“Support the Troops!”: The Social and Political Currency of Patriotism in the United States

Abstract

This article explores the meaning of patriotism in the lives of United States citizens, and specifically how and why patriotism is mobilized as a social force, particularly in times of perceived crisis. Identifying two principal patriotic styles—“deferential” and “inquisitive”—it is argued that the distribution of these styles reflects relational social and political structures of claim making in a democracy, interconnected to individuals' desire to belong to something greater than themselves, and especially to be recognized by others as belonging. In other words, different patriotic styles reflect the relative difficulty or ease individuals and groups experience in establishing and affirming their belonging and social worth, and translating this citizenship into effective political participation. The article explores how these patriotic styles relate to the functioning of the democratic state in times of crisis, and how patriotic attachments serve or do not serve the interests of citizens.

Notes

¹ Sean Owen (personal interview, November 8, 2006).

² Larry Carpenter (personal interview, April 19, 2004).

³ Laurel Mulherin (personal interview, April 27, 2004).

⁴ Geoff Bickford, Larry Carpenter, Sean Owen, and Mike Stein (personal interview, May 16, 2003).

⁵ James A. Merolla, “Upside Down US Flag Angers Area Veterans,” Attleboro [MA] Sun Chronicle, March 27, 2003, p. 11; Gary Cameron (personal interview, November 15, 2006).

⁶ Merolla, “Upside Down Flag,” pp. 11, 15.

⁷ See, for example, Ryan Grim, “Protest and Pushback on Campus,” Nation, October 31, 2005, < http://www.thenation.com/article/protest-and-pushback-campus>; Douglas Belkin, “Professor, Recruiter Face Off at UMass,” Boston Globe, April 4, 2003, p. B1; Alex Hetherington, “The Offense of an Upside-down Flag,” Yale Daily News, April 11, 2003, < http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2003/apr/11/the-offense-of-an-upside-down-flag>; Gene Policinski, “Controversy Flares as Peace Activists Use U.S. Flags to Convey Message,” The First Amendment Center Online, April 15, 2003, < http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/controversy-flares-as-peace-activists-use-u-s-flags-to-convey-message>; Matthew Rothschild, “An Upside Down Flag and a Dead Coyote,” The Progressive, June 4, 2003, < http://www.progressive.org/mag_mccoyote2>.

⁸ Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51:2 (1986), pp. 273–286.

⁹ Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (New York: W.W. Norton, 1928), p. 16. This passage has added meaning for the case at hand, as it was called upon by a student then attending Wheaton College, to make sense of the rage and violence that had come to engulf the campus. See Greg Williams, “Bertrand Russell,” blog entry, Life on Mars: Confessions of a Mangalavid Junkie, March 31, 2003, < http://kasei.us/archives/2003/03/31/bertrand_russell>.

¹⁰ Importantly, understandings of the demands of patriotism will be historically and contextually specific, and the reflections here relate to patriotic sentiments in the contemporary United States.

¹¹ Robert T. Schatz, Ervin Staub, and Howard Lavine, “On Varieties of National Attachment: Blind Versus Constructive Patriotism,” Political Psychology 20:1 (1999), pp. 151–174. See also Rick Kosterman and Seymour Feshbach, “Toward a Measure of Patriotic and Nationalistic Attitudes,” Political Psychology 10:2 (1989), pp. 247–273; Qiong Li and Marilynn B. Brewer, “What Does it Mean to be an American? Patriotism, Nationalism, and American Identity of 9/11,” Political Psychology 25:5 (2004), pp. 727–739; Linda J. Skitka, “Patriotism or Nationalism? Understanding Post-September 11, 2001, Flag-Display Behavior,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35:10 (2005), pp. 1994–2011. A very similar terminology has been appropriated to describe blind or deferential patriotism outside this psychological literature, in which adherents reflexively support their government, and resist any criticism of it. See, for example, Steve Martinot's “support-patriotism,” in “Patriotism and Its Double,” Peace Review 15:4 (2003), pp. 405–410.

¹² Myron Rothbart and James C.M. Johnson, “Social Class and the Vietnam War: Some Discrepant Motives for Supporting or Opposing U.S. Involvement in Southeast Asia,” Pacific Sociological Review 17:1 (1974), p. 49.

¹⁴ Mark Benjamin, “Post-traumatic Futility Disorder,” Salon, December 21, 2006, < http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/12/21/ptsd>

¹³ Mark Benjamin, “Post-traumatic Futility Disorder,” Salon, December 21, 2006, < http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/12/21/ptsd>.

¹⁵ Darlene Boroviak (personal interview, January 12, 2007).

¹⁶ Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998). See also David Zeiger's documentary of the GI anti-war movement during Vietnam, Sir, No Sir! Displaced Films, Balcony Releasing, Arte/France (Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2005).

¹⁷ Roland Gendron, Paul Spera, Dick Oliver, Peter C. Rego, Walt Chicoine, and Tom Tullie (personal interview, May 8, 2007). For accounts of, and a variety of reactions to, this protest see Michelle Malkin, “Witness to a US Soldier Effigy Burning,” March 21, 2007, < http://michellemalkin.com/2007/03/21/witness-to-a-us-soldier-effigy-burning/>; Jason Simms, “Fiendly, Fiendly World: Riot Cop Lyrics Chanted During Soldier Effigy Burning,” Local Cut, March 29, 2007, < http://localcut.wweek.com/2007/03/29/fiendly-fiendly-world-soldier-effigy-burned-to-chant-of-riot-cop-lyric-makes-fox-news/>; and Jen Hogg, “Two Wrongs Still Don't Make a Right,” Iraq Veterans against the War, March 25, 2007, < http://www.ivaw.org/node/606>.

