I'd say American socialists should push American patriotism along the collective lines of the history of American workers. From telling tales of the Blair mountain battles to talking about the sheer grit of the railroad workers as they connected the people across the land together. It should be taking notes from Woody Guthrie's best known song "This land is your land", and encouraging honest working folks communalism while condemning the bourgeoise hollywood culture's personality cults that infects our society.

Of course that doesn't mean every fella needs to be twanging on a banjo and whistling through :british-maw: teeth. We can look at contemporary musicians like Bambu, Rocky Rivera, and Ruby Ibarra, Boots and The Coup, the snotty nose rez kids, and the many other socialist musicians.

We must wage war on the bourgeoise culture we exist in, not in the sense a "culture war" as the libs and reactionaries view it, but as one of the aspects of total class war - a war of workers culture versus bourgeoises culture.

I could imagine it in a generation or two, maybe, but for any mainstream political movement in the next 5-10 years, I'd bet you're right. It's way easier to tell people that the warm fuzzy feelings they have about "American ideals" are fine, but that we need radical change if we want to actually live by them, than it is to tell people that their country is shit and those ideals are shit and they should feel like shit until they destroy it. I'm also struggling to think of any successful socialist movement that's lacked a patriotic element.