Ideas - Loving Your Country in the 21st Century (Step Three)

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Patriotism’s back in style. Along with it comes reasonable questions about when a love of your country is a good thing, and when it can lead you astray. Our series on the art of national pride continues with IDEAS producer Tom Howell gathering insights from Afghans, Israelis, and Americans in hopes of finding the key to doing patriotism right.

Scott Payne spent nearly two decades working undercover as a biker, a neo-Nazi, a drug dealer, and a killer. But his last big mission at the FBI was the wildest of all. I have never had to burn baubles. I have never had to burn an American flag. And I damn sure was never with a group of people that stole a goat, sacrificed it in a pagan ritual, and drank its blood. And I did all that in about three days with these guys. Listen to Agent Palehorse, the second season of White Hot Hate, available now. This is a CBC podcast.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Today, the return of loving your country. Choosing whose side you're on. Raising a flag and doing your duty. Here in Canada, even in areas of society where the spirit had dwindled, it's back. Across the country we are seeing waves of Canadian pride. All of the country's living former prime ministers are urging Canadians to raise the red maple

leaf. Joe Clark, Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper telling Canadians to show the flag as never before. I've worked here for almost 30 years and I don't ever recall a flag day as busy as this. What are the customers telling you when they come into the store? They're basically saying that they want to support our country. That's going to get me emotional. To see all of these, like, so the best of the best Canadians all coming together on the same team,

you can't be anything but patriotic. Are they feeling patriotic? Are they feeling upset? Both. patriotic or they feeling upset, both. The resurrection of Canada's national spirit is, of course, a response to a threat from the outside. Mexico too is seeing a surge of nationalism, likewise brought on by threats from the US president. Generally, this part of the story, the way we pull together as a country,

is the good news, the silver lining. But there are those, perhaps due to life experience or family history, or just having a certain cast of mind whose thoughts go to the dangers of nationalism and its close ideological cousins. Xenophobia, suppression of dissent, cruelty to minority groups. Nations are in this way dangerous. Speaking on another episode of Ideas, the writer Adam Gopnik pointed out how in the

past the structure of the unified nation state has pushed humans toward their most shameful behaviors. Nomads and tribes tend to fight each other for goods, but not to exterminate each other out of principle. The fight first to enlarge our circle of compassion, and then again not to become entrapped in that enlargement, is exactly the fight of patriotism against nationalism. patriotism against nationalism. Saying that, Adam Gopnik casts patriotism as something to be proud of and nationalism something to be ashamed of. He puts a true patriot's love into combat against a country's greatest sins rather than trying to ignore them. Simple enough as a concept.

In practice, not always easy to agree what it means. It's the tension explored in our series, Loving Your Country in the 21st Century, by ideas producer Tom Howell. Today's episode is the third and final in the series. Tom's calling it, step three, putting pride above shame. The winter of 2025 in Montreal was profoundly snowy. I seized my chance many times

to go out walking in a snowstorm. Inclement weather is a great stimulus to one's mind and spirits. On one occasion it was the American spirit that got particularly stimulated. I found that I was humming that country's national anthem, although there was something different about the tune. Maybe the dramatic weather, maybe the politics of the time, I'd begun singing it in a minor key.

No offense to our American listeners, but truth be told, the tunes much improved sung this way. Sadder but wiser. More fitting for a country that's old enough to grow up a bit. In fact, I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but their song really comes alive when it's performed in Russian. Once imagination is an unruly place and it can do very silly things, it can also be a venue of the utmost seriousness, a battleground of images. Benedict Anderson made this clear in the 1980s with his famous definition of the nation as an imagined community. I picked it very carefully. If you say imaginary, it means invented. It means it's like a unicorn or something like this, something that we know clearly isn't the case. It's purely symbolic in that sense.

