Patriotism Without Nostalgia
Attachment to a country is usually expressed as a claim about its past. It works better as a claim about obligations in the present.
Most public patriotism is a memory claim. It asserts that the country was once a particular way and that the speaker's project is to restore it, which puts the argument permanently in the past tense.
The trouble is that the two sides of any national argument remember different countries, and neither memory is available for inspection. A dispute about what was cannot be settled, which is part of why it is so attractive as a mode of argument.
There is an older version that does not require agreement about history. It holds that a citizen owes something specific to the people they share a country with: jury service, honest testimony, paying what is owed, and accepting the outcome of a contest they lost.
That version is demanding, unromantic, and available to anyone regardless of which past they prefer. It also happens to be the version a republic actually runs on, which is a reasonable argument for spending less time on the flags and more on the obligations.
Claire Vantassel writes for The 13th Bell on ideas. This piece was edited and fact checked before publication.
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