The United States is great not despite its hypocrisy, but because of it.

It is *precisely* the values baked into our foundational documents – freedom, equality, representative democracy – that pass harsh judgment on our past and present.

The American creed *compels* us to condemn the nation's history of ethnic cleansing, of chattel slavery, of treason in defense of that slavery, of racial authoritarianism... as well as at contemporary bigotry, durable inequality, and often appalling foreign policy.

To abandon our hypocrisy is to abandon our national identity. America without hypocrisy is an America incapable of maintaining and extending freedom, of striving for equality, of making democracy work.

We can diminish that hypocrisy in many different ways.

One is to embrace reactionary ethnonationalism; to cease being hypocrites because we no longer define America by its greatest aspirations.

This is not patriotism or nationalism, but their rejection.

Another is deny the atrocities of our history, and the horrors of the present. To pretend that North America was a vast, empty continent; slavery was a benign institution; anyone can make it in America; racism and sexism and other bigotries are simply atavistic remnants.

This is the patriotism of cowardice. A patriotism so fragile that it insists the truth must be hidden, that textbooks must report only the good, that monuments to traitors must remain... because it cannot imagine that anyone could love an imperfect, terrible, awesome republic.

The last few months we've seen the spectacle of an American president standing dazed and confused as a pandemic ravages the land and a majority of Americans join together to call out injustice.

Over the last two days we've seen that president mix the patriotism of cowardice with the false patriotism of reactionary ethnonationalism. A double betrayal of the the idea of America, one made ridiculous by his obvious ignorance of even the basic facts of its history.

The question before us is whether the American people will embrace the sublime hypocrisy of the United States, or the banal hypocrisy of Donald Trump. Let's hope we choose wisely.

The question before me, I should add, is how many typos this somewhat overwrought thread contains, as merely two posts ago I hit the "tweet" button rather than the "+" button, and inflicted it upon the internets sans copyediting or even a final decision about whether I wanted to.