Recorded on October 20, 2026, this video features a lecture by Desmond Jagmohan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. The lecture was delivered as part of the Matrix Teach-In series, which brings some of UC Berkeley’s most engaging social science lecturers into a public setting.
Abstract
This lecture distinguishes nationalist from civic patriotism. Donald Trump has voiced the former as a summons to restore a lost greatness, Barack Obama the latter as a call to fulfill the unkept promise of the Declaration of Independence, an ideal not yet fully realized. The lecture argues that civic patriotism offers the nobler and more democratic vision, but that a civic patriotism adequate to our moment must also take seriously the lost standing of working-class Americans, those whose material precarity, and the attenuation that follows, draws them to nationalist patriotism. Liberals must do more than reclaim the symbols of patriotism in the name of realizing political and social equality; they should also pursue an economic nationalism that puts Americans first, one that recognizes that, in America, earning determines standing.
About the Speaker
Desmond Jagmohan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. His research concerns political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. He is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), which draws on several years of archival research to recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. His second book will read Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory that grounds the wrong of slavery in property rights in another person. His work has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Contemporary Political Theory, and Boston Review.
Professor Jagmohan is the winner of several awards and fellowships: The APSA Best Dissertation Award from the Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section (2015), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2018), and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and Hellman Fellowship at UC, Berkeley. Prior to arriving at Berkeley, he was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he delivered the 2018 Constitution Day Lecture and was awarded the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Preceptorship in the University Center for Human Values. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Podcast and Transcript
An audio (podcast) recording of this panel is available through the link below or through Apple Podcasts.
MUSIC: (“80/90” by Arjun Sen)
[WOMAN’S VOICE]
The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[CORI HAYDEN]
Welcome, everyone. Happy Tuesday afternoon. I believe it’s Tuesday.
Welcome to Social Science Matrix and to this very exciting event. My name is Cori Hayden. I am director of Matrix and professor of anthropology here at Berkeley.
I just want to say a quick word about this kind of event. This is a relatively new entry in our itinerary of sorts of events that we hold here, and I thank my predecessor, Marion Fourcade, for having the genius idea to invite distinguished teachers from campus to come ply their trade with us and let us all be the beneficiaries of their brilliant teaching. We invite distinguished lecturers to come, distinguished teachers, instructors, to come deliver either a favorite lecture or maybe a new lecture that they’re not tired of just yet for anyone curious to learn.
So today we are very lucky to welcome Professor Desmond Jagmohan for his talk, “Two Concepts of Patriotism: Nationalist and Civic.” Today’s event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science. Welcome.
And before I introduce our speaker, let me briefly mention a couple upcoming events to which you all are warmly invited. Coming up next week, we have Kevin Morris speaking about the rise and fall of the Voting Rights Act, extremely timely set of discussions there. Just two days after that, Matrix on Point, a discussion with colleagues from across campus on the state of US immigration enforcement and surveillance.
Another panel just after the election on propaganda machines, by which we mean both universities and the press and their relationship to AI. That should be interesting. And then, as you can tell, an Author Meets Critics session, with our colleague Matthew Shutzer to talk about his book Until the Last Ton.
So, just a few of the things coming up. Hope to see you here for all of those. And in the meantime, you are here today for a specific event.
Desmond Jagmohan is assistant professor of political science here at UC Berkeley. He specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, with a focus on the politics of the oppressed. His first book was Dark Virtues: The Tragic Realism of Booker T. Washington.
That’s from 2027. Congrats. With Princeton University Press, and it examines the politics of deception under Jim Crow.
Desmond’s at work on two new projects, one of which is called Three Traditions of African American Political Thought, an intellectual history spanning 1850 to 1970, and a second project, A Duty to Remember: Slavery and the Ethics of Memory. Now, crucially for our purposes today, Desmond also in 2026 received the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley’s highest honor for teaching. In 2025, he received the corresponding award from the Division of Social Sciences.
He has a monopoly on this award at the moment. Yeah. He’s received the American Council of Learned Societies, or ACLS Research Fellowship, a Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton, and he was a fellow with the Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo Campbell National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, among his many accomplishments.
Without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to Desmond to enlighten us. On patriotism. Thanks so much for being here, Desmond.
(applause)
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
So, forgive the slides. It’s my foray into using Claude for slides.
(chuckling)
Literally put it together in about 10 minutes. Not the talk, the slides. So thank you to the staff of the Social Science Matrix for inviting me to take part in this new teach-in series, particularly Eva, Corinne, and Charles.
I also want to thank Sarah Harrington, who has since moved to London, for helping to organize this wonderful program. Before I begin, a brief clarification’s in order. The series asks professors to give a condensed version of their favorite or best lecture.
My lectures, however, are so good that choosing one proved impossible. Former GSIs here can attest to that fact. Obviously, I’m kidding.
I’ve chosen not to deliver one of my lectures for two reasons. First, my lectures assume that the audience, usually students, has read the work the lecture aims to illuminate. Second, with an impending election, I wanted to offer you something more civic-minded, perhaps more urgent, and something I’ve been thinking about.
Whether it grows into something or not is a different question. So… The delegates to the Second Continental Congress pledged to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in support of a declaration that all men are created equal.
Many of them made that pledge while holding other human beings in slavery. A few were uneasy about excluding these men and women from the principles they proclaimed: freedom and equality. This year, we mark the 250th anniversary of that moment, a founding that joined democracy to tyranny.
Generations of Americans from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr. have worked to diminish that tyranny and move the nation closer to its professed ideals. Yet many Americans now feel a growing ambivalence, if not outright disdain, towards their country. Some may be asking what it really means to be a patriotic American when our taxes fund a private army that rides around in masks hunting and disappearing immigrants.
