Nationalism and Patriotism, Republicans and Democrats

What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism? It is the difference between the love of nation and the love of country. In our modern age of nation-states that fine distinction is often lost, or deemed irrelevant, but in the context of American politics I think it explains much.

The etymology of "patriotism" and "patriot" is the Latin word patria, which might be best translated as "homeland" or "fatherland". Patriotism, therefore, is the love of a country, and often accompanied by a loyalty to the state that governs that country. In the American context, where our national origin story is one of the frontier, a new land conquered and settled to found an intentional community on some set of shared values. The "American people", to the patriot, are in classical Greek terms a demos, a political community of all the inhabitants of the same fatherland. 

But the nationalist does not love a country, per se, rather, the nationalist loves a nation, an ethnic group, and so only a nation-state, a state created by, or at least for, that group can command the loyalty of the nationalist. Nationalism isn't necessarily exclusive, and the nationalist doesn't inevitably desire a homogeneous ethno-state or support ethnic cleansing to obtain it. But the train of nationalist thought can lead to that conclusion without being derailed by contradiction. Thus to an American nationalist the "American people" are an ethnos, a single ethnic group.

Both nationalists and patriots "love their country". The patriot loves his country because it is his fatherland, and so his love is the unconditional filial devotion of children to their parents. Thus where the patria embodies his (and its) ideals he is filled with pride, and where it falls short of those ideals he aspires to lift it up and repair its mistakes.

But the nationalist, the nationalist loves his country because it is their country, because it belongs to his nation (which is of course a great nation), and thus is a great country. And so long as the country remains the possession of his nation he loves it, and so long as the state is commanded by his nation he obeys it. But if his country should change, if his nation should become less dominant within it, if nation should cease to command the state, he will cease to love his country or to obey its state. For the nationalists "love of country" is utterly conditional and transnational, a passing affection that exists only so as long as country and state serve his nation.

What does this mean for American politics? I advance this hypothesis: that today Democrats are patriots and Republicans are nationalists. Thus the Democrats seek to define and advance the values of their patria and serve the interests of the demos. To understand them we need only seek to understand their values. But Republicans are nationalists, (or at least the Trumpists) and the nation they love is white Anglophone Americans. Their political cause is protect and advance the power and interests of that nation, regardless of all other people.

The hazards that ideology, if left unchecked, poses to the American republic should  be obvious. 

The Value of Innocence.

Surprisingly often, the right thing to do is the smart thing to do.

Take public defenders. Or rather, don't. Because at present in the USA the de jure constitutional right to legal representation is de facto a cruel joke, with PD's working between 1.5 and 2 time the recommended caseload, and as a result about 90% of their clients plead guilty in a plea bargain. This ins't just a miscarriage of justice, its also very wasteful.

Public defenders with 11-15 years of experience earn on average about $76,000 dollars a year, rookies about $50,000. On average, the recommend number of felony cases for them to work is about 50, and the number they actually work is a bit over 100. So how many innocent people accused of felonies do they have to successfully defend each year to pay for themselves?

One.

See, putting people in prison isn't free. It costs about $30,000 dollars on average to keep people in prison, depending on the state. Since the average prison sentence for serious crimes is about 3 years (assuming a discount rate of 3%) the present cost to the government is about $84,000. That's ignoring the wages, and taxes on those wages, that are lost keeping an innocent person in prison. If we took that into account the social cost would be much higher.

Now the key variable in all this is how often innocent people are charged with felonies. So my question to you is this, how many times out of a hundred do you think an innocent person is charged with a felony?

Lets say that its 2%. That's a very good error rate. After all, the threshold for publication in the sciences is 95% confidence. But a three percent error rate means that if public defender worked 50 cases, on average 1 would be innocent. And if he successfully defended that one innocent person he's more than paid for himself. But a public defender can't mount successful defenses unless his caseload permits it. At fifty cases per PD he could successfully defend innocent clients. At the current level, where 90% enter plea bargains, that doesn't seem so likely.

Now this accounting doesn't fully measure all the other court costs, although those would generally be incurred regardless of whether or not a person is innocent, and so are a wash. But my estimates for false charges are very conservative, which I think more that balances it out.

tl;dr Public defenders more than pay for themselves. We could double the amount of money we spend on them, and more than make it up on the reduced prison spending. But we won't do that so long as cruelty and stupidity are governing principles.

Mel Gibson Should Have Been a Tory in "The Patriot"

Mel Gibson's character in The Patriot, Benjamin Martin, should have been a Tory fighting against the American Revolution. Gibson decided to airbrush away unpleasant facts and historical complexities around the Patriot cause and the historical figure (Francis Marion) that his character was based on. But those changes should have created entirely different narrative and put a strange subtext on the movie we actually got.

