Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle
11/03/02: Patriots and Tories.
It seems to me that from the U.S. colonial period until the present the term
"patriot" has indicated someone who continually questions those in
political power, whereas "loyalist" or "Tory" has
indicated someone who identifies
with the regime and more or less compliantly carries out orders from above.
Patriots have tended to identify with a democratic republic, whereas
loyalists have tended to identify with Empire -- the British empire in the 18th
and early 19th centuries, the nascent U.S. empire in the late 19th century,
the consolidating but still constrained U.S. empire from 1945 to 1989, and
the full-fledged and aggressively expansionist U.S. empire after 1989.
It is also important, in my view, not to confuse patriotism with
"nationalism" and not to counterpose patriotism and
internationalism. The defenders of Empire today, the modern Tories,
are those who actually favor a cosmopolitan
"human rights imperialism" that seeks to undermine
national
sovereignty in the name of freedoms that supposedly peoples cannot struggle
to achieve on their own (with outside solidarity). Tories despise
self-emancipation. As Hal Draper points out in his great, multi-volume work
on Marx's Theory of Revolution, there was once even a word in English
(borrowed from French) to characterize such political elitism:
"octroyalism."
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