So why should France need Mr. Sarkozy in 2017 if it did not want him in 2012? Because, as he explains in his new book, this is not the same country. The situation created by the recent wave of terrorist attacks requires a strong, experienced man at the helm, this argument goes. “I felt I had the strength to lead this battle at such a tormented moment in our history,”
.. Mr. Sarkozy hopes that his new patriotic spirit will erase the worst memories he left — of his obsessive ego, his arrogance, his bragging and his bellicosity.
.. Where Mr. Juppé aims to unify and pacify, Mr. Sarkozy is unabashedly divisive.
.. He advocates stopping economic immigration for five years, reasoning that integrating immigrants is an old-fashioned concept that has failed. He paints France as a country “forced” by “the ideologues of multiculturalism and the sociologists of inequality” to give up the mission of assimilating newcomers. “Assimilate means not only acquiring French citizenship but also France’s values, culture and way of life,” he has written.
.. Just as Donald J. Trump wants to “make America great again,” Nicolas Sarkozy wants to “make France proud again.” Schoolbooks, he says, should “make our country loved, not make it feel guilty.”
Who Loves America?
That love of country doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, uncritical. But the faults you find, the critiques you offer, should be about the ways in which we don’t yet live up to our own ideals. If what bothers you about America is, instead, the fact that it doesn’t look exactly the way it did in the past (or the way you imagine it looked in the past), then you don’t love your country — you care only about your tribe.
And all too many influential figures on the right are tribalists, not patriots... What this tells you, I think, is that all the flag-waving and hawkish posturing had nothing to do with patriotism. It was, instead, about using alleged Democratic weakness on national security as a club with which to beat down domestic opponents, and serve the interests of the tribe... Now comes Mr. Trump, doing the bidding of a foreign power and inviting it to intervene in our politics — and that’s O.K., because it also serves the tribe.
Donald Trump’s Sham Patriotism
In his bid for the White House, Donald Trump is playing many roles: law-and-order strongman, sky’s-the-limit builder, dealmaker extraordinaire. But perhaps none is more emphatic than all-American patriot.
.. His patriotism brims with grievances...Last week he suggested to The Times’s David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that if Russia invaded a NATO ally that wasn’t pulling its weight financially, he might not rise to its defense...On one hand, it leads him to echo conservatives’ longstanding charge that President Obama belittles our country by apologizing too much for it. On the other, Trump told Sanger and Haberman that he’d refrain from reprimanding allies with poor records on civil liberties because the United States is no paragon.. And he attacked Ted Cruz anew, again mentioning the National Enquirer story that linked Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination and saying that the Enquirer deserves more respect than it gets... I’m suspicious of two of the most commonly used yardsticks. But by both of those measures — a readiness to serve in the military and a devotion to domestically made goods — Trump isn’t much of a patriot... And there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that’s really an amalgam of nativism, racism, isolationism and xenophobia and that denies this country’s distinction as a land of fresh starts, its arms open to a diverse world... Patriotism,” the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s also a convenient cloak for a narcissist.
How Covenants Make Us
The liberation of the individual was supposed to lead to mass empowerment. But it turns out that people can effectively pursue their goals only when they know who they are — when they have firm identities.
Strong identities can come only when people are embedded in a rich social fabric. They can come only when we have defined social roles — father, plumber, Little League coach. They can come only when we are seen and admired by our neighbors and loved ones in a certain way. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”
.. When we are situated within something it is because we have made a covenant. A contract protects interests, Pally notes, but a covenant protects relationships. A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another.
.. People in a contract provide one another services, but people in a covenant delight in offering gifts.
.. In an interview with Bill Maher last month, Senator Cory Booker nicely defined patriotism by contrasting it with mere tolerance. Tolerance, he said, means, “I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off.” Patriotism, on the other hand, means “love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.”