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The Collapse of Patriotism

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My students invariably assume that in every conflict the US was on the side of evil. Fifteen years ago, it was the exact opposite but it’s been steadily going in the direction of always reflexively condemning the US.

It’s gotten to the point where in the most recent winter semester 2 students informed me that in WWII the United States fought on Hitler’s side. When I asked “so whom did the Nazi Germany and the US fight against?”, they were completely stumped. This is a generation that has the vaguest possible knowledge about the USSR and is invariably shocked to discover it participated in WWII.

But forget students. How many adults in the US automatically support whatever side of a conflict detests their country the most? The entirety of many people’s opinion about the world can be summarized as “US bad; its enemies good.”

28 responses to “The Collapse of Patriotism”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    It has taken decades of tax-funded education to get there, but it’s been wildly successful.

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  2. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    Patriotism? What patriotism? In order to have patriotism you first need to have the concept of a fatherland, and most Western people under 40 today have no idea what that means. In a world without fathers no fatherland is possible.

    To most young people living in the West nowadays, the globalised world appears as a huge, borderless indistinct mass of Americanised culture with the same brands, the same music, the same foods, the same street culture, the same everything all over, to which they feel they are entitled, and which, in their puny disconnected minds, owes THEM a living, not a specific country in particular.

    In the eye of the students – and the vast majority of people demonstrating in the streets anywhere in the world are students – protesting in favour of Hamas, this is a ” home” issue, even though they personally may have no connection whatsoever to either Israel or Palestine. They really think that the world has no borders, or if it does, it shouldn’t.

    However, countries do exist and I’ll be waiting for when reality bites them in the ass: for example, the day when some frisky digital nomad living in China or India or any other non-Western country for that matter, is told that he has 24 hours to leave the country and that all his belongings are being confiscated.

    Let’s see if they are going to sing “Imagine all the people… imagine there’s no countries…” then.

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  3. TomW Avatar
    TomW

    Unless they have taken college level courses in which it has come up, the average undergraduate knows little about WWII and absolutely nothing about the Cold War. I recently met a very bright young student who was learning Korean and the student brought up the North South divide. I made a very general comparison of the situation to East and West Germany, this student had absolutely no idea that Germany had ever been divided with a Communist and Capitalist side. This had never come up in this student’s education.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s exactly what I find so mystifying. They are equally lacking in knowledge of math, physics, geography, literature, grammar. They’ve got to be doing something in school for 12 years. What is it?

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Enforced ritual boredom.

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      2. Avatar
        Anonymous

        learning about slavery, indigenous peoples, the evils of capitalism and the US, how to use sex toys, how to be a leftist activist and 7 ways to add subtract and multiply OTHER than the standard methods you learned.

        no grammar, no geography, and literature needs to be of the past five years not over 8th grade reading level and be culturally relevant by being about black kids shot by cops OR kids questioning their gender or sexuality.

        That’s all.

        Amanda

        Liked by 2 people

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Totally. They can all recite woke slogans with glee. But there’s no other knowledge in their heads.

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          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            an example: my son in 2nd grade, the social studies for the entire fall was native peoples of New York State with a strong emphasis on gender roles of men and women in the tribes, often mentioning how females were in charge of important things and minimizing the role of men. It was interesting to see.

            NYS sex Ed curriculum teaches about self pleasure and I think 7th grade is where info is shared about using vegetables for this if you don’t have sex toys.

            the goal is for them to know nothing and be obsessed with sex, gender and rooting out oppression.

            amanda

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              You should see the crushed faces of my freshmen when I tell them that native peoples were not, in fact, champions of feminism and gay rights, that they had slaves, ate people, and practiced human sacrifices.

              I’m now beginning to understand where the silliness that fills their heads comes from.

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              1. cliff arroyo Avatar
                cliff arroyo

                “the crushed faces of my freshmen when I tell them that native peoples were not, in fact, champions of feminism and gay rights”

                Maybe you should devote some energies to Guinea Ecuatorial as the only Spanish speaking country in Africa…. I would pay to see films of their reactions when you get to Africa and slavery (among other topics).

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              2. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                Empire of the Summer Moon is a great book for this. The parallels to the ISR/PAL predicament are spooky. And… yeah, there was a darn good reason the US gov didn’t just make a deal with the Comanches and then leave them alone. They had a nasty predilection for torture, gang-rape, and kidnapping children, and no they didn’t just do that to white settlers, they did it to every surrounding tribe. The US would never have been able to track them down in Comancheria without the legions of enthusiastic, often unpaid, native scouts (Tonkawa, Apache, and others) who helped them, because the Comanches had driven them out of their own territories and killed so many of their compatriots.

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  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    For those of us old enough, who grew up here, I think it goes back to the Vietnam fiasco. We’ve never really recovered, psychologically. Some of us can never fully trust our government’s adventures again.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Vietnam is perceived as such a trauma because it coincided with the birth of the neoliberal mentality. And that mentality is incapable of patriotism.

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      1. PaulS Avatar
        PaulS

        The war was traumatic because it was an intractable quagmire which never seemed like it was going to end or achieve anything.