The importance of imagined, I think, is that it's both real and fictional at the same time. And as we all know, we are the first to see the light. Anderson told us a nation exists not just in territory and flesh, but in spirit, the private mind, and the hazy but somehow meaningful visions we share. We are the first to see the light. And as we all know, we are the first to see the light. Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. How we imagine our national spirit is something political leaders care a great deal about. Some have had a particular knack for bringing that spirit alive.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. President John Kennedy's immortal words. He, too, prompted his audience to exercise their musical imaginations. Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need, not as a call to battle, though in battle we are, but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. Sadly, some of his words in that inauguration speech turned out to be a bit less immortal than we'd hoped.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. But nobody bats a hundred. His bet about the tiger still stands up. Remember that in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

If only he'd warned us the tiger might also try to eat those sitting beside it, politely selling it aluminum. Kennedy's call to ask what you can do for your country makes a couple of heavy implications. One, that there is something significant you can do for your country, and whatever it is, it's something you can't just read off a government website. It's something you figure out, seemingly through introspection.

If the answer is to be found within, much then depends not only on how you imagine your country, but also the emotions you attach to that image. And how your country behaves may well, at this level, change what you think your country is. Hi, I'm Daniella Tolchinsky. I'm a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm sitting with Daniella in the hallway of a hotel in Blacksburg, Virginia.

She just delivered a talk at the Association for Political Theory conference. Her topic? Israel's conversion from Oslo to Gaza. I'm from New York. I grew up in New York, in the suburbs of New York City. I grew up in a conservative Jewish community, conservative capital C, and went to Jewish day school and in college I studied political science, studied international studies. I started thinking a little bit more critically about the underlying political thought

and assumptions embedded in underlying political thought that like structured our world, our conceptions of justice. And through that process and also just from meeting people, reading in college, got involved in anti-occupation activism around Israel and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and got really involved and loved it, was really invigorated by being active in those politics. And after college decided to move to Israel to work for an organization to do anti-occupation politics and my job for

three years was to bring American college students to the West Bank to encounter the political reality there. Bring them? What does that mean? I ran tours essentially. The operating logic was that if folks go there, see the reality of what's happening, meet people from different sides of the political spectrum, they'll come away with an understanding that will motivate them to also be anti-occupation. Daniela has a lot of reasons to care about Israel's security. On my mom's side of the family, both of her parents are Holocaust survivors. One of them made her way to Israel after her family survived. The other, much of his family did, but he made his way to New York. My mom ended up being born and raised in New York. But frankly, a lot of it had to do with my dad's side of the family story.

My dad's from Argentina, and his siblings were deeply involved in political activism against the military dictatorship that was ruling the country in the 70s and 80s, and they suffered political persecution because of that. My dad's brother and sister and each of their spouses were taken by the military regime. Three out of the four of them were what's typically referred to as disappeared. My name is Danielle after my uncle Daniel, who was disappeared by the Argentine military. His sister, thankfully, made it out after two years in detention. And my dad, along with the remainder of his family who were able to, fled to Israel. They're Jews.

My dad, I think, was given three days' notice. He was 15. He was a lot younger than his siblings who were politically active. And his parents... Sorry, given three days' notice by... By his parents, who basically looked at him and said, you know, this is where we're sending you. It's the only way to keep you safe.

So he ended up living there for high school and college. He went to the U.S., met my mom there, and so he stayed for graduate school. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] Her dad's escape to Israel, as you'd expect, formed a big part of what that country meant in Daniela's family. Israel was positioned as this salvatore entity, right?

Like it's this thing without which we, being specifically members of my family, but also Jews globally, ostensibly aren't safe. That's the sort of operating logic. You know, that narrative becomes really salient when it's the place to which my dad and lots of members of my family escaped. And then in college, encountering the tension

between that narrative and the notion that that safety comes at the expense of an entire people, and also questioning what that safety actually is, what do we mean by safe when we say it, those questions started to arise and I'm still struggling with them. started to arise and I'm still struggling with them. And her questioning has led Daniela to dispute some pretty fundamental claims. Most simply, the notion that Judaism requires national sovereignty, that's brand new, right? This sort of notion that there was always a longing for Jerusalem, there was always a longing for Zion, absolutely, in traditional texts. But the notion that that can be equivocated with a nation-state national sovereignty and

exclusive national sovereignty, that's a political phenomenon that's from the last 150 to 200 years. There are plenty of people, and to some extent I'm one of them, who argue that it's actually in tension with the tradition of Jewish thought that preceded the inception of Zionism. There's a field of scholarship called political theology. It's an approach to understanding politics through religious concepts or in relation to religious practice. Daniela's work builds on ideas from this field, like about the connection between Christianity

