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Duke University Press
November 2007
On Sale: November 2, 2007
296 pages
ISBN: 0822341107
EAN: 9780822341109
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The Truth about Patriotism is a bracing repudiation
of the claim that patriotism is essential—or even
beneficial—to democracy. Contending that even at its best
patriotism subverts the democracy it purports to value,
Steven Johnston turns to patriotism’s defenders to show how
they must jettison much of democracy to champion patriotism.
Closely examined, patriotism itself effectively demonstrates
the impossibility of love of country. Patriotism, Johnston
argues, tends toward narcissistic self-regard, blind to its
violent ways of being in the world and its dependence on
death. Thus we would be better off without
it. Drawing largely from aspects of American
political and popular culture, this wide-ranging book
presents a wealth of examples to disclose patriotism’s
self-defeating character. They include Richard Rorty’s and
John Schaar’s enmity-driven love of country, Socrates’s
angry judicial suicide, the violent obsessions of High
Noon and Saving Private Ryan, the triumphalist
self-display of the World War II Memorial, Oliver Stone’s
and Don DeLillo’s spectacular representations of the
assassination of President Kennedy, George W. Bush’s
symbolic sacrifice of more Americans in commemoration of
September 2001, and yet other memorials to and apologies for
patriotism. Ultimately, Johnston calls for a vision of
democracy that uses the tragic possibilities inherent in
politics as a spur to a life-affirming civic ethos of
reciprocal generosity.
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