The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are a “hate group,” and what they hate is “America,” says the National Review. Zohran Mamdani hates America, says Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is also accused of hating America. In 2004, after filmmaker Michael Moore released the antiwar documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, an entire response film was called Michael Moore Hates America.

What do these people mean when they say that leftists hate America? The charge is usually substantiated by pointing to our criticisms of U.S. government policies. The National Review’s Noah Rothman, for instance, says that socialist congressional candidate Claire Valdez hates America because she criticizes U.S. imperialism, and has said that “we have been sold a lie: that the U.S. empire defends freedom, advances democracy, and protects human rights.” She believes, he says, that “the U.S. is responsible for indiscriminate violence and enslavement to the capitalist project.”

First, whether the U.S. is responsible for indiscriminate violence is a factual question, and it happens to be indisputably true. But even if someone feels anger and hate at that violence, how is that a judgment on “America” as a whole? There is an assumption here that “America” is synonymous with the state—the political elite that sits in Washington, D.C. and makes policy decisions. In fact, Valdez is saying that we as Americans have been told a lie by those elites. Elsewhere, Rothman cites statements from DSA members who believe Hamas is on the correct side of its conflict with Israel. In other words, loving America has nothing to do with loving the place, its people, or its culture. To love America, one must support an entirely different country in West Asia, even when it commits heinous war crimes and apartheid, because the U.S. government has declared it an ally.

Rothman also says that Darializa Avila Chevalier, another DSA candidate in New York who recently won her primary, hates America because of her “endorsement of the abolition of prisons in America” and “her contempt for American property rights captured in her support for ‘seiz[ing] all properties from landlords.’” And Rothman essentially gives the whole tactic away when he admits that, by saying DSA “hate[s] America and the west,” he really means “they hate it as it is presently constituted, which is pretty much how it has been constituted for decades.” And there you are: by leftists hate America, conservatives really mean leftists object to the status quo distribution of power and wealth. If you don’t like landlords, well, landlords are America, so you must hate America. If you find Israel’s genocide in Gaza abhorrent, well, Israel is an ally of the U.S., so you clearly hate America.

This line of thinking isn’t only found among Republicans. In response to the political gains the DSA has made across the country, some centrist Democrats are getting visibly nervous too, and they’re retreating to old ideas about patriotism in response. One of the loudest is Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY), who recently unveiled an ideological pledge he calls the “Promise to America.” It has now been signed by several more Democrats, including Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a harsh critic of Mamdani and the DSA. Explicitly framed in opposition to democratic socialism, the first line-item in the Promise is simply “We are capitalist, not socialist.” A little further down, that’s followed by “We are proud, not ashamed of America”:

We believe America’s story is one of extraordinary achievement and unfinished work. We honor America’s strengths and exceptional character while striving to build a freer, stronger, more prosperous, and more perfect union.

In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Suozzi elaborates, writing that Democrats “should remain fiercely proud of the American system.” It’s important to “rebuild the American middle class,” he says, but “we can’t do this by abandoning capitalism. Only by improving capitalism can we reward hard work and expand opportunity for every American.” He admits that “our country has made mistakes abroad”—several million Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Palestinians would agree—but insists that “Patriotism means recognizing that America has been a force for good” regardless. This, in a nutshell, is the political line that he wants every Democrat to adopt and follow.

Regardless of who’s making it, the “leftists hate America” argument has two main points. The first is that the long list of crimes committed under the banner of “America”—from the genocide of Native Americans, to chattel slavery and Jim Crow, to Hiroshima and My Lai and Kunduz and Gaza—must not be given too much weight. They can be acknowledged, but you must be “proud of America” regardless, never “ashamed.” The second is that “America” means capitalism, and that if you don’t support the system of private business, ownership, and profit-seeking, you must be “un-American.”

But we’d argue that it’s this view that shows a contempt for America, because it suggests that the national spirit is one of meek compliance: ignoring or downplaying the country’s ugliest sins, defending the economic status quo, and working against any effort to fundamentally change the United States for the better. On July 4th, the country’s 250th birthday, let’s consider another, better way to think about what it means to “love America.”

America Is its People, Not its “System”

When we hear pompous claims that people “love America,” we must always ask: what is the “America” that they claim to love? Is it the people of the United States? The land itself, with all those purple mountain majesties? The government? The constitution? Capitalism? As we’ve seen, some people think it’s capitalism, or the projection of military strength around the world, or both at once. But they couldn’t be more wrong. Really, only the American people themselves qualify.

