Patriotism and its Double
Published in Peace Review 15, no.4, December 2003
The patriot, someone once said with tongue in cheek, is a person who always stands ready to defend his/her country against its government.
A few years ago, such a statement would have been a quip; today, it takes on a sense of urgency and reality. A short list of critical governmental assaults on our "political quality of life" would include the Patriot Act, Homeland Security policing, an unconscionable federal deficit, the unlimited incarceration of people without charge, legitimization of the torture of detainees, the organization of networks of informers, complicity in corporate corruption and criminality (Enron, the power crisis, etc.), a presidential election that violated federal law (the Voting Rights Act of 1965), and a proposed computerization of elections that promises fraud through its opacity, the unmonitorability and accountability of its proprietary software.
Internationally, the government reveals a recklessness and criminality that indirectly assaults its citizens through alienation of the world. The aggressions against smaller defenseless yet sovereign nations (Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan) in violation of international law, US treaty law, the United Nations Charter, and a variety of Security Council Resolutions, should humiliate at least as acts of cowardly bullying. After all, high-tech attacks on civilian populations constitute mass murder rather than war. And according to international law, wanton aggression against a sovereign nation is a crime against humanity. In addition to which, the US government has used its military power to blackmail third world nations into signing loan agreements that dismantle and privatize their economic infrastructures (called structural adjustment). One result is debt servitude, requiring some countries to allocate up to 60% of their Gross Domestic Product for IMF debt service. A second result is mass civilian dislocations and starvation (according to the WHO, an average of 33,000 children starve to death every day).
In its latest war, the US government prided itself on ignoring public opposition and outcry, cloaking itself in a self-defined legitimacy. It called upon national patriotism to support both its domestic policing and surveillence and its international aggression. Calls for support-patriotism have generally worked in the past; this time, a critical opposition judged the government's legitimacy arbitrary and groundless. When the support-patriots pronounced that the government not only followed proper procedures, but had good intentions, many governmental critics responded that too much crime has been committed for "good intentions" to mean much. Yet the moral stance of the opposition, also considering itself patriotic, had only opposition and outrage to stand upon, against the support-patriot's claim of what the citizen owed the nation for its standard of living and its good intentions. Thus, two patriotisms confronted each other, one seeking to defend the nation against its government, and the other a call to the nation to support the government.
None of this is new, of course. During the Cold War, with its loyalty oaths, thought control and jailings, one side said "we cannot sacrifice democracy in the name of democracy," meaning that the US should not abandon democratic principles in the interests of its conflict with the Soviet Union; and the other side said "we cannot sacrifice democracy in the name of democracy," meaning the US should not abandon the democratization of East Europe and Russia in the interests of preserving its own polite democratic decorum.
And unhappily, massive technological assaults on civilian populations and sovereign nations by the US government are not new either. For the last 58 years (beginning with the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima), an attack sequence has unfolded, inflicting destruction throughout the third world (Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Yugoslavia -- and it is worth noting that Yugoslavia was the only European nation invited to the Bandung Conference of unaligned nations in 1955 at which the idea of a "third world" was first given currency). These interventions have involved death squads, military campaigns, carpet-bombing, subversion, assassination, and economic blocades -- not to mention the use of chemical and biological weapons (against Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq, Colombia). Millions of people, who had no defenses against such technological assaults, have been killed.
Domestically, the democratic process has been a further casualty, having become inert. Because the Cold War required that foreign policy be efficient, each administration demanded consensus rather than debate or Congressional oversight. The paradigm of consensus then spread to other areas, and froze out the citizen: runaway shops, for instance, which has gutted both industrial and employment capability; corporate manipulation of markets and prices; the destruction of social welfare safety nets; the destitution of the educational system by military spending; and runaway real estate values producing massive homelessness.
In the throes of inertness, the moral person has only outrage and protest to fall back upon -- against which the support-patriot responds with self-righteous outrage. For the one, the support-patriot is part of what the nation must be defended against; and for the other, because no external enemy is strong enough to threaten the nation, the opposition is that against which the government must be defended. In the resulting confusion and loss of political language, outrage gives way to massive historical amnesia. Historical amnesia and consensus work together, as the two functional dimensions of political conformity, a congealing of political space in which both forms of patriotism become complicit because mutually conditioning.
