Are We Too Divided to Be Patriotic?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk
Episode Title: Are We Too Divided to Be Patriotic?
Release Date: September 4, 2021
Host: Yascha Mounk
Guest: Samuel Goldman – Associate Professor of Political Science, George Washington University; Author of "After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division"

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the meaning and challenges of American patriotism in an era of deep division, with a rich historical and philosophical discussion between Yascha Mounk and Samuel Goldman. The conversation investigates competing models of American identity—from religious covenant to the melting pot to civic creed—asking whether any can truly unify the country today. Goldman offers a nuanced defense of patriotism, critiques over-simplified national narratives, and suggests alternative grounds for commonality and solidarity in contemporary America.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Reflection: Afghanistan & the Limits of “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class”

• Host’s Statement ([00:53–06:41]): Yascha Mounk reflects on the fall of Kabul, critiques the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the middle class,” and discusses the dangers of reducing foreign policy to immediate domestic economic interests.
  • Quote:
    "Getting out of Afghanistan was an easy call, but that ignored some of the very substantive reasons why America should not have withdrawn ... the substantial reasons of the lives of people in Afghanistan and the international stability that is now so deeply threatened." – Yascha Mounk ([05:52])

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2. Patriotism: Three Traditions in American History

A. The Covenant Model

• Definition: Originating with Puritan New England, this sees America as a community bound by shared religious and ethnically homogeneous roots, akin to Biblical Hebrews.
• Critique:
  • Too narrow & regionally specific for the modern nation.
    "It was too narrow religiously and too regionally specific to serve as a common culture for the new country, for the United States." – Samuel Goldman ([10:58])
  • The decline of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite is both a loss and a sign of American adaptability. ([14:28–16:00])

B. The Melting Pot/Crucible Model

• Definition: Emphasizes blending of immigrants into a single, new American identity; roots in Jeffersonian ideals of the frontier and agrarian mixing.
• Limits:
  • The original melting pot metaphor pushed assimilation to homogeneity; later, more pluralist visions see America as a “symphony” rather than a single melody.
    • "The melting pot meant all of these different cultures ... went in and came out the same. Zangwill is describing something different ... a sort of broader harmony." – Samuel Goldman ([22:00])
  • Even idealized, the “symphony” isn’t the true historical melting pot, but approaches what later is called creedal nationalism ([23:57]).

C. The Creed/Civic Nationalism Model

• Definition: Americans as united by political values and constitutional ideals, rather than ethnicity or religion (e.g., "all men are created equal").
• Historical Reality:
  • The creedal self-understanding is largely a 20th-century phenomenon, especially post-WWII, not present at the founding.
  • Quote:
    "The creed ... is a possibility that we can and I think ought to pursue. But it is not an historical reality that has been present with us from the origin." – Samuel Goldman ([26:11])
• Challenges:
  • Persistent race issues and the myth of America's founding as a creedal nation.
  • Discomfort with the US’s international role and inability to generate true unity today ([29:38–31:55]).

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3. Diagnosis: The Limits and Promise of Patriotism Today

• Thin Civic Patriotism:
  • Goldman and Mounk agree: Civic patriotism is valuable but not universally motivating, nor easily instilled.
    • "Civic nationalism or patriotism is thin. It can be unsatisfactory." – Samuel Goldman ([33:46])
• Danger of Top-Down Narratives:
  • Attempts to create forced unity or cultural homogeneity are both unrealistic and undesirable; historical attempts at intensive “nation-building” were coercive ([34:55]).
• Role of Voluntary, Local Institutions:
  • Rather than seeking broad consensus, encourage civic and religious associations, local activism, and genuine interaction.
    • "We need to encourage and protect institutions that can embody and cultivate a more limited sense of identity and solidarity ... only through religious and local ... associations that we can figure out who we really are." – Samuel Goldman ([36:00])
  • Disagreement, when structured within institutions, can be a strength.
    • "I'm much more interested in finding ways that we can pursue and realize disagreement as a serious and legitimate feature of American life, rather than dismissing it in pursuit of some evanescent similarity." – Samuel Goldman ([36:53])

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4. Contemporary Fracture: Is Division Terminal?

• Are Americans Becoming Too Divided?
  • Mounk: Concern about loss of empathy and mutual comprehension between “two consolidated political tribes” ([48:20]).
• Goldman’s Reframing:
  • Institutional failings, not cultural division, are the root problem.
    • "Our institutional failure is encouraging and putting pressure on those cleavages, and in particular, the centralization of authority in the national government and in the executive branch ... I just don't think our institutions can bear that pressure." – Samuel Goldman ([49:48])
  • Federalism, strong local associations, and a return to the constitutional balance, not cultural engineering, are the antidotes.

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5. Role of the Individual: What Can Listeners Do?

