There’s a story from World War II that haunts me—though perhaps for the wrong reasons. In a girl’s apartment, a little resistance cell was making anti-Nazi flyers, an ineffectual but noble act. Among them was Jean Améry, a man Viennese by birth, Jewish by heritage, exile by necessity, working away with his fellow idealistic anti-fascists when a German SS man burst through the door. He lived in the apartment below and, disturbed by their noise, walked up the stairs, knocked loudly, and stepped in. There he was, with black lapels displaying the insignia of the Schutzstaffel. And there they were, “pale with deadly fear,” because in the next room sat all their implements of propaganda, work that would one day lead to the death of the brave girl who owned the apartment and would lead Améry himself to torture at Breendonk, followed by shipment to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, then Bergen-Belsen.

Not that day, though. The SS man, tired from night duty, only bellowed that he wanted peace and quiet. A frightening incident, but what frightened Améry most was that the SS man shouted his demand in Améry’s native dialect. Here was his regional compatriot—a Viennese, perhaps, like him. “I had not heard this accent for a long time,” Améry wrote, “and for this reason there stirred within me the mad desire to answer him in his own dialect.” Alongside fear surged feelings of intimacy, a desire to share regional patriotism with this hunter of Jews, an irrational instinct followed by a rational conclusion: “At that moment I understood completely and forever that my home was enemy country.”

Améry deploys the anecdote as part of his contention that one’s home is one’s home, whether we like it or not, even if we, as Améry would, come to repudiate it. The instinctual intimacy he felt with the SS man was a product of his childhood and youth, his first loves, family memories, his earliest conscious dawnings to the world at large. Such things come once, and never again. And they come in a specific place and community. For Améry, there is no new home, only exile, a state of self-loathing and self-destruction, since the repudiated home nevertheless persists as a part of you forever.

The scene hits me peculiarly as a New Yorker. As the specific kind of New Yorker I am. I live in Queens, raise my children in Queens, pray in my local church, help out at my local Cub Scout pack. But when I am addressed in a Queens accent, an accent marking this particular place and neighbourhood and its connection to the past, I cannot respond in kind. I’m from White Plains, New York, but my speech is the standard accent one finds across the major cities and suburbs of America, equally prevalent among college faculties and major law firms and Senate staffs, among people who might have fun talking about how weird it is that you say “pop” and I say “soda,” but who all pronounce the words identically. People who have a deeper emotional attachment to the elite colleges they went to than to the towns and neighbourhoods where they took their first steps. I never go back to White Plains. Why would I, when there are coffee shops from Hanoi to Denver where I’ll feel at home?

Améry, for all his lament for the loss of his morally corrupted birthplace, anticipates this world, conceding that future generations might be able to get along without a specific homeland. For us future generations, products of the technological-scientific revolution that we are, “the objects of daily use, which at present we still imbue with emotion, will be fully fungible.” Modern man will trade his home for the world, flying from Paris to New York, Shanghai to Buenos Aires, across an earth alien to the concept of home, where “the cities, highways, service stations, the furniture, the electric household appliances, the plates, and the spoons will be the same everywhere.” Then we will all be citizens of the world, a hollow victory over our parochialism, since it will be a victory of an essential part of human nature, as we turn our cities into malls, our public spaces into airport lobbies.

Sounds familiar, yes? For Americans, multinational corporations offer us choice selections from a global menu that, for all its variety, seems homogenized. We need not shop to get goods, go to restaurants to have meals prepared for us, or even go to bars to meet someone romantically. We’re as social as ever, but we satisfy our desire for community through easily created and easily dissolved online communities. In 1923 William Carlos Williams wrote of the “pure products of America,” decked out in clothing with no peasant traditions to give them character:

But what spiritually devastated us in 1923 we deflect today with the perpetual ephemera of the information age. Just strap on a pair of Apple Vision Pro goggles as you hurtle through space on public transit, surrounded by people but engulfed in a private world, a spectacle to the eyes of fellow travellers as you bat at the air like a cat chasing a laser pointer. That’s what freedom looks like now.