In the face of historical amnesia and consensus, not only is there no place for the oppositional patriot in structural political processes, there is no place for the support-patriot either. Mere opposition is as insufficient and reductive as the mere acceptance of given governmental rationalizations and intentions. Both patriots crouch in the cave of insufficiency, consuming the vapid fast food of forgetting. Both scan the horizon for a way of living their historical moment with some form of honor and autonomy. The one parrots the government, abjuring autonomy for official honor, and the other demands morality, abjuring official honor for autonomy. And in entertaining a contestation between government and nation, both dream of an ideal space where the government has not sunk into abject criminality, and the nation has not sunk into abject complicity.
What is the underlying logic in this? How did it arise that a person who values law, justice, and national identity must either invent a sense of honor in the midst of abject governmental criminality, or must invent a sense of autonomy in the quest for governmental morality? Wherein lies the commonality, and common complicity, of these two forms of patriotism?
Let us return to origins, against a seemingly glacial amnesia. The founding of the US as a nation was itself a process of invention; it was cobbled together out of a diverse settler society whose traditions stretched from the Puritan village to the corporate colonization, from northern shipping to southern plantation agro-business, from theocratic governance to a slave-holding culture. When the Constitution proclaims "we, the people," it is performing the act of invention that brings the "new nation" (Lincoln) into existence. That is, that nation did not emerge from its own inherently unifying linguistic, cultural, or historical traditions. It had to define itself first.
Upon what disparity or non-equivalence with England did it then define itself? After all, the Declaration of Independence assumes a disparity between "people" when it "dissolves" the "political bands" that connect one people to another. But the colonies were English settlements; and slavery, corporate economy, and theocratic government were no strangers to England. Furthermore, the American Revolution was not itself anti-colonialist (had it been, it would have been led by Native Americans, African Americans slaves, and English indenturees). The US did not abandon colonialism. Insofar as slavery represented the continued colonization of Africans, and Manifest Destiny represented the continued the seizure of land, a dislocation of Native and Mexican peoples, the revolution essentially produced a mere change of colonial adminstration. Its goals were a more unified control over the territory as land value, and over the double wealth of slavery (as value producing labor and as real estate wealth). Independence primarily meant no longer having to share the proceeds of that wealth with a distant monarchy.
All this is clear in one of the triggers of the revolution. In the mid-1770s, Virginia and the Carolinas sought to halt the slave trade into their territories. The king vetoed this measure. The motivation for curtailing the trade had nothing to do with a stroke of conscience concerning slavery. It was a measure to maintain real estate values in the colony. Plantation estate values were calculated on the total capital value of the plantation, which rose and fell with the value of slaves on the auction market (as corporate value rises and falls with the stock market). During a period of over-supply, the value of slaves falls, and thus too does the value of plantation real estate. It was to preserve the value of their land, and the health of the debt structure tied to it, by maintaining slave value on the market, that those states had acted to curtail the slave trade -- and for which the plantation owners sought to free themselves from the English monarchy.
With slavery at the center of its concerns, the new nation proclaimed itself a "white nation" -- and was the first nation to do so. Patriots as diverse as Jedidiah Morse, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson understood the "new nation" in these terms, though some of them came to think of slavery as a bad idea. When Paul Revere published his engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770, in which slaves and black laborers died, he took out all hint of a black face, and represented the crowd as both white and middle class. In effect, the US government established itself on a racialized basis; its structure, its laws, and its ideals were to be understood as those of a white nation. This was made overt, and read into constitutional law, by Judge Taney in the Dred Scott decision (1856); he argued that when the Declaration said "all men," it only meant "all white men." When slavery was eventually abolished after the Civil War, its basic functions were preserved through a complex system of debt servitude for black farmers. The betrayal of Reconstruction, the unremitting segregation and violence to which black people were subjected, and the replacement of the iron shackles of slavery by the shackles of debt and starvation, signified that the US as a nation continued to live by the precepts that Taney had articulated.
Furthermore, the fact that slavery was not abolished until the Civil War suggests that the Constitution itself defended and promoted it. The revolution could have eliminated slavery, as part of its regime change; but instead, the terror of slavery were heightened, new regulations were instituted, the patrols strengthened, and more slaves imported to rebuild the economy devastated by the revolutionary war. However, fully ten clauses in the Constitution served to preserve the slave system. These including the three-fifths clause, the prohibition of head taxes (preventing some future anti-slavery Congress from making slavery expensive), the use of militias to suppress slave rebellions, and the fugitive slave provision. In general, the slave economy was placed beyond Congressional review or tampering.
Indeed, so strong was the drive to preserve slavery that, during the 1820s and 1830s, its defense became synonomous with nationalism, and hence patriotism. In response to European criticism that the US was hypocritical in its claims to being democratic, many Americans argued that to be free, one must dominate others; in dominating absolutely, the US was the freest of nations. And others added that since property right was inseparable from freedom, in raising property right to its highest form (as property in persons), the US exalted liberty.
