Joe Scarborough Praises Democrats For ‘Figuring Out’ How To ‘Reclaim’ Patriotism

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough praised Democrats for “figuring out” how to “reclaim patriotism” as he reflected on a party that in recent decades he said was “afraid” of the word now openly committing to it and seizing on it as their message.

Enthusiasm came during analysis following the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday, which saw President Joe Biden hand over party leadership to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

As guest on the panel, The.Ink writer Anand Giridharadas outlined the take in a recent article that argued Harris’s campaign was about “reclaiming patriotism and reclaiming freedom” as he told the Morning Joe team: “Both of these things were wrongly conceded to the far right.”

Scarborough jumped in to elaborate: “Can I say why they were wrongly conceded? Let’s not go back and pretend,” adding: “Democrats were afraid.”

Scarborough, who served as a Republican representative for Florida from 1995 to 2001, reflected on his past experience with Democrats at that time in contrast to what he’d seen in Chicago at Monday’s DNC launch. He said:

I would be honest with them in the 90s and early 2000s and I’d say ‘America is great.’ They couldn’t go: ‘Yes, it is.’ They could not do it. It was reflexive. It was weird. It is like: ‘Well, but look what we’re doing here, look what we’re doing there.’ They couldn’t do what Democrats learned how to do after Donald Trump started trashing America and saying: ‘You know what? America is great. We still have a long way to go to be a more perfect Union, but we’re doing that together, and that promise makes America even greater.’

Democrats, I don’t know when they figured it out. They figured out a couple of years ago, but they figured it out at the same time Republicans started nominating a candidate who literally doesn’t get America.

Scarborough continued to quote back Trump’s first speech after he’d won the 2016 presidential election, describing “American carnage” in his dark vision of the U.S. as crime-ridden, economically broken and controlled by elites.

“He was about America being bad then; that’s how wrong he is about America being bad now,” the host concluded.

Giridharadas agreed: “That was missing was, as you said because I think a lot of Democrats felt it was cringe to be patriotic in that way. There was not always a counterpatriotism, a more Progressive version of patriotism, and I think you are finding it now. It is not a patriotism that erases hard truths about American history, it doesn’t need to lie or distort, but it is about perfecting over time.”

Watch above on MSNBC.