In The National Divorce, Democrats Got Patriotism

It's a weird thing, watching the increasingly weird American right wing concede love of country to Democrats and their allies.

That's precisely what's happened during the Trump era though, and it culminated with a 2024 Democratic National Convention that sported the aesthetic of a Republican convention in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was disorienting to watch Democrats claim the mantle of patriotism and freedom during their expertly-coordinated weeklong party in Chicago. Democratic Party backers vigorously waved American flags and hailed the potential of the Great American Experiment a few weeks after Republicans gathered in Milwaukee and wore weird patches over their ears and waved signs signaling their support for forcibly removing their immigrant neighbors from the country. Speakers at the DNC spoke of the coming Morning in America and all its promise; RNC speakers painted a paranoid, pitch-black picture of an apocalyptic, lawless, declining nation that must be remade in the authoritarian's image or perish forevermore.

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One of these political conventions hailed the United States and its people. The other hated the existing United States and wished to forge a new nation based on a notion of America that only exists in the fevered imaginations of the most red-pilled, poisoned minds among us.

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I've written extensively about how and why the American right has come to detest America thanks to helpful political and cultural cover from Donald Trump, who has made no secret about his disdain for the United States and his enduring love for vile authoritarian regimes in Russia, Hungary, China, and Brazil (during Bolsonaro's term), among others. I wrote in February 2023 about Marjorie Taylor-Green's call for a "national divorce" – an undoing in the Union that she and her ilk despise, not unlike their forefathers who tried to destroy the Union in 1861. The foolishness and unseriousness of Taylor Green's proposal, as outlined by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times, lies in the reality of an operational society: "No matter how small you go, in other words, you run into the simple fact that there’s no such thing as a truly homogeneous political community," Bouie wrote. "There will always be differences of belief and interest, and the only way to deal with them in a representative, republican government is through deliberation and majority rule."

I wrote about what MTG's burning desire to end the United States revealed about her movement, and how it would be perceived by folks who aren't still seething about being asked to sometimes wear a mask in 2020, or those Americans who don't get upset when American hostages are freed from Vladimir Putin's grip.

It can most generously be called a strain of laziness that runs through the conservative movement, or most accurately described as an everlasting authoritarian impulse: The deep yearning for struggle to end, to be done with politics, to stop with the messiness of representative democracy. ... In outlining the end of the Union, Taylor Greene acted in good faith and accidentally revealed the Republican vision for the United States – a needed point of clarity after the party in 2020 did not draft a platform and instead lined up behind Big Daddy and whatever his addled brain wanted on a particular day or week (aka whatever was on Fox or his Twitter timeline that morning). And for as horrifying as Taylor-Greene’s “national divorce” plan might sound to decent folks, her good faith in this matter is bad for Republicans as they flail to appeal to political normies increasingly disgusted by her party.

Culturally, there has been a national divorce during the Trump era. The culture wars have raged and raged and people have shot beer cans and burned jerseys (and books) and destroyed household items made by companies who didn't outright oppose basic rights for LGBTQ folks. There has been a split, and in that split, the American left got sports and patriotism. The right got Roseanne and Goya beans. Republicans need better divorce attorneys.

The right has had a simmering hatred of country for a long time, but it was the election of a black president that finally allowed them to be honest about their feelings for America. Yeah, they said, we don't like this shit anymore. We never did, but we could tolerate it as long as the head of the empire had the same skin as we did. No more. We're done.

Barack Obama's rise to power brought clarity to this festering dynamic: Conservatives were finally able to rip off the Bandaid and be honest and direct about their roiling disdain for a multicultural representative democracy that had slowly but surely expanded rights to historically marginalized groups. They could not pretend to love America during or even after the Obama years because what kind of country has a black man as president?

And so they set out on their mission to remake the country they pretended to love into one that would never – or could never – degrade itself in such a way ever again. That was Donald Trump's promise. It still is.

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Millennials came of political age being bruised and battered by conservatives who expertly wielded a brand of supercharged patriotism to mercilessly attack their political opponents as lacking sufficient love of country.