When the administration’s grift and graft would make a third-world dictator blush, and when free and fair elections are increasingly under threat. This moment reminds us once again that the nation will not realize its founding ideals in a straight line, away from tyranny and toward democracy, that the lights of moral progress will not always turn green for Americans. Time and again, the nation and its people have slid backwards, sacrificing their creedal convictions on the altars of fear and prejudice.
It may be too partisan, too polarizing for me to say that we’re living through such a moment now, a moment of democratic and civic backsliding. Some may reasonably object to my suggestion that the nation is being driven back upon itself to moments many of us would rather forget. It is nonetheless fair to say that many Americans feel this way, and that feeling, the sense of losing our way, morally and politically speaking, raises uneasy questions about our country and our compatriots.
Innocence ends when we look upon our country and our fellow citizens with eyes unclouded by nostalgia or nationalism, when we abandon the kind of patriotism that robs the future to pay homage to the past. Only then will we see the nation’s promise betrayed in the name of restoration. In this lecture, I will argue that the tradition of civic patriotism in America springs from a willingness to accept responsibility for realizing the principles on which the nation was founded.
Civic patriotism asks us to recognize that a country worth having comes at a price, and that price is sacrifice. This kind of patriotism, I will further argue, is both a duty and a discipline. Freedom for Black Americans was not won at Gettysburg or Fort Wagner, but through a century of quiet and sometimes disappointing struggle, one replete with setbacks and reversals.
We lose our country when we lose our conviction and our discipline, the very qualities that make it possible to fulfill the duty of patriotism. This is the incomplete slides. For many, patriotism is little more than nationalism or something worse.
In its broadest sense, however, patriotism means love of country. The Yale political theorist Stephen B. Smith defines it as a form of loyalty to one’s own, one’s people, one’s community, but especially to one’s constitution or political regime. This loyalty attaches to one’s own country, including its constitutional order, rather than another, and it takes the form of a due regard for the collective values citizens look up to as a people.
Smith adds that, for Americans, patriotism expresses our highest ideals and commitments, not only to what we are, but also to what we might be. He insists that patriotism is never simply blind devotion, but is always informed by reason and judgment, which compels citizens to weigh the distance between principle and practice, word and deed. This more critical and civic love demands from us not just deliberation, but action when we fall short of our own expectations.
When our country falls short of its principles, the ideals and values we hold dearly as a people, we incur a duty to realize them, to bring practice into alignment with principle. One of the promises we make to one another as citizens is not to abandon our principles to greed or hate. In this way, patriotism becomes more than a virtue, more than love of one’s country.
It is love for a normative ideal of one’s country. And when the country deviates from that ideal, patriotism becomes a duty to work to realize the ideal. The patriot, then, owes the country conduct as well as feelings.
This debt places patriotism alongside what Smith calls piety, duty, love, and reverence. This is an attachment not merely to the nation as such, but to its founding principles. And it is those principles that supply the motivation that leads citizens to accept the personal and public burden of realizing our founding ideals.
Yet the burden can grow too heavy, turning the duty of patriotism into a demand for self-sacrifice and killing. The Princeton political theorist George Kateb warns that patriotism is, “at bottom, a readiness to die and to kill for an abstraction.” For this reason, Kateb deems patriotism a mistake, and perhaps he’s right.
In many cases, when I think I am on the other side of him on a question, I’m on the wrong side. Does patriotism impose duties that conflict with more universal moral ones, including the duty not to inflict injustice and suffering on others out of due regard to one’s own people, so to speak. Distinguishing civic from nationalist patriotism helps us answer this worry, even if it does not allow us to escape it entirely.
Let’s turn to Trump’s nationalist patriotism. Critics of patriotism would be right if nationalism or nationalist impulses exhausted the meaning and value of patriotism in American history. There is indeed a nationalist patriotism tradition in which loyalty and love of one’s country is understood as arising from blood, soil, faith, and culture.
In an effort to redeem patriotism from the dangers of nationalism, Steven Smith defines nationalism as an excess of patriotism that holds an absolute attachment to one’s own way of life as unconditionally good and superior to others. And he distinguishes nationalism from patriotism. On Smith’s view, nationalism inevitably becomes a language of exclusion, of separating ins from outs.
It also looks backward. It draws on what Smith calls the narrative of return, or what we might call a desire for restoration, a returning the country to a golden moment that can never be recovered, but to which we can and should remain faithful. From this vantage point, the present always appear a civic decline, allowing nationalist stories to become narratives of treason and betrayal by unscrupulous elites.
These stories fuel the call to make America great again. Severing nationalism from patriotism, however noble the aim, risks obscuring how tightly the two have been bound together in American history. Smith separates them in order to redeem patriotism as a distinct virtue and duty that nationalism corrupts.
On this view, “Make America Great Again” is a nationalist catchcall. That, I think, is a mistake. It is the sort of view that feeds an academic and liberal conceit that the ordinary men and women who cast their ballots for Donald Trump in 2024 More than half of all voters, by the way, were moved chiefly by racial resentment or simple stupidity.
This simplistic, self-serving story, soaked in condescension, holds that racial resentment or white nationalism were all that propelled Trump to the White House, not once, but twice. Too many Black and brown Americans, too many young Americans, and too many white Americans who voted for Barack Obama twice cast ballots for Trump. For that story, that sort of political innocence born of partisan blindness to hold water.
Trump appeals broadly to roughly half of American voters, even if that fact, for it is a fact, makes some of you squirm in your seats today. Part of his appeal is the nationalist patriotism he voices. Part of his appeal is that many Americans believe, rightly or wrongly, that too many of their countrymen and women have no love of country, no sense of duty to their compatriots, to their own.
