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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

The problem is larger than fiscal. It’s about long term thinking in general. We have no common cause, vision or “myth” to gather round.

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Common rallying causes have been systematically dismantled.

You can't be patriotic because our history isn't perfect.

You can't be religious because it might offend someone.

God and country have been the common denominators of our culture and they are no longer seen as relevant, and there is nothing else to replace them. It seems like we are more interested in finding and emphasizing all the ways we are different from each other rather than rallying around anything we might have in common.

> You can't be patriotic because our history isn't perfect.

This is untrue; very few people have a problem with patriotism. Lots of people have a problem with various forms of nationalism, but none of that is about imperfection of history except insofar as certain breeds of nationalism center around glorifying and recreating bad aspects of history.

> You can't be religious because it might offend someone.

While this has always been true to an extent for faiths other than than that of the most dominant local form of Christianity, it is less true (not more) now than in the past.

> This is untrue; very few people have a problem with patriotism.

Look, I come from the left. Growing up, there was definitely the sense that it is in poor taste to express enthusiasm about America or being an American. That it was something reserved for red necks who drive pick up trucks. The American flag, as a symbol, was considered gauche and the only time you would wear anything with the flag on it is if you were being self-consciously ironic. There was no sense that America was great. Instead, the focus was almost exclusively on America's flaws.

This critique is overly focused on shallow aesthetics ("gauche", "pickup-trucks"), which really have nothing to do with patriotism, and more to do with some kind of tribal name-calling, which I'm sure takes place on both left on right. It is just as patriotic to acknowledge and grapple with a country's flaws as it is to express pride in one's country. There's no contradiction between the two.

In my experience, there is a deep vein of antipathy toward America on the left. I brought up condescension toward the flag because I think it is emblematic of that antipathy. I mean, the flag is just about the purest symbolic representation of America that exists. So if your attitude toward it is that you wouldn’t deign to adorn yourself or anything you own with it, and you disparage it as fitting only of some lower class, what viable interpretation of that fact is there other than that you feel negatively about the thing which it represents?

Or perhaps another way to think of it: if you had a friend who, every time a certain person came up, immediately started to enumerate that person’s flaws, what would you conclude about their feelings toward that person?

I don't think its offense that has killed traditional religion. After all, the religious types have traditionally been one of the loudest political groups in the US. People willing to hold up signs with dead babies to send a political message don't appear to care about offending others.

I definitely see that Christianity is getting less-and-less relevant in the US (as it has been in most other Western nations), but it seems like patriotism is its replacement, the Constitution is the new Bible and the founding fathers are the new apostles.

I was thinking this the other day actually. That we are generally best served when people extrapolate their interests for the long term. And this is a big part of religion and faith. But they don't always help people value the collective long-term interest.

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