I and the police and the legal system have already thought of a way science might prove that you’re unable to do so. Don’t drink and drive.
Thanks, that’s roughly my sense of the issue too, although you probably stated it much more succinctly than I could.
Just to rehash, from the last thread.
How about “What do you think makes you {X} patriotic?” “Why are you more patriotic than any of the other options?”
Granted, it doesn’t lend itself to standard polling because there are no set answers. But then it’s a silly question to begin with.
And I would expect someone who gave an opinion about the local drug or crime situation to be, you know, informed, i.e. researched. Otherwise, it’s a completely useless poll. So I would ask first, “Have you looked into your local drug/crime situation?” and, if the answer was No, next call, please. Not particularly amenable to the faith -over-fact crowd, but there it is.
Anyway, I’m really not interested in continued discussion over that silly question, with the implication of “See? We’re better than you!” for all your protestations. Yes, that’s right, I’m good at reading between the lines, and I didn’t miss that in your original derail of the other thread.
P.S. I still want my argument back.
Was there research that they relied on for that determination beyond self reported Gallup polls? I’m actually asking honestly. I always assumed there was, but now I realize I don’t know for sure.
And I’m waiting for my uber now, fyi.
In America, nationalist slogans are a right-wing shibboleth, especially after the Cold War, Vietnam, and Iraq. As an older millennial, during my politically formative years the culture said anyone skeptical of Iraq, Bush, and the War on Terror wasn’t patriotic, so my opinion of patriotism was shaky before I even read any leftist literature. Patriotism is generally looked down upon by the intellectual left as a relic from the pre-Enlightenment days. Thomas Paine: “I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” Workers of the world, unite! Nationalism is just another way of setting workers against each other.
If you look over history it’s interesting how patriotism is used by both the establishment and the revolutionaries seeking to destroy them. Cynically, anyone who doesn’t follow the speaker’s vision of the country is unpatriotic, and possibly backed by foreigners, which seems to be one of the most common conspiracy theories people invent. IIRC, most everyone during the French Revolution said this of their opponents. Obama is a secret Keynan, and Trump is a Russian stooge.
Economically, patriotism is dead. Corporations have no love of country. Once upon a time politicians could BS that what’s good for business is good for America, but you’d get laughed out of the room if you said that nowadays. Even Trump campaigned on punishing businesses who follow market forces, despite relying on outsourcing himself.
No, they’re not. They’re more nationalistic, and more chauvinistic, and more jingoistic.
It’s Democrats who more embody the actual love of country, and the people in it, that the word patriotism properly signifies.
OP, to get anywhere solid with any discussion you need to start by defining your terms.
“Patriotism” is an ill defined term. Consequently what people meant when they answered the survey to which you refer is unclear. And what it would mean to say that Republicans are more patriotic would also be unclear.
I did some (very basic) courses at a tertiary level on surveys as a research technique. Some of the most well-supported conclusions taught were to the effect that:
[ul] a substantial proportion of the time people answer as if they are being judged on their answer, even when the survey is anonymous. That is to say, their answer reflects what they believe their answer should be, not what is accurate;
[li]people “second guess” the question ie they answer according to what they think the question (or survey as a whole) is getting at, rather than what it actually asks (this may be a positive or negative depending on whether the question itself is well drafted)[/li]
[li]survey answers are at best only as accurate and clear as the accuracy and clarity of the survey questions.[/ul][/li]This poll means something but quite what is hard to say:
[ul] a proportion of people will have answered according to what they believe they should be rather than what they are. Further, it is possible (or even probable) that the extent to which people have done this would not be uniform between Republicans and Democrats. So one could theorise for example that more Republicans than Democrats feel that they should claim to be patriotic. If so that would bias the results;
[li] people may well have varying ideas about what it means to be patriotic and have answered accordingly. Consequently it may be that (for example) even less Democrats are “patriotic” by your definition than the survey suggests if you have a definition different from theirs;[/li]
[li]alternatively people may well have “second guessed” the survey and assumed it is trying to find out the extent to which there is support for current political movements that proclaim themselves patriotic. If so they may well have answered (for example) negatively because they don’t identify with the form of “patriotism” those movements espouse, even if they consider that they are patriotic by their own definition of patriotism.[/ul][/li]The end result is that the survey might mean lots of things; it might mean that more Republicans than Democrats think they should say they are patriotic [but aren’t]. It might mean that fewer Democrats consider they are patriotic as that word is being used by some high profile movements at this time [but may not mean they consider themselves less patriotic by their own lights].
