Donald Trump wants to be your tour guide on what makes America great and how he is making it even greater and even more patriotic.
You can kick off your journey with a visit to Charlottesville, Va., a place with “some very fine people on both sides.” There, you’ll be treated to proud displays of Confederate flags and monuments — testament to the “patriotic and idealistic cause” known as the Confederacy, whose flag “proclaims a glorious heritage” — Trump’s friend at Breitbart helpfully explains.
Next, venture to Alabama to bask in the patriotism of newly elected Republican Senate candidate Judge Roy Moore. Who could be a more patriotic or devoted American than Judge Moore, who, like Mr. Trump, has questioned Barack Obama’s birthplace and would, if he could, have homosexuality outlawed?
If all this country-loving has worn you out, perhaps unwind at your nearest NASCAR track, a venue where, according to Mr. Trump, you would not find any disrespect for our country or our flag. Here you will find one of the few remaining places for patriots unsullied by lesser Americans where the crowd is reliable, united by race, orientation and creed.
After completing your tour of Mr. Trump’s America, do not despair if you still don’t grasp Mr. Trump’s brand of patriotism (dodging Vietnam, slavishly yielding to Russia, indiscriminately mocking those beyond his “base”). Maybe you don’t play to cameras by literally wrapping yourself in a flag, but unless you’ve truly gone out of your way to be mean and obnoxious to others, you’re almost certainly a truer patriot and a more devoted servant to American ideals than Mr. Trump.
That is because what Trump and his ilk celebrate is not real patriotism. It is selective patriotism — deference and respect are reserved only for individuals who hew to their narrow mindset. In The New Yorker last week, Prof. Jelani Cobb explained that Trump’s selective patriotism is what “drives him to curse at black football players but leaves him struggling to create false equivalence between Nazis and anti-Fascists in Charlottesville.”
Prof. Cobb exposes the lie of Trump’s patriotism. How can Trump glibly condemn Black football players who protest peacefully, yet struggle to condemn Nazis, attack Russia’s meddling in our elections, and acknowledge the Confederate monuments and flags? The mind does gymnastics trying to reconcile these obvious discrepancies as anything other than racism.
Of course, Trump cloaks his conduct and words in patriotism. But the founding fathers were wary of such exploitation of patriotism. In his farewell address to the nation in 1796, George Washington warned Americans to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” Alexander Hamilton expressed similar thoughts: “(I)n popular commotions especially, the clamours of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.”
Contrary to what Trump and his acolytes think, true devotion to the United States of America does not mean wrapping oneself in a flag and covering one’s eyes. Nor does it mean being self-righteous about one’s love for country.
Being a patriot in the United States means fighting to lift the most downtrodden of people. It means refusing to accept inequalities and injustices in society, even if doing so invites criticism. “True patriotism,” as the famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow once said, “hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”
The country has had, and continues to have, many true patriots — those who advocated for women’s suffrage, traveled to Mississippi as Freedom Riders in an attempt to desegregate the South, marched in Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, marched in Washington 30 years later to fight against LGBTQ discrimination and millions more who have enlisted in the military, voluntarily or otherwise.
Like the current movement by some professional athletes to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem, these historical acts of patriotism were also seen negatively at the time. As The Washington Post noted, most Americans viewed the Freedom Riders and the March on Washington unfavorably. A Newsweek survey found that only 23 percent of Americans thought that the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation “did more good than harm in the fight for gay rights.”
Today, however, few, other than self-proclaimed “patriots” like the Charlottesville Tiki torch bearers and Judge Moore, would deny that the advances gained by the suffragettes, the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists and others who marched to promote the welfare of all Americans, greatly improved this nation, its social fabric and the lives of tens of millions.
Protest has lifted the most marginalized in our nation. Protest has jolted the United States out of systemic injustices that run counter to the values enshrined by the Constitution. When we consider the progress that we have made in our 241-year history, we look to the individuals who have had the courage to believe that this nation can and must do better.
Those kneeling in protest hold that same belief. Colin Kaepernick took a knee not to object to the flag or the anthem, but to object to the selective application of the justice system in the United States. In Slate, John Legend called the protests “an attempt to educate the public that criminal justice — mass incarceration, lengthy sentences, police brutality — is the civil rights issues of our time.”
Kneeling, a silent and nonviolent protest, aims simply to call attention to the grave failures of our institutions, especially toward Black Americans. These athletes simply seek to highlight how pervasive these racial disparities are, however uncomfortable this might make some of us. They challenge President Trump, our political leaders and all of us to not be blind nationalists but true patriots, loyal to our most cherished ideals of fair, honest, equal treatment and opportunity for all.
Lucas Maiman can be reached at lmaiman@umich.edu.