Know Your Enemy - Why Patriotism [Teaser]

Matt and Sam talk more Lincoln and equality, and then: should the left be patriotic?

Duration: 11m
Broadcast on: 13 Jul 2026
Audio Format: other

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

This conversation is something of a follow-up to our last episode on Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. We begin by "providing receipts" for the views of prominent midcentury conservative intellectuals (Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and Mel Bradford, to name a few) about the Declaration, equality, and Lincoln, then take a step back to discuss what their quarrel with Lincoln, Harry Jaffa, Garry Wills, and other partisans of equality might reveal about the nature of the American founding and the shape of our country's history. After all that—and more—we consider NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's July 3 speech celebrating America's 250th anniversary and the promise and perils of leftwing patriotism.

Listen again: "Lincoln at Gettysburg," Know Your Enemy, July 6, 2026

Sources:

Zohran Mamdani, "Remarks as Prepared: Mayor Mamdani Delivers Address Marking America’s 250th Birthday," July 3, 2026

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)

Abraham Lincoln, "Letter to Joshua Speed," Aug 24, 1855

— Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858

— Message to Congress, July 4, 1861

Alexander H. Stephens, "Corner Stone Speech," March 21, 1861

James Madison, "Federalist no. 39," Jan 16, 1788

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826

Willmoore Kendall & George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)

George W. Carey, In Defense of the Constitution (1997)

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)

— John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics (1951)

Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000)

George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 2005

But my reaction to mom Donnie's choice to use American exceptionalism, I felt a little curious. Like, I think I'm pretty open about being someone who is pretty sympathetic to a certain kind of left-wing patriotism. And even me, I was like, I tend not to think of America in those terms, and I tend not to argue in those terms. And I kind of think the arguments or I didn't need to be framed in those terms, in this particular case either. Well, I mean, I think the scandal of this speech is to say America is exceptional. Just not in the way that our enemies say that it is. I think there actually is a very strong argument for this. If you take the tradition we're describing, the tradition of contestation, and the tradition of a nation of asylum seekers, there isn't another country that's founded on that principle. That's true, you know? If you believe that that's true, and if you are as Zoron is doing, trying to re-situate that principle as the core principle of this country, not just that everyone is created equal, but that this is a country that's founded by people who didn't have a place elsewhere, that is exceptional. That's not the nature of any European country. It's not the nature of any post-colonial country. It's really not the nature of any other country. I think it is a scandalous assertion for the left because we have an instinctive aversion to American exceptionalism as such, but to the right because it's articulating what is exceptional about this country in a way that offends their principles and offends their priors. But I do think there's an argument to be made for it, and I think that this speech does a pretty good job of articulating what that exceptionalism might be. I do love this country, but I love it in a very strange way, you know? I accept its flaws, I see them, I have a lot of contempt for the people who try to wield love for this country for exclusionary ends, for persecutory ends. But I nonetheless, there's something about it that I can't rid myself of. I think sometimes about how European intellectuals of the 20th century, for the most part, they couldn't possibly be nationalists because it would be an offense against their obligations as intellectuals. It's an offense to reason because European nationalism is based fundamentally on an ethnically constituted sense of the national community. And so for the sake of a particular election, the candidate at a certain time, there's going to be somebody who's going to have to run against Marine Le Pen in France, and that person's going to have to articulate what it means to be French in a way that is patriotic. But on some fundamental level, if you're being honest with yourself, what has European nationalism produced other than world historic calamities? Yeah, Sam, I'm so glad you mentioned that in particular because I think that probably is the best case for Zoron's argument being true, or capturing something true about America that nothing is fixed. And I think that the ethnic question compared to European nations is super important, and for that reason, I want to read from Abraham Lincoln. A speech he gave in Chicago on July 10, 1858, we have, besides these men, descended by blood from our ancestors, among us, perhaps half of our people who are not descendants at all of these men. There are men who have come from Europe, Germans, Irish, French, and Scandinavians, men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves are equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days, me the founding days, by blood, they find they have none. They cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us. But when they look through that old declaration of independence, they find that those old men say that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And then they feel that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration. And so they are here here. Incredible right now. Here's Jaffa's commentary on this. He says, "Within the American political tradition, Lincoln transmutes the latter day immigrants from the ethnically divided nations of the old world into members of the same family, united by the transcendent faith in human equality. That faith is the faith of the same ancestral fathers he will celebrate in the Gettysburg Address. Indeed, insane, that they are of the same flesh and the same blood he uses, the very idiom of trans-substantiation, the Catholic terminology around the Eucharist." Isn't that incredible? Blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, and so they are. Yeah, Lincoln is articulating exactly what I'm saying. If there is something exceptional about this country, it is precisely that we've crafted a meaning of nationalism, which is based on shared principles. No other country did that, you know? I think the thing that is complicated about this, so that we don't indulge in starry-eyed patriotism for its own sake, is that, especially with the onset of the Cold War, as we've talked about this show many times, Cretal nationalism became a way to justify American imperial interventions on the world stage. It became this way to cohere a country made up of many different ethnicities. Basically, the military project of American Empire would not have been possible without Cretal nationalism. Think about the army. The army is a very diverse institution, much more diverse than the massed heads of magazines that we work for. Nationalism, on some level, one of its prerogatives and also necessities for having a coherence is to create a sense of solidarity amongst the people who are the nation.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam talk more Lincoln and equality, and then: should the left be patriotic?