Patriotism and Loyalty
AT a recent Fourth of July picnic at the home of a colleague, the hostess asked the group if we all felt patriotic. This question created a moment of acute embarrassment; it seemed to have breached some unspoken rule of political correctness. Was it even appropriate to ask such a thing? Had any of us grown up in a house that flew the flag? (She was the only one who had.) We then read the Declaration of Independence before tucking into our hamburgers and hot dogs. This was hardly an unusual experience. We were celebrating our national founding, and yet for several around the table, the meaning of this celebration was cloudy. It is not that they were unpatriotic but that the language of patriotism had become strangely foreign to them. Many Americans have a vague feeling of patriotism yet would be unable to offer any articulate rationale for this feeling. The aim of this short book is to provide it.
Americans have become deeply divided over the meaning of patriotism. When the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to take a knee during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality, was he being unpatriotic? Many clearly thought so; many others did not. What of those who—as I write—are taking to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd and calling for racial justice? Is their protest patriotic? How you answer will depend on what you believe patriotism involves.
Patriotism is above all a form of loyalty. We admire loyalty to family, friends, sports teams, even institutions—up to a point. I am deeply devoted to the New York Yankees; the team is a formative part of my identity. I am a loyal Jew who cares deeply for the land of Israel, warts and all. And I believe myself to be a loyal American. Yet loyalty often sits uneasily with other qualities that we equally admire, such as fairness, justice, mercy, equality, and open-mindedness. There seems something primitive, almost primordial, about patriotism. It seems like the mafia code of silence, or omertà, which protects members from outsiders. Does loyalty to my country require me to adopt a belligerent attitude toward other countries? Does it require me, in the jargon of our time, to put “America first”? Does loyalty to America mean that I overlook the nation’s faults, or would this be a form of bad faith? These are some of the vexing questions I want to consider.
Loyalty—to parody the political philosopher John Rawls—is the first virtue of social institutions. It is the tie that binds society together, without which much of human association would be impossible. Loyalty to country is perhaps the most demanding and, in many ways, the most problematic form of loyalty because it may require the ultimate sacrifice. In one of the best books on the subject, Eric Felten has acknowledged that loyalty is a “vexing virtue” because our loyalties, being multiple (to friends, family, country, faith), inevitably come into conflict with one another.1 How are we to decide whether family trumps friends, or country trumps family? Yet even among the great philosophers, loyalty has never quite received the respect it deserves. It is the Rodney Dangerfield of the virtues.2 To take a tiny but revealing example, Aristotle—the most sober-minded of the ancient philosophers—did not even include loyalty in his canon of virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Patriotism was already seen by the ancient philosophers as something incomplete. Instead, Aristotle distinguished between the good citizen and the good human being. The good citizen, he argued, had virtues relative to the regime of which he was a member; the good human being had qualities that would be regarded as outstanding anywhere. Citizen virtue was at most a second-best alternative.3
Yet Aristotle may have missed something important. Loyalty is a foundational virtue that undergirds all forms of social relations. This is not to say that all forms of loyalty are good. The loyalty oaths required of teachers and public servants during the McCarthy era destroyed the lives of many honorable and decent people. Loyalty to unjust institutions is no virtue, just as disloyalty to unjust institutions is no vice. As the constitutional lawyer George Anastaplo famously argued in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the invasion of privacy that such oaths required was at odds with the freedoms of the First Amendment.4 But without loyalty, there would be little foundation for human solidarity. Loyalty can be a virtue of character: when someone says “I’ve got your back” or when we describe someone as a “stand-up person,” it means that person is someone we can count on. Whether loyalty is hard-wired into our makeup, as some social psychologists have argued, or whether it is a litmus test for distinguishing conservatives (who ostensibly value loyalty to particular groups) from liberals (who ostensibly value more universalist causes) is irrelevant for my purposes.5 Loyalty is inseparable from our nature as political animals, and we function poorly without it.
