The GOP does not believe in patriotism. by Charles Mudede Three weeks after Donald Trump was elected for a second term, special counsel Jack Smith dropped the "criminal cases against" the president-elect because once in power he would be above the law. The case against Trump still has, Smith insisted, “the strength of the government’s proof”; but something like 76 million Americans and the political party that represents them made it clear that these crimes, one involving the attempt to illegally overturn the results of a free and fair election in 2020, didn't matter one bit. Meaning, all of the GOP’s talk about being patriots, the party of law and order, and so on and so forth was nothing more than an empty wagon making a lot of noise. They do not believe in patriotism.  But the leaders of the Democratic Party still do, a fact made clear in the November 24, AP article "Republicans push back against Democrats’ claims that Trump intelligence pick Gabbard is compromised." Patriotism, or putting America first, still means something for center-left Dems. They really believe in loyalty, in law and order, in defending the US against, to use Sen. Tammy Duckworth words,  "America’s foes." The GOP is completely indifferent to such appeals. It has become (if not always been) the graveyard of national feeling. Its leader is free to mock veterans, steal national secrets, and promise to release criminals who attacked and killed police officers. The Democratic Party is stuck with believing in what the GOP plainly disregards: The United States of America. How to explain this development? We can begin by watching Steve McQueen's Blitz. Now streaming on AppleTV+, Blitz, which is set in London at the beginning of World War II, is centered on a boy, George (Elliott Heffernan), whose mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), is white and father Black. The former raised him; the latter left the family before or soon after he was born. His grandfather, played by none other than the Style Council's lead vocalist Paul Weller, is as warm and comforting as a well-worn cardigan. His mother is devoted to him. His society sees him as a monkey.  When the government decides to evaluate children from London, George is put on a train that's heading to a safe and quiet place. But he doesn't want to leave his mother, who works in a munitions plant, and grandfather, who is always to be found playing catchy tunes on the piano. The world outside of home is really hostile to him, a mixed-race boy. But Hitler's blitzkrieg is intensifying. More and more bombs fall from the night sky. The casualties are escalating. The subways are clogged with terrified people nightly. And much of the city is on fire or flattened. Rita is right to put George on the train and get him out of this blitz; but the boy has a good reason for wanting to stay at home: It is an island of warmth (music, old furniture, a loving mother and grandfather) surrounded by a society that constantly mocks and threatens him. George decides to jump from the moving train and return to London. The movie is about this journey, which includes an encounter with a ghoulish gang straight out of Dickens's London, and, more importantly, a Nigerian-born British soldier, Ife (Benjamin Clementine), who not only becomes the link between George and his missing father, but also facilitates his transition from non-identity to identifying as Black, and from home (family) to the nation (a British subject). Ife is patriotic.  What happens is this: After sirens erupt, Ife takes George into the subway. In the underground, Ife comes across a working-class white family that has hung a blanket as a way to separate itself from a Sikh family. Ife angrily tears down the blanket and informs the white family that they are all British in the fight against Hitler. And so it is their duty to treat all British citizens as humans. This, as you can see, is a patriotic feeling that was echoed in the one Kamala Harris put great faith in in her race against a convicted criminal and out-and-out racist. Patriotism for all. Patriotism as humanism. Patriotism as law and order. What we see in Blitz, which expresses the emotional position of Britain's vacuous center-left (Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk expressed, as the late Jonathan Raban noted in this paper, that of the center-right—the US no longer has a center-right, it’s all far-right), and particularly in the Ife subway scene, is an emphasis not on the social causes that once defined the labor movement but the complete absorption of nationalism, even by those British society still identifies as outsiders or non-European. How did we get to this point of lameness?    One has to go back to the 19th century to see that patriotism, which emerged at around the same time as jingoism, was the only tool the right, particularly in Great Britain, had to be competitive in an increasingly democratic political order. The right could not promise improvements in wages or living standards, but it could emotionally connect workers with the dreams and designs of imperialism. You were not just British or a slum-dweller, you were empire. Something similar could be said about the GOP. It was the patriotic party, the true American party, the party of guns, gas, Jesus. And poor and working-class whites fell for it.   The Democratic party, fearing that meat-and-potatoes issues weren't enough to keep it relevant, also placed patriotism (veterans, sacrifices, worship of the war-dead, flags, national songs) at the center of its program, although there was no real reason to. And the right never believed in all of that stuff anyway. But now Dems have all of the patriotism ("Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has claimed, without offering details, that Gabbard is in Russian President Vladimir 'Putin’s pocket...") and no control of the key governing institutions in the US. This sorry situation was perfectly described by the great poet Patsy Cline: "I've got the records / She's got you."   But now that we have all of patriotism in our court, does this not present the opportunity to redefine it? Reevaluate it? Because it’s all ours, remaking into something completely new is also all ours. This possibility is not present in McQueen’s film.