Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich takes a phrase that’s usually deployed as a sneer - “patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels” - and flips it into a dare. She’s not dismissing love of country; she’s indicting the way “patriotism” gets laundered into a moral hall pass for the powerful. The opening clause concedes what many progressives mutter: flag-waving can be a cover story for profiteers, demagogues, and the merely obedient. Then she yanks the ground out from under the usual binary (patriot vs. dissenter) by recasting dissent as the higher, harder form of national loyalty.

The line works because it treats patriotism not as a feeling but as a job. “Duty” is the key word: it’s a deliberate theft from the vocabulary of civic religion, used to sanctify wars and silence critics. Ehrenreich repurposes it for troublemaking. “Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising” is a piled-up, almost comedic escalation - one foot in earnest civic theory, the other in barroom bluntness. That tonal mash-up is her signature: class-conscious moral seriousness delivered with a grin and a switchblade.

Context matters. Ehrenreich wrote in a late-20th/early-21st-century America where “support the troops” often meant “stop asking questions,” and where media and politicians routinely framed protest as ingratitude. Her subtext is that democracy isn’t defended by reverence; it’s defended by friction. If scoundrels thrive on uncritical unity, then the patriot’s task is to be inconvenient on purpose.