Personally my hunch would be that both of the above biases would be present here. But the biases could be otherwise. Or might not exist.
And further, even if the poll does not suffer from any of these biases, it is still hard to say what “Republicans are generally more patriotic than Democrats” means, to an extent sufficient to be useful. I would encapsulate that difficulty this way: I saw a comment on Facebook recently which was to the effect that “In America your patriotism means waving flags and denouncing taxes that are a symptom of intrusive government. In Germany our patriotism means denouncing destructive jingoism and raising taxes to strengthen our government”.
I don’t accept the premise. A good question would be “Why do Republicans identify as more patriotic than Democrats”, which the polling does indicate, but I don’t believe that this says anything about actual patriotism.
I’ll suggest some measures of patriotism, even if they’re not objective (and I’m not sure how one could measure an entirely subjective characteristic like patriotism objectively):
Do you believe the southern states (aka Confederacy) were justified in fighting the Civil War against the Union states?
alternately:
Do you fly or display the confederate battle flag? Do you believe it’s morally acceptable to fly or display the confederate battle flag?
alternately #2:
Do you believe the USA should celebrate, with a national holiday, the life and accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr.?
alternately #3:
Do you believe the USA should expel American Muslims?
alternately #4:
Do you believe the American government is secretly controlled by Zionist Jews?
alternately #5:
Do you believe American non-Christians should be free to publicly practice their religion, or lack thereof?
I’m sure others can think of many more.
The article also says “Republicans’ relatively higher identification with the “extremely patriotic” label is particularly intriguing when one considers that **Democrats are currently far more likely than Republicans to say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country **(41% vs. 7%, respectively). Still, the majority of Americans in each of these subgroups say they are “extremely” or “very” patriotic.”
Considering the survey was taken around 2010 during the start of the Obama administration, context matters.
Also agreeing with Princhester that “Patriotism” is an ill defined term in this survey. Taken in various contexts, it is not surprising if Republicans skew more “patriotic”.
My anecdotal experience is that Republicans tend to be more jingoist (extreme patriotism, especially in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy). They also have a much more homogenous ideology of “God, guns and 'merica”. They are also typically the cultural majority.
Democrats and Liberals tend to consist of more marginalized groups whose experience with “America” might not have historically been as positive. To Blacks, gays and other groups, their version of America is getting shot or beaten for being different. They also tend to look towards how to make America “better”, rather than celebrate the status quo or some idealized image of past America. And of course, hippies, slackers, anarchists and other counter-culture dipshits tend to skew left.
The point being is that the survey results are not surprising. However I would avoid inferring that Republicans or their policies are inherently “better” because they have a greater penchant for flying flags, waving sparklers and eating hot dogs on July 4.
This just in: the vast majority of people who start sentences with “I’m not a racist, but…” self-report that they are not racist.
I wonder if Americans who say “I’m not racist, but…” self-identify as more patriotic than other Americans? I wouldn’t be surprised if they did… and this would tell me nothing about their actual patriotism (which, IMO, precludes the possibility of racist sentiment – no matter how much a KKK member tells me he loves America, he doesn’t actually love anything but the white supremacist fantasy-version of America).
Patriotism is very nebulous and that’s going to be part of the problem with the survey.
Is a person picking up garbage at a roadside being patriotic?
Is a person burning the flag being a patriot if they’re doing it because they want the country to be a better place?
To be a little more generic, is protesting patriotic?
It is very hard to answer and the results you get are going to be highly dependent on the metrics you pick. I wouldn’t go so far to say it is unanswerable, but it certainly cannot be answered by this survey. There’s simply too many ways to interpret the survey. You could just as easily conclude that Republicans overestimate their patriotism.
If you put a gun to my head (please don’t), I think some good metrics would relate to:
- involvement in civic duties, like voting, jury duty
- volunteer work
But these simply reveal my own bias in how I think about patriotism.
In [1], they used a more robust survey and found the means for patriotism to be 4.03 and 4.24 for Democrats and Republicans respectively, which is pretty close. This measurements had the most amount of error, so it is entirely possible that it is even closer. The paper is open source, so you really should look at it.