An interesting way to think about loyalty was proposed by the economist Albert O. Hirschman. In his seminal work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman examined three modes of consumer response to failing organizations.6 The most common path is exit: we simply take our business elsewhere. The second is complaint, or registering customer dissatisfaction, in the hopes of improving product quality. This is the path of voice. The third is the path of loyalty. Brand loyalty is something that we hear about, but economists rarely explore. Why should a person remain loyal to a faltering product or institution? My in-laws always bought Fords, partly for patriotic reasons, even though they could easily have afforded a more luxurious foreign car. Loyalty, Hirschman argued, makes sense only in a world where exit and voice are possible. In a monopolistic system with only one brand and thus no option for either exit or voice, loyalty would lose all meaning. Loyalty can only be an incentive to reform and improvement. “Thus loyalty, far from being irrational,” Hirschman writes, “can serve the socially useful purpose of preventing deterioration from becoming cumulative.”7
Hirschman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, hinted at but did not apply his theory of loyalty to politics.8 Why do people choose to remain loyal to their country even if they have the choice of exit? Of course, emigration is far more difficult and costly than changing one’s brand of toothpaste. Hirschman considers loyalty only as a move in a game of strategic interaction; he does not consider that loyalty may be a good in itself. Our desire to improve a product or a public policy is predicated upon our caring about it, a loyalty that is not merely utilitarian or instrumental, but is also integral to our sense of well-being. This kind of loyalty, like any virtue—courage, honesty, justice, integrity—is more than a strategy for deterring exit or improving brand quality. It is an affective disposition that grounds our deepest commitments. It is what Tocqueville called “a habit of the heart,” a feature of moral character that cannot be fully exhausted by rational reflection alone, but is integral to the self. One can imagine, for example, that a person could emigrate to Canada and simply cease to care about the place he or she had left behind, but this seems psychologically impossible. Emigration is in most cases an extremely painful decision and a choice of last resort. We continue to care about the people and the place we have left behind, even if we choose to leave them. Full exit, then, is never a real option. For most of us, loyalty is the default position whether we believe it or not.
Patriotism or loyalty to country is ultimately a species of care, and care requires a degree of empathy. We care about things to which we feel an emotional attachment because we feel them worthy of our care. It is not just fealty to a leader or a cause. To care about something or someone is to be devoted to it as an object worthy of our concern. “A person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it,” writes Harry Frankfurt, one of the few philosophers to address this subject. “He identifies himself with what he cares about in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending on whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced.”9 There is, of course, no guarantee that what we care about will be admirable or good. People care about all manner of things. There is nothing inherently praiseworthy about steadfast loyalty to a family tradition, a religious ritual or practice, or a political leader. Stephen Decatur’s famous toast, “Our country, right or wrong,” would make no sense if we expected our country always to be in the wrong or if we never tried to get it to do better. That we expect it to be right more often than not, and that we bear some responsibility for trying to ensure that it does right, indicates that even the most unwavering patriot is able to distinguish between good and bad forms of loyalty.
There is no good that cannot be abused. Like any virtue, loyalty has its pathologies. The demand for justice, admirable in itself, can easily become harsh and punitive. The demand for equality can blind us to the need for excellence. The desire for autonomy can run afoul of our desire to belong. Similarly, loyalty can morph into fanatical partisanship and blind faith. Søren Kierkegaard’s famous depiction of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Isaac is a case in point.10 Just how far is loyalty, untempered by judgment, willing to go? However it may appear, loyal behavior must always be informed by reasoned judgment if it is to avoid descending into blind obedience.
The opposite of blind faith is the case of the “whistleblower”—a term coined by Ralph Nader—or someone who exposes the perceived misconduct of an institution that he or she represents. This is especially problematic when the person in question is entrusted with handling sensitive materials. When Army PFC Bradley—later Chelsea—Manning released thousands of pages of classified documents to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, was she betraying the trust of an institution she had sworn to uphold, or helping to shed light on American injustices in Iraq? Was she playing the part of the noble truth-teller or the resentful underling? As I said earlier, not all forms of loyalty are necessarily praiseworthy, but there must always be a high burden of proof on those who choose to break ranks and a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s deeds.11
Like much else in our public lives, patriotism or loyalty to country has become politicized. It would be easy, as we witness the rise of ethno-nationalism in many parts of the world, to reject patriotism as tainted with xenophobia, racism, and other forms of religious and ethnic bigotry. But things are not so simple. Those are not expressions of patriotism but corruptions of it. I submit that nearly every person, even those who seem the most alienated or most cosmopolitan, feels some form of love of country. Certainly the guests at that Fourth of July picnic do: all of them have the option to live elsewhere, yet they choose to stay. So long as we remain political animals, we cannot avoid patriotism. The question is only what form it will take. Will it be harsh and barbarous, or humane and enlightened? There is no third option. It might be possible to wish for a world without patriotism, as many from Leo Tolstoy to Martha Nussbaum have done, but such a world would be a world without politics. Maybe it would be a more desirable world than the one we have now, but I find it hard to imagine what it would be like to live there.