and the birth of modern liberal democratic nations. I ask if Zionism is a conversion of sorts from Judaism to something potentially more like a secularized version of a Christian theology. Are those are the terms in which I'm interested in asking about what is this thing that has come to be in a Zionist Israeli state. How would that work? How would it be a conversion? Let me think about how to best put this without just citing a whole bunch of scholars. But the notion that a secular nation state is the sort of telos, the end point of what a people should be and

should work towards. That idea is, in a sense, a secularized notion that comes from Christianity. The notion that a secular nation state, a secular democratic nation state, a secular liberal democratic nation state, all those things are inherent to Jewish thought by any means, definitely not from urbanic tradition. liberal democratic nation state, all those things are inherent to Jewish thought by any means. Definitely not from urbanic tradition that has been sort of the core of the Jewish people for the last many years. There's an argument to be made that exile and diasporism is actually sort of a core

tenet of Jewish thought and what it means to be a Jew in the world. There's sort of, particularly right now, a resurgence of diasporism and the necessity of exile and the place of these notions and these identity categories and their importance for what it means to inform a political tradition that might be more just. So diasporism is like saying I will continue to live in this sort of transnational community and that's I'm not on my way to something else. That's how it's going to be. Right, exactly. Or the something else that you're on the way to, perhaps is more metaphysical than physical. Yeah, I mean, most concretely what we can look back to is like the inception of Jewish rabbinics, like after Jews were expelled from

Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, after the fall of the second temple and the invasion of Rome. The question is like, okay, then how did Jews respond to that, right? Like, you had this moment of, quote, national sovereignty, of sovereignty of sorts of the Jewish people and a physical locus of where that was. Then there was expulsion. And the question is, okay, what kind of theological tradition got shaped in the aftermath of that? There's a great book called The Aftermath of Catastrophe, that's about that moment. And in the aftermath of catastrophe, there's a tradition that the rabbis shape that is centered on this notion of exile and of diaspora. It's premised on the lack of sovereignty. It's premised on the lack of a political power that now, Zionism in

particular, but the Jewish community around the globe in general, is sort of arguing, no, no, this kind of national sovereignty is what's Jewish. And I think that it's worth complicating that because that's not necessarily true. Complicating is a popular word among academics. When it comes to separating peoplehood from nationhood or Judaism from Zionism, the potential for complication may be vast. But even setting the politics of Israel to one side for a moment, Daniela's work remains provocative. Just on this question of how optional is one's membership in a nation-state?

Not so much whether it's legally optional, but on a moral metaphysical level, can the love of one's country become so attached to the spirit and the imagined community that it no longer comes with the baggage of owning, controlling, and defending territory? Zionism saw itself as a negation of exile, right, at the beginning of the movement. Okay, negation of exile,

but what are you negating along with exile? It sort of saw this condition of diaspora as lacking, as weak. There's an argument to be made that that means negation of the Jewish tradition of the prior 2,000 years. And that switch begs the question, okay, if we're switching from this tradition premised on diaspora and exile, what exactly are we switching to when we negate it? Can we understand that switch in religious terms? Daniela suggests we think of the nation-state as a religious concept, something to which the early Zionists were converted, which might raise the question, who did the converting?

Short answer is there's thought in general that sort of views its own ideas as the epitome of what it is to be an individual who is self-actualized and also negates everybody else who is not currently working towards that same goal. So if we look at Jews in Europe in the 19th century, they along with Arabs in Europe, or in the eyes of the European, were dubbed Semites, right? Like it was this singular category of Christian Europe's quote other. There were these racialized others. And what's really interesting about this kind of thought is to be open to the idea that this quote other would be able to subjectivate in the way that you can, would be able to politicize and be an individual and work towards national sovereignty.

That was considered a progressive, almost radical idea, because it refuses to essentialize these others in the way that, you know, an explicitly racist mode of thought might. It would sound quite racist, or just detached from reality, to say that only Europeans invented the ideals of reasonableness and rational laws, or of thinking of individuals as responsible for their own consciences and able to engage in democratic politics in a public sphere. At the same time, whenever liberal Democrats talk of a, quote, modern world based on universal humanistic values coming out of the Enlightenment, they too may be accused of a certain racism, the type that says, our culture is the truly human culture. So this openness to the Semitic others and to racialized others across the globe was the radical element of Hegelian thought. Danielle is referring to a strain of modern liberal democratic thinking influenced by the German philosopher Willem Hegel.