The most important difference between the fictional Martin and the historical Marion is that Marion was a slaveowner and a believer in slavery. Which made him like pretty much every other white guy of any means in South Carolina prior to 1865. Gibson's Martin doesn't own slaves. He employs literate free blacks on his farm. Not as sharecropping tenants either. In South Carolina, the beating heart of slave power in North America. His neighbors are plantations worked by slaves, and their neighbors are plantations worked by slaves. Every person of any wealth or power in South Carolina is involved, to one extent or another in slavery. Martin is probably the most progressive and just member of the planter class in the entirety of South Carolina, maybe even the whole American South.

And I bet his neighbors hate and fear him. South Carolina made it a crime to educate or manumit a slave well prior to 1776. Southern slaveowners, especially in South Carolina were terrified of anything that might threaten the slave system or make a slave revolt possible, with good reason. Paranoia is rational when they really are out to get you, and the 1790 census records about 40% of South Carolina's population were slaves. The category of "other free persons" (i.e. free blacks) numbered exactly 1,801, less than 1% of the population. To employ free blacks, especially in a rural area where they might most easily help slaves escape or organize a revolt, would have been barely tolerable to his neighbors. Our only conclusion then, is that Benjamin Martin is an anti-slavery radical. None of his peers would hold him in contempt for owning slaves while privately expressing reservations about the whole affair, and if he merely objected to his being a part of it he could have sold his farm and moved North. But he stayed in South Carolina, "to small to be a republic, to big to be an insane asylum", which was the center of white supremacy in America until the 1960s. But he stayed. Martin might have been done killing after the French and Indian War, but he wasn't done fighting. He was going to attack slavery at its strongest point by setting an example. It puts a whole new spin on his line (IMO the best line in the movie):

"I'd rather be ruled by one tyrant a thousand miles away than a thousand tyrants one mile away"

That sentiment, and his opposition to slavery, suggest that Martin would have sided with the British if he believed they were the stronger opponents of slavery. Which after the American Revolution they certainly were, abolitionism advancing from a fringe position in 1776 to the official policy of the British Empire by the 1830s, which they used as a justification for the expansion of their empire. But in 1776 whether the British or the American Revolutionaries were stronger opponents of slavery was unclear.  Britons were held in bondage by other Britons in Britain until 1799, and several major court cases around 1776, analogous to the Dredd Scott case, affirmed that, while slave-trading per-se wasn't practiced in Britian, slaves brought in from abroad remained slaves.

So why did Benjamin Martin fight for Americans? Because his son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), did, and provoked a retaliation by British forces that destroyed his family and livelihood. So why did Gabriel side with the Patriots? Presumably, raised in a radically anti-slavery household, he would share those beliefs. And so listening to the radical rhetoric coming out of Boston, he figured that now was the time to rise up in defense of liberty, and throw out the British and abolish slavery in a newly independent America. So he ran off to join the Continental army, and that's how we got the movie we did.

A movie in which the British are supposed to be the bad guys, perpetrating the infamously ahistorical atrocity of the church massacre. But watch that scene again. Where are the black people? South Carolina's population in 1770s is 40% slaves. In this rural area of the South is Tavington murdering all the civilians, or just the free civilians? Presumably all the slaves either ran away or were set free. Tavington, arragant brute though he is, appears to be adopting a divide and rule strategy in counterinsurgency, attempting to win over southern blacks to create a loyalist population to "garrison" a restive region. A strategy the British had used before in Ireland and would use again throughout the world. Presumably, if that's the long term plan of the British, abolition is the American colonies will have to follow a British victory sooner rather than later. And while both the Americans and British promised to free any slave who fought for them, the British actually kept their promise,

The movie ends after the siege of Yorktown and the military victory of the Americans. But the implications of this backstory and the unseen historical epilogue creates a darker, more cynical film than Gibson intended to make. He wanted a patriotic war movie and another venue to express his undying hatred of the British (seriously, why does he hate them so much?). But what he got was a film about a revolution betrayed. Because the causes and ideals the titular patriot fought for, arguably America's highest ideals, died after independence. All the suffering and tragedy he endured, the loss of his son, his family, his home, the people he killed and led to their deaths, the failure to overcome his blood-lust, was for nothing. Slavery became even more entrenched and persisted in the South until the Civil War, and the 1783 Constitution made such significant concessions to slave power that they damage American democracy to this day.