The Patriot-Strategist Dilemma

Love of country is a good basis for political action. But patriotic analysis is by definition bad analysis. It also makes good strategy impossible.

The Declaration of Independence justifies itself by citing a litany of grievances, including:

That shit could have been written this week.

Enter Bernie Sanders, who has been barnstorming the country—including red states—with a single message: Fight Oligarchy. He’s attracting massive, massive crowds, and as I discussed in a recent episode of the pod, polling shows he is by far the most popular politician in America today.

A clip from one of his recent speeches, which went somewhat viral, suggests part of why he’s so popular:

This is top-of-the-food-chain political rhetoric that demonstrates why Bernie is a master of the form. Many comments on social media—including from leftist friends—testified to the stirring emotive power of Bernie’s patriotic message, which gives voice to what many of us believe: The American project is fundamentally about constitutionally guaranteed rights, limited government, and power as the will of the people.

Bernie is offering his social-democratic politics as the promise of the American experiment. Everyone knows that the best of the American tradition is under siege from the Trump presidency and MAGA, but few have expressed it as Bernie has.

But it’s not just Bernie. Among mainstream Democrats, there’s an emerging zeitgeist in favor of patriotic messaging. Party consultants are actively betting that if they reclaim “patriotism,” they will be able to literally deflect from (not embrace) economic populism. Shadi Hamid and the anti-MAGA pundit class is urging the Democratic Party to rebrand as the party of “the patriotic working-class.”

The problem is that good messaging is not the same thing as good strategy—something the Democratic Party never learned. You’re not a party of the “working class” just because you’re patriotic; you also have to prioritize the economic well-being of the working majority, which the Democratic Party refuses to do. And the leadership of the Democratic Party is still a bunch of out-of-touch, opportunistic kleptocrats regardless of what rhetoric they embrace.

So on one level, we need less debate about patriotic rah-rah as as a political strategy and more scrutiny of what politicians aim to do once they’ve captured our rah-rah in a bottle.

But the more serious peril of embracing patriotism is the risk of confusing vibes with analysis. Patriotic rhetoric can be effective precisely because it’s affective; we all (even me) go a big squishy one when we hear stories about the history of Americans who stood against tyrants and for their rights.

Those nationalistic vibes are not inherently a problem, but how you channel them is what matters. As Immanuel Wallerstein cautioned:

the public pursuit of nationalist themes on the part of state leaders should be analyzed as an attempt to strengthen the state.

Policymakers and pundits quite often end up embracing bad analysis because they reason about how the world works from the perspective of their national flag; a problem known as “methodological nationalism.” The (few) well-meaning advocates of Trump’s tariffs are guilty of precisely this problem of methodological nationalism. They confuse their fealty to a particular territorial unit in the world-system—in this case the United States—with an analysis of how that system actually works.

This bias, this category error, leads people to overestimate the favorable outcomes that flow from their preferred nation’s actions and underestimate their capacity to inadvertently produce unfavorable outcomes.

Methodological nationalism is also politically reactionary. To engage in this way of seeing is to risk erasing who specifically constitutes the nation-state; to dismiss the importance of political forms beyond the nation-state; to impose sacrifices on territorial units that are not your own; and to conflate the power of the state with the good of the nation.

Part of the folly of the Biden years was precisely that it succumbed to methodological nationalism. There were many things going on in Biden statecraft, but there’s a way in which, per Wallerstein, it was all one big project for expanding state power. The “post-neoliberalism” of Bidenomics was not about strengthening labor power or making the working class more secure; it was about using the state to distribute society’s resources to corporations that promised to benefit the relative power of the state (specifically relative to China).

It is genuinely dumb to analyze a world-system as if it’s only a bunch of national states, and dumber still to grant moral weighting to the individual units in your analysis (ie, the interests of the US national state are more important than everyone else’s interests because they are exceptional).

People who genuinely want peace, democracy, or equality in this world might necessarily be people who earnestly feel something that we could call patriotism or nationalism. I might count myself among them. But we cannot confuse political rhetoric for political strategy. And the analysis on which we base political strategy must take a global—not national—view. Otherwise, we go the way of fascism.

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