He wrote in the early 1800s. What I find so interesting about this is even this radical, ostensibly open version of relating to others still demands of them, you have to be like us or you'll continue to endure our negation. I also find crucially important and so, so interesting that part of this, what I'm calling Hegelian thought, requires the presence of others, even though they're being negated. Now, why is that?

Because the Hegelian white Christian European can look at those others and understand, oh, this is what I have to learn to not be like, and not be disturbed by, you know, their essential race, but rather to be disturbed by their refusal to try to be like a white European who is politicized, who's subjectivated, who's, you know, living on these terms. So if I am the westernized white Hegelian subject, so I'm using words, I don't know what they mean, but, and I am looking at my Jewish neighbor and I feel that I am enlightened and I'm not a horrible racist, anti-Semite or something, what am I demanding of them essentially? and I am looking at my Jewish neighbor, and I feel that I am enlightened and I'm not a horrible racist, anti-Semite or something. What am I demanding of them, essentially?

So with Jews in particular, you're looking at their communal closure, their rigidity when it comes to living according to Jewish law. You're looking at their closed kinship structures. You're looking at essentially their parochialism, and you're looking at them and saying, why don't you modernize, in short. But as you look at them and say, why don't you modernize, you learn to identify what unmodern characteristics might be, that then you can look internally to yourself and say, okay, I've seen these unmodern characteristics in these not so good people out there. What kind of latent qualities like that do I have within myself?

And I can use these people as sort of a therapeutic environment to learn how to not be like them. And so it's actually because of the presence of the other in Europe or in contact with the European, that the European learns to be better himself, quote, better. Right? Learns to be closer to the ideal type that he should be. So at the same time that the other is negated, he's also a necessary and permanent

presence. So then when we turn back to Zionism, Zionism, or it's possible, I read Zionism and it's possible to read Zionism as a decision on the part of certain elements of the Jewish community to self-negate, to say, you know what, Christian Europe is right. I'm unmodern. Judaism is unmodern, and that's a bad thing. And it's the cause of our oppression. And so we should embrace the terms that the Europeans around us live by, and we should

learn to become like them. And in that way, I call that becoming Europe's, quote, good other. And why good? Because Zionism's conversion to this kind of European politics, European modernity, also has the effect of proving to Europe that its negation of others doesn't eliminate them and isn't essentializing, right?

It's possible for all these other people to become like us. Look, the Jews are doing it. We're not bad. We're not essentializing them. Anybody can be like us. On ideas, you're listening to an episode called putting pride above shame, part of our series on loving your country in the 21st century. We're podcast and the broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio,

across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Exile from a beloved homeland can become its own kind of belonging.

An imagined community of exiles spread across multiple nation-states. Over the generations, the idea of the country becomes increasingly abstract. The physical borders around the national spirit, harder to define. For the newly exiled, the tie to a specific patch of land and the people currently on the land remains as tight as ever. Hello, thank you for having me. My name is Najib Asil. Najib Asil runs a nonprofit organization called Free Speech Hub. It supports Afghan journalists in exile.

If you look back to Afghanistan, which has 34 provinces, I would say in northern provinces like Panjshir, Badakhshan, Qonar, Nuristan, these provinces are the most beautiful provinces in my country. Until August, 2021, Najib was the head of current affairs at Afghanistan's largest private TV network. Najib's career gave him the chance to travel to all parts of Afghanistan.

2016 to 2018, I was the head of the election desk, which Afghanistan experienced for the first time. We went to 24 provinces of Afghanistan and we taped town hall shows with local people. And we talked about the presidential election, parliamentary election, the values of vote, how they're going to vote, around these topics. So that was an experience to me for the first time I visited all the country and saw the people. Today, Najib Asil lives in Canada.

