On Patriotism and Protest
We can protest injustice without rejecting our country.
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“Protest is patriotic” is something we often hear or read on bumper stickers. Yet if this is true, why do so many protests seem anything but? Why do we see more Mexican flags and even Palestinian flags than American flags at protests? Why do many protesters go masked? Why do so many “peaceful” protests devolve into violence, vandalism, and looting? None of these seems remotely patriotic.
To understand the psychology behind today’s protest politics, it is useful to reconsider a lesson from the great German sociologist Max Weber. In his 1918 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber distinguished between two kinds of political ethic. One he called an “ethic of absolute ends,” because it focuses on the ultimate goals of political action; the other he called an “ethic of responsibility” because it focuses on the means necessary to achieve those goals.
Weber’s message was that political action requires attention to both means and ends. An exclusive attention to the ends alone can lead to violence and political extremism; an exclusive attention to means can lead to excessive caution and a failure of nerve. Knowing how to balance means and ends is a sign of political maturity.
The contemporary protest culture that we have seen play out on college campuses and in many of the anti-ICE protests seem to be vivid expressions of Weber’s idea of an ethic of absolute ends. “The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends,” he wrote, “feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing that the flame of pure intentions is not squelched.” Motivated by righteous anger at Donald Trump’s deportation measures, protesters do not see that their actions play directly into his hands.
The classic form of this ethic can be traced back to the Sermon on the Mount with its injunction to “turn the other cheek,” but Weber found contemporary examples of it in those pacifists during World War I who preferred to see their country perish rather than compromise on their ethic of peace. He also saw in revolutionary socialism another example of how belief in the goodness of the cause wiped out any qualms about the ruthless means necessary to achieve it.
American history is rife with these kinds of protest movements. A classic example is the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who advocated “no compromise with slaveholders” and burned a copy of the Constitution on the Fourth of July, 1854. It would take Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to understand that if slavery was to be abolished, it would not be by shredding the Constitution but by embracing it.
In more recent times, this kind of moral absolutism was embraced by journalists like Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange who both published official state documents without considering how such materials would inevitably be distorted and misused. Men like Garrison, Ellsberg, and Assange preferred to see their country either dismembered or defeated rather than compromise on the purity of their convictions.
Conviction ethicists have always claimed the right to put their conscience above the law. The classic example is Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience which argued that any law that violated the sacred right of conscience had no claim on our loyalty. Thoreau’s appeal to conscience has proved an indubitable inspiration to generations of people worldwide, but its demand for moral purity contributes to an exaggerated sense of self-righteousness that makes its proponents averse to any compromise. If half a loaf is the price of compromise, the conviction ethicist prefers none.
The danger with protest politics is its tendency toward moral overreach. A sense of indignation, no matter how well-meaning, gives rise to a demand for action that invariably invites violence. Once it is realized that righteousness is impossible, paroxysms of rage and contempt follow. Students who only yesterday were calling for “safe spaces” and protesting “microaggressions” are today calling for the elimination of Israel (“from the river to the sea”) and defending Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement. The path from moralism to extremism is short indeed.
To be sure, the appeal to moral convictions can play a useful, even necessary, role in exposing injustices and calling for their redress. Figures like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were excluded from political life for some or all of their lives, but, through persuasion and sheer moral force, they helped to change the direction of their societies.
The best examples of protest politics are those that appeal not to some impossible standard of moral purity but to the very standards of justice of the societies they are criticizing. These are what political theorist Michael Walzer has called “connected critics.” Examples of connected critics are Douglass not Garrison, Gandhi not Fanon, Martin Luther King not Malcolm X. This is a point that many social justice advocates today could learn from.
In the summer of 2023, shortly before the Hamas attacks of October 7, I participated in a protest against the Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms in Jerusalem. The protest was awash in Israeli flags, there was not a hint of violence, and some of the protesters even brought trash bags to clean up after themselves. American protesters might take a cue from their Israeli counterparts. Only when protesters learn to embrace the flag and repudiate violence will protest be considered patriotic.
Steven B. Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and author of Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.
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While I completely agree with Dr. Smith’s thesis, we are now faced with the utter contradiction and hypocrisy of an American president espousing violent protest as long as it is done on his behalf while calling in the National Guard to quell violent protest when it opposed him.
I am both an army veteran from and a veteran of anti-war protests during the late sixties and early seventies. Some of our protests were violent, some not. But what really turned the majority of Americans against the war were the increasing number of body bags returning from Vietnam and Cambodia combined with the disastrous exposure of our folly during the Tet Offensive.
I applaud those who are going into the streets to oppose Trumpism, and I pray that they do not on day fall into Trump’s eager trap by becoming violent. But what will finally swing the majority of Americans against Trump will not be the protests, which will generally serve only to harden MAGA against us, but rather the effects of the BBB on MAGA and our suswquent actions in the voting booth in November of 2026.