Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Can a progressive be a patriot? Well, you say, yes, of course! More than two centuries ago, Sir Walter Scott defined patriotism as love of country – a special feeling for one’s birthplace and its people.
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
To Scott, this sort of affection for one’s homeland separates people who care for others from those who care only for themselves. The villain of his poem (“The Lay of the Last Minstrel”) is a wealthy aristocrat “concentrated all in self” who, having isolated himself from his less privileged neighbors, is doomed to die “unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.”
Updating Scott somewhat, here’s what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America’s most articulate and eloquent progressive, has to say on the same topic: “We don’t leave the things that we love, and when we love this country, what that means is that we propose the solutions to fix it.”
AOC defines the nation in terms of class, not just ethnicity, concluding that “you cannot love this country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business. To love this country is to fight for its people — all people, working people, everyday Americans like bartenders and factory workers.” She identifies U.S. history with the history of popular movements such as abolitionism, the labor movement, and the women’s movement. And she defines the key American value as “true freedom — not just freedom of speech… but also the economic freedoms to live in dignity.”
This is the clearest left-leaning answer to the challenge posed by centrists like the New York Times’s Frank Bruni, who laments that progressive Democrats have “readily and foolishly ceded many tradition-tinged, conservative-coded concepts — freedom, patriotism, family values, law and order — to their opponents” (NYT, 8/17/26). The answer, says Bruni, is to redefine and reaffirm such values as freedom and patriotism. But the main problem with this redefining and reaffirming is not what it does but what it avoids. It avoids recognizing and dealing with patriotism as it is actually defined and practiced by most Americans, and for that matter, by a great many people living in other nations.
“Actually existing” patriotism is not just a Sir Walter Scott-ish natural affection for one’s national neighborhood – it enshrines a commitment, come what may, to secure preferential treatment for fellow nationals (particularly those recognized as legitimate or “true” members of the community) over the residents of any other nation.
Dig it: We (Americans) have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness. They (non-Americans) can assert the same rights, but if we have to choose between their rights and ours, patriotism means choosing ours. Ditto where economic interests and prosperity are at stake. And double-ditto where the relevant need is for national security or military supremacy. Unfortunately, the world is often a zero-sum place where great powers compete, and where when what helps the residents of one nation harms or jeopardizes those of another. Under such circumstances the rule of patriotism (which some conservative theorists believe rises to the level of “natural law”) is to favor your own people over all others.
Thinking about this, I can’t help recalling the frequent noisy discussions that my father and I used to engage in concerning the rights of Jews and of non-Jews in places like the State of Israel. “Of course, your first obligation is to take care of your own,” he would insist. “But that’s tribalism,” I would reply. “Oh? Do you think it’s tribalism if I take care of my own family before worrying about the family down the block?” That used to stump me, since I didn’t know enough in those days to criticize a scarcity-based capitalist system that sets family against family, or to point out that a nation is not a family, and that the ideology that proclaims it a family is fascism.
Disputes over patriotism also remind me of demonstrations against the Vietnam War that I used to march in (and sometimes organize), in which a frequent issue was the appropriateness and effectiveness of antiwar slogans displayed and chanted by competing groups. A rough line separated those focusing on the war’s immorality and young people’s refusal to fight in it (“Hell no, we won’t go!” “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!“ “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”) from those expressing critical or total support for the Vietnamese rebels (“U.S. out of Indochina!” “Support the Vietnamese Revolution!” “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win!”). While recognizing that many people would consider their refusal to fight in the war “objectively” pro-communist, some demonstrators did not wish to root openly for an enemy victory over U.S. forces, since that would be unpatriotic. Others wanted to make clear that if patriotism meant supporting American forces in an unjust war, they were anti-patriots.
Similar issues have reappeared in less dramatic form in connection with the current U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Listening to Democrats criticize this vastly unpopular war, it often seems that their main objection is that it was not fought more efficiently and did not fulfill Trump’s promises to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, destroy its military forces, prevent it from supporting regional allies, and enforce regime change. Rather than resting on principle, most objections have been largely technical and tactical: Trump should have gotten Congressional authorization for the attack; Trump and Hegseth should have realized that Iran would interfere with oil traffic in the Straits of Hormuz, etc. Some progressive Democrats such as AOC and Zohran Mamdani have gone considerably farther than this, branding the attacks against Iran “an illegal war of aggression” and calling for reduction of U.S. forces in the region. But even these critiques stop well short of stating as a general principle that patriotism must not be defined as American supremacism.
Our ultimate loyalty as human beings is not to the nation but to the human family. Since this is the case, the needs and interests of Americans should never be treated as superior to those of any other nation or people. This principle is all the more important to assert and defend when one recognizes that the U.S.A. is not just one nation among others but a global empire whose imperial interests masquerade as national interests. Recently, left-leaning elements of the Democratic Party have begun to question the dogma that arming the State of Israel to the teeth and supporting whatever military actions its government decides to take is in the U.S. “national interest.” But they are just beginning to understand that this sort of patron-client relationship and a regional policy of divide-and-conquer are classical empire-building strategies designed to benefit U.S. oligarchs and militarists, not the American people.
Even if one could prove that these strategies benefitted working-class and middle-class Americans (which they clearly do not), the question demanding an answer would still be whether patriotism demands that one serve and protect “our” nationals by sanctioning and killing “theirs.” Of course, it is always possible to imagine a scenario in which a person bound by ties of affection to her neighbors responds to some direct physical threat to them by picking up a weapon and joining in their defense. But this sort of communal self-defense has nothing to do with the patriotism that defines one people’s socioeconomic system, politics, culture, and religion as superior to all others and as worth killing and dying for to ensure its supremacy.
Can one be a progressive and a patriot? Yes and no. Yes, if this means appreciating the historical and local conditions that, in part, fashion one’s cultural identity. Being an American sometimes makes me happy and sometimes ashamed, but I have no doubt that it defines part of who I am. But only a part. America is an oligarchy and I’m a skilled worker. America is an empire and I’m an anti-imperialist. America is a nation, and I’m a human being: an earthling. Being American is no better, in the last analysis, than being Iranian, Chinese, or Montenegrin. And patriotism can never mean killing Iranians, Chinese, or Montenegrins to secure American supremacy.
How about it, AOC and Zohran? Can you campaign on a platform that both Karl Marx and Pope Leo would approve of? Or is questioning supremacist patriotism a bridge too far? The answer will tell us how progressive your progressivism really is.