• Actionable Patriotism:
  • Focus on lived, local participation: local government, voluntary associations, religious communities.
  • Quote:
    "All that we can do is contribute to its solution, or at least to its management, for ourselves and for people that we actually know." – Samuel Goldman ([52:35])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On patriotism’s complexity:
  "The United States is not a classic nation state and can't be governed like one. So here we are, we're stuck. It's our job to make the best of it." – Samuel Goldman ([39:00])

• On the "melting pot" vs. "symphony":
  "The image that Zangwill keeps returning to is a symphony ... that's actually quite different from what the melting pot was usually understood to represent." – Samuel Goldman ([22:00])

• On the potential for local patriotism:
  "It's often people who are most closely engaged with ... a religious community, a town or region or labor union or other interest based association who are also most patriotic about America as a whole." – Samuel Goldman ([38:09])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Biden’s foreign policy & Afghanistan withdrawal: [00:53–06:41]
• Introduction to Samuel Goldman & topic: [06:41–07:52]
• The Covenant Model: [09:31–14:28]
• Decline of WASP elite/Adaptability: [14:28–17:24]
• The Melting Pot Model (history and critique): [18:17–24:21]
• "Symphony" as alternative to melting pot: [22:00–23:57]
• Creedal Nationalism/Civic Patriotism: [24:21–31:55]
• Challenges of Civic Patriotism / 20th Century Formation: [26:11–31:55]
• Thinness of civic unity & potential dangers: [33:46–36:00]
• Institutions vs. consensus models: [36:00–39:16]
• Disagreement as a strength: [36:53–39:16]
• Institutional vs. cultural causes of division: [49:40–51:50]
• Role for individual patriotism: [51:50–53:23]

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Episode Takeaway

This conversation challenges simplistic calls for "more" or "better" patriotism, showing that every major model in US history is historically contingent and has real limits. Goldman and Mounk argue that searching for perfect consensus or top-down national identity is both impossible and potentially dangerous; instead, America’s continued health depends on vibrant local institutions, an acceptance of legitimate disagreement, and an unromantic but resilient civic framework. The American tradition of reinvention and finding meaning in pragmatic, everyday solidarity, rather than mythic unity, is both a reason for pessimism about grand narratives and optimism for the possibility of lasting commonality in diversity.

Transcript

[Samuel Goldman]

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe [e-mail] whereas conventional appeals to patriotism or nationalism have this top down quality that I think makes them thin and unsatisfactory, I'm much more interested in find ways that we can pursue and realize disagreement as a serious and legitimate feature of American life, rather than dismissing it in pursuit of some evanescent similarity. And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.

[Yasha Monk]

For those of us who care about democracy and human rights, the last weeks have been really bitter. The Taliban's victory in Kabul and the whole of Afghanistan dashes the hopes of millions of Afghans, of girls who were able to go to school and learn reading and writing and aspire to a better life, of women who were able to work and have some forms of rights and freedoms, of secularists and liberals and others who do not want to live under a theocratic regime. It will also have destabilizing effects well beyond the borders of Afghanistan, posing a challenge to neighboring countries like India, emboldening Islamist terrorists and Muslim countries in the Middle east, making it hard for countries that will take in a lot of refugees in the coming months and years. That should be the main focus of our postmortem of America's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. But I also want to speak to how it reflects on the foreign policy of the Biden administration. One of the most influential ideas in the administration was the so called foreign policy for the middle class. This was meant to be a response to the challenge posed by Donald Trump and his view on foreign policy. When Trump came in, he essentially said America should just fight for its own interests without caring about its allies. All this talk of America upholding the liberal international order, the rules and norms of the international system, is bogus. We should not care about that. And of course we should end engagements like that in Afghanistan because those don't actually help average Americans in any tangible way. Now that analysis hit home among many traditional foreign policymakers in the United States who knew that much of what America does to uphold the international order it was quite unpopular Home who worried about the rhetorical appeal of the promise to bring the troops home and stop expending American blood and treasure on the interests of foreign nations. And so, in an attempt to maintain some of America's basic commitments internationally, but also to blunt the electoral appeal of Trumpism, the senior leadership of the Democratic Party on foreign policy adopted this idea of a foreign policy for the middle class. The idea was to get out of foreign entanglements as quickly as possible and then to justify some of America's engagement in the world by saying, we are doing this directly in order to improve the economic standing of average Americans. All of our foreign policy actually is pursuing these relatively immediate domestic economic interests. It was a way of trying to square the circle. Now, I think Afghanistan shows exactly why that is wrong. From a perspective of foreign policy for the middle class, getting out of Afghanistan was an easy call, but that ignored some of the very substantive reasons why America should not have withdrawn from Afghanistan in a precipitate manner, the substantial reasons of the lives of people in Afghanistan and the international stability that is now so deeply threatened. But the foreign policy for the middle class also failed on its own terms, on the terms of actually making it less likely that somebody like Donald Trump will get reelected. For even though Trump himself favored a withdrawal from Afghanistan, it neglects the extent to which right wing populists always run on the supposed weakness of their adversaries, saying that they alone can keep a country safe, they alone can defend the interests of a country. And ironically, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has meant to weaken the appeal of authoritarian populists, will actually make it much easier for them in 2024 or perhaps later to say, this administration cannot be trusted with avoiding national humiliation. It cannot be trusted with being strong. It cannot be trusted with keeping America safe. We need a strong man who really fights for American interests in order to know that our interests are served. There are many lessons to be drawn from Afghanistan, many concerning implications, but one of them is that for the Biden administration's foreign policy to succeed, its leaders will need to rethink whether a foreign policy for the middle class is a helpful or coherent framework for figuring out how to limit the appeal of Trumpism in America, and as importantly, how to actually stand up for what is right in the world in a humane and effective manner.

