A Treatise on Metamodern Patriotism
By Sean Dempsey | 07/08/24
It has become fashionable among the well-fed and self-serving flatterers of power to insist that a man must either adore his government or despise his country. They say this as though America were a marble idol seated behind a mahogany desk in Washington DC, signing appropriations bills with one hand and death warrants with the other. These dour creatures, having mistaken the barnacle for the ship, the parasite for the host, and the tax collecter for the nation itself, tell us that patriotism consists in clapping like trained seals whenever the magnanimous State enlarges its appetite. They would have us believe that to question our redoubtable ruler is treason, to doubt the necessary war is cowardice, to resent the insatiable debt is cruelty, and to prefer the Constitution to the convenience of capricious presidents is some species of unheard madness.
But I submit, with all due contempt for such greasy doctrines, that it is not only possible to love one’s country while hating one’s government; it is, in fact, the only honest form of patriotism we have left.
For America is not Congress. America is not the President. America is not the swollen, self-worshipping machinery of agencies, departments, beauros, committees, subcommittees, intelligence offices, revenue collectors, regulators, inspectors, informants, contractors, consultants, lobbyists, superpacs, and professional explainers of why liberty must be postponed until after the next emergency.
On the contrary, America is the farmer looking out over his field at dawn. She is the mechanic teaching his son how to turn a wrench. She is the small business owner opening the door before sunrise and wondering whether this month he works for his family or merely for the Treasury. She is the mountains of New Hampshire, the rivers of Tennesssee, the planes of Kansas, the deserts of Arizona, the forests of Maine, the cliffs of California, and the cold clear streams that ask no permission from Washington before continuing to run free.
It is crystal clear to me that America is the church supper, the county fair, the school gymnasium, the diner coffee poured by a woman who knows every regular by name. America is jazz and bluegrass, baseball and barbecue, front porches and Fourth of July parades, the absurd and glorious confidence of a people who once believed they could cross a continent, build a Republic, raise a family, worship God, speak freely, keep the fruits of their labor, and dare to be left alone.
America is beautiful beyond compare. Yet her government is hideous beyond words.
America gave us a Constitution whose central insight was not that rulers are angels, but that they are not. The Founders, having studied history with more seriousness than our modern politicians study polling data, understood that power is a beast which must be chained, watched, starved, and mocked. They did not spill ink and blood so that future presidents might discover, by some mysterious alchemy, that “commander in chief” means unchecked emperor of the earth. They did not divide power among branches so that Congress might become a theater of cowards, outsourcing its gravest responsibilities to whichever executive can speak most solemnly while bombing brown babies abroad.
And yet here we are, ruled by men who swear oaths to a Constitution they have not read, do not understand, or often actively despise. Presidents wage wars without the express authorization of Congress, as though the solemn question of life and death were a matter of scheduling inconvenience. Legislators complain on television, fund the machinery in committee, and then return home to shake hands and kiss babies beneath flags they have utterly betrayed. The war state lumbers on, sanctified by euphemism, lubricated by debt, and justified by the permanent discovery of enemies who, by happy coincidence, always require more money, more secrecy, more surveillance, and fewer restraints.
We are told these bombs are necessary and even humanitarian. How marvelous! The screaming Iranian child clutching his mother’s severed limbs does not really die; he is liberated from the burden of breathing. The village is not destroyed; it is introduced to the benevolent religion of democracy from above. The funeral is not a consequence; it is an unfortunate externality in the noble sceince of geopolitical management. Such is the moral vocabulary of empire: a language in which murder becomes policy, theft becomes taxation, spying becomes security, and cowardice becomes statesmanship.
Yes, we may hate this. We may despise it all with a patriotic, clean heart.
Yes, we may hate the blood-soaked monsters in Washington like Lindsay Graham or Ted Cruz who delight in abstractions because abstractions do not scream. We may hate the contractors who sell the bullets and the bombs, the lobbyists who sell the war and the propaganda, the think tanks that sell the theory, the media men who sell the panic, and the greasy red and blue politicians who sell the whole rotten enterprise back to us as “patriotism.”
We may hate the omnibus bills, those magnificent barges of corruption, loaded in darkness and floated through Congress before any honest man can count the rats aboard. We may hate the so-called Big Beautiful Bills, whose beauty consists chiefly in their size, as one might call a tumor beautiful because it has grown impressively. We may hate the legislative trick by which every vice is hidden in the folds of every necessity, so that a man who wants roads must also purchase undeclared wars of choice, domestic surveillance, corporate favors, bureaucratic expansion, and some new office dedicated to studying the emotional welfare of gendered furniture.