RETURN OR PROGRESS
Today American patriotism finds itself at a crossroads. Patriotism presupposes some kind of national consensus around which citizens might coalesce. But at this time of intense partisan conflict, when we are deeply divided by class, race, education, and culture, even that minimal consensus seems to be lacking. Are the American framers to be celebrated for creating the first and most enduring experiment in self-government, or condemned for their complicity in the evils of slavery and their blindness to the fate of indigenous peoples? Is American hegemony in the postwar era a source of freedom and a beacon of light to other nations, or are we the agents of a new imperialism spreading a degrading commercial culture? Are companies like Amazon and Google a tribute to American creativity and entrepreneurial genius or products of an out-of-control business culture that has become an engine of inequality and corporate exploitation? Are the immigrants flooding our southern border aspiring participants in the great American experiment in freedom, or are they illegal aliens who would take our jobs while corroding our culture? We cannot agree even on the basic facts by which to debate these questions. We seem no longer to possess an agreed-upon narrative that could provide a foundation for national unity.
Part of our current discontent grows out of the bifurcated origins of American identity. Being an American has never been easy. Those of us who were born here take it for granted. America, we like to say, is an idea but it is not a single idea, more like a cluster or a family of ideas. There is a polarity at the heart of our identity. This is not simply a difference between liberals and conservatives, multiculturalists and nationalists, Democrats and Republicans; it gets to something more fundamental. At the core of our identity are two conflicting narratives—by which I do not mean stories or histories but the basic beliefs, cognitive values, affective dispositions, and prescriptions for action that constitute our shared way of life. These two competing accounts are the bifocal lenses through which we understand ourselves. I will call them the narrative of return and the narrative of progress.12
The narrative of return is an origin story. It tells who we are by taking us back to our beginnings. In Hebrew, the term Ba’al teshuva is a person who has returned to God, driven by feelings of sin, guilt, and atonement, as well as by hope for redemption. The Hebrew origin story, based on the prophetic ideal of a chosen people that goes back to ancient Israel, connects faith with fidelity to tradition. In the American context, the narrative of return is usually associated with the founding. It suggests a golden moment that can never be recovered but to which we can and should remain faithful. This moment might be associated with the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock, George Washington at Valley Forge, or the founders who signed the Constitution in Independence Hall—all of whom are seen as more venerable, more worthy of honor and respect, than any present-day person could be.
The first people fully to espouse this narrative of return were the Puritans. “I see the entire destiny of America embodied in the first Puritan to land on its shores, just as the entire human race was embodied in the first man,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America.13 This is a bit of hyperbole. The legacy of Puritanism was peculiar to New England, not to the entire United States, and it is what made New England different. You might even call it New England Exceptionalism. Had Tocqueville spent more time in Virginia or South Carolina, he would have found a very different political culture. Still, he was on to something. America was and to some degree still is a Puritan republic. We continue to see ourselves through the old Puritan conception of a chosen people, the indispensable nation, the bearer of the torch of liberty. To be sure, Puritanism has never entirely lived down its reputation for hypocrisy and sexual repression, canonized in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. “Puritanism,” according to H. L. Mencken’s famous quip, is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”14 Nevertheless, its legacy has done as much as anything to shape the American character.
Puritans, as the name suggests, were purists. The term was originally pejorative, coined by their opponents to convey religious extremism and zealotry, but a number of Protestant sects quickly adopted the label as a way to distinguish themselves from the Church of England.15 The Puritans began as a set of cults in seventeenth-century England that took exception to the official church, which they considered insufficiently purified of Roman practices. Their aim was not merely to found a new sect, but also to redeem the religious life of society. For the most radical Puritan leaders like William Bradford who emigrated to the Plymouth Colony on the Mayflower or Roger Williams who founded Providence Plantations—later known as Rhode Island—reforming the established national church was not enough. Because they deemed society irreparably corrupt, it was necessary to remove themselves from it altogether in order to build a new world in the promised land. This new world was America, and their promised land was New England, where they could live in covenanted communities uncontaminated by the old order.
