CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Can a Progressive be a Patriot?

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Can a progressive be a patriot?  Well, you say, yes, of course!  More than two centuries ago, Sir Walter Scott defined patriotism as love of country – a special feeling for one’s birthplace and its people.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand!

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand!

To Scott, this sort of affection for one’s homeland separates people who care for others from those who care only for themselves.  The villain of his poem (“The Lay of the Last Minstrel”) is a wealthy aristocrat “concentrated all in self” who, having isolated himself from his less privileged neighbors, is doomed to die “unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.”

Updating Scott somewhat, here’s what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, America’s most articulate and eloquent progressive, has to say on the same topic: “We don’t leave the things that we love, and when we love this country, what that means is that we propose the solutions to fix it.”

AOC defines the nation in terms of class, not just ethnicity, concluding that “you cannot love this country if you only fight for the wealthy and big business. To love this country is to fight for its people — all people, working people, everyday Americans like bartenders and factory workers.”  She identifies U.S. history with the history of popular movements such as abolitionism, the labor movement, and the women’s movement.  And she defines the key American value as “true freedom — not just freedom of speech… but also the economic freedoms to live in dignity.”

This is the clearest left-leaning answer to the challenge posed by centrists like the New York Times’s Frank Bruni, who laments that progressive Democrats have “readily and foolishly ceded many tradition-tinged, conservative-coded concepts — freedom, patriotism, family values, law and order — to their opponents” (NYT, 8/17/26).  The answer, says Bruni, is to redefine and reaffirm such values as freedom and........

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