We may also hate the entitlements that, like parasites, fasten themselves upon the productive and deign to call their hunger compassion. We may hate the moral obscenity of a system that punishes thrift, mocks prudence, subsadizes recklessness, and then congratulates itself for redistributing what it first had to confiscate. We may hate brutal taxes not because we hate the poor, but because we weep for them and love justice; not because we despise charity, but because we know charity ceases to be charity when delivered by threat, extracted by force, and administered by men who take their immense salaries before the widow sees a dime.
We may hate the spying. We may hate the presumption that every citizen is a suspect, every transaction a clue, every message a file, every private life an interest of the NSA. We may hate the agents of the State peering through the keyhole and calling it vigilance. We may hate, with the full fury of free men, the idea that a government founded to secure liberty now demands access to the intimate corners of the very people it once claimed to serve.
And in hating these things, we are not betraying America. We are remembering her!
For what did the Founders hate if not distant rulers, arbitrary power, standing armies, taxation without genuine representation, general warrants, consolidated authority, and the whole imperial habit of treating free men as revenue-producing livestock? What was the American Revolution if not an act of profound love expressed through profound, sublime hatred? The love of liberty, and hatred of tyranny; the love of home, and hatred of occupation; the love of posterity, and hatred of chains.
The modern Fox News-watching boomer or venerable courtier of the almighty State cannot understand this because he has trained himself to worship the austere chain so long as it is painted red, white, and blue. He sees the flag behind the podium and forgets to ask what is being done beneath it. He hears the anthem before the game and concludes that the debt is holy and being spent on righteous, patriotic aims. He watches jets pass overhead and mistakes the noise for freedom. He has reduced patriotism to a costume, a slogan, a bumper sticker, a posture of obedience performed loudly enough to drown out conscience.
But true patriotism is not obedience. It is fidelity to a memory of what that meek, gentle creature named America once stood for.
It is fidelety to the rich country beneath the barren government, the heroic people beneath the hateful regime, the righteous Constitution beneath the lifeless statute, the liberty beneath the emergency, the truth beneath the speech. It is the stubborn refusal to let our beloved America be defined and defiled by the worst men and lizard-people who temporarily occupy her offices. It is the insistence that the State is not the soul of the nation, but rather the steel boot upon its neck.
Here, then, we must practice a kind of metamodern synthesis, holding two truths in one heart without surrendering either. Yes, we can love America and hate that beast which governs her. We can love the Republic and despise the corrupt Empire. We can honor the Constitution and condemn the men who daily trample it. We can love the soldier and hate the war. We can love the poor and hate the dependency machine that feeds poverty. We can love order and hate surveillance. We can love justice and hate the theft-fed leviathan that grows larger than any power the Founders would have tolerated.
Indeed, we can love America precisely by hating the government that cruely binds her.
For America, at her best, is not a bureaucracy but a solemn promise. She is the promise that man need not be born a servant to kings, committees, elites, experts, or mobs. She is the promise that rights come not from parchment or presidents, but from God Himself, nature, and the raw dignity of the human soul. She is the promise that government is a tool, not a master; a servant, not a savior; a necessary evil, not a national religion.
And if that promise now lies buried beneath endless debt, undeclared war, mindless corruption, surveillance, cowardice, and administrative bloat, then let no one tell us that love requires silence. Love does not stand politely beside the hospital bed while the patient is poisoned. Love does not compliment the arsonist on his management of the flames. Love does not call the paracite a partner merely because it has been feeding for a long time.
I declare this with all my soul: to love America is to wish her free again!
I wish her free from charlatan presidents who treat the Constitution as a decorative relic. Free from bought-and-paid-for legislators who spend money that future, unborn generations must somehow repay. Free from bureaucrats who mistake permission slips for civilization. Free from wars that make widows abroad and bankrupts at home. Free from the pious cruelty of those who call theft compassion and surveillance safety. Free from the wretched men who have wrapped themselves in her righteous flag while draining her strength, mocking her principles, and selling her future by the trillion.
So yes, let us love America: her people, her mountains, her rivers, her farms, her towns, her restless genius, her inherited liberties, her stubborn hope. Let us love the America that could be… these United States of America that might yet break loose from the pernicious chains of the State and stand again as a country of free citizens rather than managed subjects.
And let us brutally hate, without tear or apology, the vile, blood-soaked government that has betrayed her. Not because we are unpatriotic…
No, dear God no. Not at all! Rather, we patriotically love America BECAUSE we hate her vile, wretched, blood-stained, pernicious government that takes and takes and takes and gives absolutely nothing back in return. Patriots love America and hate her government because they still remember what patriotism actually means.
