I didn't even watch the video, but there's a lot of pure ideology going on in this thread. Too many fart huffing liberals for me to dunk on myself.
I didn't even watch the video, but there's a lot of pure ideology going on in this thread. Too many fart huffing liberals for me to dunk on myself.
Man as much as I love the old-school CPUSA imagery from the 40s of a "patriotic" communist USA with cool communist flags for every state... it's just not possible within the framework of a state founded on settler-colonialism. It's nice to think about but it's neither desirable nor, crucially, practicable.
I'm gonna break a bit from this thread since I think there's a distinction to be made from the USA and just the vague notion of "Americans". One traces its lineage directly to a capitalist, settler-colonial experiment that has proven it cannot remotely change its underlying nature, while the other is an amorphous concept of a group that implies entirely different things to different people. We can reframe it to mean something else entirely, and also point out the inherent hypocrisy in how the usual American "patriotism" treats its actual people.
You can look at other historical examples. The Bolsheviks didn't create a "Soviet Russian Empire", but they did create the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. They didn't glorify the concept of Russia's pre-Socialist history, but they did adopt symbols and bits of the past they came to appreciate or even identify with (why else would they wear pointy wool head kettles?). This isn't to say they were perfect in breaking with the past, since remnants of "Great Russian" chauvinism still persisted throughout the Union's history, but such cases could be understood and approached properly within the USSR, as opposed to the Russian Empire. Same could be true in a hypothetical socialist society in place of the US.
Regardless of how any of us personally feel about it, this country's obsession with patriotism isn't going to change, but it will bend and fold to whatever direction depending on the material circumstances, just like it did for countries leading up to socialist revolutions. Attempts at coopting patriotism can and should be made, not only to gain legitimacy in the eyes of Americans but to also take the bite out of rhetorical attacks coming out of reactionaries. Still, there are lines to be drawn. I sure as hell wouldn't try to co-opt Washington or Jefferson like the CPUSA did, for example. And there are plenty of other symbols to rally behind that aren't long-dead, slave-owning white men (the Torch of Liberty, for instance).
I think the major hurdle lies in the differences between the national character of the Russian empire and the USA. The former was comprised of Russia itself, which included a core axis of what even counted as "Russia" in the first place (Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev), alongside its colonial holdings in central and eastern Asia, all of which directly bordered Russia. The USA is a settler colonial project, started in large part by the British Empire, Spain, France, and the Netherlands sprinking a bit of their own character, built on lands originally occupied by other nations of peoples displaced and killed for its formation, replacing them with foreign white settlers in their place. Therein lies the key difference and contradiction with the USA's national character, in that it gives no representation to those displaced peoples and never did. It would have been a very different national character if indigenous nations were annexed but still recognized and allowed some degree of autonomy in the same way Poland and Finland were under the Russian empire. Instead, these nations were torn out, its peoples killed and rendered extinct, or flung to the far reaches of the most harsh and unlivable parts of the territory and prevented them from leaving. There cannot be any meaningful national character until after decolonization has begun and a new national identity, one no longer gloating and profiting over the graves of countless nations, has been established.