So, historical materialism time: certain other banned subreddits with lemmy forks had issues early on rooting out racists and transphobes. There was a lot of pushback from the aggressively white/masc subset community for what they considered overreactions to microaggressions. But when push came to shove, they would often show their whole ass and post the most vitriolic and honestly boomer chud shit to grace the modlogs.
Please keep your minority comrades in mind when posting and moderating your communities. We are service workers, factory workers, and low-level clerks in this together with everyone else, and we would like to believe that socialists care about us too. This is not to say I doubt this community at all, but just wanted to convey lessons from the past.
Trans issues, pronouns, and race issues also make a great litmus tests for weeding out Maupin-type “nationalists” who are mainly self interested.
Hoping to see great things from this community, and nice to meet you all! (っ_)っ
What you’re talking about is the difference between a government and its people. But patriotism is a means of conflating those two things in order to justify particular actions of the government. It works because it creates an in and out group and makes people less critical of actions of the in group. In the case of patsoc in the US, it’s advocating for particular actions contrary to the US’s current interests and its ingroup can fluctuate wildly depending on who is advocating for it.
Maupin aside, patsoc has major potential for cooption specifically because it is not critical in nature. Patriotism is just not a vehicle for self-criticism, particularly for people benefiting more from the existing system. If you’re not familiar with Freire, he talks in Pedagogy of the Oppressed about how critical consciousness is always liberating for oppressed people. Those who are accustomed to power will insist that oppressed people learning of their oppression will make them angry and irrational. In reality, oppressed people experience liberation when exposed to truth of their situation. Putting a group of people (patsoc’s ingroup) up on a pedestal is not an act which encourages critical consciousness. It encourages a sectarian worldview, which in turns creates taboos around certain subjects.