TO LOVE A COUNTRY

The dangerous appeal of falsehoods cloaked in the flag.

Erdozain (author of the acclaimed One Nation Under Guns, 2024) pens a concise, intelligent analysis of overweening patriotism’s ill effects. Of the Founding Fathers, John Adams alone grasped the peril of believing in a “special providence for Americans.” Not coincidentally, he and his son, John Quincy Adams, were the only opponents of slavery elected president before 1860. Erdozain is particularly sharp on Abraham Lincoln, showing how his interpretation of patriotism fortified the American “myth of redemptive violence.” Contrary to abolitionists, Northern journalists, and advisers arguing that Southern states should be allowed to secede without a war, Lincoln prioritized preserving the Union. When the Confederacy captured South Carolina’s Fort Sumter, he opted against measures that might have cooled tensions, Erdozain writes. The escalating standoff “provided a lightning rod for patriotic rage and the larger goal of reunion.” Opponents of the war “had been played” by the president. Erdozain’s Progressive Era heroine is Jane Addams, who sought to imbue patriotism with internationalism and establish the U.S. as “a peace nation.” During the Cold War, this mantle was taken up by Martin Luther King Jr., whose landmark anti-Vietnam War speech—called “facile” by The New York Times—showed that “he loved his country and saw criticism as an expression of that love.” It would presumably pain Addams and King to learn that today, per Erdozain, America’s yearly contribution to the United Nations equals “a mere seven hours of Pentagon spending.” The book’s epigraph, which cites Molly Ivins’ paean to “apple-cart upsetters and plain old mumpish eccentrics who just didn’t want to be like everybody else,” raises hopes that Erdozain intends to introduce readers to unjustly obscure figures. If that seldom happens, it doesn’t make his conclusions any less righteous.

A knowledgeable history of what’s lost when willful blindness dominates our politics.