Military lapel pins serve many purposes; patriotism, remembrance, recognition and membership. Still another variety is the patriotism of
liberty" propounded by Maurizio Viroli, who calls for a return to what patriotism used to be before it was harnessed in the service of the nation-state and submerged in nationalism: love of the laws and institutions of one's polity and the common liberty they make possible (Viroli 1995).
Such an odd attitude towards justice could be sarcastically named using Dickens's words: telescopic philanthropy 11 Within the argument of the nation's survival (and well-being) it seems unjustified to give priority of my co-nationals' luxurious preferences over the basic needs of the inhabitants of the LDCs.
The counterargument that patriotism can sometimes achieve some social good holds up no stronger than the argument that white supremacy encourages white men to be good fathers. The message is clear: in war, patriotism consists in following orders without considering whether they are right or wrong, or even if they make any sense.
David Miller (Miller, 2004, pp. 323-325) names the following features as essential to all national communities that are to be distinguished from any other communities and collective identities: (1) conviction of the existence of a nation; (2) feeling of common identity ('the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past'); (3) common active identity (members of a nation do some things together); (4) defined place; (5) characteristic features that allow to single out inhabitants of one community from the others.
Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The word patriotism derives from the Latin patria, meaning country." Patriots are citizens joined by a love of country and a readiness to sacrifice, perhaps even die, for their country. Taking care of the people who serve our country is an important way to show patriotism.
However, they need to realise that, as I have already pointed out, the destruction of the nation in the sense of a cultural value is counterproductive, because the consequence of this will not be the end of primitive nationalism, but, on the contrary, the strengthening of it. We are already experiencing this today: among a growing segment of the nation as a social group primitive slogans have taken the place of cultural values.
While regular viewers of news across the political spectrum tend to be more patriotic, patriotism means different things to the consumers of different news sources. If you use loyalty to say, "You're unloyal and you're not patriotic, and you're not - my American flag is bigger than your American flag," as soon as you hear these words used in that way, you know that somebody is excluding somebody.