Fatherhood Quote by Hjalmar Branting

Patriotism, Branting suggests, is often just a bad category error dressed up as civic virtue. The “modes of expression” he’s eyeing are the familiar rituals of flag-waving and nation-talk that demand loyalty without specifying what, exactly, deserves it. His target isn’t love of country as place or people; it’s the sleight of hand that equates “the fatherland itself” with whatever power arrangement currently runs the place. When that confusion takes hold, “support” becomes automatic, even when the “social conditions” on offer are exploitation, hierarchy, or exclusion.

The line is doing quiet but forceful rhetorical work: it separates nation from regime, identity from policy, home from the rules that govern it. That separation matters for a social democrat like Branting, who built a politics around expanding rights and social protections while resisting the nationalist reflex that tells workers their real enemy is across a border rather than across a class line. He’s diagnosing how elites stabilize the status quo: make dissent feel like betrayal, make reform sound like disrespect.

Context sharpens the intent. Early 20th-century Europe was thick with mass politics, militarism, and the pressure to treat national unity as sacred. Branting’s warning reads like an antidote to that pressure: if you let “fatherland” mean “whatever conditions happen to prevail,” you’ve granted the present a moral veto over the future. His subtext is permission-giving: you can oppose injustice at home without being anti-home.