“I perhaps am living in 1908, but my neighbor is living in 1900 and the man across the way in 1880,” wrote the influential architect and convicted pedophile Adolf Loos in 1908. “Happy the land that has no such stragglers and marauders. Happy America!” Happier now than before, if you buy what Loos was selling at the beginning of the twentieth century, and what our titans of digital industry are selling now.

So why is it that precisely those tools of connectivity and homogenization so frequently deliver bouts of nationalism and, in perhaps its most interesting form, proxy nationalism?  I rarely see intellectuals expressing unabashed American patriotism, but these past few years I’ve watched them identify intensely with nationalist causes in Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, and Gaza, identifications usually corresponding to American political tendencies. If you think that Russia’s standard of living is better than America’s because Tucker Carlson bought some groceries and swooned over Stalin’s subway station, you’re on the far right. If you fell for the Ghost of Kiev, a supposed Ukrainian fighter-pilot ace, you’re likely in the centre. And if you find it hard to believe that Hamas committed widespread rapes on October 7, or if you believe that you shouldn’t talk about it much even if they did, you’re deep into the fringes of the left. Is this a product of a genuine internationalism, a symptom of our disconnection and disaffection with the modern world, or something else entirely?

Recently, on Instagram (where else?), I saw a post by someone who got involved in the New York theatre scene after briefly attending Dartmouth around the same time I did. The post appeared on December 1, World AIDS Day, a few months after Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7 and amid the mass bombing and ground assault on Gaza. In response, this person announced that until the New York Theater Workshop condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, they would no longer take their HIV medication. The comments are full of supportive heart emoji. Over subsequent posts, this person would go on to denounce Israel, celebrate Palestine (a later post of red, green, and black Mexican sweetbreads declared that “the conchas are also free Palestine”), and document their campaign using the hashtag #howmanyTcells.

Set aside the practical issues here. We all know geopolitics do not generally turn on the political statements put out by obscure theatre groups. I don’t bring the post up to mock its author. I too, after all, had once declared myself willing to risk my life for a country. Some details differed. Most notably that the country in question, of course, was my own. This was May 2005, when I signed my name and swore an oath and accepted my commission as an officer in the United States Marine Corps. For the occasion I wore my recently purchased dress blues, the most expensive piece of clothing I had ever, and would ever, purchase, a form-fitting straitjacket of a uniform that, supposedly, was an “automatic panty dropper”—though it didn’t arouse my girlfriend at the time so much as make her sad.

Right before I put pen to paper, a Marine Corps staff NCO pointed out that my signature put my life at risk, that I wouldn’t own myself anymore, and that my bodily integrity, mental soundness, and survival were, theoretically, on the line. That was fine. I didn’t really think anything would happen, but it lent a pleasing gravitas to the moment, one generally absent from the lives of the young and privileged. It also meant I would be joining a community about something greater than free choice. I signed, feeling adult and serious and just a touch noble.

Our national project, at the time, involved force-feeding the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan our own conception of what national aspiration should look like. Abstract principles like democracy and free markets and rule of law were being applied to specific countries with unique social and political and cultural conditions, none of which were being taken into account. Things weren’t going so well when I joined up, and when I deployed to Iraq, it was as part of the Surge, an increase in troops and a change in tactics designed to halt the spiralling violence taking over the country. Part of the ideology of the moment was that troops needed to be living closer to the communities they occupied, pushed out into combat outposts and in regular contact with local leaders. For a time it seemed to work, with the violence going down, only for Iraq to explode again years later with the rise of ISIS, causing more war and genocide. But I’d left the military by then, getting out in 2009, passing up an opportunity to deploy to Afghanistan as part of Obama’s surge, in which Marines I knew would be killed or injured. A decade later the fruitlessness of that effort would be brutally underscored as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. We withdrew our troops, leaving our Afghan allies to their uncertain fates as we retreated, like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, into our money and our vast carelessness.