To be clear, I’m not making the causal claim that Trump won the presidency because of his appeals to nationalist patriotism. I’m using him instead as someone whose rhetoric exemplifies a tradition that precedes him. Nationalist patriotism.
Patriotic appeals are hardly incidental to that rhetoric. In his major addresses, Trump uses the words patriot, patriotism, or patriotic in more than half of his speeches, compared with about a third of Obama’s. And nearly three in four of Trump’s major addresses draw on the broader vocabulary of patriotism: the flag, the founders, the creed, America First.
This tradition has also drawn adherents from both parties across American history. Across the 20th century, nationalist appeals surfaced in the patriotic rhetoric of presidents of both parties, from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, down to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And they peak under Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, for obvious reasons.
Even as civic appeals outweigh nationalist ones in every presidency, from Franklin Roosevelt through George W. Bush. Curiously, in their patriotic rhetoric, Trump sits closer to Franklin Roosevelt and Obama closer to Ronald Reagan. As noted, patriotism means love of country.
What we love when we love our country, and what that love is worth, remains disputed. For many Americans, patriotism means something close to “my country, right or wrong.” Importantly, the nationalist strain of patriotism tells a story of decline, and it tells that story for a reason, to summon us to renewal and repair.
Patriotism of this kind binds civic faith to the reclaiming of a lost tradition. It almost always casts the nation’s founding ideals as displaced or besieged. The age of national strength and civic cohesion, now forgotten, serves as the standard against which the present must be measured.
Ironically, this brand of patriotism holds before us a past that can never be recovered and ask, all the same, that we do just that. Nationalist patriotism, I’m suggesting, becomes a summons to defend the country and its ideals from internal and external enemies. And this readiness to sacrifice oneself is the price of restoring the country to founding values.
On this view, the patriot feels a morally binding attachment to her country and its people, an attachment constitutive of her very sense of identity. It is not only that patriots believe in the principle of “America first,” we might say, but that they also see themselves as Americans first and foremost. That their national identity takes moral precedence over their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual identities.
The patriot resents those who insist on hyphenated identities. This brand of patriotism draws its appeal from the belief that the country is in economic, political, and social decline, and that this decline has fallen hardest on ordinary people, on working and middle-class Americans, crushing their dreams and their spirits alike. On this account, only through political mobilization can these men and women win back what globalists and a corrupt political class have taken from them: the promise of a decent and dignified life, pride in themselves and their country.
In this telling and retelling, the ordinary hardworking American appears as one who has been mugged by progress, slandered by elites, and shamed by liberals. We need not look far back to find the nationalist strain of patriotism changing the course of American history. In his first inaugural address delivered on January 20th, 2017, President Donald J. Trump declared, “We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our own country has disappeared over the horizon.
One by one, the factories shuttered and left their shores.” But not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.
But that is the past, and now we are looking only to the future. Silence for a moment whatever contempt you may harbor for our current president, so that we may better understand why he appeals to so many Americans in 2016 and today. Even if you judge those who embrace him to be sorely mistaken.
Near the close of the address, the president set his call for renewal in a nationalist key, summoning patriotism as a means of mending our civic and even our racial wounds. “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice,” he said. Like every accomplished nationalist, the president reached for the vocabulary of sacrifice, blood, and flag.
It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American flag. This appeal to repairing the moral injuries inflicted by decades of economic hardship and political neglect through patriotic sacrifice becomes very common throughout his presidency. Trump closed the distance between nationalism and patriotism when he said, “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.
From this moment on, it’s going to be America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.” Earlier in the address, he had vowed to reverse the decades of decline that had left so many Americans behind.
Echoing the 19th-century sociologist William Graham Sumner, he declared, “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.” And did we all?
Giving voice to the legitimate grievances of working-class whites and of working-class Americans generally, the president reminded the country that the suffering of these forgotten men and women belonged to the whole nation. We are one nation, and their pain is our pain, he said. Their dreams are our dreams, and their success will be our success.
We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny. In a way, it’s a lot easier to read Donald Trump’s speeches. They resonate much more compellingly than listening to him.
There’s something about his affect that undercuts their force. With me, and maybe with a lot of academics, but not with the public. The public seems sometimes to hear him and to actually take him quite seriously in a way that I think our sense of him obscures our ability to hear him.
My claim is not that President Trump genuinely cares about working-class Americans or that his policies serve them well. They plainly do not in many ways. My claim is that he grasps something about the relationship among falling wages, a diminished sense of standing, and the erosion of self-respect and dignity.
In his first address to a joint session of Congress on February 28, 2017, the president said, “I will not allow the mistakes of recent decades past to define the course of our future. For too long, we’ve watched our middle class shrink as we’ve exported our jobs and wealth to foreign countries.” Having named globalization as the source of economic and civic decline, he then proclaimed, “A new chapter of American greatness is now beginning.
A new national pride is sweeping across our nation, and a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp.” Central to that new chapter, and among the pledges the president left largely unredeemed in his first term, but now pursue over bipartisan objection, stands his abiding devotion to protective tariffs, which he presents as an expression of love of country. I believe strongly in free trade, but it also has to be fair trade.
It’s been a long time since we had fair trade. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the abandonment of the protective policy by the American government will produce want and ruin among our people. Lincoln was right, and it’s time we heeded his advice and his words.
The president’s appeal rang true for many Americans, and not only, as so many academics would have it, for those in the supposed grip of racial resentment. The president said things too few are willing to acknowledge. Globalization exacted real costs from working-class Americans.
