(2018-07-05) McArdle America Needs More Patriotism

Megan McArdle: Opinion | America needs more patriotism.

Ugh.

We’ve forgotten that the nationalists actually did start out in the 19th century with a worthy and difficult project: persuading a large group of people to think of themselves as a single unit.

Just how much we take them for granted is reflected on the left, which utters harsh words for nationalism while also constantly engaging in nationalist projects. A welfare state, after all, is a fundamentally nationalistic enterprise.

Our particular species of primate is, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, “groupish.”

Nationalism channeled that groupish instinct into the nation-state. Some of those nations then used the immense power of mass group-ness to commit great horrors.

The groupish instinct has not gone away, and neither has it leveled up into a mass identification with all humanity. Instead, it has leveled down, into a global outbreak of populist particularism.

If we are to fight our way back from this soft civil war (CultureWar), we will need a muscular patriotism that focuses us on our commonalities instead of our differences

we desperately need the flag, and the anthem, and all the other common symbols that are light on politics or military fetishism and heavy on symbolism. We need much more of them, rather than much less — constant reminders that we are groupish, and that our group consists of 328 million fellow Americans with whom we share a country and a creed, a song and a flag, and the deep sense of mutual obligation that all these things imply.