I do not think so – there is no American nation and no American religion, and thus any patriotism is superficial. American Indians and African Americans have nothing to be grateful for to USA. Many ``European Americans" and Asian Americans are descendents of recent immigrants or are immigrants themselves – they would relate much more to their country of origin then to USA. I am Jewish – I never was Russian and never became an American.
Sure there is. It’s a refuge for scoundrels.
Their last one, AIUI.
Simply put: you are wrong.
I’m the American born son of Asian immigrants. As is my brother, my cousins, and several of my friends, co-workers, and neighbors (Fort Bend Co, TX has a 40% Asian American population).
Among people of Jewish descent? One of my friends is married to a woman who is the granddaughter of European Jews who survived the Holocaust. She, and most of her contemporaries, associate much more closely with America than Israel, and in many cases, more closely with America that their religions.
As descendants of recent immigrants, we still relate more to the US than to our parents’ countries of origin. Our experience is that, because (not in spite of) a lack of a single American ethnicity or religion, our parents were welcome to come to this country and make a life for themselves and their children. And, yes, we feel strongly this is a good thing and a uniquely American trait, despite your insistence to the contrary.
And, as an American, your thesis sounds pretentious at best. I should think the more sensible option is asking me, and what others like me, actually feel about our country, rather than coming up with borderline offensive stereotypes that are easily disproven.
Of course, anecdotes are not data, YMMV, etc.
The US certainly exists as a nation.
There’s no State religion, but you don’t need one for patriotism anyway.
Apart from profitable casinos and the Presidency.
Why did they come to America then?
OK, that’s one example of an unpatriotic American. 300 million to go …
Yes, there is an American nation. It’s defined by a system of government and a culture, not an ethnicity or religion…that doesn’t mean it’s not a nation, it means it’s a particular type of nation.
Maybe don’t impute beliefs to others.
They don’t, though.
If you’re living in the U.S., it’s certainly influenced and changed you.
“Questions” like this just make this patriotic American sad.
This is not a debate. It is an opinion to which the OP is going to simply reply “nuh uh” to anything presented as evidence of the contrary.
While I do not like burdening the IMHO staff with this sort of stuff, it really belongs there, not here.
Off to a more appropriate forum.
Your thread title asks whether it exists; your OP seems to argue why it shouldn’t exist. Two very different points.
On the first point, obviously there IS American patriotism; we’re often accused of having too MUCH of it.
On the second point, there are arguments to be made for how much and what kinds of patriotism are best for the US, but the points you make against it are mostly bizarre.
Yes; rabidly, dangerously so.
There certainly is an American nation, and there’s an American religion; Christianity. “America is a Christian country” as we are told over and over.
That’s ridiculous; the same kind of argument that led to Americans of Japanese descent being rounded up into internment camps during WWII.
I am Jewish and there are many Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists in USA. Most Catholic and Orthodox Christians do not consider Protestants Christian.
There may be some superficial patriotism in USA, but in reality there is no such thing as an American nation – there is a conglomerate of people of different backgrounds and religions.
Moreover, the worst war for USA was the Civil War.
Let me guess - you can’t have a real nation unless everyone is a single, neutral, color?
You mean there’s no American ethnicity.
So what? Ethnicity does not a nation make.
Some individual Catholics, maybe, but the Catholic church certainly does consider Protestants to be Christians, and I expect the same is true of the Orthodox churches. There are a few Protestants who don’t consider Catholics real Christians, but even they are very rare.
Certainly; but they are regarded as inferior, followers of “false religions” and often essentially as traitors. Atheists of course are regarded as outright demonic.
So? Most nations have some amount of diversity. America is less homogenous than many countries, but it doesn’t lose its nationhood on that account – unless you want to redefine the word “nation”. Otherwise, the only “nations” that exist would be the ones with state-defined religions and cultures… North Korea, China, Iran, maybe Russia. Every other country is just a pretender, loose conglomerates of people.
But that’s just a silly semantic argument. Your underlying point, I think, is that Americans are so diverse we have no shared culture.
I don’t think that’s true, either.
Much of our country shares a blind love for democracy, television, obesity, good-looking white people, a guilty fear of Muslims, Apple, Inc., big cars, suburban houses, Starbucks, factory farmed meat, security from invasion, some variant of the English language, the de facto national religion of Christianity, and a very poor understanding of civics and international events. We are united by our common love for a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle defined by our preachers, employers, and media producers, who together write the broad themes of the American Story. That’s what Americans celebrate – this freedom to exploit the world and each other and to be happy in our little bubbles while doing so.
Maybe this story isn’t as easy to define as a nation’s whose identity centers around the worship of some particular religious idol, or a nation that has a lot of homogenous cultural tradition, but it is a culture nonetheless.
The love of this culture – the patriotism for shiny things approved by God – deserves recognition if not for its innate existence, then at least for its impacts on the people who live here and the rest of the world. America is a great clockwork vacuum, sucking up labor and capital from across the globe and turning it into the greatest military-industrialist empire history has seen. What’s remarkable about this is not that patriotism is missing, but that it’s very real and present – we are one of the few nations to have made genuinely happy cogs out of the peasant classes, convincing them that a comfortable life protected by a powerful military where you might one day be shinier than your neighbor is a good life worth celebrating. This is not a new idea, but most societies that practice this either forces it through oppression and state dominance, or is lucky enough to have an educated and rational citizenry that understands its role in their society and they power they usually have over it. Americans, generally, have neither: We are phenomenally ignorant yet freakishly loyal, a perfect combination for our very particular brand of jingoistic, shallow patriotism. And if you listen to any presidential address, you can hear this same rhetoric over and over. People united under God to work hard and earn their happiness as we continually seek out new bogeymen to wave Old Glory at.
If there is no American nation, why did the Civil War end with the preservation of the U.S.A. as one? And as costly as the Civil War was in terms of loss of life, I believe we emerged from it stronger.
In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. – A. Bierce
What does this have to do with whether or not there is an American nation (there is, by the way – it has a military, a government, a constitution – everything modern nations have!)?