And it took from them more than their jobs. It stripped them of the material and social bases of self-respect and civic standing. In her Tanner Lectures, the political theorist Judith Shklar argued that American citizenship has been defined by voting and earning, and that we derive our standing largely from the marketplace, from the work we do for a living, and from the regard in which our fellow citizens hold that work.
Deindustrialization and then globalization brought economic and civic collapse to entire communities, from small white rural towns to northern cities with large Black populations. Working-class men and women who once held union jobs could send their children to college and anticipate a dignified retirement. Today, the working classes increasingly depend on a gig economy that will, before long, be swept away by dizzying technological change.
In none of these speeches does the president say who killed the unions, who shipped the jobs offshore, or who is now laying track for a runaway train that may threaten their very existence. President Trump plays the patriotism card time and again, even if patriotic sacrifice itself remains a mystery to him, because, well, it works. The question, then, is not one of sincerity.
In politics, sincerity has long been an endangered species. We should ask why the nationalist strain of patriotism appeals not only to white working-class Americans, but all Americans. The answer, in part, is that it addresses two vital concerns liberals had long avoided: the material vulnerability globalization inflicted on working people, and the civic injury bound up with it.
With the exception of, say, Bernie Sanders, In 2016, liberals were afraid to embrace economic nationalism. That has since changed, in part because of the president’s success in mobilizing working-class Americans, and in part because of those voters’ broader flight from the Democratic Party. His genius, if genius is what we’re speaking of, lies in seeing that economic nationalism, which has a long and varied history in American thought and politics, reaching back through Teddy Roosevelt, even to Hamilton, affords a political opening that socialism never will in America.
So let’s turn to the final part. There is a second and minor tradition of patriotism in American history: civic patriotism. Civic patriotism envisions loyalty to a political creed and to the constitutional order not yet fully realized in national practice.
This tradition of patriotism often looks to the principles of the Declaration of Independence: equality, liberty, and the rights of all persons. Membership follows from assent to these principles, not ancestry to a race or culture. It follows then that newcomers become full patriots by affirming the constitutional creed, which includes the promises enshrined in the Declaration.
Civic patriotism looks forward rather than backward, replacing desire for restoration with commitment to realization of a still unfulfilled promise. It treats the founding as a moral and civic promise still to be kept, and membership as imposing a burden to work for the realization of that promise. Smith calls this enlightened patriotism.
Whose self-questioning character requires citizens not only to take justified pride in our country’s accomplishments, but also to feel justified moral shame in its shortcomings. Where the nationalist patriot speaks of returning to a golden age, one since corrupted and in need of restoration, the civic patriot speaks of a promise not yet fulfilled. The Declaration is, on her view, a promissory note issued in 1776.
For those subscribing to civic patriotism, the best chapters are yet to be written. Or as a Southerner leaning into the future conditional might say, “We’re fixin’ to complete the founding.” The tradition of civic patriotism neither denies nor downplays the progress that has been made: the end of slavery, women winning the vote, the fall of Jim Crow, the welcoming of immigrants, and the expansion of rights to sexual minorities.
The two conceptions leave clear traces in presidential speech. In the patriotic passages of 49 Obama speeches and 63 Trump speeches, both men invoke sacrifice and military service at similar rates. Appeals to pluralism, unfinished work, and progress, however, appear in roughly a fifth of Obama’s patriotic message passages and almost none of Trump’s, while appeals to heritage, national patriotism, and restoration, which run through 15 to 27% of Trump’s passages, are all but absent from Obama’s.
The promise nonetheless remains unfulfilled, and the work of fulfilling it falls to each generation. In February 2007, when announcing his candidacy for president, Barack Obama called on Americans to make good on the debt we owe past and future generations. At Selma in 2015, he summoned the country to finish the work left undone.
What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished? That we are strong enough to be self-critical and recognize that unfinished quest. Our civic debt, he said, runs in both directions: a debt to those who paid for our progress and a duty to those who will inherit the imperfect union we bequeath.
The point is not to canonize Obama’s civic patriotism but to understand what it embodied. Three speeches from his first campaign gave his civic patriotism its fullest expression: his announcement in Springfield, Illinois on February 10, 2007, His address on race in Philadelphia in March 2008 in response to the Reverend Wright crisis, and his remarks on patriotism in Independence, Missouri that June. In Independence, Missouri, Obama said that patriotism begins as a gut instinct, but that it is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people.
That sentence draws the boundary between the two traditions with unusual precision. Loyalty to a place and a people is the whole of nationalist patriotism. For the civic patriot, it is only the beginning.
The colonists at Lexington and Concord, Obama said, fought not on behalf of a particular tribe or lineage, but on behalf of a larger idea. His account also answers Kateb’s charge that patriotism is love of an abstraction compelling suicide or murder. Patriotism, Obama maintained, is not just love of America in the abstract, but a very particular love for and faith in the American people.
Consider first his civic perfectionism. “The genius of our founders,” Obama said in Springfield, “is that they designed a system of government that can be changed, and changed for the better.” His is a moral reading of the founding.
Just as telling are the markers of progress he names. We unified a nation and set the captives free. We put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty.
We welcome immigrants to our shores. Abolition, the New Deal, and immigration appear not as departures from the founding, but as fulfillment of its promise. Working for change rather than to conserve the order of things is the essence of civic patriotism.
Such change, however, rarely arrives in a single lifetime. In Philadelphia, Obama observed that words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage. What was needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part, to sacrifice life and limb, to narrow the gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of our time.
The parchment, meaning the Declaration and the Constitution, states the promise. The sacrifice of citizens realizes that promise. Obama’s civic perfectionism prevents his clear-eyed view of the history of injustice from curdling into pessimism.
