Politics & Power Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff’s line lands like a politely raised eyebrow: America is full of heat, yet he’s not convinced it deserves the nobler name we give that heat. The phrasing is doing the work. “Intense national feeling” is clinical, almost diagnostic, as if he’s describing a symptom rather than a virtue. Then comes the soft downgrade: “could be called patriotism.” Not “is,” but “could be” - a hedge that signals both respect for the emotion and suspicion of how it gets used.

As a politician (and a public intellectual by training), Ignatieff is attuned to the gap between civic attachment and tribal reflex. The subtext is that American nationalism often arrives not as quiet allegiance to institutions but as a performative, high-volume identity. It’s a feeling with a flag wrapped around it, sometimes tethered to resentment, purity tests, and a demand for public proof. Calling it “patriotism” becomes less a description than a political move: a way to sanctify a mood and foreclose argument.

The context matters: late-20th and early-21st century America has repeatedly fused patriotism with crisis branding - post-Vietnam recriminations, post-9/11 unity that quickly hardened into suspicion, culture-war politics that treat disagreement as disloyalty. Ignatieff’s restraint is the point. He’s separating love of country from the country-as-litmus-test, hinting that the most American thing about American patriotism is its volatility: inspiring, mobilizing, and dangerously easy to hijack.