This carelessness horrified me. A few months after the fall of Kabul, I spoke with a man I’ll call Abdul, who used to work for the Americans. When I asked him to describe how it felt when the Taliban took Kabul, he gave a nervous smile, looking almost embarrassed. “Sorry, sir, I can’t say,” he said. “I can’t try to describe that feeling.”

Abdul has four children, three of them girls who kept asking him what this meant for their school and their future. But there were more immediate problems for Abdul. Since he used to work for the Americans, his life was at risk. He had already fled his home once before, after a threat to his daughter’s school. How desperate would life become with the Taliban fully in charge? Over a WhatsApp video call, though, Abdul’s voice was gentle, his manner polite, with a kind of resigned calm in his voice. Whatever he said, no matter how shocking, he delivered in an understated, matter-of-fact tone.

Then Abdul walked into a bedroom and tilted his phone to show the large bed where all his children were sleeping in their rented Kabul apartment. It was nine in the evening. Too early to go to sleep, and yet what else did they have to do in those days but sleep and dream?

“When a person loses their hope, their future, you can’t think for the future,” Abdul said, looking at his daughters’ faces with an expression of such adoration it was painful to see. “For one week after the Americans pulled out from Afghanistan, we didn’t eat anything. All my daughters say, ‘I’m not hungry.’”

He showed me each one of their sleeping faces. Then he walked out of their bedroom and said, “I have a lot of plans for my life and for my children. And now I don’t have any plans. We lost everything. Our home. Our plans. Our future. This is our real life. It doesn’t have anything.”

Abdul never made it to America. I don’t know where he is now, or what the future looks like for his children. I know we didn’t have a system in place to help people like him, to whom we owed a debt and whose life was at risk because of us. We could have easily helped him, had we wanted to. But we didn’t. Because Congress is broken. Because we don’t like Muslims. Because refugees were not a priority for Joe Biden. Because contempt for immigrants is a Republican applause line. Because Americans are better at briefly feeling sad at the horrific images floating across their computer screens and moving on than they are at the long hard work of responsible statecraft.

When I signed my name and swore my oath as a Marine officer back in 2005, this was not my image of the democracy I had signed up to serve. I still have that yearning, that intense need to serve something larger than myself. But I would be lying if I told you that yoking that desire to the Stars and Stripes has not, at times, been heartbreaking.

As for the American public, well, how long has it been since you’ve thought about people like Abdul? We’re several global crises past that now. First there was the invasion of Ukraine, with blue-and-yellow flags proliferating across social media as we found a less morally ambiguous conflict to support. And now there’s Gaza. People who would sneer at a robust display of American patriotism (at one event at a bookstore I frequent, a worker reported feeling threatened because a patron came in wearing a shirt displaying an American flag) wholeheartedly embraced other national symbols, cleansed and sanctified by victimization, while across college campuses students on different sides of the conflict declared, as if reciting the lines of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “‘I am the victim.’ ‘No. I alone am / the victim.’”

Thinking about all the American wars of the past decades, the wars we’ve fought, the wars we’re fighting, and the wars we’re funding, is dizzying. Nonetheless, I’m not sure why I feel such disdain when I see a #howmanyTcells post urging, once again, for that theatre group to denounce the Israeli war. I should be pleased. Like so many veterans, I’ve often wished that the public at large would approach war with a sense of the vast human cost of the thing. Like many veterans, I’ve felt alienated from and slightly superior to the disconnected American public who rarely thought about our wars—not simply the ones we were directly fighting but also the ones we were implicated in through various forms of military support, from advisors and training to arms exports and the supply of intelligence. Like many veterans, I’ve wished we undid the tangle of laws and practices that have removed war making from public debate, and I’ve wished more people would act like they had a personal stake in foreign wars. Well . . . that’s precisely what the Instagram poster is doing. And here I am, like some sort of war hipster, insisting that I was complaining about America’s proxy wars before it was cool, and that the newcomers aren’t complaining correctly.

