Centrists Concede Patriotism to the Right

Jerusalem Demsas and Jon Favreu help Trump punch left

Image source: Dclemens1971, CC

“If we’re going to save America, we have to start loving it first,” says the promo text for Jerusalem Demsas and Jon Favreau’s rah-rah-USA podcast episode of Offline. The “we” they are talking about is the broad Democratic/left coalition, and they hope that they can convince “us” all to drape ourselves in flags, read the Declaration of Independence, and thereby reap electoral and moral victories over the MAGA foe.

Unfortunately, their attempt to seize the flag for good is badly marred by a series of missteps. The duo misrepresent the left’s relationship to patriotism, the right’s relationship to patriotism, the history of the country, and the nature of patriotism. As a result they end up blandly, and blindly, affirming the right’s dominance of patriotic imagery while simultaneously delegitimizing patriotism on the broad left in the exact same way that the right delegitimizes patriotism on the left.

It’s a disheartening display—and one which underlines the dangers of patriotism divorced from history, skepticism, and nuance.

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MAGA has not cornered the market on patriotism

Demsas asserts that the Democrats and/or the left (have been “ceding” American symbols to the right. “There’s this weird unilateral disarmament,” she claims, where the right takes Americanism and the left just hands over our patriotic heritage.

The problem with this argument is that it isn’t true. Demsas herself, over the course of the podcast (and indeed in the clip above!) acknowledges that No Kings protests are absolutely wall-to-wall American flags. She also acknowledges that Democratic nominating conventions, including Harris’ in 2024, are decorated in such a way that if you are allergic to red, white, and blue you will go into anaphylactic shock.

Yet somehow all of this bombastic patriotism is not real patriotism, or not enough patriotism, or…something. Demsas is very exercised over the fact that she mistakenly wore a “Don’t Tread on Me” hat at one point and people told her that it was a right-wing slogan. She has concluded from that that the right is slowly poaching American symbols in a one-way ratchet that will soon leave the left with not stars and bars to call their own.

But this is silly. America is a big, complicated place, and as a result there are a whole range of American symbols and patriotic paraphernalia to choose from. Over time these are appropriated and deployed for a range of causes and reasons, which then alter their meanings. No symbol is static over time. For instance, “No Kings” is itself a reference steeped in American history (because of the whole Revolutionary War thing.) This is a patriotic slogan which is now out of reach for the right, both because they are spineless sycophants who love their farting orange god-king, and because the broad left has taken the term “No Kings” and applied it to massive antifascist protests.

More, Demsas and Favreau are apparently oblivious to the fact that the 2^nd Trump regime has been absolutely obsessed with pissing on widely revered symbols of American patriotism. Trump has always been too narcissistic to deploy shared symbols with any grace—it’s not an accident that garish red MAGA-branded gear has gone some way to overwhelm flagware among the faithful.

But simply replacing red, white and blue with red isn’t enough. Trump has now gone all in on defacing every honorable symbol of America he can get his tiny grasping hands around—puking his name onto the Kennedy center, destroying the East Wing of the White House, filling the reflecting pool with festering algae, literally supergluing tacky gold shit on the walls of the Oval Office, turning the 250^th anniversary of the country into a gross partisan exercise that no one wants to participate in. He is a one-man bolus of anti-patriotism.

Nor am I the only one who has noticed. Democratic politicians point out all the time that Trump hates America and American symbols. Democratic Congress members excoriated Trump for disgracing the Kennedy Center, a “beloved national memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy.” Economist and hugely popular liberal columnist Paul Krugman said that in Trump’s destruction of the East Wing he is “treating a national treasure that belongs to the people as if it were his own personal property.” And so on. Democrats and leftists constantly underline Trump’s lack of respect for patriotic symbols as a way of highlighting his unfitness for office.

Again, these are not obscure incidents or discourses. Trump’s reflecting pool problems have been in the headlines for weeks; the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center after a judge told him he sucked was livestreamed to large, enthusiastic audiences. So why are Demsas and Favreau oblivious? Why, in a discussion of patriotism and its uses, do they downplay the Revolutionary War implications of No Kings and skip over Trump’s relentless assault on national symbols? Why can they only see patriotism on the right, while they only see attacks on patriotism on the left?

Centrists follow reactionary framing

The problem is that centrists like Dembras and Favreau are constantly looking for ways to both sides the left, which means that they end up being suckers for right-wing framing.

The left is not leery of patriotism because they are dooming jerks who ignore the power of star-spangled messaging. The left is leery of patriotism because patriotism has been used as a cudgel against the left by the American right and center for over a hundred years at least. Red baiting has been used by mainstream politicians (and less mainstream ones) to kneecap and terrorize leftists, queer people, Black people, and more recently Muslims. The name of the House Un-American Activities Committee speaks for itself.

