President Trump once again has enraged the left by suggesting, with colorful language no less, that NFL players who kneel during the national anthem should be fired by their teams. Progressives criticized Trump’s lack of presidential decorum, racial insensitivity, and disrespect of the players’ First Amendment rights—and the head of the NFL defended the players and rebuked the President for his tweet demanding the players be fired. At the same time, declining attendance at NFL stadiums and lower ratings for televised games suggest that many Americans are unhappy with privileged athletes disrespecting the country’s flag.
Though anti-patriotism is having a cultural moment in the United States, disliking and disrespecting one’s own country is nothing new. The origins of modern anti-patriotism lie in the continuing influence of Marxism on Western culture.
Marxist and socialist political movements intrinsically disdain patriotism for several reasons. As a political theory that transcends nations and peoples, Marxism is the natural enemy of particular ethnic or national identities and loyalties. These attachments create a “false consciousness” that obscures the true engine of history: the ownership of the means of production and the permanent conflict between workers and bosses. Pride in the success and power of the British Empire, for example, distracted the ordinary worker from the oppression under which he suffered, and which forestalled the collective ownership of the economy, and the egalitarian utopia promised by Marxist theory.
The idea that patriotism camouflages the injustice of capitalism became increasingly widespread in England before World War I. In 1907, J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study influenced Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Hobson reduced Victorian imperialism to what he called “economic parasitism,” or the exploitation of the labor, resources, and markets of colonial peoples. War was the inevitable outcome of imperialism, as competing empires fought over control of foreign markets and resources. The belief that World War I was driven by capitalist bosses and fought for the sake of patriotism and nationalism reinforced this interpretation. Loss of faith in the empire created a loss of faith in England.
By the 1930s, such attitudes of “unwarranted self-abasement,” as Winston Churchill called them, were common among the British intelligentsia. The newspaper cartoonist David Low created Colonel Blimp, a caricature of the blustering, xenophobic, patriotic imperialist. The poet Wilfred Owen, who served in France during World War I and was killed a week before the armistice was signed, called patriotism “The Old Lie” in the most famous piece of literature to come out of the war, “Dulce et Decorum,” an ironic reference to the Roman poet Horace’s famous line, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” The popular writer H. G. Wells protested against the “teaching of patriotic histories” that promote a “poisonous war-making tradition,” and novelist J. B. Priestly called patriotism “a mighty force, chiefly used for evil.”
The influential Bloomsbury group of writers, artists, and intellectuals were instrumental in propagating such attitudes and making them status symbols of intellectual sophistication. The draft-dodging Lytton Strachey attacked Victorian imperialist heroes like Florence Nightingale and General Charles “Chinese” Gordon in his 1917 book Eminent Victorians. In 1939, as England was facing down Nazism, the novelist E. M. Forster epitomized this fashionable set of attitudes when he said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (emphases in original). By 1941, anti-patriotism was so prevalent that socialist George Orwell wrote disapprovingly, “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”
This animus against patriotism among the intellectual elite survived World War II, and became even more widespread in the postwar period. One factor was the left’s analysis of the war, which did not distinguish between the extreme ethno-nationalism of Nazism and fascism, and the liberal democratic nationalism that had destroyed those regimes. Patriotism thus became associated with Hitler and Mussolini, who exploited it in order to gain support. Nationalism was redefined as diseased patriotism, as in Charles de Gaulle’s statement, “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”
Among leftists, patriotism has always been considered dangerous for another reason. Liberal democratic nations––especially the United States––were successful in achieving all of the social, economic, and political boons communism had promised but failed to deliver. As French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1957, leftists have “a grudge against the United States mainly because the latter had succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought up intellectual has been taught to despise.”