In effect, historically speaking, the American Revolution can be seen as the final stage in the consolidation of the slave system. It had gone through three previous stages of construction. When the English colonists first arrived in Virginia (1606), they had neither a juridical concept of slavery, nor a sense of themselves as "white" (the modern concept of race as we know it had not yet been invented). Both evolved slowly (it took a century) out of the colonial enterprise and the need for cheap labor to make tobacco plantations profitable.
The first step toward constructing a system of slavery occurred in the 1660s, when the Colonial Council legislated perpetual servitude as punishment for Africans who ran away. At the same time, it codified matrilineal servitude status, which meant that the children of mixed marriages were given the servitude status of the mother rather than the father. Though this measure inverted the central precept of patriarchy, it enhanced plantation wealth, and deployed motherhood for the construction of a socio-juridical difference between English and African laborers.
The second step was the statutory codification of slavery in 1882 and 1705 for all people of African descent (after Bacon's Rebellion had shown that previous measures had not prohibited English-African solidarity). And the third stage, in the 1720s, was the institution of the slave patrol system. The patrols were conscripted from poor English laborers and farmers. Their function was to guard against runaways, and suppress any signs of organization or autonomy among the slaves. The patrols rapidly developed into a system of gratuitous violence, its members venting their frustrations against the elite on the slaves, and using that violence to gain social approbation for suppressing presupposed rebellion. Thus, the patrols perpetrated a culture of terror, producing a sense of social threat to be located in the slave labor force. Against this threat, the English demanded social solidarity and allegiance among themselves. The violence of the patrols made their fear real, while generating a sense of wellbeing and self-justification toward slavery within their social solidarity. Thus, a paranoia (as a self-induced fear generated by their own injustice) produced a demand for solidarity; social solidarity generated gratuitous violence; and the violence rationalized the solidarity by giving the paranoia concreteness.
It was from this sense of social solidarity, consensus, and self-justification, created in opposition to a violenced and violated African American labor force, that the English saw themselves as white. Whiteness first appeared as a term of social identification in the 1690s in Virginia; it took hold as a primary identification in the colonies during the 18th century. The colonies racialized themselves as white through their racialization of African Americans (as slave, black, inferiorized, and categorized as instrumental). That is, the structure of racialization, based on a system of oppression, and comprised of paranoia, a demand for consensus, and violence, was what came to be called "race." "Race" does not refer to anything intrinsic in people, but to a system of social categorization engendered by oppression and violence.
Finally whiteness constituted a different identity from that of being "English." It became one of the driving forces for the move toward independence. In establishing a "white nation," independence constituted the fourth step in the consolidation of the slave system. It established sovereign, unshared, and unified control over every aspect of the wealth the slave system provided, as a "new" sense of national identity.
In sum, the foundations of patriotism in the US have been, from the beginning, embued with a solidarity based upon a paranoia, and a gratuitous violence launched to render that paranoia real. Nothing exemplifies this structure like the recent assault on Iraq, from the paranoia in all the administration's false rationales, through their use in generating consensus, to the absolute violence deployed in the invasion. In a metaphoric sense, the demand for patriotic support for bombing Afghanistan, or invading Iraq, is the solidarity of the slave patrols; and support-patriotism thus reveals itself to be integral to the structure of racialization (with respect to the third world). Similarly, the critical patriots who prioritize a defense against government repression, its Patriot Acts and Homeland Security policing, do not link their criticism of the government to the prison-industrial complex, which has made the US the world leader in prison population, 75% of which is of color; nor do they link it with the horror of the Guantanamo Bay prison by demanding habeus corpus for the prisoners there, who are Islamic, and mostly Arab. Instead, they seek to preserve the social wellbeing of white consensus against a threat of forced obedience.
Both forms of patriotism reveal themselves to be white patriotism.
In both, a defense is called for (against an alleged threat) whose
underlying terms are a white supremacy that proclaims that the white
people of the US are not to be dealt with in the manner in which they
themselves deal with people of color. This explains why the concept of
patriotism in the US is so ambiguous; it does not refer to nationhood.
It refers to a structure of racialization. Though different forms of
patriotism plug into different moments in the structure of
racialization, the social solidarity they all call for is an allegiance
to whiteness. This does not mean that people of color cannot be
patriotic in the US; it simply delineates the nature of the patriotism
available to them.