So does the fate of W.E.B. DuBois, probably the most important historian of American history in American history, who devoted his life to making his country more equal and more free, and who was rewarded with relentless contempt and persecution, culminating in the seizure of his passport, a final, brutal assertion by the United States that as a Black man and a leftist, he could not be an American. He finally renounced his US citizenship at the age of 93, becoming a Ghanian national, not because he was insufficiently patriotic and not because he did not understand the tactical advantages of patriotic resistance, but because he preferred to end his life as the citizen of a country which did not so flagrantly hate him. Or as he put it, “I just cannot take any more of this country’s treatment.”

The point here is not to excoriate America nor to argue that America is all bad nor to argue against patriotism. America is a lot of different things and patriotism is going to persist whatever I say about it, for better or worse. But it’s important to remember people like DuBois because it’s important to remember that, historically, patriotism as an ideological wedge has not been equally available to everyone. Certain people—white, straight, male, Christian, not radical—are assumed to be patriotic and are given to declare others less so. Other people, like DuBois, have had less leverage—so little leverage, indeed, that they are often unable to hold onto their American passports, or, in the worst case, their American lives.

This is unfortunately the dynamic that guides Demsas and Favreau’s discussion. Historical tropes frame the left as less patriotic than the right, and so the two podcasters blithely say that the left is less patriotic than the right, despite evidence they cite themselves, despite the blaring headlines across every major news site over the last year and a half.

Patriotic pride in the academy

The most invidious example of this in the podcast discussion is the duo’s attack on academics. Demsas and Favreau repeatedly insist that academic critiques of America have led academics to abandon their faith in America. They argue that Academic leaders have convinced the easily led American left that the US is irredeemable and that American flags are some sort of hate crime.

The entire evidence for the anti-Americanism of the academy is a single unconfirmed anecdote from the Atlantic’s Yori Applebaum. Demsas and Favreau do not mention by name a single academic. They don’t even mention the 1619 Project (which, if they’d bothered to read it, they would have found is quite patriotic.)

Favreau and Demsas do not feel they need to cite cases because they are embracing what to them is a self-evident narrative. “Pointy-headed intellectuals” (to use white supremacist Alabama governor George Wallace’s phrase) aren’t red-blooded, real, patriotic Americans. The right has been saying this over and over, with ever increasing virulence, for decades—and as centrists, Demsas and Fabreau are honor bound to furrow their brows and nod along if the right says something with enough enthusiasm.

The Trump administration and the right have launched a brutal, sweeping attack on US universities and colleges, targeting universities which acknowledge or admit disfavored groups (like trans people, immigrants, and Black people), demanding the firing of professors who criticize right wing figures like Charlie Kirk, cutting funding for research which is labeled as contrary to the right’s partisan interests. This is all done using rhetoric that suggests that academics are harboring “anti-American values.”

US universities have been the wonder of the world for decades; we have been a destination for world-class researchers in both the sciences and the humanities. This could be a point of patriotic pride—and in fact many Trump critics have pointed out that his assault on our universities is an assault on the US itself. “American innovation is under attack,” CPAC declared, as just one example.

But Demsas and Favreau don’t even consider the possibility that universities might be a symbol of America of which we could be proud. Instead, they help Trump make his point. Academics, they agree, are unpatriotic. Academics, they agree, are undermining the American spirit and leading us astray. Academics are the problem.

Use patriotism, don’t let it use you

Demsas and Favreau believe Trump is bad and wrong. Yet they cosign his view that the right has the only symbols of patriotism that matter, and they join in his attack on American universities, amplifying his attack lines without any mention of, or effort to offer solidarity to, the people who have suffered as a result of those attacks. The duo’s limited, blinkered, ahistorical patriotism is not, as they promise, used against the right. Instead, it is used, as such patriotism often is, against the left, and against those who oppose fascism.

As numerous more strategic and thoughtful figures on the broad left have demonstrated, it doesn’t have to be this way. Organizers of No Kings, many Democrats, and many on the left have used patriotic symbols and rhetoric while highlighting Trump’s assault on American values and monuments. And others on the left have critiqued the way that patriotism is sometimes used to whitewash American violence and cruelty, leaving us with a distorted view of our country that leaves us unprepared when the Trumps of the world come along.

These are complementary projects; in a big tent, unpatriotic antifascists and patriotic fascists, and ambivalently patriotic antifascists can all work together towards crushing the fucking fascists. It would be nice if Demsas and Favreau could get onboard. Alternately, they could get out of the fucking way.