Patriotism and its enemies — the Jack – Latest News
The Winter Olympics had its thrills and spills — and a deep philosophical divide represented by two American, or American-born, athletes.
Jack Hughes, the gold medal-winning American hockey participant for the US crew, gave voice to a patriotic reflex in his unhesitating, heartfelt expressions of love of his nation.
Eileen Gu, the gold medal-winning American-born freestyle skier competing for China, exemplified a cosmopolitan superb that purports to drift above mere nationhood.
This distinction — between the bloody-mouthed hockey participant draped in his own nation’s flag and the exceptionally proficient part-time model immune to any questions on national loyalty — drives many of the divisions in American society.
Is loyalty to nation a matter of selection, or an unalterable dedication?
Do borders imply something?
Is our common tradition important or dispensable?
Is the acceptable perspective towards America one of elementary gratitude or essential distance?
These varieties of questions are concerned in disputes over immigration coverage, over American historical past and how to show it in faculties, over the standing of the English language, and over how a lot we should always care about multinational establishments and so-called worldwide opinion.
It was a subtext in the controversy at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks in the past when Secretary of State Marco Rubio mentioned we should combat for Western civilization, whereas Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rendered “Western culture” in sneer quotes, as whether it is a fiction or contemptible idea.
The proper is of course drawn to the patriotic or nationalistic perspective, whereas the left is more cosmopolitan, tending to consider that attachment to at least one’s own nation is narrow-minded and patriotic shows are crude and simplistic.
Jack Hughes attends a celebration of the USA males’s hockey crew’s Olympic gold at E11EVEN Miami on February 23, 2026, in Miami, Florida. Getty Images for E11EVEN Miami
Cosmopolitanism has a long historical past: As I be aware in my ebook “The Case for Nationalism,” the time period “cosmopolitan” has its root in the Greek phrase kosmopolites, or citizen of the cosmos or world.
The fourth-century BC Cynic thinker Diogenes lived in Athens after his exile from his native Sinope and rejected all conventions, making a barrel into his home in the Athenian market.
He is the first recorded individual to make use of what has now grow to be a cliché: “When he was asked where he came from, he replied, ‘I am a citizen of the world.’”
That was a radical assertion, since the Greeks thought of citizenship attainable solely by the polis, or metropolis.
During the Enlightenment, the cosmopolitan concept was expressed in the notion of Weltbürger, or world citizen.
Gold medalist Ailing Eileen Gu, snowboarding for the People’s Republic of China, celebrates during the medal ceremony for the girls’s freeski halfpipe ultimate on day 16 of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games. Hector Vivas
This tendency has been given stark expression by the likes of the novelist Virginia Woolf, who urged the rejection of “pride of nationality,” and the titanic Russian author Leo Tolstoy, who thought it “obvious that patriotism as a sentiment is bad and harmful; as a doctrine it is stupid.”
Cosmopolitanism has at all times been open to the charge that — no matter its actual or purported idealism — it cultivates a contempt for what’s close to, instant and tangible in favor of what’s far off.
Behind cosmopolitanism is what the British author Paul Gilroy has known as “the principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.”
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The downside is that no one is admittedly a citizen of the world, reasonably of explicit nations which have shaped us in apparent and refined methods.
Yes, people to migrate and there are literary and mental exiles, however most of us have an attachment to home that feels natural and important.
One purpose that people had been so moved by the US hockey crew was the palpable bonds of the gamers — to at least one one other, to their nation, to the reminiscence of their tragically deceased fellow participant Johnny Gaudreau.
These weren’t bonds that had been chosen, a lot as accepted and embraced; they had been true to their teammates and nation.
In distinction, Eileen Gu claims to be true to herself.
If requested if she is proud of the accomplishments of her countrymen, she might need to ask, “Which countrymen?”
It is true that the Olympics deliver athletes round the world collectively, however the Games themselves are testomony to the enduring energy of patriotism.
It was, after all, a distinctive variety of sports activities pleasure to witness the triumph of our boys in purple, white and blue.
@RichLowry