He vows never to forget that in no other country on Earth his story is even possible, bending the idea of self-making associated with conservatives toward a progressive conclusion. Yes, he faulted his minister, Jeremiah Wright, for a profoundly distorted view of this country, one that sees white racism as endemic. Distancing himself from Wright’s racial pessimism was prudent and principled.
He saw the harm in throwing out the inclusive baby with the exclusionary bathwater. Obama knew that many founders owned slaves and that 1619 preceded 1776. He could count.
He knew, too, that in America, no one who goes up against the founding and the flag ever wins. See Kaepernick. Pessimism passing itself off as historical revisionism shores up the right’s view of America as a nation founded by white men for white men, rather than loosens the grip of that view.
Does anyone really need reminding of the founders’ sins? Like us, they were more than their worst days and better than their best. Obama’s civic perfectionism, a more perfect union, aided by the duty of patriotism, rested on a belief in the essential decency of the American people.
This idea of decency in his account of America is a civic virtue that serves as an assurance condition of the constitutional order. It guards against both moral and democratic backsliding, the sword that threatens our political and moral constitution. It is the abandonment of decency itself, and that, more than any policy, is what shocks so many Americans, including those who still regard themselves as conservatives today.
We are just living in an indecent times. Next, consider Obama’s account of opportunity, which places patriotism in a domestic key. Obama says that as a young organizer, he’d learned that the decision to close a steel mill was made by distant executives.
The source of economic ruin in this and other accounts by him is not immigrants threatening American jobs and livelihoods, but CEOs. In Philadelphia, he took seriously the anger of white workers who had seen their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. And he redirected that anger toward corporate America.
The real problem is not that someone who doesn’t like you, who doesn’t look like you, might take your job. It’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than profit. Trump, too, would lament that the factories shuttered and left our shores.
But while the injury is the same in their respective appeals to economic patriotism, the source of harm differs, and with it the remedy and the boundaries of the “we” called upon to restore jobs differ too. Obama understood and availed himself of appeals to economic nationalism without embracing the chauvinism that often follows. He said Americans had been told to blame the other party, or gay people, or immigrants, because blame is easier than remedy.
Against that temptation, he offered domestic programs as an expression of patriotism, calling on his generation to ensure our nation’s workers are sharing in our prosperity and to end poverty in America, both of which he saw as part of fulfilling the promise of America. Consider finally Obama’s defense of patriotic criticism. When government falls out of alignment with the nation’s ideals, he said, the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism.
Protest is profoundly patriotic. The nationalist hears in such criticism a betrayal of the founding. The civic patriot hears the founding own’s voice across the ages, correcting itself.
That criticism was nonetheless disciplined by pragmatism. Politics for Obama is not about winning moral points. It’s about improving the lives of Americans, and that end requires calibrating means.
Consider his realist pluralism. We may have different stories, he said, but we hold common hopes. Civic patriotism seeks union in a divided world by avoiding the temptation to vilify those you disagree with.
For him, union is bound by shared hopes rather than shared blood, soil, or even culture, and it is grounded in a certain kind of decency. Trump often reminds Americans that we all bleed the same red blood of patriots. Obama, however, spoke instead of Americans of every color and creed who bleed together under the same proud flag, using the same imagery.
For the nationalist, however, shared blood makes a people. For the civic patriot, shared sacrifice under a shared flag does. The object of their civic affection is the nation, and often the nation as they imagine it ought to be.
So let me just conclude there. Questions?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
What should the Democratic Party or future presidential leader— you mentioned civic patriotism— but how do we pull a Bill Clinton to a certain extent, like a co-opting in the sense that You know, on one hand, like I’m a veteran. I understand some of the nationalistic trends, you know, saluting the flag, being proud of our country and knowing we have a great country. On the other hand, we have a long way to go to support our ideals.
So what is the message or the leadership approach going forward? Is civic patriotism is a path, but one that’s going to unify or have a bigger message? And also, you know, our young generation has a lot of cynicism in our system, in our country.
How do we capture that back? And we’re also concerned about that as well.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
So it’s a good question. So this kind of project started out having two empirical components. One is I just wanted to know how often different presidents use these different appeals.
And it’s interesting where they align. And I’ve chosen to focus just on Obama versus Trump because they’re familiar to all of us. In some ways, we’ve done the pre-read, by simply existing.
Second, one is we ran these experiments. With Jeremy Levy, he’s a postdoc at University of Wisconsin now. where we give different cues, nationalist cues, civic cues, and we wanted to know if there’s a set of appeals that a broad group of Americans would adhere to.
So you might think the nationalist appeals… There’s just some group of Americans who would only— Like, the MAGA crowd might only hear the nationalist appeals, but you might think the far left might think any appeal to patriotism is morally worrying and reject both, but there might be a broad group of Americans that find the civic appeals to be ethically binding somehow. You know, there is some evidence of that.
But also, a lot of Americans are kind of moved by the nationalist appeals as well. And my sense, and I don’t do this kind of work to say, and I don’t really like to. In a weird way, I’m interested in studying the history of normative ideas, but never articulating them for myself of what one ought to do here.
But it seems to me it would be probably strategically prudent for Democrats and the Democratic Party, and I think they already see this, and I think the Harris campaign started going in this direction. is to actually embrace the flag and embrace the symbols of patriotism for a couple of reasons. I think both strategic reasons and ethical reasons.
Strategically, it might disarm the right’s criticism of liberals as un-American. But ethically, I don’t know why we would give this over to the right. Just because they’ve claimed it and been very good at claiming it, why should we abandon the Constitution and Declaration to the right?