This idea of establishing a new community, untouched by history and the Old World, has its roots in these Puritan founders who came to this country to found “a city upon a hill” as John Winthrop declared in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board the Arabella.16 America would be a new Jerusalem for a new chosen people, one that would serve as a light to nations around the world. These men and women saw themselves as a new community of saints who were on an “errand in the wilderness”; they would create towns and cities across New England with names like New Canaan, Bethel, Salem, and New Haven.17 This Puritan tradition established the university where I teach, and where the Hebrew urim v’tumim, the sacred stones worn as part of the breast plate of the high priest, very loosely translated as “Light and Truth,” remain the centerpiece of Yale’s motto. Every year at graduation, Yale students sing—or used to sing, until the university administration found the lyrics politically incorrect—the following verse in memory of those Puritan founders:
Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God
Came with those exiles o’er the waves;
And where their pilgrim feet did trod,
The God they trusted guards their graves.18
Winthrop’s vision of the city on a hill, famously revived by Ronald Reagan, became the basis for the idea of America as an exceptional nation with a special mission, even while there has been much disagreement on what that mission is.19 Our modern idea of American exceptionalism is inseparable from this sense of mission. Winthrop’s phrase has its source in the parable of Light and Salt from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his listeners, “You are a light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14), although Jesus was himself echoing Isaiah: “we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us” (Isaiah 42:6). Yet behind these aspirational words lay the perpetual fear of backsliding. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” Winthrop warned, “so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”20
The idea that the “eyes of all people” were watching the fate of this tiny band of religious dissidents departing for a largely uninhabited world—uninhabited, that is, by Europeans—testifies to the remarkable strength and confidence they drew from religious faith. The fear of dealing “falsely” with our founding principles remains a staple of present-day conservatism. For conservatives, American patriotism means a return to the “original intent” of the founders as expressed in the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia and other icons of the right.
The second narrative we tell about ourselves is the narrative of progress. Progress is a secular idea, a product of the Enlightenment, that is less concerned with veneration of the past than with hope for the future. The belief in progress is rooted in the modern conception of science. Science, as everyone learns in school, is a cumulative activity capable of almost infinite improvement. Through trial and error, it builds on previous knowledge to improve and surpass what went before. We may not know where science is going, but we do know that the truths of today will be replaced tomorrow by higher truths. The central idea is that through the application of the scientific method, the human condition can be bettered; want, poverty, and ignorance can be abolished; and the future will be superior to the present, just as the present is superior to the past.
The progressive ideal stresses not perfect beginnings followed by backsliding and punctuated by periodic calls for moral renewal, but imperfect beginnings followed by cumulative efforts at correction, reform, and improvement. Progress, or what became known as progressivism, was based on the belief that history—dubbed the “historical process”—could be shaped and directed by human intelligence. In the past, progress was achieved piecemeal and haphazardly, but with new methods of scientific planning and expertise, it would be possible not only to know the direction of history but to get there more quickly as well. For progressives, history is the story of the collective self-improvement of humankind.21
The idea of progressivism owed much to German philosophers of the nineteenth century, especially Georg Hegel, who saw history as the immense unfolding of the idea of freedom over time. In the American context it is expressed in the philosophy of John Dewey, who regarded democracy as a kind of laboratory experiment subject to perpetual revision and change. The greatest document of American progressivism was Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909), which in many ways anticipated FDR’s New Deal a generation later. Progressivism can take credit for a host of notable accomplishments, including the passage of the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, which created a national income tax and legalized women’s suffrage, respectively; the establishment of the Labor Department and the protection of workers’ rights; Social Security; and the founding of the Tennessee Valley Authority, an enormous national public works project. While progressivism as a political movement achieved dominance in the early part of the twentieth century, it came to exert a powerful influence over a large section of the American left with its call for more expansive welfare provisions.22
For progressives, patriotism is not so much loyalty to an already established nation, but an aspiration to a country still to be accomplished. It is not that progressives do not love their country; they have just become less certain about whose country it is. On their account, America is rooted in a flawed beginning tainted by slavery and other moral failings that require continual adjustment to the needs of the present. The recent dispute over the roles of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, once considered democratic heroes, is a case in point. Jefferson’s failure to free his slaves and Jackson’s Indian policy have made them anathema to progressives.
