Throughout American history, as in recent times, no word has been used more freely to silence dissent than “patriotism,” which Mark Twain once characterized as “grotesque and laughable.” Those who dare to criticize the powers that be are derided as “unpatriotic,” as if pride in country requires blind obedience to government or unthinking acceptance of the myths of American exceptionalism that we are spoon-fed as schoolchildren. A frequent target of such derision throughout his life, Howard had a provocative response to those who would challenge his love of country: “If patriotism means supporting your government’s policies without question, then we are on our way to a totalitarian state.” In this essay, he argues that if we take seriously the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then we must make “a clear distinction between the government and the people.” He continues: “This principle . . . suggests that a true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.” Here, Howard flips the script, arguing instead that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. He offers numerous examples from American history of how “obedience to government . . . has been disastrous for the American people.” This is never more the case than during times of war. “War is almost always a breaking of that promise,” he writes. “It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.” To be true patriots, Howard reminds us, we must side with the people whenever the government violates its principles, betrays its promises, or abuses its power.
SOMETIME IN THE 1960S the folk singer Tom Paxton wrote a song called “What Did You Learn in School Today?” The song includes the following lines:
I learned that Washington never told a lie,
I learned that soldiers seldom die. . . .
I learned our government must be strong,
It’s always right and never wrong.
The song is amusing—an exaggeration, of course—but not too far off the mark for all of us who grew up in the United States and were taught to have pride in our nation as soon as we entered public school. So much of our early education is filled with stories and images coming out of the Revolutionary War: the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere, the battle of Bunker Hill, Washington crossing the Delaware, the heroism of soldiers at Valley Forge, the making of the Constitution. Our history is suffused with emotional satisfaction, glorying in the military victories, proud of our national leaders.
The march across the continent that follows the Revolution is depicted on classroom maps as the Westward Expansion. The phrase suggests a kind of natural, almost biological growth, not mentioning the military forays into Spanish Florida, the armed aggression against Mexico, and the massacres and forced removals of the indigenous peoples. Instead the maps are colored and labeled with different events using benign language: “Louisiana Purchase,” “Florida Purchase,” “Mexican Cession.” Commercial transactions and generous gifts, rather than military occupation and conquest.
Young people learning such a “patriotic” history would easily conclude that, as Tom Paxton’s song puts it, our government is “always right and never wrong.” And if so, it is our duty to support whatever our government does, even to be willing to give our lives in war. But is that patriotism in the best sense of the word? If patriotism means supporting your government’s policies without question, then we are on our way to a totalitarian state.
Patriotism in a democratic society cannot possibly be unquestioning support of the government, not if we take seriously the principles of democracy as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, our founding document. The Declaration makes a clear distinction between the government and the people. Governments are artificial creations, the Declaration says, established by the people with the obligation to protect certain ends: the equal rights of all to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” And “whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. . . .”
Surely, if it is the right of the people to “alter or abolish,” it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that a true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.
That characterization of governments expressed in the Declaration, as “deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed” has been understood by the most heroic of Americans—not the heroes of war, but the heroes of the long struggle for social justice. Mark Twain was one of many who distinguished between the country and the government.
Several years before he denounced the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, Mark Twain had written the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and put into the mouth of his main character these words:
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.
The same distinction between government and country was made in the years before World War I by the feminist-anarchist Emma Goldman, who lectured in many cities on the subject of patriotism:
What is patriotism? Is it love of one’s birthplace, the place of childhood’s recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivety, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? . . . Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
Defining patriotism as obedience to government—as an uncritical acceptance of any war the leaders of government decide must be fought—has been disastrous for the American people. Failure to distinguish between the country and the government has led so many young people, recruited into the military, to declare that that they would be willing to die for their country. Would not those young people hesitate before enlisting if they considered that they were not risking their lives for their country, but for the government, and even for the owners of great wealth, the giant corporations connected to the government?
As a patriot, contemplating the dead GIs in Afghanistan and Iraq, I could comfort myself (as, understandably, their families do) with the thought: “They died for their country.” But I would be lying to myself.
Today, the U.S. soldiers who are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for their government. They are dying for Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld. And yes, they are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation’s wealth to pay for the machines of death. As of July 4, 2006, more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and almost 20,000 have been maimed or injured.
It is the country that is primary—the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life, and the promotion of liberty. When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, always claiming that its motives are pure and moral (“Operation Just Cause” in the invasion of Panama and “Operation Enduring Freedom” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the present instance), it is violating its promise to the country. War is almost always a breaking of that promise. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.
Mark Twain derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” In his words,
The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: “The King can do no wrong.” We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: “Our country, right or wrong!” We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had—the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it: away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.
With the United States imposing its might in Iraq and Afghanistan, shall we revel in American military power and—against the history of modern empires—insist that the American empire will be beneficent?
Our own history shows something different. Obedience to whatever the government decides is founded on the idea that the interests of the government are the same as the interests of its citizens. However, we have a long history of government policy that suggests that America’s political leaders have had interests different from those of the people. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution, while they drafted provisions for a certain degree of representative government and agreed to a Bill of Rights, did not represent the interests of people forced to be slaves, people whose enslavement was in fact legitimized by the Constitution. Nor did they represent the interests of working people, American Indians, and women of any color or class.
Nor did they represent the average white man of that time—the small farmer—for they intended to fashion a government that would be capable of putting down the kind of rebellions of farmers that had been erupting all over the country in the year before the Constitutional Convention. The very term we use, “Founding Fathers,” suggests a family, with common interests. But from the founding of the nation to the present day, the government has generally legislated on behalf of the wealthy, has done the bidding of corporations in dealing with working people, and has taken the nation to war in the interests of economic expansion and political ambition.
It then becomes crucial for democracy to understand this difference of interest between government and people and to see expressions like “the national interest,” “national security,” “national defense” as ways of obscuring that difference and of enticing the citizens into subservience to power. It becomes important, then, to be wary of those symbols of nationhood which attempt to unite us in a false “patriotism” that works against the interests of the country and its people.
It is not surprising that African Americans, conscious of their status in a white-dominated society, would be more skeptical of such symbols. Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became a leader of the abolitionist movement, was asked in 1852 to speak at a Fourth of July gathering in Rochester, New York. Here is a small sample of what he had to say:
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? . . .
What, to the American slave, is your 40th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity . . . your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery . . . a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
African Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude toward the idea of patriotism. They have wanted to feel patriotic in the best sense of the term, that is, to feel at one with their fellow Americans, to feel part of a greater community. And yet, they have resented—while they have endured slavery, lynching, segregation, humiliation, and economic injustice—attempts to enmesh them in a false sense of common interest.
Thus, their reaction to the nation’s wars has been a troubled one. The complexity is illustrated by the dramatically different reactions of two boxing champions in two different wars. There was Joe Louis, who was used by the U.S. government to build black support for World War II, saying that whatever was wrong in this country, “Hitler won’t fix it.” And there was Muhammad Ali, who refused to be drafted for the Vietnam War and told a reporter who challenged him on the war:
“No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. . . . The real enemy of my people is here. . . . So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”
In times of war, the definition of patriotism becomes a matter of life or death for Americans and the world. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights. I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for her or his country might act on behalf of a different vision.
We need to expand the prevailing definition of patriotism beyond that narrow nationalism that has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade—some call it “globalization”—should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?
Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.