Though comedian Sarah Silverman says that she’s actually experienced a change of heart about Trump voters, her recent attempt to elevate the conversation about the meaning of the word “patriotism” ended up slipping back into the standard conservative-blaming, Trump-bashing that she’s made a staple since he was elected.
“Patriotism is perverted,” said Silverman in a recent interview with Vice about her Hulu series “I Love You, America,” in which she talks to people from various political views. The reason “patriotism” has become distorted, she suggested, is because of the Right, who have “perverted” the meaning of so many important words, including feminism and liberal.
“The right has perverted the meaning of being liberal, or being feminist. Even ‘social justice warrior’ is an insult,” Silverman told Vice. “We pervert language so much. Patriotism has always been a bit owned by the right.”
At the heart of the distortion of the term, she said, is the false notion that we are more divided than we truly are.
“The last delusion on all of our parts is that there are two parties, and they’re made up of two very different kinds of people. I have to think that oligarchs and billionaire wealth addicts aside, for the most part, people are more alike than we think. We’re just getting our news from outlets that are telling us different types of stories,” said Silverman.
“Patriotism is perverted,” she continued. “We’re not on the same page of what it means. To me, being patriotic is loving your country—being a citizen, having a voice, being e pluribus unum. How perverted it is to go from ‘We are one’ to ‘We are number one,’ which is such a childish idea.”
The comedian took the opportunity of the word childish to work in some criticism of her least favorite politician.
“There’s a difference between childlike and childish. The president is childish,” she said. “He was stunted around eight years old––maybe something traumatic happened––but he stopped growing emotionally. And yet, he got all the way to the presidency. There are a lot of pathologies that are not healthy but can bring great success, if that’s how you measure success. The deepest people look at the world with wide-open eyes—which is childlike, not childish.”
Later in the interview, Silverman offered some thoughts on religion and managed to make some slightly more even-handed points.
“Like patriotism, religion can be sometimes used as a weapon, or to support someone’s own narrative or fears and prejudices,” she said. “These Christian-fringe, Roy Moore, do-what-I-say- not-what-I-do people––they’re not very Jesus-like. I see them as fringe the way I see ISIS as fringe. But when we look at the fringe as a whole, it’s dangerous. That’s why there’s the Muslim ban. They’re taking a tiny fraction of a people that’s loud and making it the entire people. That’s dangerous. The left often does that with the religious right. The religious right is not all of religion. The notion of religious freedom used to be this beautiful notion that all religions can come here and practice. What it’s become is legal homophobia—or racism.”
Silverman has been trying to be more “open” as of late, and that includes even being open to conservatives. The comedian recently said that after speaking with Trump voters across the country, she was surprised to find that she “fell in love” with them.
“When you’re one-on-one with someone who doesn’t agree with you, or whose ideology is different than yours, when you’re face to face, your porcupine needles go down,” Silverman told a Vulture Festival crowd in November. “The surprise was I fell in love with them. I had a great time with them and I felt comfortable.”