My guest today is my old friend, friend and colleague, Samuel Goldman. We were in grad school together. He is now an associate professor of Political science at George Washington University and he has a new book out which is called After Being American in an Age of Division. It's a really interesting reflection on the different ways that Americans have historically tried to make sense of their national identity, why none of them are quite coherent in themselves, and why we shouldn't give up on patriotism altogether. Anyway, it's quite an American focused conversation, but one that I think will resonate with many other democracies trying to figure out what the citizens have in common today. Sam Goldman, welcome to the podcast.

[Samuel Goldman]

Thank you for having me, Joscha.

[Yasha Monk]

I feel like I just pronounced your name in a very German way. Someone said Goldman rather than Goldman.

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, you know, when I lived in Germany, I always enjoyed receiving mail addressed to Herr Goldman with two N's, which I thought looked very distinguished. So I sometimes, sometimes toy with the idea of adding a letter to add to my cultural authority.

[Yasha Monk]

And then, of course, you have to go by Professor Dr. Goldman, as any good German academic would.

[Samuel Goldman]

I would not hesitate to do so.

[Yasha Monk]

Well, we're starting to speak about Germany. I grew up in Germany and I'm Jewish. And so sort of a question of German patriotism and nationalism and whether I feel German has long been something I've been thinking about. You just wrote a book that's very surprising, I think, in many ways, which is that you are conservative. You're certainly not a Trumpy conservative, I guess I would say, I don't know if you call yourself that, a reasonably moderate conservative. And yet this is a book that in some ways criticizes or undermines the idea of modern patriotism, argues that there's really not a very coherent logic to a justification for it. Is that broadly right? And why do you think that?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, I don't think the book is critical of the idea of American patriotism. Quite the contrary. I see it as an act of patriotism and a defense of what I think is the most plausible and effective form of American patriotism. It is a criticism of the quest for a thicker conception of national identity, which is not something new. It predates the Trump moment and indeed predates the establishment of the United States, but is an enterprise which I think has generally been unsuccessful. And the book is a case for learning to live within the limits of a vast and extended republic that nevertheless protects the freedom, prosperity, and peace of most of its inhabitants remarkably well.

[Yasha Monk]

So let's go through those different attempts to try and define patriotism that you're critical of. And then I'd like to understand better how it is that you see the book as a case for patriotism nonetheless. So, as I remember your book, it has sort of three main conceptions or ideas of patriotism. One that is more religiously based, one that perhaps plays with the idea of a melting pot and identity, New American man. And then the third, which is more about civic values in the Constitution and civic patriotism. Let's start with the first. What role did that play in the formation of a country. And why is that an inadequate way of trying to define patriotism today?

[Samuel Goldman]

So the first model of the American nation that I discuss can be designated with the term covenant, which is obviously deeply resonant for religious reasons. And it designates the idea of a national community bound both by a shared commitment to government and also to some degree, by ethnic homogeneity on the model of the biblical Hebrews. This is an idea that we are familiar with from the Puritan tradition and that in the later 18th century, was nationalized. Originally, it was a way of understanding the purpose and meaning of New England, but it came to be seen as a vision of American national unity. And in many ways, I'm admiring of this enterprise, which has remained an inspiration to intellect and to the arts for the last 250 years. But I think that it was too narrow religiously and too regionally specific to serve as a common culture for the new country, for the United States. And in the book, I try to describe how, after a peak of influence in the 1790s and really the first decade of the American republic, it gradually receded, first from electoral politics, as New England lost population and influence relative to Southern and Western states, and eventually in culture as well as the old Puritan Anglo Protestant identity simply became too narrow to describe most of the citizens of a much more diverse country.

