This is why slogans like “make America great again” are so potent and intoxicating. “Make America great again” is fundamentally about reclaiming a lost or elusive dignity. For most of human history, our sense of worth was tied to thick, inherited identities—tribe, kin, land, ancestors. You knew who you were because you knew where you came from.
Modernity stripped us of those identities. Sources of meaning have become thin and self-constructed. Into that vacuum steps the modern nation-state. Identity shifts and becomes increasingly associated with a state, a flag, and a country.
The status of the nation, its heroic narrative, confers status on its citizens. And if you don’t have a lot going for you, you can cling to that. You can raise the flag. No one can demean or shame you, because you’re an American.
This psychological exchange is the neurotic appeal of nationalism. And for a lot of people, especially those who feel invisible, disrespected, or losing, the exchange works. You can wrap yourself in the flag and borrow significance.
By and large, Republicans understand this dynamic better than Democrats. Elevate the stature of the nation and you elevate the worth, value, and dignity of its citizens. Make America great and you make its people feel great. But given how this dynamic is fundamentally neurotic, it is prone to abuse, manipulation, and pathology. There is a primal, visceral pull here, a neurotic violin that can be played by a master violinist.
Our attempts to secure dignity through nationalism also explain why our political discourse has grown so hot and toxic. The nation is carrying psychological weight than it cannot bear. Specifically, if your self-worth has become fused to the greatness of the nation, then any critique of the nation is experienced as a personal attack. Political disagreement stops being about policy and becomes an existential threat. This is not to say that love of country is bad, only that patriotism cannot hold together a fragile sense of self.
Here’s where my argument from The Shape of Joy shows up. Nationalism is not a durable source of dignity. Nations rise and fall. Their prestige waxes and wanes. Their moral witness swings from heroism to atrocity. Their leaders are often corrupt and self-serving. So if you attach your significance to the “greatness” of a nation, your sense of self is going to be radically unstable. Sensing that instability, we opt for illusion and delusion, a myth of innocence and greatness. By refusing to admit weakness, failure, or evil in our national story, we stabilize our sense of worth. Dignity is secured by delusion. We become, to borrow from M. Scott Peck, “people of the lie.”