Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen

Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen


Are Most Americans Unpatriotic?

July 23, 2019

If we criticize Trump, we don’t love America. If we learn history, we are disloyal. You know that’s what a lot of people on the right (in larger numbers than we’d imagined) are claiming. But what is Patriotism? Does the right own it? On this show, historian Steve Hochstadt explains the famous quote from 1775, that patriotism can be the last refuge of scoundrels. For example, Trump’s picture literally hugging the flag, is a cover for bad behavior. And in the new alleged patriotism, anyone who favors reasonable restraints on untethered monopolistic capitalism is clearly unpatriotic. What can we, non-Trump people, do to take back “patriotism?” How dangerous to America is this new nationalism?