But he still loves Afghanistan, despite its many flaws. Despite it being a nation where he cannot live since the Taliban takeover. Loving my country means committing to stand with those who fight for freedom, its voices and dignity. And also every day it drives my work, my advocacy and my hope that one day my country can rise again, the nation of peace and freedom. This is the third and final episode in our series, Loving Your Country in the 21st Century. Ideas producer Tom Howell takes it from here. Ideas producer Tom Howell takes it from here. What's the difference between loving a country and approving of its behavior in the world? Right. Yeah, the reality is I was born in Afghanistan and it was always in my mind and my blood. The country I love is not our country of today.

It was Afghanistan of the past and the one my father and grandfather grew up in, a place rich in beauty, culture, art, and history. It's also the Afghanistan of the future that I still hope for, where peace, freedom freedom and dignity prevail. In our imagination, a country can exist in the past and the future and somehow withdraw from a horrific present reality. We can say this is not the country I know and love. But to what extent does your country's behavior have to affect how you judge its spirit? If our leaders ask us to be more patriotic,

how are they hoping we relate to any atrocities that have occurred on the land, or any ideologies that are taking hold there? Because perhaps these should make you love your country less. Hi Tom, my name is Zahra Nader. I am an Afghan journalist and editor in chief of Zan Times. It's an Afghan woman-led media that covers human rights in Afghanistan.

Zan means woman in Dari, the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. I'm the kind of person who always tells long, long stories from school time. So bear with me when I'm trying to tell you this story. Like Najib, Zara is now based in Canada, although right now she has a fellowship to spend the year at the University of Michigan. My parents are both illiterate. They never had a chance to go to school. And none of my close relatives, we don't have any educated people who kind of became our leader or our hero. For most of my childhood, I grew up in Iran, where I didn't have the right to education. The way I learned how to read and write is mostly through informal schools.

["Taliban Song"] Many families, including both Zahra's and Najib's, fled Afghanistan under the first Taliban government. They sheltered in neighboring countries. When the US and its allies overthrew the Taliban in 2001, many of those families returned as soon as they could. At that time, Najib was around 11 or 12, at the age to start high school. My uncle, another uncle, they were in Kabul,

and they get in touch with my father and told us right now, if you guys want to come back to Afghanistan, it's a good to Afghanistan it's a good opportunity and it's a good time. So during the Taliban and during the Mujahideen our home which was located in old city they destroyed by rocket. When we came back we nothing had. There was only the space. We just moved to our uncle's house.

And we started from there. So after passing years, my father decided to build again our house. So when I came back to Afghanistan, I started formal school. In the suburb of Kabul, we didn't have electricity, didn't have running water, and the schools that I was attending didn't have proper building. Some of the schools that I studied in was under a tent.

So one time we had math, it was summer, and a snake actually like fall off from the wall on the blackboard. And it was like such a hilarious moment because our teacher was actually, he wrote something, a formula on the board. He's looking at us at the class to explain that formula for us. And then we all stand up and we're shouting

as like a very chaotic moment, but also interesting, interesting you know how much there was need of resources but also there was so much enthusiasm. It was not very important like whether we get that opportunity under a tent or we get it you know in a proper schooling. What really mattered for me personally and for many many girls of my generation it was the fact that we had an opportunity to get an education. Zahra and Najeeb both attended university in Kabul and became journalists. They reported on everything from local traffic problems with idling buses on city streets

up to the debates on the ideal democratic society. We had lots of hope, kind of thinking that we have a right, we have opportunities. We're going to build the kind of society, the country we want to build. Najib Asil calls it a golden time. A golden time when I started. A blossoming time. During the blossoming time in the past two decades. 12,000 journalists worked in Afghanistan's media industry,

and he was proud to take part in it. The media landscape in Afghanistan was the biggest achievement of the government over the 100 years, past 100 years. The success stories we built around media internationally, when most of countries talk about Afghanistan, the success story was media and freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Afghanistan was the freest country over the past two decades in the region, much better than Iran, than Pakistan, than India, than Russia and China. But Sarah is not so convinced that it was a success story. She faced male newspaper editors who felt she shouldn't travel or go out at night.

The various news departments she worked in were all run by men. Her own excitement at building the kind of country she wanted kept butting into the kind of country it was. We had an opportunity in the past 20 years that we could push for more fundamental change. And I really feel that past 20 years is a lost opportunities. I always talk from the experience of a woman journalist. You know, in the past 20 years, there was so much funding available, so much support available.