How does one go about saving the world, anyway? In the Catholic tradition, my tradition, we’re supposed to look to Jesus Christ, whose very first miracle happens at Cana. It’s an insane place to start. After the creation of the world, the birth of planets, the evolution of man, the millennia of grappling with the awe and terror and mystery of the world, God arrives, gets himself born, does some carpentry, and prepares to let humanity know what the deal is. But before the big reveal, with the heavens tearing open and the Holy Spirit descending like a dove as a voice declares, “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” Jesus goes to a wedding with his mom. And (not one of the major problems for our Lord God King of the Universe but a problem for the partygoers) they ran out of booze.

So Mary tells her son, the Son, “They have no wine,” and Jesus rebuffs her. “Mine hour is not yet come.” And she ignores him. She tells the servants to follow his instructions, knowing he’ll do what she wants, because she is his mother. And he does, dutifully turning water into what everyone agrees is pretty incredible wine.

From the perspective of an abstract, impartial morality, this makes no sense. None of it. The ultimate good appears as a man bound by local attachments rather than unbiased and universal principles. And when the teachings of that certain child were spread out to the world, the Spirit gave utterance to each preacher so that the devout of every nation on earth heard the news as if spoken in the language of home. In Fratelli Tutti Pope Francis writes, “I can welcome others who are different, and value the unique contribution they have to make, only if I am firmly rooted in my own people and culture.” But times have changed.

“I saw the world spirit on horseback,” Hegel famously wrote to a friend after seeing Napoleon in 1806. The unhappy consciousness of medieval Christianity was not simply fading but shattering as the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars brought about a “glorious mental dawn.” Yes, there was violence. New methods were instituted for mass executions. The guillotine most famously, but that only slices off one neck at a time. In Nantes, French Republican officers had too many rebels for such niceties. “They had unleashed the ‘infernal columns’; they had starved and massacred their captives; and they had been shooting batches of prisoners,” writes historian Norman Davies. “But it was not enough.” The clever radicals of the new order carried out mass executions by loading people into boats and casting them overboard. First a group of 160 priests, taken out under the cover of night. Four swimmers escaped, and though “collected with humanity by sailors, who gave them brandy to warm them up,” according to later testimony, the Revolutionary Committee learned of their survival and drowned three of them the next day. The revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier, bragging over dinner of his new method for exporting priests, joked, “It’s true that I got a lot of people on board; not one escaped the shipwreck.” A boatload of 58 followed, then an escalation to 300 condemned men, requiring multiple boats, followed by more drownings, more victims. Boats were sunk in the Loire with prisoners trapped in the hold. Prisoners were grabbed at random by drunken “American hussars” and tied to rocks and tossed overboard, victims rumoured to have been stripped naked, naked man tied to naked woman. Later, since nothing is ever as perverse and cruel as it could be, this became retold as a naked priest tied to a naked nun and drowned in a “republican marriage.” Did these marriages happen? Isn’t it exciting to imagine they did? We know children were killed. At least one blind old man. Infants. Such spasms occur as nations come alive.

Writing in the generation after the French Revolution, the great nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet said, “My noble country, you must take the place of God who escapes us, that you may fill within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity left over.” In the twentieth century fascism undermined the viability of praying to a national God, and by 1992 Francis Fukuyama looked to the past for a template for dealing with the problem. “Nationalism can be defanged and modernized like religion,” he wrote, turned not into a public force but into a private pleasure. “The French can continue to savor their wines and the Germans their sausages, but this will all be done within the sphere of private life alone.”

And though Fukuyama preaches liberalism, the mode of the transmutation was the spread of the commercialized world, interconnected globally but disconnected from local culture. In his infamous 1989 essay on the end of history, penned just before the collapse of the USSR, Fukuyama repeatedly notes the “ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture,” from colour TVs in China to rock music in Prague to Sony, Hitachi, and JVC advertisements plastered all over post-revolutionary Iran. “We might summarize the content of the universal homogenous state,” he writes, “as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.” He admits this universal homogenous state might be a little boring, and a little sad, and so maybe we’ll start playing with fire just to amuse ourselves.

