Politics & Power Quote by Eric Hobsbawm

Patriotism here isn’t treated as affection for a place so much as a sorting mechanism: a moral yardstick that only works if someone is standing on the wrong side of it. Hobsbawm, the great historian of invented traditions, is pointing at a distinctly American habit of turning national identity into a negative definition. “Right Americans” don’t need a shared civic project; they need an internal enemy. The cleverness is in the circularity he exposes: the “wrong Americans” are declared “not really Americans” precisely so the “right Americans” can feel more real.

The subtext is about power disguised as purity. Once “American” becomes a credential rather than a legal or civic status, it can be issued and revoked by whoever controls the megaphone: politicians, pundits, cultural gatekeepers. That’s why the language of authenticity (“real,” “right”) is doing so much work. It’s not describing citizenship; it’s policing belonging.

Context matters: Hobsbawm’s lifetime ran through Red Scares, McCarthyism, Cold War loyalty rituals, Vietnam-era dissent, and the culture-war escalation that followed. In each cycle, a familiar script reappears: radicals, immigrants, atheists, communists, unpatriotic artists, “coastal elites,” Muslims, “woke” activists - the cast changes, the function doesn’t. By framing patriotism as a mirror held up to an outcast group, Hobsbawm diagnoses a nationalism that feeds on internal exclusion, because exclusion is emotionally efficient. It offers instant cohesion without the hard labor of agreement.