Larison and McCarthy exchange on Nationalism and Patriotism

From Daniel McCarthy:
Nationalism is What We Need Now--The Case for an “Unpatriotic Conservatism”
Further Notes on Nationalism

From Daniel Larison:
Abusing Patriotism

American Nation--an interesting snippet about the Loyalists:

To the extent that political philosophy enters into the question, we find in the colonies an embrace of the Country tradition and Old Whig ideas among the patriot rebels, with which their Loyalist contemporaries were also broadly sympathetic (except for the republican emphasis of some of the radical Whigs). Of course, Loyalists were Americans, too, which is something that even the most flexible nationalist narratives have never been able to accommodate. They are forever remembered as the hated enemy within, the collaborators who dared to obey the law, but they had every bit as good a claim to being American as the patriot rebels. Given the destructive effects of the war on the colonies, the Loyalists arguably had the more patriotic position. Even when we include republicanism as something distinctive about the patriot rebels, they did not necessarily speak for the entire population of the colonies, and even then the rebels were espousing a patriotism that identified love of country with the common good and the respublica. That is, they were espousing something that was hardly distinctive to them. The classical and classicizing 17th century philosophical legacy they drew upon was shared with those whom they drove into exile. One might as well claim that Canada is an ideological nation of a more Conservative bent, but that would be to see how inappropriate the label is for America as well.

Rather than strengthening “the element of traditional nationality in American nationhood” against “the hypertrophy of the ideological component of American nationhood,” we would do better to challenge the assumptions behind the claim of the existence of an ideological component. After all, which ideological component is it that is relevant? That of the Federalists or of the Jeffersonians? Though broadly similar in important ways, they represent two very different trajectories and two different traditions in Anglo-American political thought. As in any national history, different factions fight for political preeminence, but that does not make America even a partly ideological nation, just as that label does not apply to Greece or Ireland because they waged ideologically-charged conflicts at the time of their independence.

Clarifications