Three Questions on Patriotism, Satire, and the Meaning of Dissent
John Dewey’s Unfinished Inquiry
It happened in February at a public university in Ohio. A sophomore posted a two-second video on TikTok: a slow-motion recording of the National Anthem being played before a basketball game, with a caption overlay reading “Sped up version sounds better.” The university’s Office of Student Conduct received forty-seven complaints within six hours. The student was put on disciplinary probation for “acts of disloyalty” under a decades-old policy originally written to expel communists.
A Student’s Satire, A Nation’s Panic
The response was not a debate. It was a reflex. The university’s president issued a statement declaring that “patriotism is not optional for members of our community.” The student’s parent, a retired Army officer, called the punishment “appropriate.” Meanwhile, on a comedy subreddit, the video went viral with 2.3 million views and a different caption: “America, where love of country means you cannot make a joke about tempo.”
No one paused to ask the uncomfortable questions. What, exactly, is being loved when we demand uniform emotion toward a flag? Why does a two-second joke feel like a crack in the foundation? And if satire is the sharp edge of democratic speech, why are so many institutions rushing to dull it?
The answer is not about a TikTok video. It is about a philosophical failure that a hundred years of warning did not prevent.
Dewey’s Democratic Wager
John Dewey, writing in the 1920s and 1930s, saw something that most of his contemporaries missed. Democracy, he argued, is not a machine you inherit. It is not a set of institutions—voting, Congress, courts—that run on their own. Democracy is a method of experimental inquiry conducted by a public that must continuously reconstitute itself.
This means that patriotism, for Dewey, could never be a fixed emotional posture. It could never be a pledge repeated without thought or a symbol defended without question. Real patriotism, he wrote in The Public and Its Problems, is “devotion to the process of democratic life itself”—a willingness to subject every inherited belief, every flag, every anthem, to the slow, grinding test of experience. Love of country, properly understood, is love of the messy, unfinished conversation that democracy requires.
Dewey warned that this conversation was fragile. He saw the rise of nationalism in Europe, the manipulation of public emotion by propaganda, and the growing tendency to treat dissent as disloyalty. He called it “the betrayal of the public by the very symbols meant to unite it.” The warning was simple: when you mistake the symbol for the substance, you lose both. A country that cannot laugh at its own anthem has already ceased to be a democracy in any meaningful sense.
The Machinery of Misidentification
Dewey’s warning maps onto today’s landscape with uncomfortable precision. The university in Ohio did not act out of malice. It acted out of confusion—a confusion engineered and amplified by the infrastructures we have built for ourselves.
