February is Black History Month in the United States. African American history is inseparable from racism, and the impeachment trial starting on Feb. 8 in the US Senate is all about racism.
Former President Donald J. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting a riot at the US Capitol on January 6. The people who broke into the building were mainly of two kinds. One group was comprised of Trump cultists and QAnon converts, and neither of them represented any kind of ideology. The other group was the militias — organized and trained detachments of men who were seen moving in formation among the rioters: the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the like — and those were rioters driven by a definite ideology.
Unlike the first group, they probably didn’t believe the canard about a stolen election or rigged voting machines. They believed instead that their country had been stolen from them. In their view, it was not that the votes in Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta had been cast illegally or counted incorrectly, but rather that they had been cast by the wrong kind of voters. They wanted to disenfranchise black and brown voters whose American citizenship was just as valid as their own. They wanted to abolish democracy with its one person-one vote principle and preserve white supremacy, even if it meant minority rule.
Thus, racism, or white supremacy, was the only ideology on display at the Capitol on that day in early January. And, in a particularly disgusting twist, its adherents styled themselves as patriots, arrogating for themselves this honorable title and claiming that they were defending America.
But how patriotic are they really?
Trump cultists who waved Trump flags and QAnoners who believed that was some sort of a Superman sent by god certainly we’re not patriotic at all. As Teddy Roosevelt wrote, “To announce that there must not be any criticism of the President is not only unpatriotic and servile but morally treasonable to the American public.”
However, the same is true if the “patriotic” militias. America is not a nation based on race, religion, bloodlines, or landmass. It is based on an idea. Or a set of ideas embodied in its Constitution, and on the rule of law. The country didn’t fully live up to those ideas when it was founded, and there have been plenty of shameful pages in its history, but over the past two and a half centuries, the primacy of the Constitution and the principles it promulgated has been repeatedly affirmed. When America has been at its best and strongest, it always acted in accordance to its Constitution, and when wrongs were righted that too was done in accordance to the Constitution.
By the standard of the Constitution, the men and women who stormed the Capitol were the opposite of patriots even if they were bedecked in the colors of the American flag.
However, had Trump’s unconstitutional coup succeeded, and if a group of people had then stormed the Capitol in defense of the Constitution, their actions might have also been unlawful, but they would have been patriotic.
By the same standard Black Lives Matter, denounced by Trump as un-American or anti-American when some athletes took a knee during the singing of the national anthem, is a true patriotic movement. Their demand is for American society to conform to the basic American principles and to treat all Americans equally regardless of their skin color. The license to kill unarmed African Americans that some on the police force believe they have is unconstitutional and therefore unpatriotic.
The same perverse concept of patriotism was weaponized against Martin Luther King, Jr, and his opposition to the war in Vietnam. And yet, by fighting to get rid of segregationist laws and practices that blatantly violated the Constitution he and other civil rights activists were engaged in the most American struggle a patriotic American could be.
At around the same time, patriotism was misused also across the Cold War front lines, in the Soviet Union. Physicist Andrei Sakharov had been rewarded by the Soviet state for his work on the H bomb but vilified as a traitor the moment he began to campaign for human rights. His Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded in 1975, eleven years after Dr. King’s, was cast by the Soviet propaganda as proof of his work on behalf of hostile foreigners against his Motherland. Yet, Sakharov and other dissidents used peaceful and purely legalistic means to combat injustice in the USSR by demanding that the Soviet government abide by its own laws. The Soviet Constitution at the time had been written at the height of Stalin’s purges and as such, it was permeated by communist ideology. Yet, the Soviet government was failing to honor even those laws and reacted angrily when Sakharov demanded it did.
Sakharov’s centennial will be marked on May 21, 2021, and his legacy is as ever relevant in post-Soviet Russia. President Vladimir Putin and his clique are once again presenting themselves as great Russian patriots while shamelessly stealing Russian natural resources and dismantling social institutions, dooming the future generations of Russians to a life of poverty in a weak, backward nation. Even as they transfer their assets abroad and acquire citizenships in the West, they label any non-government organization combatting their lawlessness, corruption, and neglect as “Foreign Agents.”
Alexey Navalny put patriotism in perspective when he spoke at his recent court appearance in defense of those Russians who oppose Putin’s repressive kleptocracy, calling them true patriots.
The Trump world, which has so many unexplained and shady links to Russia — starting with Trump’s own business dealings before he became president, numerous contacts with Russians by his 2016 election campaign, and his expressed admiration for the Russian strongman — has adopted many of Putin’s political practices. Such as populist slogans, pervasive lying, and attacks on the free press. The use of the term “patriot” by people who have nothing to do with the principles on which the United States of America was built and are actively hostile to American ideals is among the most dismal of those.