Perhaps here we can locate my disquiet. I concern myself with the American military because I feel personally responsible, not simply because of my service, but because of my citizenship. In the Israel-Gaza war, one of many wars in which we have a finger or a whole hand, I see massive human suffering and no clear articulation of anything approaching a just end state from an Israeli government with prominent members happy to cheer anti-Palestinian violence, and who have openly advocated ethnic cleansing. In short, the way the war is being carried out, and the major concerns about the direction the war is taking, bothers me as an American patriot and as someone implicated in the war by our government’s support of it. I am frustrated by the way political accountability has been evaded, the way the Biden administration twice bypassed congressional review to approve emergency weapons sales to Israel, and how the Senate voted down a resolution demanding a report on whether Israel has committed human rights violations. These are actions designed to ensure less debate and more ignorance about a highly contentious war being waged with, at the very least, an acceptance of civilian casualties radically beyond what America deems acceptable when waging its own wars.

I’d like to insist on an important difference here, between a concern emerging out of one’s citizenship and a free-floating yet at least temporarily intense identification with a national cause that is not your own. When I see people who have never set foot in Russia or Ukraine or Gaza or Israel, with no family ties to those countries, spouting the propaganda of foreign lands, I wonder whether I am witnessing the genuine adoption of an identity or a consumer for whom sampling the spice of nationalist fervour is just one of the commercial choices you’re offered when you purchase a cell phone that connects to the internet.

Glory to Ukraine, and glory to the heroes, until the war becomes a grinding, expensive war of attrition and the congressional politics of sending 155 shells gets weird, and suddenly there are far fewer blue-and-yellow flags in social media profiles, and American authoritarians wax ever more eloquent about life under Putin’s brutal regime. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, even if we’re not sure which river and which sea and what that means in practice. Representative Rashida Tlaib might insist that “from the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” but the phrase, originally a Zionist slogan, has been used for decades as part of a call for either the dissolution of Israel and the expulsion of vast swathes of Israeli Jews, as it appeared in PLO statements from the 1960s, or as a call for mass Jewish murder, as in more contemporary statements by Hamas and Islamic jihadists. I don’t think most Americans shouting the slogan mean either of those versions of the phrase, though. Not the immaculately progressive version where it just so happens to mean everything Americans like and nothing that makes them uncomfortable, or the much darker ones readily on offer. I don’t think it means much of anything. I think it’s cotton candy, inserted in the place of the national pride that escapes us, no longer filling within us the immeasurable abyss that extinct religion left over.

But perhaps this, too, is essential to the Americanism I claim to value. I’m not, like Améry, a Viennese born in the last days of the Habsburg Empire. I’m a New Yorker. The essential New Yorker isn’t necessarily the guy with the outer-borough accent whose family came here generations ago, fleeing the potato famine or the pogroms of Eastern Europe. He’s also the newly arrived immigrant from Nepal or Colombia or Ukraine who, with feet planted firmly on Queens concrete, declares himself a New Yorker with pride. To love America is to love the turbulence of identities and attachments of the American people, who are always starting anew, refashioning and remaking themselves, little Gatsbys, the lot of us.

The playwright on the HIV strike noted, in a laudatory profile in Vulture, that their attachment to the Palestinian cause came from their family history crossing the American border with Mexico, where the humiliations of checkpoints struck a familiar chord. They even staged a pseudo-religious pill funeral on Instagram, burning their HIV medication on a geode their parents had brought from Mexico. What a statement! Here are roots, here is political commitment, here is ritual, here is a self-destructive attempt to engage with one’s immediate community and the outside world while being as cringe-inducingly dramatic about it as possible. Here is a true American.

My own responses to the predicament of American identity are more mundane. I pray at my local church. I participate in my local Cub Scout pack. I even join the odd protest sometimes. I take my children to Colombia to spend time with my wife’s family as often as possible so they’ll have a genuine connection to that side of their heritage. I try to be an engaged citizen at national and local levels, idealistic about our potential, alert to our failings, in love with this country and its wild mixture of people, and deeply worried about where we’re heading.