Patriotism and Its Critics
PATRIOTISM remains a deeply contested virtue. Some even deny that it is a virtue at all. The charge most frequently raised is that patriotism represents an unjustified moral preference that leads us to attach greater partiality to our own country than is due. George Bernard Shaw made the point with characteristic wit: “Patriotism is your conviction that [your own] country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”1 Patriots on this account are constitutionally incapable of entertaining harsh or disconcerting truths about their country or themselves. Simon Keller called patriotism a “delusion” because it forces us to act on epistemically unjustified beliefs.2
Leo Tolstoy, one of the great anti-patriots, saw in patriotism nothing more than a form of collective egoism that leads only to war and death. “Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most unmistakable significance is but a weapon for the attainment of aggressive and mercenary aims,” Tolstoy wrote in “On Patriotism.” “Patriotism is slavery,” he concluded.3 The idea that patriotism is simply jingoism and warmongering is often connected to a second complaint, that love of country stands in conflict—often tragic conflict—with other forms of loyalty. This is more than a claim about the inevitability of multiple loyalties. It suggests that if patriotism comes into conflict with other loyalties, so much the worse for patriotism. In Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster famously stated that if he had to betray either his country or his friend, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country.4
Later I will take up the question of conflicting loyalties. For now, it is enough to note that Forster’s way of posing the problem is highly misleading. It all depends on the context in which we are being forced to choose friendship over country. We would have to know what our friend did—or what our country did—to make such a choice necessary. What if our friend had committed or was contemplating an act of domestic terrorism to protest a public policy? Is it so clear that our first obligation is to our friend, even if such an act would take the lives of many innocent bystanders? We cannot easily say that friendship should always trump patriotism, or that patriotism should trump friendship. Forster’s claim that personal friendships must always take priority would deprive us of the ability to exercise judgment.
Forster was only reformulating ideas that he had learned from G. E. Moore and his circle at Cambridge a generation before. They argued that the experience of certain private pleasures such as intimate friendships and the enjoyment of beautiful objects should be accorded a higher priority than the virtues associated with public life. For this circle, which would later become the Bloomsbury Group and which included such luminaries as John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, and Lytton Strachey, the affirmation of personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments necessarily meant removing from the list of virtues all claims made on behalf of patriotism, country, and public service. Forster was being completely consistent with this perspective when he presented the choice of friendship over country—of private over public goods—as a tragic, even a noble decision. No doubt influenced by ideas like these, three Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess—chose to betray their country. They became Soviet agents and for years passed on vital secrets to Moscow as they ascended the ladder of the British intelligence services, until they were finally exposed in the 1950s and 1960s. Before long they began to betray one another. Treason is not like a bus that you can get off at will.
Treason has always had its defenders. To paraphrase what Oscar Wilde said of war, so long as treason is regarded as evil it will always have its fascination. Only when it is regarded as vulgar will it cease to be popular.5 In his foreword to Philby’s autobiography My Silent War, Graham Greene sought to provide a high-minded justification for Philby’s betrayal, which had cost the lives of hundreds of loyal and patriotic Britons. “He betrayed his country—yes, perhaps he did,” Greene wrote, “but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? In Philby’s own eyes, he was working for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit.”6
This is an extraordinary piece of sophistry for its combination of moral fastidiousness (“who among us”) and a Machiavellian logic that claims that in the long run Philby was actually working for his country’s interests. Greene went on to compare Philby to an English Catholic under the reign of Elizabeth I working for the victory of Spain. “How many a kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope of the future as a riding anchor?” Greene asked.7 Revealingly, his concern was with the “kindly Catholic” who suffers at a distance from the injustices and cruelties inflicted by his own faith and not at all with the victims of the Inquisition—or Stalin’s purges—of whom he has nothing to say. As a Catholic writer, Greene might have remembered that Dante reserved the innermost circle of hell for those who betrayed their own people. Worse than gluttony, lust, or violence, betrayal was the vice deserving of the most agonizing fate.
But if treason is a vice, it is by no means clear that patriotism is a virtue, and if so, what kind of virtue it is. The defense of patriotism must still confront a minefield of obstacles.
THE CASE AGAINST PATRIOTISM
The most powerful recent case against patriotism was stated in a brilliant article titled “Is Patriotism a Mistake?” by the Princeton political theorist George Kateb.8 Kateb attacked patriotism as incompatible with the central ideas of the Enlightenment, especially intellectual freedom, a hatred of fanaticism, and a rejection of all forms of groupthink. Patriotism, on this account, is simply one part—the most dangerous part—of a larger tendency to find meaning in group membership. “Group membership and allegiance,” he writes, “simplify life by tying the identity of each member to a structure of inclusion and exclusion, of questions and answers, of rites and ceremonies, of allowable and censurable fantasies.”9 He considers patriotism, like all forms of group identity, a kind of bad faith that subordinates the principles of autonomy and liberty of conscience to the dictates of a largely fictitious—imaginative or aesthetically induced—abstraction called one’s country.
