I’m in favor of expanding “patsoc” to really any american socialist who tries to latch on to ambient americanism instead of toeing the hard line of dismantling the project, renouncing its legacy, redistributing the piles of imperialist loot, and retreating into the background

e.g. from former cpusa chair sam webb

A big challenge for sure, and crucial to winning the American people to engage in such a[n anti-imperialist] movement, is re-envisioning our role in the world community. The point isn’t for the U.S. government to simply to crawl into a national shell, but to reinsert itself into world affairs on the basis of cooperation, peace, equality, and mutual benefits.

or current co-chair joe sims

In reading “No Room for Patriotism,” it’s as if Eugene Debs never went to jail to protest the First World War, the communists never risked life and limb to organize the mass productions industries while helping free the Scottsboro defendants and sending thousands to fight Franco in Spain. Did not our grandmothers and grandfathers fight the good fight in WW 2, keep the red flame alive in the heat of the Cold War while marching to desegregate swimming pools and restaurants and bathrooms before it became popular? Were we not on the front lines in demanding an end to the Vietnam War, the embargo of Cuba and freedom for Mandela?

And what about the hundreds of millions of other plain ordinary folk who comprise the vast majority of our class and people: Christian and Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, citizen and immigrant, gay and straight, workers, professionals, black, white, brown, Asian and Native American – simple decent minded individuals who strived to “do the right thing” as they understood it by upholding democracy and fighting war and repression?

Do they count for nothing?