[Yasha Monk]

So what does it mean when you reject one of those conceptions? That's something that perhaps we'll come back to towards the end of a conversation about patriotism. I mean, do you have a notion of an overlapping consensus, as John Rawls might have put it, where, you know, it's okay if different people come at patriotism from different angles? And for some people, something like the covenant continues to inform them in their understanding of what America is, but it can't sort of be the agreed upon basis of our common identity? Or do you think that actually, because of these limits, it really can't play any significant role at all in our thinking of what America is? Almost specifically in the thinking of most citizens of what America is, I think

[Samuel Goldman]

the covenant can and does remain an inspiration and reminder of what a thicker and more demanding sense of national community might look like. And it has, as I've described briefly, great historical importance? I don't think that it can serve as a widely shared basis for social or political cohesion. If people do adhere to it, I think that's fine. And I don't reject either this or the other models of patriotism in the book. For those to whom they appeal. But I think the practical value of the Covenant in particular is very limited, partly because the old Anglo Protestant cultural and ethnic community that developed it has almost vanished. You know, the old Yankees or wasps are no longer a coherent force on the national scene, but also because even among the religiously devout, the particular forms of theology that underpin the covenantal vision of nationalism are simply not very widespread. So, you know, you refer to Rawls and overlapping consensus. Sure, if people have different reasons to come to the same conclusion, that's well and good. But I don't think that the Covenant can provide the sort of binding influence that either its original advocates in the 17th and 18th century hoped, or figures like Robert Bella, who tried to revive it in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that it might.

[Yasha Monk]

I think, in a way, by the way, this is a hopeful story, which is to say that a lot of people at the moment believe that America is incapable of changing the darker aspect of its past, somehow define its present, and therefore predetermine its future, or that the country is incapable of dealing with real transitions of power. And I think the really remarkable loss of power and influence of the old WASP elite is a sign of the fact that the country does adapt to demographic change, that elites that once used to be in charge are capable of tolerating losing a lot of that power, and that none of that goes very easily, but that there is in fact precedent for it. At some point during the presidential transition, I was trying to think of who the most senior ranking WASP in American government was going to be once Joe Biden took office. This is a few months ago, and I haven't quite thought about the question since. But even today it's not clear to me who it would be. I think it may be Mitch McConnell, who's now only the Senate Minority leader, and even he is only WASP in a very expanded sense of that definition. He's a white Anglo Saxon Protestant, but he very much is not a descendant of the sort of traditional WASP elite from New England that dominated so much of the country's politics, culture and economics for the first hundred or so years of its existence. So how do you think we should feel about the decline of waspermark?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, I find a certain irony in the fact that the most prominent scholars and in certain ways advocates of the covenantal vision in the 20th century, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, were descendants of the so called new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who upheld this image long after it had lost its relevance to the class and milieu that had generated it. It was figures like the American studies scholar Sakvan Berkovitsch who popularized the idea of the Covenant as the master key to American national identity. I think there's something to mourn or if not altogether lament in the decline of the WASP elite. It was a class that had its virtues, and that in certain positions was very successful. But I agree with you that America has changed, and one of the arguments of the book, and one of the limitations of the Covenant in particular, is that it's focused on origins in a way that can't account for difference and development, even in ways that were unforeseen or unintended.

[Yasha Monk]

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[Yasha Monk]

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[Samuel Goldman]

So the melting pot is associated with the new immigration of the early 20th century, but that's something of an anachronism. The image actually emerges in the late 18th and early 19th century, and it's focused not in the port and industrial cities of the east, but rather in the West. And the idea, which is closely associated with a Jeffersonian agrarian perspective, is that people from all over the world will come to America, they will move to the west, they will mix their lab with the soil and they will transform themselves into a distinctive American people. And this is importantly different to the covenant because where the covenant emphasizes the past and the role of the Puritan fathers of great founders, the crucible shifts the focus of national identity into the future. So Americans are not yet a people the way the French or the English or the other great nations of Europe are peoples, but they will be in the future partly as a result of cultural fusion under the pressure of frontier conditions. Theodore Roosevelt wrote about this in many of his books, but also as a result of ethnic or biological mixtures of their blood in a way that I think is uncomfortable for many of us today.

[Yasha Monk]

So what you're saying is that when we talk about the melting pot, it's a very unpopular idea today to some extent in the public, but certainly among academics. You know, when you read something about mark national identity, there's always this sort of obligatory riff rant about this idea of a melting pot, which means that all immigrants have to completely shed their cultural origins. And it's sort of, in my mind, it looks like a sort of 1950s, 1960s American living room where people are watching television and having TV dinners and they're all sort of cookie cutter. And so it's a rejection of that because that doesn't allow for the kind of diversity that America has. And because, frankly, it would be a pretty sad vision of what America might look like. It's not a particularly vibrant, interesting or rich idea, certainly, if you follow this metaphor, the TV dinners in the sort of 1950s living room. Now, it's not clear to me that that historically has been what the idea of a melting pot is. My concern about it comes more from the actual play by Israel Tangwal, which popularized that name, which actually is a love story of ill fated lovers. It turns out that this Jew from Russia and this aristocratic Russian who fall in love share a very violent history in which her father has killed his family and a lot of other people. And this is not an ahistorical vision of everything is fine and we shed the history completely. It is a heroic call to overcome the enmities and the feuds and the massacres and the murders of the old country in order to share what we have in common. So it's actually, I think, a morally very rousing vision, very difficult one, and one that I think ultimately is unconvincing, but rather different from the sort of 1950s, 1960s TV dinners. Now, I hear you saying even that is actually a sort of limited vision of what the melting pot is really. When you go back 100 years there's already a kind of vision of a crucible, and that's even more ethnic than something like Tzangvalo would talk about.

