Patriotism Is Racism!

A few years ago, during the Summer of George Floyd or thereabouts, I came across a photograph of some antifa demonstrator proudly holding a sign that declared "Patriotism is Racism!"...

I want to suggest that this statement "patriotism is racism" is neither absurd nor even obviously false. Patriotism means loyalty to one's tribe, normally the tribe into which one has been born. It is an extension of one's family duties, since tribes are themselves essentially extended families. Such loyalty, even going as far as a willingness to sacrifice one's life if called upon, has for most of human history been considered among the most sacred of moral obligations...

Racism, of course, is a word that can mean almost anything, and therefore means almost nothing. But one of the meanings attached to it has certainly been the preference for one's own tribe, that is, for people one is more closely related to... In other words... loyalty to one's tribe - may indeed be the common ground of the two words "patriotism" and "racism."...

Tribal loyalty is an important virtue because we live in a world of competing groups... On the other hand, we are also individuals, and it is in our personal interests not merely to belong to a successful tribe but also to gain status within that tribe. These two sets of interests, tribal and individual, can come into conflict...

... it is significant that most people who would be described as right wing or conservative stress the various moral foundations about equally, while those we would call themselves liberal or left wing have almost no interest in the binding foundations. They are almost exclusively concerned with individualizing foundations...

What this means, in plain English, is that those who identify with today's political Left are uninterested in duties to those closest to them (their tribe), but only in moral considerations directly relevant to themselves... They are the sort of people who would happily see their country destroyed as long as they could rule over the ruins... As Ed Dutton has phrased it, such people are born traitors. This class of people overlaps considerably with those whom psychiatrists refer to as "sociopaths."...

It is not natural to elevate those with no loyalties above those capable of self-sacrifice for the greater good. But this moral revolution has in fact largely been carried out...

Our survival demands that the healthier fraction of our population remove the sociopaths from power and force them at least to act as if they knew the meaning of loyalty.