How Can Liberals Close the Patriotism Gap?

Emphasizing the difference between patriotism and nationalism

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In 1938, the English professor Howard Mumford Jones wrote an article in The Atlantic titled “Patriotism — But How?” He was writing at a perilous time for democracy, not just in the United States but around the world.

The United States was mired in what seemed like an endless economic depression; it looked like a brutal recession that year had wiped much of the tentative progress the country had made under the New Deal. Some Americans were growing impatient with the lumbering mechanisms of the republic.

Abroad, the forces of authoritarianism were on the march. It seemed that the best the democratic countries of the world could do in the face of aggressive fascism was to appease it and hope it went away on its own.

As his title indicates, Jones was curious about patriotism. Specifically, why was it, he asked, that the “dictator countries have succeeded in… [making] patriotism glamorous?”

Jones acknowledges that most of the patriotism on display in authoritarian states is obviously fake:

Everybody knows about the parades, the ‘spontaneous’ cheering, the farcical elections, the uniforms, and the perpetual celebrations. Naziism has its martyrs, —…