[Samuel Goldman]

Yeah, I mean, the striking thing to me about Zangle's play is that the melting pot, even though it serves as the title, is actually not the dominant metaphor. The image to which Zangle keeps returning is a symphony. It's a musical composition that David, the male romantic lead, is composing, and that's actually quite different to what the melting pot was usually understood to represent. Initially, the melting pot meant all of these different cultures, and again, all of these different ethnic backgrounds went in and came out the same. Zanguil is describing something different, which is also found in the work of pluralist theorists like Horace callan and also W.E.B. du Bois, which is the idea that you can have all of these different contributions that remain distinct but nevertheless contribute to a sort of broader harmony. So just like a musical composition, the different instruments, the different sections of the orchestra are all playing different things. They're not all playing one tune, and yet the result is greater than the sum of its parts.

[Yasha Monk]

So I guess my question would be, how do you feel about that idealized understanding of what this metaphor might be? Why shouldn't we say, look, whatever people fought in the beginning of the 19th century, or whatever demands people might have made at certain points in American post war culture in the 50s and 60s for conformity, that was a mistake. But the idea of the symphony composed of different voices that Sangwol has, or the idea of perhaps a melting pot culturally, where we do have some form of common American culture, but it is really composed of contributions of people from all kinds of different places and is able to incorporate those influences on ongoing basis. Why isn't that a satisfactory rendition of American identity in your mind?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, I think that is the most appealing of the three, although I argue that it's really not the melting pot, which stands for something different. What you're describing seems much more similar to me to what I call creedal nationalism, which develops theoretically and institutionally in the early 20th century, even though it draws on much old sources.

[Yasha Monk]

And so this is the third notion.

[Samuel Goldman]

That's right. And the creed suggests, more or less, as you're describing, that Americans will retain significantly distinct cultural, ethnic and religious identities, but they can cooperate in a way that yields goods of beauty and order that would not be immediately obvious. And I think that when we talk about American nationalism today, we are almost always talking about some version of this creedal image, the melting pot, as it was historically understood has dropped largely out of favor. As you say, the covenant is a somewhat limited scholarly fixation. It's the creed that attracts our interest and I think mostly our loyalty today.

[Yasha Monk]

It seems to me, certainly right again in sort of broader intellectual and journalistic circles, that you should either reject patriotism or nationalism altogether as a anachronistic, backward looking vision that is unjust and prioritizing some people over others. And all the sort of obvious criticisms you can make of these forms of national collective attachment, or you give a defense of it, which is creedal or civic in that way, which says, look, as long as your American identity is a commitment to the ideals expressed in the American Constitution, even though we've never quite lived up to them, that can give us a kind of guiding light towards the future. And so it's fine to be a patriotic American. If by that what you mean is wanting to live a society in which everybody actually has access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why is it that you think that is incapable of really explaining and representing American identity today?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, it's not that I think it's incapable of doing so, but rather that we need to sever the political and moral argument from a particular historical narrative, which one encounters in various forms that claims that the United States was founded as a creedal nation. And of course, there were setbacks and contradictions, but they were all inevitably worked out over time, leading us to our present condition of enlightenment. I just don't think that that's true historically. The credo vision that I largely accept is a possibility that we can and I think ought to pursue. But it is not an historical reality that has been present with us from the origin.

[Yasha Monk]

So at what point did it develop, and why should we worry about that? Why does it matter that it wasn't there from the beginning?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, it develops, at least in theory, from early stages of American political history. And the creedal narrative always depends heavily on documents like the Declaration of Independence and also formal rhetoric, set speeches given by presidents and other statesmen. And I don't deny any of that they said what they said in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it is really only in the 20th century that I think as a coherent theory of what it means to be an American and to be institutionalized as something like an official philosophy. And by that I mean reproduced in textbooks, in popular culture, used as the basis for legislation and so on. And that happens largely because of the pressure of the Second World War, which encouraged, if it didn't force Americans to understand themselves in a way that was very different to the kinds of nationalism on display among our enemies. So this isn't an idea that was invented in the 20th century. Far from it. But I think it's in the 20th century, and particularly the middle of the 20th century, that it comes to be a widely shared default understanding of what it means to be American in a way that it wasn't earlier.

