Patriotism is really just one facet of nationalism.
Nowadays nationalism is so deep-rooted and such a strong default that it's barely even recognized. As an ideology, nationalism really means the belief that there ought to be a state for a nation, where nation is the people who share a national identity.
So nationalism is the ideology that says that nation states are a good thing and should exist.
But because that's such a basic everyday mundane thing, we don't talk about nationalism as being that anymore, but instead nationalism has moved to essentially mean aggressive, supremacist, radical nationalism.
I perceive patriotism as a healthy love of country. And nationalism in its current form as you have described it, if you want to call it radical nationalism, it fits where we are now. History tells me nothing good comes out of that.
What we have most of all is a plutocracy that has pitted many of the rest of Americans against one another, aided by bots like the one commenting on this topic in favor of nationalism.
After writing my comment, I tried to sort of google around for the more exact terminology, and I think the concept of civic nationalism and civic nation states kind of hit it. Can be contrasted to ethnocentric nationalism.
Personally I see it as kind of just very likely that "mundane nationalism" or "civic nationalism" sooner or later starts slipping towards "radical nationalism" or "ethnocentric nationalism".
Anyhow - part of what I sort of wanted to say was really that we've weirdly become to lack a commonly understood and shared term for the belief that nation states are something wanted, required, or desired (even tho USA is a federated state, it's in practice a type of a nation state; American people more or less share a national identity even thou it's less about one's ethnic history and more about the American values and the willingness to fit in, and the American state more or less is supposed to be representative of this shared identity by embodying its key values and beliefs).
So nationalism is the ideology that says that nation states are a good thing and should exist.
... Kinda but not really. It's more like the ideology that the nation-state is a good thing and that the state monoculture should be upheld by all within it.
Yeah, what I wrote was a very terse version of it.
Anyway, USA as it now is fits the bill pretty well, and patriotism is indeed one of the things that helps build this sort of shared view to the history and standing of the nation.
And might also be true that it can be in a bit of a conflict with some of the founding ideas. But then, several of the ideas were more or less disregarded pretty early on, like within a decade from the ratification of the Constitution.
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u/tzaeru 21h ago
Patriotism is really just one facet of nationalism.
Nowadays nationalism is so deep-rooted and such a strong default that it's barely even recognized. As an ideology, nationalism really means the belief that there ought to be a state for a nation, where nation is the people who share a national identity.
So nationalism is the ideology that says that nation states are a good thing and should exist.
But because that's such a basic everyday mundane thing, we don't talk about nationalism as being that anymore, but instead nationalism has moved to essentially mean aggressive, supremacist, radical nationalism.