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  5. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Have you heard about the massive decline in army recruitment numbers? What a shocker, that when you teach an entire generation that America is an evil country and white people are evil, the people most likely to volunteer to die for the country don’t feel like doing so anymore.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      There’s way more to it than that. Long after patriotism, the Army was still a great way to get out of hickville, see the world, and make something of yourself, if you didn’t have the money or the SAT scores to go to college. That is not so appealing now with the “we’ll pay for your gender transition” recruiting of the mentally ill, and the last couple rounds of involuntary medical experiments on troops. My brother got out before the craziness really set in (not voluntarily– he was doing well), and thanks his lucky stars for the good timing on that. Says everything he’s hearing from people he still knows in the ranks makes him glad he’s out. It’s as though they are deliberately purging competent men.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        It’s very similar to what’s happening in education. We have an outstanding student who was studying to be a teacher. But he quit the teaching program and told me, “Professor, please understand, I’m a religious man, and I can’t teach the things they want me to children.” And I told him I understand completely. This guy would have been an excellent teacher, a role model. But who can blame him? We are one of the most aggressive states in introducing gender theory and CRT.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          He’d be a great teacher at a religious school– but they mostly don’t require teaching degrees these days– so a degree in the subject he most wants to teach would be more relevant. The pay is terrible though.

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        2. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          …I think it is high time we simply closed down all the teacher colleges and switched to some other credentialing system for teachers– pass an exam, do two years of internship, that sort of thing. The current system, even if it was great (and it’s not), traps too many people in the teaching profession who really shouldn’t be there. They’ve gone all the way to masters’ degree, racked up a bunch of student debt, and now they discover they kind of hate kids… but it’s still the best job they can get.

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          1. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            “simply closed down all the teacher colleges and switched to some other credentialing system for teachers– pass an exam, do two years of internship, that sort of thing”

            Colleges of Education are a victim of the academic model where you have to keep coming up with new things…. we’ve got a bead on how people learn (mostly on their own there’s really not much that teachers can do) and how much help they need (more help when they’re younger and less as they grow) and past an intro course or two there’s not much to add to that. But create a whole college with sections and they have to keep coming up with new approaches and ideas for educational reform (dirty secret: in the short term lots of reforms work, in the longer term almost none of them do).

            Then you have some practice to see if it’s for you or not. But most methodology courses are about making people with no particular aptitude for teaching…. barely passable.

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              Exactly. My mother says teacher college was basically worthless. Everything practical she learned about teaching, she learned in the classroom. If any formal classes are necessary for that *at all* (and I still lean toward just an exam), it shouldn’t be any more than could be covered in a 2 week boot camp paid for by the school district, that, say, drills on legal issues, mandatory reporting requirements, administrative paperwork, that sort of thing.

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              1. TomW Avatar
                TomW

                Teacher ed courses are wasted on people who’ve never taught. It’s all done in the abstract and the teacher ed students just aren’t in the position to actually absorb and incorporate most of what they are learning or to sort the actually useful stuff from the bullshit. I think an ideal system would have teacher ed candidates working in schools part time as assistant teachers and in a teacher ed courses part time where they can spend a lot of time discussing what’s going on with the kids and classrooms they are working in.

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              2. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                We have our teaching ed students teach for a semester while we observe and correct them. But the School of Education people are absent from the process. They teach these completely vague and useless courses and insist they can’t observe teaching because they don’t know our content. Even though you don’t need to understand content to evaluate the pedagogy.

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              3. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                That seems like it’d work far better than what we’ve got now.

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      2. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/10/13/big-bonuses-relaxed-policies-new-slogan-none-of-it-saved-military-recruiting-crisis-2023.html

        Just wow.

        “The military took a variety of innovative approaches to inspire young Americans to join up, including reviving the Army’s 1980s slogan “Be All You Can Be,” the Air Force loosening prior tattoo and drug testing policies, and the Navy rolling out record-high financial incentives up to $140,000. But those efforts ultimately did not push the services over the line of their recruitment goals.”

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          ugh. Whether it was the burn pits or the anthrax vaccine or something else, Gulf War Syndrome was real, the military never really fessed up to it or took responsibility, and it established a really public precedent: join the military, mysterious things happen that destroy your health, get gaslit by your employer about it and then dropped like a hot rock. But it was kind of starting to fade from the collective consciousness and might’ve gone quietly to bed.

          The most recent round of “oh, gosh I can’t imagine why so many fit young military people are getting heart attacks!” … if they’d never done it *before* it might be more believable. Now, it’s flushed a huge number of good soldiers *out* of the military– people who would have re-upped for another few years, but didn’t, etc. and recruiting in conservative-leaning rural america which has always provided a big chunk of their volunteers, is not going well lately, because that’s all been very public.

          Liked by 1 person

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  6. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Even though you don’t need to understand content to evaluate the pedagogy”

    I’ve sat in on classes and in one case oral exams in languages I don’t know at all (at the teachers’ request) I was happy to do it and shared ideas with the teachers afterwards.

    Colleges of Education are mostly not about pedagogy but about theory and now that means crap like gender or critical race theory…..

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s actually a very useful, clean experiment to evaluate the pedagogy separately from the content. At my job interview for my current school, my teaching was evaluated by two German professors who don’t know a word of Spanish, and their comments were specifically about the teaching methodology. It was very useful. But yes, the School of Education isn’t doing any of it. Our department does all of the actual teacher training.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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