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[Yasha Monk]

That's very interesting historical context, and it helps to change my thinking on this question somewhat. But why should that matter? Why is the fact that it actually arose to some extent in the middle of the 20th century in response to World War II, limiting to the role it should play today? Why is somebody like Barack Obama or somebody like George W. Bush, both of whom I think in different ways, appealed strongly to civic patriotism, mistaking and making that the sort of center of attention for a vision of what American patriotism is and should be?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, I think the two challenges for the Creed arose in the middle of the 20th century, and we've never really been able to get past either of them. One was the challenge of race, which continues to define many of our political debates today. So the Creed was associated with a kind of moderate reformist liberalism, which acknowledged that there was injustice, there was exclusion of African Americans, but argued that American institutions could slowly be brought in line with creedal principles without doing violence to any of them. And that proved to be very difficult. And we can discuss now or another occasion the sort of trajectory of the civil rights movement as moderate reformist policies became less satisfactory to people who demanded equal treatment for black citizens. And some of them even concluded that the idea of equal treatment is itself incoherent and is counterproductive. I think that's where our present debates about critical race theory, so called, come from. The other challenge is that, as I described, the Creed was very closely bound up with a particular conception of America's international role as the leader of the free world, as the bastion of liberty and equality. And that was an easy thing to believe during World War II and perhaps in the early Cold War. It became much harder in the midst of the Vietnam War and a series of subsequent international conflicts. So I think where we are today is a sort of admiration for the creed in principle, but discomfort with the political and institutional conditions that upheld it. And that's why we see political figures, presidents and others continually invoking the same documents, same principles and the same figures. And yet it never seems to generate the unity and solidarity that we want or that we think we remember from the past.

[Yasha Monk]

So I have a chapter on patriotism in my next book. And I also point out the limitations of civic patriotism. Now, to me, civic patriotism is very powerful. And certainly my American identity, I think, is in many ways a civic one. It is my appreciation for the principles of the American founding and the fact that I still retain some hope that America is more likely to live up to the. Than other countries in the world. That made me so interested in living here in the first place. And that made me happy and proud to join this political experiment fully as a citizen. At the same time, it just seems to me unrealistic to think that most citizens of United States, or most citizens of any modern contemporary polity, put so much importance in political ideals, but so much importance in documents like the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, in politics at all, in driving principles of a country's political self. Understanding. But that helps descriptively to explain what makes them proud of a country. What makes people willing to sign up for the army and defend the country after an attack like 9 11. What makes them cheer for somebody from geographically very far away, who may come from a different race and religion at the Olympics because they compete under the same flag. And so to me, the objection to not so patriotism itself, but to the role it can potentially play in a society has more to do with the extent to which it is potentially going to be taken up than it does with any inherent internal contradictions. How different is your view on this? Do you think I'm really missing something, or is this just a different way of framing much the same thing?

[Samuel Goldman]

I'm very sympathetic to those objections. My question is really what the alternative is. Particularly if we are not willing to engage in the kind of systematic and often coercive manipulation of national culture that characterized the wartime mobilizations of the 20th century. Civic nationalism or patriotism is thin. It can be unsatisfactory. And I don't think that it plays the sort of definitive psychological role for many people that one might think based on some of the discussions of these issues. But there are 330 or more million people of very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds in this country that spans a continent and more. And I'm just not sure that we can do a lot better than that in practice, at least, without adopting measures of centralized control that I at least would find frightening.

[Yasha Monk]

Those would be cures worse than the disease. In the language of American civic patriotism in the Federalist Papers. So I read your book in draft form, and when I did that, I got the impression that there isn't really a very clear answer to the problems that you're posing. That by deconstructing the three cases that people have historically made for different ways of understanding American identity and patriotism, we're left slightly wringing our hands and saying, well, so perhaps the whole enterprise is a little futile. I understand now from this conversation that either I misunderstood the draft or you've changed your mind since. But what do we do going forward for those of us who think that it is important for precisely a huge diverse nation to find something on which we can rally around, something on which we can agree, something, by the way, that makes it easier to say, look, we may have these differences of race and religion, other things, but I still owe you a duty of solidarity. I owe you consideration precisely because we're both Americans. What can the basis of that be?

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, I think, somewhat counterintuitively, that we need to encourage and protect institutions that can embody and cultivate a more limited sense of identity and solidarity, and that will allow us to see better what are the things that we truly have in common. I think the problem with consensus seeking patriotism is that we look for things everyone agrees on and there's a short list and it doesn't tell us very much, and that's unsatisfying. I think that it's only through religious and local and interest based associations that we can figure out who we really are. And once we have a sense of who we are, we can determine how we relate to others with whom we have some things in common. We are fellow citizens and we have certain cultural similarities, but not all of them. So whereas conventional appeals to patriotism or nationalism have this top down quality that I think makes them thin and unsatisfactory, I'm much more interested in finding ways that we can pursue and realize disagreement as a serious and legitimate feature of American life, rather than dismissing it in pursuit of some evanescent similarity.

[Yasha Monk]

So that sounds very appealing to me, but it sounds a little abstract. What does it mean to take disagreement as One of the fundamental building blocks of. Of what it is to be American, or how is it that those different organizations you invoked, from civic to religious organizations all over the country actually add up to a form of commonality? Because often they precisely emphasize what makes us different from each other, not always in a problematic way. It lies in the nature of religion to say we are one religious community and we disagree with the other religious communities. There's nothing inherently worrisome about it, but it's hard to see how it can provide a fulcrum for some form of recognition that we have things in common, no matter how thin that notion may be.