It’s everyday Americans who built this country and everything in it, from the skyscrapers of New York City on the East Coast to the Golden Gate Bridge on the West. It’s ordinary Americans who work every day, in often brutal conditions, to keep the country running. Over the last 250 years, a long roster of brilliant Americans have produced incredible cultural treasures: poetry from Walt Whitman to Jay-Z, novels from Melville to Morrison, New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, L.A. Chicano culture, Hollywood classics, Woody Guthrie’s ballads (including his attack on his landlord, Old Man Trump). They’ve faced disasters and tragedies, from the Great Depression to 9/11 and COVID-19, and helped each other get through them. So if, when we say “America,” we mean We The People, then it’s true: Americans are indeed worthy of love and admiration.

This has political implications, though. In the first place, to love America means having a basic belief in democracy, because it means trusting that the American people, if given a chance to decide their own affairs, will make basically decent judgments. That means opposing corporate power and wealth inequality, which warp democracy and place control over the country in the hands of only a few. It also means that if you care about Americans, you must want a political and economic system that actually serves their needs. So there’s nothing to say that a socialist, an anarchist, or even a communist can’t love America. In fact, they may love it the most of all.

This 250th anniversary has seen dueling speeches from President Donald Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani—the leaders, for all practical purposes, of the Right and the Left in the U.S. today. Mamdani’s speech was characteristically warm and hopeful, emphasizing the way the U.S. has been a haven for immigrants over the centuries, including his own family who came here from Uganda. “It belongs to us all,” he said, and “you each hold a special power… to determine what America means.” In contrast, Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore was bitter and angry, as he railed against “the communist menace in our land” and warned that “you can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America… you cannot be both.”

Well, that would be news to Karl Marx. Ironically, for all that generations of U.S. conservatives have painted him as the devil incarnate, it’s fair to say that Marx loved America. In one of his many pamphlets, he called the United States “the most progressive of countries” for the way it advanced industry and trade, and he even considered moving to Texas in 1845, considering it a safe refuge for dissidents. Marx also followed the American Civil War with great interest, and admired Abraham Lincoln as one of history’s great revolutionaries. He wrote Lincoln a letter in 1865, saying so directly:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Hardly the words of someone who “hated America” as such! And for that matter, Lincoln himself sometimes wrote in terms that sounded a lot like Marx’s, which would have present-day liberals like Tom Suozzi seething and calling him “un-American” too. Just look at this passage of Abe’s from 1861, which for some reason is rarely taught in high school history classes:

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

History shows us, then, that the political opposition people like Trump and Suozzi want to set up is a false one. There is no reason a socialist—you might say the socialist—can’t love and admire America, and there is no reason the greatest Americans can’t challenge capitalism.

Even Ho Chi Minh loved America, as he understood it. Long before he was leading a guerilla war against American GIs in the jungles, the Vietnamese communist leader lived in New York City, where he worked as a baker and pastry chef through the 1910s. Later, when he sat down to draft Vietnam’s declaration of independence from France, it was the American Founding Fathers he turned to for inspiration:

All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776.

 

[...]Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.

In other words, Ho took the promises of our country’s revolution, of “liberty and justice for all,” perfectly seriously. He was then shocked and dismayed when the United States rejected his offers of friendship and sided with the French empire, and he ended up having to fight a bloody, decades-long war against us to secure his country’s freedom. And that shows us the more fundamental problem: there’s “America” in the sense of the American people and their ideals, and there’s “America” in the sense of the political and corporate leaders who drop all the bombs, and they have nothing to do with each other.

In fact, you might say only a radical can truly love America. Some of the greatest Americans are those who have gone to war with “the American system” — Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Molly Maguires, Mother Jones, “Big Bill” Haywood, Eugene Debs, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Barbara Ehrenreich, Afeni Shakur, Daniel Ellsberg, Aaron Bushnell, and so on. Each of them was driven by love for their fellow Americans, and it meant that they couldn’t sit still for a second longer while the “American system” abused them. Some were socialists, or anarchists, or something else that’s harder to pin a label on. They were condemned and called “un-American” for their troubles; some were imprisoned or even executed. But time and hindsight have proven them right, and it’s their efforts that have made the United States a place worth living. When Ellsberg was asked how he felt about being called a “traitor,” he was indignant. “I’ve been a patriot all my life,” he writes. His critics “think they’re under the rules of the Empire we broke free from, where officials take an oath to the King.” His philosophy was not “my country right or wrong” but “My Country—when right, to be kept right; and when wrong, to be set right.”