I mean, Douglass didn’t do that. Lincoln didn’t do that. Why are we doing that?
There’s a price to a kind of pessimism or the sort of pessimism we are embracing, and I actually think it’s just prudent to embrace patriotism, maybe a more civic-minded one, the one Obama kind of expressed. Yes, and then Chris.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Yeah, your comments perfectly dovetail what I was hoping to bring up. I actually have done experimental work involving nationalism, particularly related to global warming and climate change, because they’re negatively correlated about 0.5, we found. And we found even experimentally that if you can reduce a person’s sense of nationalism, it will increase their acceptance of global warming.
Even if you don’t even mention global warming in the intervention. And there are lots of reasons, you know, because nationalism is kind of the enemy of international action on global warming, and there are a bunch of other reasons. But one of the ways we assess nationalism empirically is we have like a measure that includes sort of loyalty elements, kind of general nationalism, also economic nationalism.
But one that you haven’t really mentioned on is military nationalism, because I think a lot of our nationalism is based upon especially World War I and World War II and our dominance. And so we have items like, how much do you agree with the idea that we could beat any other country in a fair fight, that kind of thing. And I think there’s a little element of that in military service, but it’s much more generic, like honoring veterans.
So I’m wondering if you think that maybe military nationalism in the sense that we can beat you, and this comes out a lot on Trump’s rhetoric, like “We’ll just nuke them,” and so forth. Do you think that could be a component worthy of more consideration?
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah, it’s easy to check for that. I mean, one reason I didn’t emphasize this too much is because one thing that’s really interesting that’s occurred in American history from Bill Clinton forward I think for the generation that saw Bill Clinton become president but had in their memories previous presidents, maybe two or three previous presidents, I suspect many of them were shocked that someone— Clinton sort of had, but not really— someone without military service Could be the president of the United States.
That’s different now, but this was quite implausible, I think, for many Americans at the time. You know, as not the only veteran in the room, but I think any veteran can tell you there’s an uneasiness with the way Americans use military sacrifice, and especially the right. I mean, one is often confronted by it being used for these causes by people who’ve never served.
And the military is actually quite diverse internally. So I do think the right… I’d be curious to see.
I don’t think there’s much… There’s great distance between how often Democrats and Republicans appeal to military sacrifice. It’s sort of like the flag.
It’s one of those things you don’t cross. So I’m not sure it separates them very much. Chris?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Thanks very much. I see why the prizes were well deserved. I was curious about, maybe this connects a little bit, about the sort of intensely negative affects and how those relate to patriotism.
So you read Very nicely sections of Trump’s first inaugural. I’m guessing those were more the Bannon passages, the kind of Fourth of July passages. You left out the Miller passages of seething resentment and,
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
You know, it’s all American carnage. And on the face of it, that it seems hard to connect, you know, resentment, anger, bitterness with patriotism, with, I mean, you know, the word itself is, right, love of country. Similarly, I was wondering, you quote Stephen Smith on saying, you know, he wants to reconstruct civic patriotism to include shame.
But it’s very hard. I mean, I was thinking, you know, would you call a young German who is committed to supporting Israel, right or wrong, Patriotic, if they’re doing it out of a sense of historical guilt or shame. It seems like something else is going on.
It’s some kind of collective identification that brings about shame and anger, either inward or outward. But patriotism just… It seems like an odd construct to hold that kind of intense negativity.
With Obama’s version, it’s easier to understand the kind of critical improvement, but…
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting question. I think it’s a difficult question to know what people hear in Trump’s appeals. Clearly he taps in.
You know, clearly, there’s a quite sizable amount of Trump supporters that don’t distinguish between their patriotism and even white nationalism. I mean, we’re seeing this play out in Ohio in an interesting way. Where Vivek Ramaswamy is running into the reality of courting this kind of politics.
And there I think we’re starting to see this right now also in a fracturing of MAGA to some degree around the war in Iran. But what I wanted to point to is that I’m more interested in people who voted twice for Obama and voted for Trump twice. I’m also interested in the fact that 50% of Latinos, or more than 50%, voted for Trump, and he had the largest share of Black male voters by any Republican candidate.
So whatever underlying view of race and resentments occurring there is much more complicated than the way we often think about it. And I don’t have a clear answer to that. I’m more interested in what’s going on there.
So how is he like… So people know all the Miller stuff, sort of. Maybe to their own fault, they didn’t take that seriously.
I think 2024 has been a very different administration than 2016, and some people are probably going to have buyer’s regret. We’re going to find out in two weeks. But I do want to— It’s not that I want a sympathetic view of Trump.
I want to think about Trump the way a historian would think about him, but not wait 30 years to do so. So how do you put as much kind of somewhat ethical distance between him and yourself as you try? I’m just really trying to understand his appeal, including to many people I served with that I deeply like and love
and I spend time with on the condition we have a gag order that we don’t talk about Trump. But they vote for Trump. Like, every Veterans Day I go away with people I served with and We spend a weekend together, and we generally don’t talk about politics.
And they voted for Trump twice, and everyone but one of them is of color. The white veteran, he actually didn’t vote for Trump. He and I are the only two in the group, which is interesting.
And they voted for Trump, and several of them are from immigrant backgrounds. And… And if you were to ask them the reasons why, none of them are the reasons we think, this kind of simplistic, reductive, racial resentment sort of reasons.
Many of them actually work in jobs that are threatened. Many of them work in factory jobs, not on the line, but in some management. Two of them were like combat medics, are now nurses.
They’re worried about You know, not being able to send their kids to college. They essentially went to the military to get a GI Bill, to go to college, to send their kids to college. And now, like, in some ways, the sacrifice they made for a middle-class life seem out of reach for their children.
