Top Highlights

• Patriotism denotes a special attachment to a particular political community, although not necessary to its existing form of government. Nationalism, with which patriotism is often confused, stands for a very different phenomenon—the fusion, actual or aspirational, between shared ethnicity and state sovereignty. The nation-state, then, is a communit...
• But just as patriots can go astray, they can also acknowledge their mistakes and do their best to make reparations for them. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being deficient in patriotism, but he was the president who formally apologized to Japanese-Americans on behalf of the country for their unjust internment during World War II.
• Patriotism is a moral mistake because it requires (and tends to create) enemies, exalts a collective form of self-love, and stands opposed to the only justified morality, which is universalist. Individuals and their rights are fundamental; one’s country, he says, is at most a “temporary and contingent stopping point on the way to a federated humani...
• As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.

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