Progressivism has become less concerned with improving on the past than with erasing it. The debate over national memorialization has morphed from a demand to remove monuments to Confederate heroes—men who actually fought against the Union—to the removal of monuments to Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. For progressives, patriotism is best exemplified by protest movements like the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, the suffragettes and civil rights protesters of the early and mid-twentieth century, or the Stonewall riots of 1969 that set off the LGBT movement. They believe that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” a phrase wrongly attributed to Thomas Jefferson that is still enshrined in our national discourse. America is regarded as a continual work in progress, and celebration of past accomplishments draws attention away from the considerable work still to be done.
The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty gave pitch-perfect voice to the progressive view in his aptly named book Achieving Our Country.23 Following his heroes William James and John Dewey, he saw America as a continual work in progress. Patriotism, Rorty acknowledged, is based on the stories we tell about ourselves. These stories are not intended to be accurate representations of historical truth, but are an effort to forge a moral identity. The problem, as he diagnosed it, is that many on the progressive side of the ledger have come to associate patriotism with an attempt to paper over the worst American atrocities. Invoking the names of Lincoln, Whitman, and Dewey, he put forward his own progressive narrative of what America might yet become:
Dewey and Whitman wanted Americans to continue to think of themselves as exceptional, but both wanted to drop any reference to divine favor or wrath. They hoped to separate the fraternity and loving kindness urged by the Christian scriptures from the idea of supernatural parentage, immortality, providence, and—most important—sin. They wanted Americans to take pride in what America might, all by itself and by its own lights, make of itself, rather than in America’s obedience to any authority—even the authority of God.24
I disagree with Rorty’s militant atheism, but admire his attempt to wrest an affirmative ideal of America away from a progressive left that has become self-absorbed and caught up in an inward-looking cult of identity politics.
AN EXCEPTIONAL NATION?
Each of these views, the exceptionalist and the progressivist, captures one aspect of patriotism. Both are necessary but neither is adequate for my purposes. The exceptionalist narrative attempts to capture the singularity of the American experience, but it can too easily morph into the language of nationalist triumphalism. The idea of biblical chosenness without biblical humility risks an idolatry of the nation. It is too often bound up with sentiments like “my country, right or wrong” and, more recently, “America First.” If America is truly an exceptional nation, it can be so only at the expense of others. It is precisely this attitude of moral preening and obliviousness to one’s faults that gives patriotism a bad name. One remembers the flak that President Obama received when he declared that he believed in American exceptionalism in the same way that the British believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism. Every nation, on this account, is exceptional in its own way. For many, this was not exceptional enough. There can only be one exceptional nation, and that nation is America. When the disgraced television comedienne Roseanne Barr tried to explain her racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, she claimed it was because Jarrett and Obama “don’t like the idea of American exceptionalism.”
American exceptionalism has always been a double-edged sword. It can be an ideal to which we may aspire, or a mask to rationalize public behavior that often falls far short of the ideal. Do we judge our actions by our standards, or our standards by our actions? Faced with repeated accusations of not loving America, President Obama eventually declared at a speech delivered May 28, 2014, at the U.S. Military Academy commencement ceremony, “I believe in American Exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” In 2015, however, Donald Trump told a convention in Houston called “Celebrating the American Dream” that “I don’t like the term [exceptionalism]” because it insults other countries, a view he has since repudiated. Trump’s initial characterization was later echoed by the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who criticized the language of American exceptionalism at a Netroots Nation Conference, telling the audience, “We export American exceptionalism . . . but we don’t live those values here. That hypocrisy is one that I am bothered by.”25
If exceptionalism has become a kind of litmus test for how we think about America, the origins of the term tell a very different story. Exceptionalism is often traced back to Tocqueville, who asked what distinguished American democracy from its French counterpart. For Tocqueville, who believed that democracy or what he called “the equality of conditions” represented the future, America was exceptional only in the limited sense of having got there first. The language of exceptionalism took on a new meaning during the Cold War, when a number of historians wondered why America had never developed the kind of class-based political parties found in England and Europe. While European politics were riven by competing ideologies and “isms”—communism, fascism, syndicalism—America seemed peculiarly consensual and pragmatic, untouched by these major currents of thought and practice. The “genius of American politics,” Daniel Boorstin argued, was our imperviousness to grand theories.26