For these 80s babies – the Greatest Generation – watching George W. Bush "win" two terms as Republicans ground Democrats into edible little bits in the years after 9/11, patriotism belonged to the right. There was no questioning this arrangement. They loved the country, we were told, and we did not. They, therefore, had a right to run shit around here.

The American right's monopoly on patriotism began to shake lose with the 2006 midterm election, in which Democrats seized congressional majorities on the strength of right-wing members of their party who claimed patriotism as their own. They waved the flag, they talked of American exceptionalism – an admittedly toxic concept – and they talked and acted a lot like their Republican counterparts because – wouldn't you know it – they were a lot like Republicans (so much so that they barely had the stomach to pass the Affordable Care Act, a conservative healthcare program that wasn't conservative enough for some of these Blue Dog Dems who won election in 2006).

Democrats during their 2024 convention expertly weaved the theme of freedom into their patriotic messaging centered on teaming up to stop fascism in its tracks. This is all so disorienting for me, an elderly millennial who was trained from an early age to associate Republicans – and only Republicans – with the concept of freedom. They fucking loved freedom back in the day. It's all they ever talked about.

The liberal conception of freedom, of course, is different from the more rugged, individualist concept long pushed by the American right. As Kevin Kruse writes on the Campaign Trails site:

And as Kruse rightly says, it's a winning message.

The right wing charge that anyone who so much as questioned their priorities was anti-American was so loud and so consistent that it made you question whether you did, in fact, hate the United States. In those days, when Republicans labeled any and all domestic enemies as terrorists, I knew that I didn't hate America, though I very much hated that we had to live with the remnants of Jim Crow and the slow but steady (and highly coordinated) chipping away of the most important legislation in our history, the New Deal. When you hear the same thing over and over and over, it starts to at least sound true. Just ask Trump.

That the right would give up patriotism, such a valuable and effective political weapon, is beyond comprehension. It had been so easy for them to play the patriotism card any time the center or left pushed back against their plotting and scheming. Now they boo when American hostages come home and they cheer when their presidential-candidate-for-life praises dictators as models of strength. These are all nakedly anti-American in nature. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise for a group of people who have desecrated the American flag with blue lines and Trump's face and other variations meant to indicate that there is only one kind of Real American, and you ain't it.

Democrats can and have used patriotism to their advantage during this election cycle. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have positioned themselves as defenders of the American Way, which has come under constant threat by ascendant fascism that has no interest in carrying on the traditions of representative democracy and self governance. In fact, they explicitly oppose these norms, something media outlets seem unable to grasp.

It's an enormous advantage for Democrats because, put simply, normies love the shit out of patriotism and its self-affirming trappings. Democrats being able to say (in good faith) that they are trying to save the nation from an internal enemy – while Republicans make no secret of their disdain for America – gives Democrats a sustained edge in appealing to normal folks, those who don't spend forty hours a week reading about Hunter Biden's laptop and the gender of Olympic boxers. Republicans have given up their most effective weapon and handed it to Democrats – a baffling concession that will change American politics for at least one generation, maybe more. If the DNC was any indication, Dems plan to wield that weapon with as much force as possible.

It was during the last couple days of the Paris Olympics that I understood the breadth of hatred conservatives have for the United States as it is currently constituted. The dad, a living avatar for white grievance working class politics, came over to my house while I watched the second half of the gold medal men's basketball game between the USA and France, and after I explained the stakes of the game and my dad saw France held a slight lead in the second half, his face lit up.

"You know I'd love to see these guys lose," he said matter of factly.

"Which guys?" I asked.

"The Americans," he said. "Can't stand them. They deserve to lose."

Them. Not us. Not we. Them. My dad, who 20 years ago was among the tens of millions of Americans who refused to eat French fries because France did not support our invasion of Iraq, was rooting for France to defeat the US in a gold medal Olympic matchup. He actively rooted against the United States. We live in weird times. Nothing makes sense, and yet it does.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.