category they'd like to invent. But actually, this is why I have an obsession with China. Because to me, China is "The Other Big Time", and what happens in China matters, even if you don't have any fondness or familiarity with it.