[Samuel Goldman]

Well, I think that reflection on differences is often helpful for discovering which things we truly do have in common and which we don't. So I'm teaching a seminar on nationalism this week, and among other things, I'll be teaching the historian Bill Maclay's essay America, Idea or Nation? And one of the things he points out, which I think is correct, is that contrary to what you would think, it's often people who are most closely engaged with and identified with a religious community, a town or region or labor union or other interest based association who are also most patriotic about America as a whole. You would think that would be a paradox, but in practice it actually isn't. And again, I am less worried about difference pulling us apart when it is embodied by and structured by institutions. The problem arises when we're simply yelling at each other on social media.

[Yasha Monk]

Why does that make a difference? Why is it a problem when people yell at each other on social media, but we shouldn't worry about it when it is, for example, different activist groups coming together, but really in pursuit of shouting at each other.

[Samuel Goldman]

So two differences. First, I think it's very important psychologically and sociologically that we do things in person and face to face. The abstraction of social media encourages irresponsibility and heightened rhetoric of a kind that is much more difficult when you actually have to look at the people you are talking to. The other is that institutions of this kind are responsible for delivering results. They promise something to those who participate, and presumably if they don't provide the good, they will lose their participation and support. So again, I think that on the level of rhetoric, it's very easy to disagree and to yell at each other and to denounce each other. But when you actually have to do things for particular people, there are much greater incentives, if there are no guarantees, to engage in the kind of pragmatic negotiation and compromise that is necessary to our institutions. And if There is a sort of background intuition to the book. It's that, like it or not, and not everyone has liked it, the United States is not a classic nation state and can't be governed like one. So here we are, we're stuck. It's our job to make the best of it.

[Yasha Monk]

What about an alternative way of trying to emphasize some of the things that Americans do have in common, which is that for all of our huge cultural diversity, as well as ethnic and religious diversity, to somebody who comes to the United States for the first time, or for somebody who, like me, has moved to the United states in their 20s, it is actually striking how much the country does have in common. It seems to me that despite globalization and the slight dampening of cultural differences across the world that it has brought about, the differences between France and Germany remain really very striking. The differences between France and the United Kingdom remain really very striking. And frankly, the differences between United Kingdom and the United States remain very, very striking as well. There's a kind of line of criticism from some authors who say all of the elites have become citizens of nowhere. And when you talk to an investment banker or somebody, really, they have nothing in common of their compatriots, but they'd be just as happy living in Hong Kong or Delhi or London as they would be in their home country. And while I think that there are some people within that elite circle of whom that is true, it is striking that it actually remains untrue in my mind. Even of the majority of are, for example, investment bankers who really do want to live in their own country, who, even if they are willing to live in a different country for a job opportunity for a little while, feel the cultural differences very acutely. And so, you know, I am wondering at the moment whether we aren't underplaying the cultural basis of patriotism around the world, but in the United States in particular. And that doesn't mean that we need to look back to the Mayflower in the way that covenant conception of American patriotism may have done. It certainly doesn't mean that we should try to homogenize American culture in the way that at least that version of a melting pot idea did. But it is to recognize that actually Americans do have a lot of things from verbal usage. Despite the regional and ethnic variety of different Englishes that are spoken in the country, there is a recognizable American English to the cultural script of how you encounter somebody in the street, what it looks like to order a drink in a bar in the United States versus a pub in England. It seems to me, there's actually a lot more cultural overlap and similarity within the country than Americans often think. And that what makes people love America, what actually phenomenologically, descriptively gives people the sense of common identity and solidarity, is the recognition that in their lived experience of their neighborhood, of their city, of the countryside around them, there is something there to be celebrated, which they share with a lot of their fellow citizens.

[Samuel Goldman]

I largely agree with that, but I don't see that as incompatible with anything that I've said. I mean, I think. I think one difference between us may be that I see more variation among American cultures than maybe you do. Although I think it's true that they're not geographically separated in the easy way that they were in the past. They tend to be layered. So you have several different American cultures in very close physical proximity. But I also think that it is precisely a more limited and civic or patriotic conception of American identity that allows those things to flourish. And I am very glad this may be a confirmation of your point. I am very glad that we don't have a Ministry of Education, as they do in France, that dictates what schoolbooks are used in every schoolhouse in the country.

[Yasha Monk]

