By Antonia Marie Cucchiara
Questions about patriotism abound across various liberal democracies today. A trend among ascendant far-right and populist movements in these states has been to monopolize the concept of love of country to promote nativist and anti-immigrant policies and national identities. The co-opting of patriotism by these groups has sidelined the broad left, and has opened up active debates about the utility of seeking to reclaim and redefine this concept as their own.
Whether or not more progressive forces enter this fight as unified blocs and with centralized campaigns is still a matter of speculation. But if the reclamation of patriotism is pursued as a coordinated effort, the question of strategy becomes critical – how can parties on the left counter far-right and populist takeovers of the flag? My book Becoming Loyal Americans provides an analysis of a historical precedent for the success of an antifascist patriotic discourse. The antifascist-led movement to reclassify Italian alien enemies during the Second World War was effective at reframing the widely-held profascist version of Italian patriotism as antithetical to the true Italian cause of universalism and democracy, and offering a new vision of an American patriotism that allowed for sustained affections and loyalties to the ancestral homeland. Becoming Loyal Americans sheds light on the dismantling of authoritarian patriotisms today by exploring the discursive moves that were effective at infiltrating fascist monopolies on issues related to exclusion and belonging, and considering the potentially dangerous and counterproductive implications of relying on political myths and narratives steeped in histories of violence and supremacy to sell new forms of antifascist patriotism.
Contemporary United States is an exemplar of these political dynamics. Intermittent efforts have been made by politicians and activists on the left to infiltrate the hold that MAGA has had on American patriotism. But these pitches have yet to produce any significant traction, or party consensus about whether or not to take on this fight. This impasse was front of mind when writing my book, as the parallels between the challenges that Democrats face today and in the interwar years are stark, with one particular episode in the Italian American fight against fascism serving as a perfect distillation of this contestation.
A large majority of the people of Italian descent, albeit to varying degrees for the children of immigrants and successive generations, embraced the fascist imaginary and welcomed a newly articulated Italian patriotism with the rise of Benito Mussolini as a response to and an antidote for the various forms of discrimination and othering that this group faced in the US. The binary became quite simple: to rebuke the Duce and his ambitions was to be “anti-Italian” or “un-Italian.” But this phenomenon did not go unchecked. Fellow ethnics who understood the dangers of fascism, and its exponents of nativism and imperial aggression, sought to challenge the success of the fascist project to monopolize Italian patriotism. Clashes ensued, not only as a war of words over various mediums, but as physical confrontations on American streets, with one of the most emblematic moments of this struggle captured by the riots in New York City on August 24, 1926. The funeral for the popular Italian motion picture actor Rodolfo Valentino was the site of an interethnic fight between profascists and antifascists over the right to lay claim to the memory of the late star, and, in turn, declare victory over and ownership of a symbolic marker of Italian greatness. The imagery captured from that day, with Black Shirts standing guard at the coffin, and the descriptors of the failed effort to fully disrupt this takeover, reflects a critical hurdle that Italian American antifascists were unable to overcome at the time – the ability to reframe Italian patriotism in non-fascist terms.
This event took place almost a hundred years ago, but it speaks to the dilemma that progressive forces face again in seeking to win back the mantle of American patriotism. The declaration that Valentino clashed with Mussolini was true, but it did not mobilize the masses in opposition to the fascist rendering of Italian patriotism. Becoming Loyal Americans documents for the first time the discursive lengths that it would take for the leaders of the reclassification movement to cast love of country to the United States and Italy as an antifascist call to action. The current appeals to wrest the American flag from MAGA has led to some consideration on the left and a smattering of think-pieces, but it has yet to produce a coherent move forward, either in terms of offering a new and progressive patriotism, or in calling for a collective rejection of it as a mobilizing force altogether.
Questions therefore remain: will antifascist versions of patriotism compete against more hegemonic and aggressive iterations articulated by the far-right and populist movements? If so, how? And, moreover, should they? Becoming Loyal Americans provides a critical piece of political history about antifascist success to consider when thinking through this moment in the United States today, and across all liberal democracies wherein the notion of love of country is used as a partisan cudgel to determine loyalty and silence dissent.
Pre-order Becoming Loyal Americans
Learn more about and pre-order Becoming Loyal Americans from Amazon.