¹⁸ This debate is captured well in Martha C. Nussbaum's For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), in which Nussbaum's case for cosmopolitan humanitarianism is debated by a wide range of interlocutors. In addition, Steven Johnson, The Truth About Patriotism (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 2007) and George Kateb, “Is Patriotism a Mistake?,” in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 3–20, both have recent and novel contributions to the cosmopolitan side of the argument.

¹⁹ Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country, pp. 2–17.

²⁰ Margaret Canovan, “Patriotism is Not Enough,” British Journal of Political Science 30:3 (2000), pp. 413–432.

²¹ See, for example, Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks, “Patriotism and Progressivism,” Peace Review 15:4 (2003), pp. 397–404; Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

²² Pauline Kleingeld, “Kantian Patriotism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29:4 (2000), pp. 313–341; Attracta Ingram, “Constitutional Patriotism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22:6 (1996), pp. 1–18; John Schaar, “The Case for Patriotism,” in Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981), pp. 285–311.

²³ Omid A. Payrow Shabani, “Who's Afraid of Constitutional Patriotism? The Binding Source of Citizenship in Constitutional States,” Social Theory and Practice, 28 (July 2002), pp. 419–443. See, also, Mary Dietz, “Patriotism,” in Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 177–193; Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” Praxis International 12:1 (1992), pp. 1–19.

²⁴ Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

²⁵ Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6.

²⁷ O'Leary, To Die For, pp. 53, 54.

²⁶ Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 44–47. See also, Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992).

²⁸ Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 4–5.

²⁹ O'Leary, To Die For, p. 5.

³⁰ Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity”; Viroli, For Love of Country.

³¹ Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service—and How it Hurts Our Country (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 111.

³² See, for example, Patrik Jonsson, “Noncitizen Soldiers: The Quandaries of Foreign-born Troops,” Christian Science Monitor, July 5, 2005, < http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0705/p01s03-usmi.html>.

³³ Roth-Douquet and Schaeffer, AWOL, pp. 97–98.

³⁴ Roth-Douquet and Schaeffer, AWOL, 110–111.

³⁵ See Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) for an account of how, among a number of other causes, the military's post-Vietnam reforms to address the increasing divide between the military and society would create perverse incentives for the societal embrace of US militarism.

³⁷ Shabani, “Who's Afraid of Constitutional Patriotism?,”, 437.

³⁶ Shabani, “Who's Afraid of Constitutional Patriotism?,” p. 419.

³⁸ Schatz et al., “On Varieties of National Attachment.”

³⁹ Gail Sahar, “Patriotism, Attributions for the 9/11 Attacks and Support for War: Then and Now,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 30:3 (2008), pp.189–197; Schatz et al., “On Varieties of National Attachment”; Deborah J. Schildkraut, “The More Things Change…American Identity and Mass and Elite Responses to 9/11,” Political Psychology 23:3 (2002), pp. 511–535.

⁴⁰ Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly 118:4 (2003–2004), pp. 569–598.

⁴¹ Philip E. Converse and Howard Schuman, “‘Silent Majorities’ and the Vietnam War,” Scientific American 222:6 (1970), pp. 17–25.

⁴² Rothbart and Johnson, “Social Class and the Vietnam War,” pp. 56–57.

⁴³ Swidler, “Culture in Action,” p. 276.

⁴⁴ Swidler, “Culture in Action,”, 273.

⁴⁵ Rothbart and Johnson, “Social Class and the Vietnam War,” p. 49.

⁴⁶ This hierarchy is somewhat fluid in any society, as the range of material and status rewards available for various strata are determined as well through the interplay of capitalist market forces and the success of organized political action (for example, industrial labor unions, professional organizations). It is also true that some professions—such as the professorate, the clergy or high level civil servants—see their relatively modest material compensation recompensed by relatively high social status.

⁴⁷ Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 1, 2.

⁴⁸ Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

⁴⁹ This is true, perhaps, notwithstanding the sudden celebrity of Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher during the 2008 Presidential election, and specifically the appropriation of his persona by the McCain campaign, as a sort of conservative organic intellectual.

⁵⁰ Rothbart and Johnson, “Social Class and the Vietnam War,” p. 58.

⁵¹ Deniz Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” Gender and Society 2:3 (1988), p. 274. The term “patriotic bargain” appropriates Kandiyoti's conceptual and theoretical insights beyond her original intent.

⁵² Schatz et al., “On Varieties of National Attachment.”

⁵³ Anne Caldwell argues that neoconservatives and liberal hawks should not be seen as a break in US foreign policy tradition, but an essential continuation. See Anne Caldwell, “Empire and Exception,” New Political Science 28:4 (2006), pp. 489–506.

⁵⁴ See Kevin Baker, “Stabbed in the Back! The Past and Future of a Right-wing Myth,” Harper's Magazine 313:1874 (June 2006), pp. 31–42.