For better or worse, American politics was deemed irretrievably middle of the road. Our two great political parties (at least then) tended to meet in the center. In 1950 the American Political Science Association issued a report titled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System” complaining that the parties of that era did not offer clearly defined ideological alternatives.27 Why do we have a Democratic Party but not a Labor Party? Why is there a Republican Party but not a Tory Party? Why did America produce a Thomas Jefferson but not a Maximilien Robespierre, a Lincoln but not a Lenin? Put more bluntly, “why was there no socialism in America?” This is a question that many on the left are beginning to ask again.28
The answer, most famously developed by Harvard historian and political scientist Louis Hartz, was that from its beginnings the American liberal tradition, based on the philosophy of John Locke, exercised an ideological dominance that made it impossible for movements of either the extreme right or the extreme left to gain traction.29 Americans of all stripes, Hartz believed, subscribed to Lockean ideas about individual rights, private property, and equality. Lacking a feudal past based on a system of inherited hierarchy and status, America was by the same token cut off from a socialist future. The nation was, for Hartz, a case of arrested development, with our political identity permanently locked into eighteenth-century Whig political theory. The dominance of the liberal tradition—the key to American exceptionalism—was viewed ambiguously by Hartz and his contemporaries. For some, like Boorstin and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., it provided the basis for a broad-gauged consensus politics that helped to explain American political stability, while for others, like Hartz himself, it contained the germ of conformism, McCarthyism, and the kind of “soft despotism” that Tocqueville feared.30
If the narrative of return can become too exclusionary, the progressive narrative is insufficiently American. Here we should distinguish an older version of progressivism from its current form. The progressives of the early twentieth century, like Randolph Bourne and Walter Lippmann, were ardent patriots and nationalists. They sought to create a more robust national state in reaction to the doctrines of federalism and “states’ rights,” which they viewed as having led to civil war and the dominance of private interests over the public good. This strain of progressivism can still be found occupying the mainstream of the Democratic Party, but a different form has developed alongside it. New age progressives, as I call them, have adopted a form of multicultural politics increasingly focused on race and ethnicity as hallmarks of identity, but they reject any appeal to patriotism or national selfhood. Multiculturalism represents a fragmentation of the older progressive narrative that was centered around the patriotic idea of a single people engaged in a common enterprise.31
Many on the new age left still support traditional progressive policies such as single-payer health care, extended parental leave, and college tuition forgiveness, but they regard any assertion of American patriotism as the problem, not the solution. They have nurtured a deep hostility to the nation-state and national institutions—even some who aspire to national political office—regarding them as the source of all political evil. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why so many call themselves progressives when their theory of history is often anything but. The earlier optimistic narratives of progress, from the Civil War to the New Deal and Great Society to the election of Barack Obama, described America on an upward trajectory toward greater justice and inclusion. While progressives once believed that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” today’s new age progressives view the prospect of piecemeal political reform as hopelessly naïve. The optimistic narrative of progress has been replaced by counter-narratives of victimization and irredeemability that have produced racism, climate catastrophe, and an impending fascism foreshadowed by the election of Donald Trump.32
New age progressives, like their nationalist counterparts, have walled themselves off into self-reinforcing enclaves with little reason to communicate with the outside world or hear challenges to their certainties. They have fostered a kind of grievance politics that never misses an opportunity to take offense at a slight, either real or imagined.33 They may call themselves progressives and may celebrate certain universal values—democracy, human rights, freedom—but nothing as ostensibly parochial as God or country. New age progressives lack a core value of patriotism, a sense of loyalty to a particular tradition and way of life. Anyone can embrace the ideas of progress and rights, but only an American can be patriotic about America. The progressive patriot—like most of those in attendance at my colleague’s Fourth of July picnic—is devoted not to the America that exists, but to the idea of America as it is yet to be. What remains of actual patriotism has become vanishingly thin.
Patriotism needs to be distinguished—and reclaimed—from these two competing dispositions. On the right, patriotism has become indistinguishable from nationalism, a quite different sentiment. Nationalism, I will argue later, initially grew out of a legitimate desire for self-determination and independence, but over time it has morphed into an ideology of grievance and resentment. Nationalist stories are typically narratives of treason and betrayal by unscrupulous elites, in which listeners are encouraged to feel contempt for fellow citizens who fall outside the dominant ethnic group.34 They seek the warmth of community but always at the expense of an out-group, who are deemed un-American, traitors, and enemies of the people. The nationalist mentality thrives on the language of “us” and “them” and cannot survive without it.
