Keen On

“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country, argues that there’s a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn’t love their country, Erdozain says. It’s not a good place. His argument is that American patriotism has the same Puritan root as British imperialism. The idea of a chosen people, a city on the hill, a nation with a special mission is a kind of moral virus. He says it infected America in the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided moral cover for slavery, military aggression abroad, and the denial of rights at home. So what America needs, he argues, is a new set of foundational myths laid out by progressives like Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. This would establish a new kind of American pa