Long post coming. If you don't want to read a long post, then read something else.
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I'm an anti-patriot. By that I mean that I see no redeeming value in the idea of patriotism. This definitely relates to the subject of the thread, as hopefully I will demonstrate.
I've been an anti-patriot for a long time. When I was 9 years old, my sixth grade teacher sent me to the principal's office during the lesson on patriotism. I said, "you can't love a country. You can only love something that can love you back, like your parents." Heresy like that was frowned upon in NC public schools. True story: I was wearing a UNC shirt that day. When I was in the principal's office, the principal asked me if I loved Carolina basketball. I said I did. The principal asked whether UNC basketball loved me back. I said, Dean Smith didn't know me, but if he did, he'd love me. The principal, also a Tar Heel, was satisfied with the answer and sent me back to class. [this anecdote isn't particularly germane, but I thought people might enjoy it]
By the time I was 12, I had moved to a somewhat more sophisticated view, which was that patriotism was an excuse for evil. If America was good, then we wouldn't need to love it. We could just love its goodness. Patriotism is only necessary when the country is doing bad things, and I didn't really want to be a part of that. By then I had moved to a private high school and the folks there were a little more tolerant. I'm not sure my view made me popular, but I didn't get blowback from it.
A few years later in college, I had generalized the idea into a view that a country is defined by its people. To love America is actually to love Americans. The things that we claim to love, like the Constitution, were created by Americans, not by America. And to the extent that the constitution lays out the rules for governing the country, it was only going to be as good as those rules were implemented and enforced. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution was indeed exceptional; but the use to which it was put was pretty fucking bad for many many years.
At every stage, I received pushback from peers. Admittedly, I was precocious and even though I was skipped ahead a couple of years, I still doubt that my new peers were interested in thinking this way. But I still think there was something disconcerting to people about these ideas, because for them patriotism and American greatness had been crutches. Deep down, I think, people knew I was right and they didn't want to admit it. Slavery was bad, and I didn't want to have anything to do with that. At the same time, slavery didn't define me, or anyone living today. Hence the conclusion that America is as good as Americans, some of whom are bad and some of whom are good. Politics is the process of determining whether the good people or bad people are in charge.
[note: I am still sick and my mind muddled a little bit. Otherwise I would be mortified to use such simplistic terminology/concepts like "good people" or "bad people." ]
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So why do/did people think America is a great country? It's not just Americans who have thought that, by the way. People who immigrated here thought it was a great place to be. Other countries have, at times, tried to emulate the US. There is real truth, I think, to the idea that America has at times been a great nation -- when the people who would make it a wonderful force for good were in charge.
We had the great fortune of being led at the outset by a group of exceptional leaders. Yes, I know, many of them held slaves; some of the ones who didn't were rapacious capitalists (well, pre-capitalists, I guess). But they did produce a set of ideas and expectations that were radical at the time and radically good. The Declaration could have said, "we want to rule ourselves, fuck off K George" but it didn't. The constitution could have been written as an analogue to the Magna Carta, as establishing an oligarchy instead of a monarchy, but it was that only in part.
But after that burst of civic inspiration, Americans went a long time without exceptional leadership. Was America great in the 1840s? I have my doubts, and I don't think it was widely viewed that way in Europe (I'd be curious to know more about Americans' view of America during that time; my sense is that there was much less patriotism outside of parades than there is today -- which dovetails with the excuse theory). We got exceptional leadership again during the Civil War and immediately thereafter, but the politics didn't work out.
The progressive era was a time of true exceptionalism, I think, so long as we remember that nobody is perfect and countries even less so. We got a huge flowering of democracy and for the most part it was for the better.
And then finally, I think the leaders who built the rules-based order after WWII were extraordinary. Again, nobody and nothing is perfect. I'm aware of the crimes. But how many countries in history have ever been brutally attacked by a foreign power, spent four long years fighting a bloody war, and the end were like, "hey, we're going to help you rebuild"? And we helped create the Geneva Convention, and the UN, the GATT, and so on.
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A big part of the success of the country has come from a relative lack of conflict over distribution of wealth. Those kinds of conflicts were typically destructive. I'm not going to try to project that forward to today, nor am I going to apologize for robber barons or the like. I'm just saying that the country was able to become an economic powerhouse because we didn't waste a lot of energy fighting over who gets what share of the spoils. I know this is an oversimplification and cut me some slack as I try to condense a whole lot of history into a few paragraphs. I'm not overlooking the struggles of labor, but it was less than in Europe.
We didn't argue about that as much because we had plenty. There was a lot of wealth to go around. Part of that was ample land. Part of it was cheap labor. And part of it was unfree labor, whether formally unfree (slavery) or de facto unfree (sharecropping). Oops. When we reached the point where we decided to apply those ideals from previous generations of exceptional Americans, the wealth wasn't so plentiful after all. When we had to divide the pie to include everyone, the conflicts over dividing the pie became more acute.
But we didn't have a conceptual language of pie-division. We had universalist ideals that were never practical. AND we had simmering hatreds. There's the famous chart about wages and productivity, and how wages became uncoupled from productivity in the 1970s. This chart is often used as a critique of "neoliberalism" but I see it differently. I see it as the result of integration. Not that integration was at all bad, or that it made us poorer, or anything like that. It's that the people who never had to reckon with the problem of scarcity (relatively speaking -- again, a message board post) except during the Depression suddenly had to, and the response made the scarcity more acute. It was the era of drained pool politics.
I also think that's when the idea of "patriotism" became more front-and-center in the American consciousness. This is a speculative claim and I very easily could be wrong, but that's my impression. And it makes sense. Patriotism is a concept that we need to justify bad things. We had come out of Vietnam, which was definitely bad, and many people wanted to retain segregation in some form or another, and there were racial conflicts, and oh yeah, gender conflicts. And hence was born, 'Murcia!
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In some ways, MAGA is the result of not having an adequate conceptual language to deal with pie division. Every word of that slogan (OK, maybe not 'make') is not only contestable but acutely contested. And it's not meant to be inclusive. It's meant to avoid the problems that liberation created, because we otherwise don't want to talk about it.
For a very long time, the people pulling the strings cynically used the idea of patriotism and American exceptionalism to justify their domination. They found willing subjects, so to speak, in the poor and middle classes who, again, saw those ideas as ways to paper over the selfishness they felt but didn't want to disown. But soon the puppet masters lost control, much like the mafia in Batman who loosed the Joker on the world and came to regret it. And thus do we get the epistemic anarchy of MAGA: its suspicion of elites but worship of a billionaire and occasionally other billionaires. The paranoia that had always been there (cf. Richard Hofstatder) became more tangible and real with the advent of instantaneous misinformation, so that MAGAs are simultaneously scared of things that won't harm them and seemingly welcoming those that will.
And so here we are. I don't think Musk is really a part of MAGA. I think he's MAGA adjacent, and he's trying to cling to the movement for his own private ends, but he's not really a part of it. MAGA isn't really pro-billionaire (with the exception of one). I'm not really sure if it's pro-anything. It's against a lot of stuff. The wrong stuff.
Eh, this has not been my most lucid post. My head is full of congestion.
