The patriotism election

Harris is parking her tanks on Trump's lawn

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One of the most striking elements of Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention last week was its invocation of national unity and patriotism. She said that to be an American is “the greatest privilege on Earth” and called the United States “the greatest democracy in the history of the world” and “the greatest nation on Earth”. She leaned into the traditional symbols of American patriotism, like the flag and the military, saying that she would ensure the latter was always “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”. The crowd, bedecked in American flag hats, responded with boisterous chants of “USA! USA!”

Over the past ten years or so - perhaps longer - Democrats have had an uneasy relationship with patriotism. There’s no question that Democratic elected officials and voters love their country. But they’re also often sharply critical of it, and they know how invocations of patriotism can be used to silence dissent and create momentum behind disastrous choices. The 2003 War in Iraq is a great example - the Republican Party’s embrace of Donald Trump is another. As a result, there can be a tendency on the left to be snooty and dismissive about patriotism - to view it as the thing you invoke when you haven’t got any real arguments to make.

So Harris’ breezy, uncomplicated embrace of patriotism at the DNC should not be taken for granted. If you got together a committee representing all the different factions of the Democratic Party and got them to write a speech, I’m willing to bet that it would not have invoked patriotism in the same way. This was a deliberate choice by a candidate and a campaign with a particular idea about how to win this election.

The basis of that idea is that patriotism is the most effective way to illustrate the contrast between Harris and Trump. When Biden was the nominee - both in 2020 and the run-up to 2024 - the debate was over whether the best way to beat Trump was by depicting him as a “threat to democracy” or by promising concrete economic benefits from Democratic rule. The Biden folks, who were personally very motivated by the democracy argument, came to believe that voters at large were more responsive to the economic one. The result was a mishmash which mostly focused on people’s pocketbooks but with a pinch of the democracy argument thrown in.

Harris talks about democracy even less than Biden, presumably indicating a continuation of the belief that this message does little to motivate persuadable voters. During the DNC speech, her only mentions of the word were as pieces of patriotic rhetoric. For instance, she invoked “the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny” abroad, which is another traditional trope of American nationalism. The economic argument is also difficult for her to make, because she’s been vice president for three and a half years, a period in which most Americans have experienced a dramatic rise in their cost of living. She’s made lowering prices a key plank of her campaign, but offered few policy specifics - including during her much-touted first TV interview of the campaign with CNN.

The result is a new recipe. If Biden’s message was 80% economics and 20% democracy, Harris’ DNC speech was closer to 80% patriotism and 20% economics.

You can, of course, be critical of this. Harris has done little to provide policy specifics on how exactly she would tackle the cost of living situation, although a cynic might also note that there’s little a president can actually do to bring down high prices. But seen purely as a strategy for beating Trump, the patriotism approach has a lot to recommend it. And that’s for a simple reason - because Trump, for all that he portrays himself as the person who puts “America First”, is one of the least patriotic and most self-obsessed people to ever run for the presidency.

What’s amazing about Trump is not just the overwhelming narcissism that makes him stage a political rally and then spend the whole time talking about his own court cases and crowd sizes and media coverage. It’s also how little he seems to even understand the traditional rituals of American patriotism, most obviously respect for the military and veterans. Virtually any politician in virtually any country in the world can realize that even if they’ve never given a second thought to the military, it is good politics to pretend that you care about wounded veterans. But even this elementary self-interest seems to elude Trump, who in just the past two weeks has managed to be condemned by the Veterans of Foreign Wars over his disparaging remarks about Medal of Honor recipients and to have his campaign condemned by the Army for disrespecting the dead at Arlington National Cemetery.

The key to understanding Trump’s relationship to patriotism is that he’s not actually a patriot. He doesn’t love America as an actually existing country or Americans as an actually existing people. Rather, he cherishes a hateful and retrograde vision which excludes tens of millions of his fellow Americans from having a legitimate stake in their country. To him, only certain people matter, and nothing - neither the democratic process or the rule of law - should get in the way of those people always coming out on top. He’s already laying the groundwork to reject a Harris victory, should it come, by casting it as fundamentally illegitimate. He doesn’t stand for love of country, but rather a twisted vision of it - and he’s willing to destroy the things that actually make America great in order to make that vision a reality.

Harris is right to sense that Trump’s abandonment of the traditional idea of American patriotism represents an opportunity for Democrats. And by driving her tanks into that gap, she’s avoiding making the election too much about the groundbreaking nature of her own run for the presidency. Rather than focusing explicitly on identity politics - as Hillary Clinton’s “Stronger Together” campaign did in 2016, but Barack Obama notably didn’t in 2008 and 2012 - she’s instead focusing on themes which are unifying and universal. The fact that she’s the first black woman running for the presidency is obvious, and she’s spending no time belaboring it. Instead, she’s trying to build her coalition outward, and giving people who don’t look like her - who are the majority of the electorate - a reason to give her a chance.

So far at least, it seems to be working.