For I do not conceive that we are more inspired — have more wisdom — or possess more virtue than those who will come after us. The power under the Constitution will always be with the people.

George Washington

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Thomas Jefferson

It is not for the dead to give laws to the living.

John Adams

The passages above help to highlight the irony of Americans forever looking backward in gauzy nostalgia, as the founders themselves looked forward to the wisdom of future generations. This tendency to idolize the past is ultimately the familiar American refusal to actually see the people themselves as the foundation of good government and a good society, even though Hobbes, Locke, and other Enlightenment thinkers, the founders included, based their revolutionary thinking on just such a belief.

As Thomas Frank noted recently, the strange fusion of a nostalgically-warmed past with a rosy but forever-fleeting, wondrous future (a la Disney’s worlds and lands of tomorrow) began under Reagan, and like much else in the 80s, it is a plug and platform for consumption: patriotic, old-timey products combined with cutting-edge doodads of the future, all on offer from the nation’s finest vendors.

What gets disappeared in this reveling in nostalgic patriotism and breathless enthusiasm over the glittering future is the present, the actual nitty-gritty of dealing with the people as they exist right now, in all of our grubbiness, limitation, and mortal fallibility. Even the American Dream itself is a deferred entity, forever focused on the precious future generations and potentialities for growth, but brushing aside those millions who are getting crunched by the system right now.

This is a patriotism that loves God and Country, but holds actual people — all the people — in disdain and/or suspicion. What once seemed harmless under Grandpa Reagan, the smiling flag-hugging and joyful deregulation to allow the “business community” to create the wondrous neoliberal bounty for the future, has metastasized into a toxic, polarized version of American nationalism, where general misanthropy has become algorithm-tested and laser-focused on specific enemies within.

Why? Because there is not much actual substance to a free-floating patriotism that lionizes a past that was itself actually more forward-facing and optimistic about future generations. Slavery, of course, is the key vector here. Many of the founders, even some of the slaveholders, were themselves conflicted over the mismatch between universal freedom and dignity, as espoused in the Declaration of Independence, and the brutal and dehumanizing bondage of chattel slavery.

This gave some of the most famous founders a kind of wistful guilt, a sheepish recognition and subdued hope that their peculiar institution would or should wither away as the ideal of American freedom spread. Some of the founders would end up freeing slaves, but often only near death or in their wills, a contrite but stubbornly-late gesture, a commentary of action on the physical and spiritual damage that slavery was inflicting on our hallowed origins.

The current essence of Trumpism and the Make America Great Again slogan itself (cribbed from Reagan) represent an explicit refusal to understand this forward-looking, but somewhat embarrassed nature of our founders. It is an angry scream of, “No, we don’t need to work to get better, and we don’t need to acknowledge our common humanity! We must return to that time when our founding fathers were holy and blameless, the most unapologetically American of all Americans ever!“

This is why there is so much conservative rage over things like Critical Race Theory, DEI, feminism, acknowledgement of the Indian genocide, accepting the brutality and moral wrongness of slavery, and even the trans wars. These things all challenge the Edenic vision of the United States as the salvation of humanity, the earthly incarnation of the divine.

Basically, we’re talking about a religious vs. nonreligious understanding of nature and history. The religious mind doesn’t cope with change very well. It wants static models of unchanging goodness: an eternal God, the Chosen People, Constitutional original intent, beatified founders, City on a Hill origin stories, heroic patriots and soldiers. And in our dualistic Christian heritage, the controlling motif is always good vs. evil, with the righteous forever blameless (or easily rehabilitated from egregious sin via a tearful repentance), and the benighted enemy ever-changing on their merry-go-round of iniquity (atheism, child-grooming and pedophilia, baby murder, sodomy, laziness, elitism (book-learnin’), or speaking Spanish).

This is why, in the US at least, patriotism feels either embarrassingly trivial, due to over-commercialization (tri-color bunting at all used car dealerships), or sickeningly tribal (the bad form of tribal we covered last time). The love of country has been fused to a frozen idea Good vs. Evil, and our patriotism is often intensified in direct proportion to how much we currently hate our enemies, both foreign and (especially) domestic.

The truly righteous alternative to a shoddy patriotism like this is a messy amalgam of universal love (yah, I know, the hippie Jesus was a drag), an understanding and acceptance of the ever-evolving nature of society and its constituent people, and a firm dedication to actually caring for our particular places, including all the human and nonhuman inhabitants, as well as the natural systems and processes that keep up alive.

Because the United States is so young and diverse, lacking the centuries and millennia of continuous cultural development that older societies have, we overcompensate by loudly and proudly trumpeting our greatness at every opportunity. But this boasting is ultimately tautological. If you ask people on the street, “What makes America great?,” the answer is something like, “Well, it’s our greatness itself, that’s what! We’re the greatest country in the world…really just… because.”

The result is a shabby and vacuous patriotism, where people don’t actually know much about the content of our national history, all the complex confrontations and compromises that established our government and nation. Rather, the litmus test of American patriotism is not how much you have learned about the realities behind and underneath our history and present, but how loudly you can shout our greatness, and how aggressively you can dehumanize and disqualify those who aren’t “American enough,” usually because of their color, their religion or non-religion, or simply because they prefer reflective thinking instead of reflexive genuflection.

When nationalism fuses with dualistic religion, and is then accelerated by the plutocratic capture of government, the outcome is the poisonous polarization we have right now, where millions of people profess love of country but also express hatred of different millions of their fellow citizens in that same country. And needless to say, this is also fertile ground for all the worst things we see from the current Trump regime: erasure of inconvenient history, shredding of institutions (especially those that aid the enemy within), delight in cruelty, grift on an epic scale (swept under the rug because it’s done by the ‘good guys’), goose-stepping authoritarianism, and the embrace of delusional worldviews that become more fantastical as the stubborn realities of ecological collapse and economic implosion continue to unfold.

As mentioned last time (link above), Marx’s idea of historical materialism is perhaps the most important concept that we have ever had in social science, but we continue to ignore it, to our peril. Nothing good will come out of our current situation until we recognize that we have created, mostly by accident or indifference, crummy physical places and unjust economic spaces, out of which our shoddy ideologies and sham patriotism have emerged.

Until we rebuild those spaces and places from the ground up, giving actually-living people a better life right now, then we will not embody a genuine, full-spectrum love of place, country, and humanity.