Spencer Case on Defending Patriotism

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Editor’s Note: This podcast was produced as part of Persuasion’s partnership with the Civil Discourse @ MIT program, at which Spencer Case spoke late last year on the topic “Does Citizenship Require Patriotism?” To learn more about Civil Discourse @ MIT, visit the program’s website here, and to see prior episodes in the series click here. Spencer Case hosts Micro-Digressions: A Philosophy Podcast. He's the author of many academic philosophy articles and coauthor of Is Morality Real? A Debate. He is currently an assistant teaching professor in the Bowling Green State University philosophy department. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Spencer Case explore the difference between patriotism and nationalism, what extremists get wrong, and how to think about self-identification in the debate about trans rights. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Mickey Freeland, and Leonora Barclay Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.7	So just to motivate the idea, we often talk about extremism as vicious as a bad thing,
0:39.9	and yet it seems like it's difficult to say what the essence of the vice of patriotism would be.
0:50.1	It's difficult to say what the vice of extremism is in its essence.
0:56.9	So why can't someone always just say, oh, well, I'm an extremist, but I'm an extremist for a good cause.
1:04.8	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
1:12.6	My guest today is Spencer Case.
1:15.3	Spencer is an assistant teaching professor at Bowling Green State University and the host of
1:22.0	the micro digressions, not microaggressions, microdigressions podcast.
1:25.9	We talked mostly about the role of patriotism
1:30.9	in our society. Why it is that patriotism is justified and why in fact it may be a necessary
1:40.2	sentiment to hold together really complicated societies like the United States.
1:47.3	In the part of the conversation reserved for paying members, we also delved quite deeply
1:53.8	into one of the interesting philosophical controversies of the last 10 years, when Rebecca
2:00.0	Tuval wrote a paper arguing that the acceptance of transgender
2:05.6	people should logically also commit us to accepting people with transracial identities,
2:12.6	like the infamous Rachel Donizal.
2:15.6	Spencer believes that there is something to that analogy,
	...

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