And there were some of us who joined the media. But literally, we didn't have a lot of power to shape the ideas around gender, to really inform our audience and tell them, what is feminist, what's human rights? And the people who weren't in power, the people who could make those changes, didn't, whether they didn't notice them, whether they didn't want to bring those changes. But the society remained very, very conservative.

What I see as a part of that problem was that there was this perception that we have to keep the society very conservative to ensure that the Taliban would not have another way to approach us and say, oh, this is not an Islamic society. So you know, like the law that was prohibiting violence against women was not approved. Why? Because they were claiming that, oh, this is like, no, it's prevent men from marrying, you know, four women and from, you know, marrying a 15-year-old or 14-year-old girl. So, you know, you understand the society remained very conservative.

And as part of that was there was not a lot of critical thinking. There was not a lot of questioning of the status quo and also not a lot of history for us to look back and understand where we were, how did we get here and how can we move forward. Fast forward to today, Zahra and Najib are both living in exile. From afar, they continue to try to do what they can for their country. Zahra works in secrecy with Afghan women to get their stories out to the world. Najib has been finding some work in Canada doing translation and journalism, trying to pay the rent while also staying up to 1am every night running the Free Speech Hub project,

keeping Afghanistan's journalists connected and supported as much as possible, wherever they are now. Most of our journalists, when they came here, because the tough situation of life in here, the expenses that family will have here, it's something shockable for all of us. Most of our colleagues, they just left journalism and they are doing other jobs today.

And that's a hard-working story for all of us because I know most of them, they were so young, talented journalists and very well-known journalists. Unfortunately, much of Najib's work involves documenting the demise of the media industry he was so proud of. More than 300 media organizations shut down. More than 167 journalists.

They're beaten, tortured, imprisoned. 7,000 journalists, they left the country. For Zahra Nadir, her web publication Zan Times is a way to provide employment to Afghan journalists in exile, focusing on women's stories. Some of the riskiest work involves keeping in touch with women inside Afghanistan and reporting what's going on there. And with the recent funding and everything cuts in the US and everything, it has become extremely, extremely difficult.

In her spare time, Zara is also a PhD student at York University in Toronto. When she's not trying to train and keep women active as reporters under the Taliban, Zahra is working to fill what she sees as a huge hole in Afghan culture today. The level of knowledge about women's history in the country. We had much more rights in the 1970s, 1960s, 1980s in Afghanistan, then we have, you know, in 2020 or, you know, the Kabul that I grew up was not like the Kabul that I hear from the woman who lived in the 1970s, 1960s. So what was the difference? Like, how can we move from that society who was tolerant of all these women who are able to dress the way they like to dress, go out with a miniskirt, didn't

wear a headscarf. The society was able to tolerate that, like, you know, 40 years down the road. How did we became suddenly to this misogynistic society that anybody who would hear the name of Afghanistan, they know what kind of place it is, that it's a prison for women. Part of my PhD is actually writing that history for Afghan women, from the perspective of Afghan women to help them see where we were, what were our demands, and how our fight today is the continuation of women's fights in Afghanistan, the generation before us. Patriotism can come in the form of expressing pride in your country's achievements, or shame regarding its failures. But it's tricky to express both forms of patriotism at the same time.

Often the expressions of shame sound like attempts to contradict the sources of pride. There have been weeks when the most-read stories on CBC News concern what's been called Canada's history of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. It's estimated that 150,000 children were taken from their families. Will the government explicitly acknowledge the cultural genocide that has taken place? It's another further black eye for Canada. Alright. Who would think that Canada, a beautiful rich country, is practicing cultural genocide on

Indigenous people? They won't admit that. And there are weeks where the top stories are about Canada's encouraging burst of flag waving. We are beautiful. We are the greatest nation on earth. There aren't weeks, so far as I've seen, when both topics are popular at the same time. Some thinkers have taken the position, though, that patriotism is all about managing to feel

both at once, the pride and the shame. In the 1990s, America's most cited philosopher was Richard Rorty. His book, Achieving Our Country, was his own answer to John F. Kennedy's call to ask what you can do for your country. In his case, Rorty's contribution was to appeal to his fellow Americans to relearn the art of national pride. He said, emotional involvement with one's country, feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history and by various present-day national policies, is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive.

Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame. A lot of Americans on the left, back in 1997, disagreed with Rorty that more patriotism was a good idea. A lot of Americans on the left today, watching Trumpism and MAGAism unfold, still disagree. My sense and my conviction that what is needed in this moment is not a kind of doubling down on nationalism, if anything, has been strengthened. My name is Adam Dahl. I am an associate professor of political theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And I broadly study the history of political thought with a particular focus on what I call transnational political thought in the Americas.

Ask you what I think of as a cheeky question to ask any intellectual. Are you a patriot? Am I? No, I am not a patriot. And why is that? I mean, you know, I mean, patriotism, if you think of the roots of it, it's a really weird kind of archaic idea. It means to love the patria, which is Latin for the fatherland.

Right? Now, if we took out the fatherland part and we just talked in the etymology of patriotism and we talk about loving your country, does that do any, does that help or are we still in the same, you feel like loving your country is not a useful idea? I don't know that I want to say that it's a useful idea. I mean, again, it depends on what you mean by country, right? If you mean the land, the people, the culture, the community, right? Like yes, of course, right? Like I don't see how one can exist without having some attachment

to the place that you live and work and have your community. If country means, again, the state, the government, which has, of course, a military force, then I become much more skeptical of that idea of love of country. Now I think there's people that will say, you know, I can be a sort of patriot that is also capable of criticizing my country and my state and my government. That's all well and good, but in actual fact, I think at least in the United States for me, discourses and sentiments of nationalism and patriotism are very strong. They can sometimes be so strong that they can make us incapable of really critiquing and really criticizing

and opposing these forms of militaristic violence that are driving global conflict and that we see all over the world today. Adam prefers what he calls transnationalism instead of patriotism. I am deeply tied to the idea of America. But my idea of America is not the United States. It's something like, you know, all the different kinds of peoples that have shaped the Western hemisphere. A transnationalist viewpoint is different from the cosmopolitan who thinks of themselves as a citizen of the world. And it's different from the internationalist who thinks nation states should work together.

The transnationalist falls somewhere in between. They know who their friends and enemies are, and they work across borders, pulling together imagined communities for security and flourishing. It doesn't establish anything set in stone. It's like a jazz improvisation. There's no preset recipe for how this happens.

Transnational means to move across and to change in the process. And so it's incredibly idealistic in a lot of ways, but it's also interesting that I think, at least in the United States, that these kinds of ideas have been reclaimed in the kind of wake of really this resurgence of authoritarian nationalism

that we've seen under figures like Donald Trump. It does seem to be a particular antidote to that make America great again sentiment, that what defines America is not in the past, but it's actually in the future. An example of a transnational community might be migrant laborers, says Adam. You might think of transnational activist networks. The primary actors are not states and not necessarily individuals, but I would say rather movements, peoples, collections of community that are not

bound necessarily by national borders and boundaries, but that move beyond that, but that also aren't states. I'm increasingly skeptical of nations and states as being able to ensure a peaceful world, as being able to ensure communities the ability to survive. So. I got Adam to read another quotation I'd underlined in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country. So do you want me to read? Because I felt it was aimed straight at intellectuals like Adam. Okay, so the cultural left seems convinced that the nation state is obsolete, and there

is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans." Is he talking about you? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think in some ways he would say perhaps yes that he is. I think it's important to note though that he published this argument in 1997 and I was around 14 years

old then, so definitely not part of the cultural left. But in all seriousness, the argument is certainly not that nation states are obsolete, that they have no role in politics, and it's also certainly not that one shouldn't have any pride in one's country necessarily. I do seriously question whether or not the nation state is the primary source of broader political and social transformations that we need right now, and I think specifically of things like climate change, the various refugee and border crises, the resurgence of authoritarian leaders throughout the world, the rise of artificial intelligence, and what some scholars have called surveillance capitalism that occurs through the proliferation

of digital media. All of these things are not going to be resolved within nation-states alone. Back in 1997, Rorty warned that if the American cultural left didn't manage to get its national pride and national shame back into the right proportions, it risked losing the working class to a demagogic back into the right proportions, it risked losing the working class to a demagogic huckster or strongman who would soon come along and manipulate them into giving up much of the social progress America had made during the 20th century. Yeah, so this is a really interesting sort of point about the book.

