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.