Yeah, I agree that my point is a corrective to how we think and talk about patriotism. And it's a reason to be more optimistic about the persistence of a non noxious form of American patriotism. I don't think it's very useful as a prescription. I don't think it follows from that. But we should try and strengthen people's cultural scripts or that we should say, you know, here in America we do things this way and anybody who doesn't, you know, there's something wrong with them. And we're going to teach you that in some kind of way in school or, you know, on television. And all of that seems like a very, very bad idea to me. But I guess the importance of this beyond academic interest is that you've written a book about the successive notions of American patriotism and why none of them have been entirely satisfactory. It seems to me, until you have done more research on this. So you'll tell me whether that hunch is true, that one might also write a book about the successive crises of American identity and the fears that have persisted in the country from the beginning, that because we don't have a coherent conception of patriotism, the country is going to fall apart. But actually we really don't have anything in common that the idea of the Founding Fathers to build this incredibly territorially large state with as it turned out, a lot of different cultures and religions and so on. We'll just always run the risk of the centrifugal forces winning out over the centripetal ones. And I guess it seems to me that there isn't very much evidence of that, actually in American history. Now, of course, we did have a civil war, and we had moments in which the unity of the American polity was very much threatened. But that, interestingly, was over political as much as over cultural disputes. Right. I mean, it was over the persistence of slavery, which is obviously bound up with culture and demography in very obvious ways. But it was nevertheless a political dispute rather than one as we're seeing it in the United Kingdom, for example, where it's a question of Scotland saying, actually, culturally we're different from the rest of the country and we want to break up the United Kingdom because we want to be on our own. That, to me, is a much more cultural form that an independence movement takes.

[Samuel Goldman]

I'm not sure that's true historically. Certainly there were Southerners who considered themselves Southern nationalists or Southern patriots who sincerely believed that the south had a distinct culture that was not limited to a clash of economic interests. There's been some very interesting scholarship about that. I don't write about it much in the book because I don't think it has much purchase for us today. But I agree that the history of American national identity is a history of rediscovery and reinvention, often under the pressure of necessity. And in that respect, I think contrary to the title, which might lead some readers to think I'm saying that nationalism is over. I'm somewhat of an optimist, but I think that it's through a thinner and more political understanding of what makes us American that we open up the possibilities for these rediscoveries and reinventions to take place. And they often do that in unforeseen and unexpected ways.

[Yasha Monk]

Let me broaden out the question at the end to ask you about how your reading of the history of patriotism makes you think about the present state of America. We are at a moment of ongoing political crisis. We are certainly in a moment of very deep lack of mutual comprehension. You know, two consolidated political tribes that really hate each other quite deeply. And if there's one thing I worry about today in terms of American identity, it is not whether we have anything in common. It is not whether we're going to have regional independent movements in Texas that rival the ones we're seeing in Catalonia and Spain, or in Scotland and The United Kingdom. It is whether our inability to afford each other empathy and sympathy, our inability to see each other as citizens, that can be decent parts of a common polity, isn't going to push us to ever more dangerous forms of political conflict. And so do share that fear. And is there something that your model of patriotism can do to contain that risk of fracture?

[Samuel Goldman]

I do share that fear, but I think I would direct the causal arrow in the opposite way. I don't think that our institutions are threatened because we have an insufficient sense of social and cultural solidarity. I think it's rather the other way around. Our institutional failure is encouraging and putting pressure on those cleavages, and in particular, the centralization of authority in the national government and in the executive branch in particular, drives the sense that every political conflict is an existential one that depends on the occupant of the White House. I just don't think our institutions can bear that pressure. I think, and it may be too optimistic, but I don't really see the alternative, that a renewed commitment to the authority of Congress, which is designed to deal with these sorts of disputes much more than the executive branches, to federalism, which allows states to pursue their own course in a range of matters on which national consensus is impossible, and to local government and voluntary association, would relieve some of that pressure and make it easier again for us to see ourselves as fellow citizens and as sharing certain, but not all, interests. So my approach suggests that we really need to focus on the political institutions rather than the culture, and that if we get the institutions right, then the culture will to some degree follow. And in that respect, I think of myself as really thinking constitutionally, not in the historical sense of trying to figure out exactly what Hamilton or Madison or any of the others were trying to do, but rather following their suggestion that the only way to organize an extended republic on this scale is through the setup of its political institutions, rather than through the kind of top down uniform cultural formation that would become much more common in Europe.

[Yasha Monk]

I think this answer actually has helped me understand the point you were making earlier about local associations and local organization. Why that's part of. Of the answer. As a final question, I'd love to know what role this leaves for the individual. If the solution to our problem is institutional and if we don't really need to have a coherent American patriotism in the kind of way that those three old models put forward, what does that mean about how you would encourage listeners, if they happen to be American, to construct their own American identity, their own American patriotism? And if they are feeling patriotic about the country and they want to help alleviate some of those fishes you're talking about, what would be a good patriotic way of doing that?

[Samuel Goldman]

I think the best thing that people can do is to participate in the kinds of local and voluntary associations that I've been describing. I truly believe that whether it is a political party or running for local office, participating in a church or other religious community, it is only by living and working together with other Americans that we can recover a sense of shared responsibility and shared enterprise. None of us is going to succeed in solving the problem on the grand scale. All that we can do is contribute to its solution, or at least to its management, for ourselves and for people that we actually know.

[Yasha Monk]

Sam Goldman thank you so much for

coming on the podcast.

[Samuel Goldman]

Thanks Yasha. It's been a pleasure.

[Yasha Monk]

Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight.

Lots of listeners have been spreading the

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[Samuel Goldman]

this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song

[Yasha Monk]

Chess Pieces

[Samuel Goldman]

Foreign

[Yasha Monk]

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