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Patriotism and its enemies — the Jack Hughes-Eileen Gu Olympics debate

The Winter Olympics had its thrills and spills — and a deep philosophical divide represented by two American, or American-born, athletes. 

Jack Hughes, the Gold Medal-winning American hockey player for the US team, gave voice to a patriotic reflex in his unhesitating, heartfelt expressions of love of his country. 

Eileen Gu, the Gold Medal-winning American-born free-style skier competing for China, exemplified a cosmopolitan ideal that purports to float above mere nationhood. 

This difference — between the bloody-mouthed hockey player draped in his own country’s flag and the exceptionally talented part-time model resistant to any questions about national loyalty — drives many of the divisions in American society. 

Is loyalty to country a matter of choice, or an unalterable commitment?

Do borders mean anything?

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Is our common culture essential or dispensable?

Is the appropriate attitude toward America one of fundamental gratitude or critical distance?

These types of questions are involved in disputes over immigration policy, over American history and how to teach it in schools, over the status of the English language, and over how much we should care about multinational institutions and so-called international opinion.

It was a subtext in the controversy at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks ago when Marco Rubio said that we must fight for Western civilization, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rendered “Western culture” in sneer quotes, as if it is a fiction or contemptible concept. 

The right is naturally drawn to the patriotic or nationalistic attitude, whereas the left is more cosmopolitan, tending to believe that attachment to one’s own is narrow-minded and patriotic displays are crude and simplistic. 

Cosmopolitanism has a long history: As I note in my book “The Case for Nationalism,” the term  “cosmopolitan” has its root in the Greek word kosmopolites, or citizen of the cosmos or world.

The fourth-century BC Cynic philosopher Diogenes lived in Athens after his exile from his native Sinope and rejected all conventions, making a barrel into his home in the Athenian marketplace. 

He is the first recorded person to use what has now become a cliché: “When he was asked where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’” 

That was a radical statement, since the Greeks considered citizenship possible only through the polis, or city. 

During the Enlightenment, the cosmopolitan idea was expressed in the notion of Weltbürger, or world citizen. 

This tendency has been given stark expression by the likes of the novelist Virginia Woolf, who urged the rejection of “pride of nationality,” and the titanic Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who thought it “obvious that patriotism as a sentiment is bad and harmful; as a doctrine it is stupid.”

Cosmopolitanism has always been open to the charge that — whatever its real or purported idealism — it cultivates a contempt for what’s near, immediate and tangible in favor of what’s far off. 

Behind cosmopolitanism is what the British writer Paul Gilroy has called “the principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.” 

The problem is that no one is really a citizen of the world, rather of particular nations that have formed us in obvious and subtle ways.

Yes, people emigrate and there are literary and intellectual exiles, but most of us have an attachment to home that feels natural and important. 

One reason that people were so moved by the US hockey team was the palpable bonds of the players — to one another, to their country, to the memory of their tragically deceased fellow player, Johnny Gaudreau.

These weren’t bonds that were chosen, so much as accepted and embraced; they were true to their teammates and nation.

In contrast, Eileen Gu claims to be true to herself.

If asked if she is proud of the accomplishments of her countrymen, she might have to ask, “Which countrymen?”

It is true that the Olympics bring athletes around the world together, but the Games themselves are testament to the enduring power of patriotism.

It was, after all, a unique kind of sports joy to witness the triumph of our boys in red, white and blue. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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