And maybe they don’t lay the blame where we think they should, but Trump is tapping something. And I want to figure out what that is, and I want to take that seriously, at the risk of probably losing some friends thinking about it out loud. Annie, and then…
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Thanks, Des. I agree with you that the left should not abandon the language of patriotism, but should reappropriate it. So I’m sympathetic.
I also agree with the general idea that we need a more sophisticated engagement with the kind of causes of Trump. I think Trump was a symptom of some underlying problems, rather than just being the underlying problem. But I guess the question I want to ask is, what do you think a renewal of civic patriotism should learn from Trump?
And I guess I think I’m a little skeptical that just renewing Obama’s version of it would be very effective.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
And I think that the reason I’m a little skeptical is because I think the sources of the appeal of nationalist patriotism Rely heavily on the experience of insecurity and the desire of people who are insecure to want to belong to a protective community. And so I think any renewal of civic patriotism is going to have to respond to that desire effectively, and just holding out an unrealized ideal doesn’t do it.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah. I didn’t mean to cut you short, Annie. Are you done?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Oh, that’s it.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
So I cut out a part of this talk, which I’d just given at Wisconsin, and it ends on a kind of criticism of Obama that calls for a return to economic nationalism. And drawing more on Shklar’s point, that since our sense of standing is grounded in our ability to earn, as our capacity to earn diminishes, our standing diminishes, our insecurity increases. And one of the things, while Obama has these gestures, to economic concerns, it is not a robust part of his vision.
And I actually think the left should lean into economic nationalism. We should be talking about Lordstown. I also just don’t want to belong to a party that doesn’t care about the working class.
I don’t want to belong to a party of just liberals, people of color, elites, and millionaires, and just abandon the working class, white, black, and brown altogether. And I feel like that’s where the Democratic Party’s at. Maybe the Democratic Socialists Might pull it towards that, but I would say the left or liberals or the Democratic Party, depending how you slice these groups, need to embrace economic nationalism.
And it need not come in an anti-immigrant rhetoric, but it might call… like… I have a kind of complicated view about tariffs. The principle of tariffs don’t really bother me as a principle.
Now, the pragmatism perhaps behind them and who and how we’re applying them, et cetera, I might have more of a problem with their application or Trump’s insidious use of them. But the idea of policy that are meant to protect American workers, Even at the cost of international workers, I don’t have a problem with that. I actually…
I think liberals should be more nationalist. I think we can have a liberal nationalism that is not profoundly illiberal or necessarily cruel. And I think liberals will just have to confront that, and Obama doesn’t go far enough to me in his nationalism.
I know that’s probably an unpopular thing to say in a university because we’re such a kind of international group, diverse, et cetera. But I do think protective mechanism or protective policy for American workers is not a bad thing. I think until Democrats or liberals really come to terms with that, they’re going to continue to lose the working class, especially a generation that’s terrified of AI.
We don’t have an answer to that. David and then Terry.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Desmond, I think what you say makes very good sense, and I appreciate all your remarks. Toward the end, you were reflecting on the, sort of how puzzling it is, or troubling, That so many people are giving up the flag, giving up the civic tradition, giving up a lot of the ideals that you speak for. And I wonder if we aren’t still experiencing a legacy of a lot of the 1980s, 1990s politics when, well, I can’t remember how many times I was informed.
That civics, basic civics about what America is, is by definition racist. And we need to understand that the very idea of America and of an American tradition is a mask for white racism, for white supremacy, for patriarchy. This was very widespread throughout a lot of academic and liberal and reform organizations in the ’90s and then into the early 20th century.
I experienced it extensively. I remember one time in the ’90s, when I was at a conference, I was supposed to chair one of the sessions of a multiculturalism conference, and I was to introduce the poet, Amiri Baraka. When he found out I was to introduce him, he gave a fit.
He would not be introduced by me or by any white man. And the people running the conference had to scurry around the campus to find some accommodating black guy who would come in and introduce him. Now, this is not an isolated incident.
There was so much sense that unity across the color lines, across all these lines, was a way of keeping minorities and traditional downtrodden people forward. So the sense that the American flag itself stood for racism and patriarchy was very deeply embedded in a lot of American discourse. And we’re now sort of against that, but I wonder if the legacy of that isn’t still with us in a lot of ways.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Well, I think you would know better than I. David Hollinger’s written extensively on multiculturalism, but on religious pluralism in American history. So, David, you’d know better than I, but I do think we’re living through an interesting moment. Of a kind of backlash, and I think some of that is behind us.
So certainly we had the ’80s, ’90s rise of multiculturalism, and then that was followed later by what AOC called Woke 1, and maybe we’re living through Woke Dead now. But I think you’re right. There was this moment that also relates to the canon wars, where it wasn’t an appeal for either intellectually diversifying or questioning or engaging with it, but rather of just kind of rejecting it outright.
But there’s always still been a tradition coming out of Ralph Ellison and Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison famously says in the epilogue of Invisible Man to never conflate the principles with those who’ve committed violence in their name. And Baldwin says to his nephew James in The Fire Next Time, If not us, then who is gonna redeem the Republic, right? So there’s always been this redemptionist narrative in Black political thought as well.
And we’re living through a moment now where there’s actually a kind of return to civics. So one of the things is, it’s interesting who is funding and advocating civics: the right. And there are these growing up of these civic centers and a return to the canon.
And I actually think that’s a good thing for one reason why it employs political theorists and philosophers, and, you know, who’ll take money from anyone in a jobless market. The thing there I worry about, though, is we’re going from the civics as being thrown away, or the canon as being cast aside, to now the canon as being a kind of antidote to questions of diversity, et cetera. It’s funny how these debates, they come back, perhaps not in the same guise, but sometimes in a different one.
