MEGAN MCARDLE: In Defense of Trump’s ‘Day of Patriotic Devotion.’

So Donald Trump declared his inauguration a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.” Left-wing Twitter went into a frenzy about how creepily quasi-fascist this was. Right-wing Twitter went into a frenzy pointing out that Barack Obama had declared his own inauguration a “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation.” Left-wing Twitter angrily responded that those things are completely different, implying that if you couldn’t see the difference between a beautiful and healing day of renewal and reconciliation, and a disgusting celebration of atavistic nationalism, you might be something of a fascist. And I, bordering on something perilously close to despair, thought, “Guys, this is why Red America hates us.”

It used to be a trope on the right that the left thought patriotism was a bad word — a charge the left angrily denied. Now here we have a surprisingly large number of people arguing that … patriotism is a bad word, and wildly inappropriate when issued from the Oval Office. Or at least, more than a bit uncouth. . . .

What it does mean is that you should be able to say, without irony or reservation, “I love my country more than any other country,” and understand that adults around the world won’t hear this as an insult against their own land, but as the moral equivalent of “I love my wife more than any other woman.” You don’t love your country best because all the others are rotten places full of awful people; you love it best because it’s yours.

This sits badly with the cosmopolitan values of wide swathes of the country, because this sort of particular love closes off other options. But as I’ve noted before, the idea of being a “citizen of the world” is nonsense. If you get into trouble in a foreign country, it’s the U.S. embassy that’s required to swoop in to bail you out, not “the world.” Don’t get me wrong; there are many fine people abroad, and many of them may help you. But the U.S. government is the only one that has to, and that makes all the difference.

This should be obvious at a time when that cosmopolitan ideology is failing everywhere. Elites somehow got the idea that national loyalties would fade away and be replaced by a gentle globalism. And indeed, some of the old loyalties did fade away. But it turned out that the alternative to nationalism was not globalism, but particularism — the fracturing of polities into angry tribes that passionately loathe each other. And many in those tribes now demand to know why they should let cosmopolitan elites run things, when those elites declare, as a matter of pride, that they feel no greater loyalty to their fellow citizens than they do to strangers far away.

Indeed. And Trump’s little proclamation certainly brought that into sharp relief.