Wprld War II clearly inspired some of the greatest productions in the checkered history of Hollywood. Mina Cikara, a psychologist who runs the Harvard Intergroup Neuroscience Lab, says there is an important distinction between patriotism and nationalism. While nationalism is accordingly aggressive, patriotism is defensive: it is a devotion to a particular place and a way of life one thinks best, but has no wish to impose on others (Orwell 1968, 362).
The latter would put aside the country's well-being in a mundane, non-moral sense, and would focus instead on its distinctively moral well-being, its moral identity and integrity. As an instrument of survival, patriotic leanings have, at various times, upheld our republic, beginning with the Revolutionary War and including World War II, when democracy was under assault.
Blattberg, Charles, 2003, Patriotic, Not Deliberative,
Democracy," CRISPP: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 6: 155-74. We drove from Milwaukee, Wis., to Kansas City, Mo., stopping along the way to talk to people about civic duty, national pride and the symbols often used as stand-ins for Americanness.
The main feature of the Republic Day is a grand and royal parade that showcases the military powers and cultural wealth of the country along with the patriotic fervor of the Indian citizens. And for our children, I think it's a chance to realize that growing up there are really responsibilities that come with citizenship as well as the privileges of being an American.
The term was later adopted by Jürgen Habermas in the context of a case for overcoming pre-political, i.e. national and cultural, loyalties in public life, and supplanting them with a new, postnational, purely political identity embodied in the laws and institutions of a free and democratic state.
Habermas is insistent that constitutional patriotism has no connection with any prepolitical attachments, characteristic of nationalism or strong patriotism. This description of the American people was only partly true at the time. European restructuring has been delayed by misguided patriotism with governments determined to pursue nationalistic goals.1 Over the years, they forgot that ownership nationality is often irrelevant to the creation of wealth.
There is a vital and living tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals, with their rationalist and contractual tendencies, and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture, and the land.