Terry?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
When you were talking about national patriotism, I thought a lot about populism and how connected the two concepts are. Looking at the ins and outs, that’s very much in line with populism. A return to a golden age nostalgia, that’s very much populism.
So I wanted to ask you how you distinguish national patriotism from populism?
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
So yeah, I mean, one of the things, populism is just one of those terms now, like, I feel if you touch it, everything unravels around it. So we tend to think of Donald Trump as a populist, but there’s many ways in which he’s not a populist, certainly in the tradition of someone like Tom Watson or even others in the American tradition. And there’s some ways in which he is a populist.
I didn’t want to go there only in part because I’m trying to make sense of how patriotism works in America, and then if I had this further variable of populism, which I’m still not altogether sure what that is meant to kind of capture when we’re speaking about America in particular. So I don’t have a good answer. I do think just based on the commitments, you would see a lot of overlap.
But I’m more interested in this question. So you could just flip the question. You could just flip the point and say, well, what you’re saying is Democrats should just make more populist appeals.
But, you know, populist appeals can also be quite, depending on the mood or the time in American history, populist appeals can be completely inconsistent with things like economic nationalism. I mean, we’d have to think about a period like that, or I could imagine… There are certain kinds of populist commitments or convictions that may be in conflict or may be at least inconsistent with certain kinds of economic nationalist ones.
I don’t know. I have to think. I hadn’t thought about it carefully enough to give you a thoughtful answer, and I don’t want to just pretend to have an answer when I don’t.
Jack?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Well, you know, David Hollinger is here and So I don’t want to misquote him or something, but in his book—
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Oh, go ahead, it’s okay.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Which, in his book, which I myself relied on a lot, he has this concept of who is in the circle of we, right? Who belongs to the nation? Who are we a part of?
Who’s in and who’s out? And, of course, throughout American history, that has been an ongoing conflict. And it’s, I mean, you use the terms…
Civic and national patriotism usually is you have a civic or ethnic concept of national identity, right?
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Absolutely. Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
That’s the more common language. So I don’t want to kind of thrust that upon you if that’s not where you want to go.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
No, no, I’m actually borrowing on that distinction from Cohen.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
But I mean, you know, so… nationalism, and you… said this yourself, is kind of, in some sense, a unifying ideology because the nation is supposed to take precedence in your loyalty over lesser identities, right? And so that’s where multiculturalism, in some sense, is incompatible with nationalism, not with patriotism necessarily. So I think…
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
But pluralism isn’t.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
if you think about the integration or the attitudes towards waves of immigration, there was always a negative reaction. And the price of entry was assimilation in some sense, right? And so if you accept the assimilationist ethos, you find that people are much more positive and accepting of the waves of immigration.
So now multiculturalism rejects that as well. So there’s a tension there in terms of the unifying aspect of this. The other point, I think, and I think, you know, why is The nationalist patriotism sort of so much more automatic.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Right?
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
This is a good question.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
I mean, Stephen Smith and all of these, are highly intellectual versions of an identification, an identity, and they don’t resonate. I mean, they resonate in this room, I’m sure, but they don’t resonate with your veterans, and they don’t resonate easily with ordinary people. So you have to kind of work to get the Obama vision accepted on a mass On a mass level, whereas the kind of “We belong, we love our country, this is the flag,” these symbols are so much more accessible to ordinary people, and that I think is an issue.
And I think if you think about what the Democrats are doing, if you look at their candidates, they’re trotting out veteran candidates wherever they can, right?
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
Yeah.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
So there is some recognition of that in terms of strategic Behavior. Yeah. I mean, the one thing, and then the other thing about civic patriotism or civic nationalism, how does that distinguish American identity from British identity or Canadian identity or any other democratic identity, right?
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
So let me end on—
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
So that’s a problem, I think.
[DESMOND JAGMOHAN]
So let me end on as brief of an answer to this question. The first point, as your own early work have shown, is that immigrants assimilate, and Huntington is wrong. There isn’t a clash of civilization.
That after the second generation, immigrants rank as high on a nationalist survey as native-born whites. More so. More so, actually.
So we should have predicted that Latinos would be more nationalistic than whites, actually, and immigrants in general. So there’s just a way in which I think a lot of academics just don’t know that empirical work, that actually minorities actually rank very high. And the second and final point is I don’t think that the civic patriotism in the American tradition is distinct from any civic patriotic tradition.
However, what is distinct about the American tradition is that the kind of fixed nature, though something to be realized, of the founding is very different in America than most countries. The kind of founding moment of setting out a set of principles, it’s not distinctly American. Vietnam has something similar in other countries, But I do think the Declaration in particular can be something the civic patriot should hang their hat on and move forward, because I do think Try to distinguish myself from enlightened patriotism.
I have great admiration for Stephen Smith, but I really think this is a patriotism for Yale undergrads and Berkeley undergrads and Princeton undergrads. It’s very demanding. It assumes you know the constitutional order, you know the principles, you know how they’re interpreted, et cetera.
And I think I’m not even sure I know that half the time. I think there’s something about the way… And I just think the nationalist patriotism always has an advantage here, because there’s something about the symbols, there’s something visceral and raw about it, and they’re just operating at an advantage.
And the question is, can we arrive at a civic patriotism that has that kind of immediacy, that sense of urgency, that clarion call that ordinary people can hear? I’m not sure we’ve seen it on the American scene. Thank you.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER]
Thank you.
(applause)
(“80/90” by Arjun Sen)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
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