You know, I have been reading this book for a long time and thinking about it and engaging with it. But then when Donald Trump was elected president for the first time in 2016, you start to see a bunch of commentary saying that, wow, look at Richard Rorty in 1997 predicted in a lot of ways Donald Trump. And I think that there's some truth to what he's saying, but I also think that there are risks in casting him in the role of the prophet. President Obama was somebody who actually spoke in a kind of rhetoric that was incredibly

resonant with precisely what Rorty was talking about. He preached hope in the national project. He preached a sense of faith and pride in the idea of America or the idea of the United States. And so in a lot of ways, I would say Obama was the sort of Rortyian politician or the kind of politician that Rorty was looking for. And you also saw elements of that under the Biden administration, and we still kind of got the strong man. The sort of hollowing out of the middle class and the working class in the United States

is part of a broader process of globalization that has been led by elites. Reigning in those elites, reigning in the plutocratic and oligarchic control of some of the richest people in the world is going to require more than just simply national politics. It's going to require a kind of internationalism where there is a real sense of solidarity among oppressed peoples, among middle class and working class folks across national boundaries.

Do you feel your national spirit, the one that you can feel proud of, is dead? No, I don't think it, I don't think it is. And I don't, I don't think, um, I think it can be too defeatist to just say that I have no national pride. I have a lot of pride in my country. Um, I actually think that I've been thinking about this a lot and as we've been talking, it's made me come back to a couple people that I have been deeply inspired by

in thinking about these questions. One of which is Emma Goldman, who was an American anarchist who was ultimately deported under the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1919. The United States government had been trying to strip her of her citizenship since as early as 1909 and they finally succeeded about a decade later. And she wrote about this over a decade after her deportation from the United States in an essay called A Woman Without a Country. And the last paragraph of that, I think, is just absolutely beautiful and sort of sums up maybe what a sense of pride might be. So could I read that?

I'd be delighted. So this is Emma Goldman, A Woman Without a Country in 1933. She writes, as for myself in the deeper significance of spiritual values, I feel the United States my country. Not to be sure, the United States of the Ku Klux Klan-ers, of moral censors in and out of office. Not the America of Tammany or of Congress, of respectable inanity, of the highest skyscrapers and the fattest moneybags, not the United States of petty provincialism, narrow nationalism, vain materialism, and naive exaggeration.

There is, fortunately, another United States, the land of Walt Whitman's, the William Lloyd Garrison's, the Henry David Thoreau's, and the Wendell Phillips's. The country of a young America of life and thought, or of art and letters. The America of the new generation, knocking at the door of men and women with ideals, with aspirations for a better day. The America of social rebellion and spiritual promise, of the glorious undesirables, against whom all the exile,

expatriation and deportation laws are aimed. It is to that America that I am proud to belong. I'm not sure you're not a patriot. Yeah, I mean, it could be the case. Like I said, I'm not against national pride. I have a deep sense of pride in the history of my country with its warts and all, but the United States has never been about just what happens in the United States. The promise of the United States is the result of as much people like Emma

Goldman who have been deported from the country as it is, you know, people who are from within the country. Well, Adam, thank you so much for your clarifying and edifying responses today. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure. There's a type of pride that spurs a person to action. And the pride people take in their heroes can be this sort. Emma Goldman might persuade a patriotic American student today to risk getting themselves deported. The thought of women trapped inside their homes in Afghanistan right now, secretly learning to be journalists despite the risks, might provoke their fellow members

of the journalistic community to take their own patriotic chances. Whether to put greater faith in national pride or transnational solidarities may not be as important, ultimately, as the heroes one chooses and the choice between engaging with our imagined communities as spectators or as actors. What we can do for our country may in many cases be acts of mutual encouragement, aimed at conjuring just the nation's better spirits back to life. You were listening to an episode called Putting Pride Above Shame, part of our series Loving Your Country in the 21st Century by Ideas producer Tom Howell, thanks to Rusty Brock in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and to Erin Kupek at the University of Massachusetts

News Office for technical help. Thanks also to Yulia Kalinina and Elena Bratyshenko for guidance on Russian phonetics. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nika Lalukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. O, Skaggy...