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Our Anticompetitive Patriotism, Todd E. Pettys

Todd E. Pettys

In this article, I contend that the nation’s seemingly exclusive claim to citizens’ patriotism significantly shields the federal government from the competitive forces that the Framers believed would restrain Congress’s and the President’s ability to govern in objectionable ways. I argue that, because America is a nation-state built upon certain core convictions about public life, there are strong connections in this country between the entity about which people feel patriotic and the sovereign that people would like to govern many—perhaps even most—of their important public affairs. I argue that American patriotism was constructed in a manner that led nineteenth- and …