In [2], they look at trying to identify characteristics associated with blind vs. constructive patriotism. They find that “political disengagement, nationalism, perceptions of foreign threat, perceived importance of symbolic behaviors, and selective exposure to pro-U.S. information” is related to blind patriotism, while “political involvement, including political efficacy, interest, knowledge, and behavior”.
So I guess if you really wanted to you could try to measure some of those things.
[1] Kosterman, R., & Feshbach, S. (1989). Toward a measure of patriotic and nationalistic attitudes. Political psychology, 257-274.
[2] Schatz, R. T., Staub, E., & Lavine, H. (1999). On the varieties of national attachment: Blind versus constructive patriotism. Political Psychology, 20(1), 151-174.
Anecdote alert! Also, I’m going to make a lot of assumptions in the below, all of which may be wrong, but I’m going with my hunches. If you ask me to defend myself, I probably won’t be able to, but here’s a story about patriotism and likely Republicans:
Where I work, we have a really high-end marina right outside our offices. All summer long, giant motor yachts come and park while their extremely wealthy owners visit NYC. We also get fleet week, where we have many sailors walking around the area.
I was walking at lunch when I saw an older man, and his somewhat younger, but still older than middle age wife/partner come off one of these giant yachts. These are older rich white people riding around on a yacht, and I’m going to assume they were Republicans – I could be wrong, of course, but they looked like conservative old rich people to me.
As they are walking, they pass by a couple of sailors who are having a nice walk and conversation. The woman interrupts them in mid walk and mid sentence and says, “I just want to thank you for your service.” The sailors responded politely, as you would expect, and went on their way.
I have no doubt that this woman considers herself a patriot. However, looking at the boat they just left, it was registered in the Cayman Islands or Marshall Islands or something like that – many of the larger super yachts are registered outside the US to avoid paying all kinds taxes and registration fees. Is avoiding paying taxes patriotic? I’d say no (the president says it’s smart). Is interrupting a couple of sailors having a stroll patriotic? I’d say no. Would she self-identify as a patriot? I’d say yes.
So, I’m not at all surprised that many people self-identify as patriotic. Does that mean they are actually working for the betterment of the USA? Isn’t that a better definition of patriotic than self-identification?
I’m not disputing the OP – I agree that the survey shows that Republicans self-identify as patriotic at a higher rate than Democrats. I’m not sure how meaningful that is. That is, I don’t agree that Republicans act in ways that show they love their country more than Democrats do. I think members of both parties want good things for the US and have different ideas about how to achieve that. I think that Democrats may have a higher tendency to see the mistakes that the US has made internationally, but that doesn’t mean they love their country any less. I don’t think that, for example, displaying a flag on your porch means you love your country more than people who work to get out the vote.
Is it more patriotic to support your president when he’s about to push the US into a very damaging war in Iraq or to protest against going to war? I guarantee the pro-war folks would consider themselves more patriotic than the anti-war protesters, but which group was really looking out for the US?
I think I am more patriotic than most Republicans I know. They fly the flag in front of their house, but I have read the constitution, the declaration, the federalist papers, and other background material many times. I have taken many college level courses over the years on constitutional law and history. I have also read many supreme court decisions and oratories from through the centuries and I believe I have a much better idea of what the US was, is, and what it was intended to be. But I am sure Okra would believe he is more patriotic than me if he met me.
For a variety of reasons conservatives are more tribalistic than liberals. Patriotism is a symptom of tribalism because you are dividing humanity into groups and identifying with your group. Conservatives also seem more prone to identify with their race, religion, gender, orientation and be hostile to those with a different race, religion, gender, orientation, etc than liberals too.
So probably tribalism, conservatives identify with their nation state more than liberals the same way they identify with their racial or religious group more than liberals.
However, seeing so many conservatives be perfectly fine with Russia hacking our elections and blackmailing our president, the term patriotism as a term for willing to defend the nation has lost all meaning.
Let’s add one more data point from the same survey:
Independents:
30% extremely patriotic
44% very patriotic
19% somewhat patriotic
5% not especially patriotic
So overall we have Republicans at 91% extremely/very patriotic, independents at 74% extremely/very patriotic, and Dems at 62% extremely/very patriotic. That sort of makes Republicans look like the outlier. I, too, wonder why that is.
How about: caring about your country is measured by:
- Not shirking taxes
- Caring about the wellbeing of other Americans
- Caring about the wellbeing of the American natural environment.