Since that quote in 1875, “patriotism” has wandered over to the other side of the line, inbred with superstition, ambition, and ignorance, and turned into nationalism.
That just leaves intelligence, by its lonesome, on the other side.
That’s not patriotism. Being patriotic is like being honest; if someone has to stress how honest they are, they’re not.
Put another way: patriotism is shown through actions, not through words.
Patriotism is loving your country by loving its foundation. It’s people. Loving your neighbor. Loving your brothers and sisters. I feel no love from the GOP.
I’m starting to think we need more wartime generals and less businesspeople in politics.
Pretty sure Grant is widely considered to have been a lousy president.
He committed the unforgivable sin of actually trying to do Reconstruction, and no modern American historical revisionist can tolerate that shit.
He’s easily my favorite president, but he chose hands down the worst and most corrupt cabinet members of all time.
What makes him your favorite then?
He was better for emancipation and reparations of freed slaves than Lincoln, he even had a history of employing them and treating them well during the war and before the great emancipation. His inaugural address alone was enough to earn points with me, but he was also responsible for changes of the Tenure of Office Act which allowed him to remove presidential cabinet members without the senate needing to vote on it, gave suffrage to people of all color via the 15th Ammendment (which almost certainly would have been vetoed by the previous Johnson who took the reigns after Lincoln was assassinated and before Grant was elected), and his administration defeated the KKK via state marshals and federal troops over his 2 terms as president.
To be clear, Grant was a radical of his time. He was fringe and far left from the norm of the time. He treated blacks as equals and as citizens when under the previous president Johnson there were massacres and riots against African American communities. To Grant, they were worth defending with the lives of servicemen like himself.
By comparison Lincoln was a moderate too afraid to give any promise of rights or eventual freedom to slaves because he wanted to avoid any and all conflict. It took two years after secession and war for Lincoln to emancipate slaves. I’m not saying Grant was perfect in every way, mind you, but if I had to pick a president whom I liked the most it would easily be Grant. (It’s not a high bar).
And that’s all you’ll get out of me, go read a book you lazy fuck.
You’re quite correct on all points in my opinion, for what it’s worth.
Edit: although to be fair, Lincoln had to navigate an extremely complex political situation. He could’ve done a lot worse than how it ended up.
Except that both sides will call themselves patriotic and intelligent.
So anyone just looking at the situation with their peripheral vision, will not know which one they are looking at.This is a fundamental problem with any kind of civil conflict. You’re inevitably going to have inteliigensia at the highest levels of each side of the dispute. You’re going to have mountains of propaganda to justify the need for the conflict and the existential nature of the threat of the opposition. You’re going to dehumanize your opposition in order to de-legitimize any kind of dispute. And you’re going to tap a rich vein of low-income, low-education civilians to fill out the rank and file of your military.
Plenty of liberals lined up to march into the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan and jungles of Vietnam. Plenty of conservatives are still part of the Soy, Woke, and Gay modern military, NSA, FBI, and CIA. Even if you’re looking dead center, you’re only going to see the view that your lens of observation affords. Its not like Bezos owned WaPo or Bill Gates’s MSNBC is above filling your eyes with Murdoch-tier bullshit. Just look at how the clusterfuck in Gaza has been covered.
What we have, at the end of the day, are all the same tools of dividing and conquering our own nation that we have historically inflicted on our colonial territories. Fascism is just imperialism returning to the core. And when your wild-eyed gun totting next-door neighbor breaks in to your house, convinced that you’ve got an adrenachrome factory in a non-existent basement, it’ll be under the same conditions that turned Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis against one another or Serbs and Bosnians or Koreans and other Koreans or Texans and Mexicans time and time again before.
