The Left Needs to Rediscover Its Patriotism

One the eve of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence, more Americans on the right than on the left say they feel patriotic. Recent polls show that a majority of Democrats are “proud” of the country only when a president of their party is in the White House. And many progressive activists and historians see the founding of the nation as a tragedy for Native Americans and enslaved people instead of the glorious fight for liberty that conservatives insist it was. Why love a country founded in conquest and exploitation that remains deeply unequal today? After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky dismissed patriotism as the political elite’s way of telling citizens ‘‘You shut up and be obedient, and I’ll relentlessly advance my own interests.’’That attitude is deeply flawed as a way to understand history, as well as a serious political error. In fact, the left has a long tradition of patriotism, using the nation’s founding ideals as both a benchmark against which to measure how far we have fallen short and a means of articulating the Constitution’s vision of “a more perfect union.” More than ever, the uneasy mix of liberals and radicals needs to return to that approach.The war for independence was indeed a morally ambiguous event. Despite Thomas Paine’s famous vow that Americans had the “power to begin the world over again,” leaders of the new nation allowed white citizens to grab Indigenous lands and resources and expand the institution of human bondage. As the British historian G. R. Elton put it, “if historians are not sceptical, they are nothing.”Yet the Declaration of Independence also proclaimed ideals that contradicted those noxious deeds. As the political theorist Danielle Allen argues, the document “makes a cogent philosophical case for political equality.” By detailing the ways in which King George III had lied to and mistreated the American colonists—“a history of repeated injuries and usurpations”—it established the principle that