The Nationalism We Call Patriotism

America spent decades teaching its students to recognize the warning signs of dangerous nationalism--the militarism, propaganda, silencing of dissent, the belief that a nation's cause is righteous enough to exempt it from history's rules. And we still never applied them to ourselves.

America spent decades teaching its students to recognize the warning signs of dangerous nationalism — the militarism, the propaganda, the silencing of dissent, the belief that a nation's cause is righteous enough to exempt it from history's rules. We took notes. We just never applied them to ourselves.

The United States has done genuinely good things, and the people who love it aren't entirely wrong to do so. But the issue is what it's become. And more than that, the issue is what it refuses to acknowledge.

We spent years in classrooms learning to recognize a specific pattern. A pattern of nationalistic nations drifting into militaristic ones. Those countries began silencing dissent. Those countries slowly drifted towards a catastrophic culmination of war-hungry nationalists with an idealized world in their goals.

We sat through these lessons and took notes. We questioned how the events we learned about were ever allowed to take place. How did nobody stop these terrible movements before they began violating rights at home?

Nobody told us that we would ever have to apply that lesson to ourselves. In part because Americans typically view the United States as a pioneer of freedom and righteousness – a similar story to those we studied in history.

The United States spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. That number is not an abstraction. More than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine – combined. This fact is occasionally mentioned in a think-tank report or a progressive op-ed, but it quickly disappears into the background in a country that has normalized this type of spending over generations.

In the curriculum we were taught at school, that very statistic has a name – militarism. And we were taught, clearly and without ambiguity, that militarism is one of the primary causes of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

Yet at nearly every major sporting event, fighter jets fly over stadiums and are met with roaring crowds. Recruitment ads look more like movie trailers than anything else. The United States military is not merely an institution in American life. It's become a value system. It's the closest thing that this country has to a national religion. Questioning it is often treated like blasphemy.

This isn't an argument against soldiers but, instead, an argument about what our country is teaching itself when it makes military power a sacred entity.

To many, the nationalistic traits of the United States are harder to see. To Americans, nationalism is something that only happens in other countries – Germany, Imperial Japan, the ethnic blood-pride of the Austro-Hungarian collapse. Here, nationalism is still rampant. It's called patriotism.

Historians don't flag people loving their countries as dangerous. They instead focus on a specific set of ideas: that the nation is the highest moral unit; that its interests override universal ethics; that criticism from within is a form of betrayal; and that the suffering of people outside its borders counts less. Run that checklist through the last forty years of American politics and see how far you get.

When NFL players knelt during the national anthem to protest police violence, the debate was reframed as being about the flags, troops, and respect. The actual content of the protest – that the state was killing its citizens – became almost beside the point. What actually mattered was that the respect ritual had been disrupted.

In today's America, the language of World War II is used to start wars. Not prevent them.

Recently, every adversary is Hitler. Every moment we hesitate is Munich 1938. The lesson – that you can't negotiate with pure evil – is invoked so regularly that it can now acceptably be used in justification for any form of military intervention, bypassing any debates. That is not the actual lesson. That's just the lesson gutted of everything that makes it useful.

The full lesson of the World Wars was not that the United States should stop all evil in the world. The full lesson was about systems – how ordinary nations and people slide into relentless regimes through nationalism, militarism, propaganda, and the erosion of dissent. The warning was just as much about us as it was about them.

We took the easier half of that lesson and left the harder half on the table.

The hard half is this: the nations we studied didn't always think they were the villains either.

The United States has its own list. In 1899, American forces entered the Philippines, waging a war that killed between 200,000 and 1 million Filipinos. Civilians were forced into concentration camps as their villages were burned. The military called it pacification, and it rarely comes up in high school classes.

In 1945, the United States infamously dropped atomic bombs on two civilian cities. Somewhere between 130,000 and 220,000 people died, most of them civilians. We teach this as a difficult but necessary decision. The issue is that every other country that has ever committed an atrocity has taught it the same way.

In Vietnam, American forces killed over 2 million civilians. We burned entire villages with napalm. We poisoned entire generations with Agent Orange. We combed Cambodia in secret while telling the American public we weren't. My Lai was a direct symptom of what war quickly evolves into when you've convinced an entire military that the enemy is subhuman.

In 1996, a reporter asked then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright whether the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children from U.S.-led sanctions were worth it. She said yes.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on fabricated intelligence, destabilized an entire region, and oversaw the deaths of over 200,000 civilians. Nobody involved was held accountable because in America, accountability for military action is extended to other countries, not ourselves.

Still today, the United States provides the bombs, the funding, and the support for a military campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians – many of them children – and that legal scholars and international courts have begun describing in terms that parallel verdicts taught in history books.

This is exactly what the nations we studied looked like from the inside. Their citizens were also taught that their country was a pioneer of freedom. Their governments also called it self-defense. Their politicians also found justifications. The lesson of the World Wars was never just that genocide is wrong. The lesson was that every country that committed atrocities thought it was the exception because its cause was righteous enough.

We were taught to recognize that thinking. We weren't, however, taught to recognize it in ourselves.

American exceptionalism, put simply, is the belief that history's rules don't apply here. That overreach, arrogance, and the slow intoxication of military dominance are patterns that America can live indefinitely without consequence, and that we are inherently different.

That belief is incorrect. It is the one that we were taught to oppose in school. Now it is time to oppose it consistently – not just when it's another nation's endeavor.