Patriotism speaks a different language, one of loyalty and respect. It suggests a home or an extended family. We love our families not because we think they are better than other families, but because they have nurtured and sustained us through good times and bad. Like a marriage that we accept for better and worse, it is connected to a sense of gratitude to one’s birthplace—its climate, music, language, contours, and cuisines—for providing our lives with meaning and purpose. Patriotism is rooted in a rudimentary, even primordial love of one’s own; the customs, habits, manners, and traditions that make us who and what we are.
On the left, patriotism is often contrasted unfavorably with cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism has roots in the Western tradition that go back to the Roman Stoics, who thought of themselves as “citizens of the world” with no particular allegiances to state or nation. This idea of world citizenship had a counterpart in the Christian idea of the City of God, where people would be judged not by their place of origin, but only by their faith. In such a world, there would be neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, but all one under a monolithic Christian faith (Galatians 3:28). Contemporary cosmopolitanism is a secularized idea of this Christian faith, which is in turn guided by an ideal of humanity or humanitarianism. Modern humanitarianism is based on the idea of human dignity: that each person, regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin, is entitled to equal moral respect. This is in many ways a noble ideal. But too close an attachment to the idea of a global humanity runs the risk of ignoring the specific loyalties that bind people to their own countries. At the extreme, cosmopolitanism cuts people off from their national traditions, leaving them alienated from the culture in which they are embedded.
In contrast to both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, American patriotism has a dual structure that captures elements of both progress and return. Against the charge that patriotism represents an insular and exclusionary mind-set, I want to argue that it can be an enlarging sentiment that democratic societies cannot afford to do without, founded on something more than a primitive attachment to blood and soil. We are, as Samuel Huntington argued, a “creedal nation” subject to periodic bouts of “creedal passion” and insurrection that grow out of a sense that we are not what we ought to be.35 From the beginning, Americans have been a people of the book who have sought to ground national identity in higher principles like equality, rights, and freedom of religion. These ideas are embedded in our earliest national documents, from the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights to their later articulation by our leading jurists, political leaders, and public figures. American patriotism is a uniquely principled patriotism.
Yet American patriotism is based not solely on the high principles of self-government and civil rights, but also on the sentiments and dispositions that have shaped our common history, both good and bad. Patriotism is tied to place and rooted in experience, in how we have been brought up, our rituals and habits, our customs and feelings. It is not only a matter of the head, but also one of the heart. It is not entirely rational, but neither is it irrational. Being a patriot is like possessing a language—by which I do not mean simply written and spoken English or any national vernacular, but the whole network of signs, informal codes, cultural references, gestures and inflections that shape our perceptions, feelings, and beliefs, as well as our body language, facial expressions, posture, and accent. It is what makes us instantly recognizable to each other as ones who share a common background. Language has been called the house of being. It houses our deepest commitments, our loves and desires, our goals and aspirations, and no essential communication can be made outside of it. I have struggled for much of my life with French and have attained a fair degree of competence, but this does not mean I can think and feel like a Frenchman. In fact, quite the opposite. The more I learn, the more I realize the distance between myself and the experience of what it must be like to know French from the inside. We can truly know and hence truly love only what is our own.
What is true of language also applies to patriotism. Anyone can come to America, but only those who have lived here and decided to make it their home can understand what loyalty to this country means. This is why some of the most ardent patriots are those who have recently arrived or have taken what we revealingly call a “naturalization” test. America is a bounded community, held together by affective ties and dispositions such as duty, loyalty, and service. These sentiments can be found only where there is a history or ethos that binds a people as part of a common moral tradition. “A man’s ethos is his destiny,” wrote the wise Greek philosopher Heraclitus.36
This word ethos—meaning habit and character—defines the source of distinct national identities, what it is that distinguishes one people from another and gives each its distinctive character. It is something like the experience of inhabiting a place or a home, and like every home, over time it acquires peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. An ethos is not a steel-and-glass skyscraper—who would want to live there?—but a house that has been added to over many years and by now may have a slightly ramshackle feel. It is not that we believe our house is better than any other house, but it is ours and it makes us feel at home. Patriotism is like inhabiting such a place. As I will argue later, it is an ethos, a shared habit, a learned disposition, something that must be not only taught but also felt. These feelings are embedded in our laws, habits, manners, and most importantly in our collective self-consciousness—what Lincoln, our greatest patriot, called “the mystic chords of memory.”37