“What is patriotism?” asks Kateb, who then answers his own question: “It is a readiness to die and to kill for an abstraction: nothing you can see all of, or feel as you feel the presence of another person, or comprehend.” For the sake of this abstraction, “one commits oneself to a militarized and continuously politicized conception of life, a conception that is entirely masculinist.”10 Most damningly, Kateb finds that patriotism is often combined with a military cast of mind that mistakes loyalty for principle. “Patriotism needs external enemies,” he writes. “Devotion to a free constitution for its own sake is not patriotism.”11 Patriotism necessarily endorses the logic of friend and enemy, those who are with us and those who are against us. “Patriotism is, if it is anything, a passion to forsake moral principle with an easy conscience. We misunderstand patriotism if we see it as given to moral doubt,” Kateb writes in one of his best sentences.12 The certainty and moral self-righteousness that patriotism induces lead Kateb to conclude that it is not only a mistake but a deadly mistake.
A related attack on patriotism has been made by Martha Nussbaum, perhaps the foremost advocate of cosmopolitan citizenship. In her widely discussed article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” she invokes the model of ancient Stoicism to defend her views on cosmopolitan citizenship. When the Greek philosopher Diogenes called himself “a citizen of the world,” she writes, “he meant, apparently, that he refused to be defined by his local origins and group memberships, so central to the self-image of the conventional Greek male.”13 Diogenes argued, in a way that drew on Plato and anticipated Saint Augustine, that we actually inhabit two worlds: the local community into which we have been born as a matter of accident, and the global community of humanity from which our moral obligations derive. Diogenes understood that being a citizen of the world was a lonely business, an invitation to permanent exile from one’s family and way of life:
The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.14
This did not mean that Diogenes and the Stoics advocated the abolition of all local and national forms of government. “Their point,” Nussbaum asserts, “was even more radical, that we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.”15
Nussbaum’s account of cosmopolitan citizenship wavers between two different ways of thinking about patriotism. On one variation of the Stoic creed, it is not necessary to give up our local identifications and loyalties, which, she admits, “can be a source of great richness in life.” It is only necessary to think of them as part of series of concentric circles beginning with the self, extending to the family, then neighbors and fellow citizens, and so on until we reach the widest circle of all, the circle of humanity. “We need not give up our special affections and identifications, whether ethnic or gender-based, or religious,” she writes. “We may and should devote special attention to them in education. But we should also work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern.”16
Yet Nussbaum also treats patriotism and the whole range of local attachments and identities as a childish security blanket that we should get rid of once we reach full moral maturity. She recognizes that being a citizen of the world can seem a loveless disposition that puts reason before emotion and universalism before the symbols of national belonging. “Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business,” she writes. “It is, as Diogenes said, a kind of exile—from the comfort of local truths, from the warm, nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one’s own. In the writings of Marcus Aurelius (as in those of his American followers Emerson and Thoreau), a reader can sometimes sense a boundless loneliness, as if the removal of the props of habit and local boundaries has left life bereft of any warmth or security.”17 Like Kateb, Nussbaum finds patriotism a misplaced form of paternalism. “If one begins life as a child who loves and trusts his or her parents, it is tempting to want to reconstruct citizenship along the same lines, finding in an idealized image of a nation a surrogate parent who will do one’s thinking for one.”18 Patriotism, ultimately, is morality for children, and Nussbaum’s advice is simple: grow up.
These two articles provide in a nutshell the contemporary brief against patriotism. At the core of Kateb’s argument is the claim that patriotism is a form of bad faith. The patriot willingly subordinates his judgment and independence of mind to an imaginary, often highly idealized expression of the nation. Unflattering truths are filtered out, and what remains is seen through rose-tinted glasses. There is some truth to this. It is often difficult for us to accept harsh truths about someone or something we care deeply about. But Kateb takes a distorted or one-sided conception of patriotism for the whole. He writes that “a good patriot is a good killer” without ever asking for whom or for what purpose a person might kill. Are war heroes like Joshua Chamberlain or Colin Powell equivalent to mass murderers? Kateb’s world of absolute moral purity versus absolute evil seems to have no room for these distinctions. Yet there is surely a difference between men and women who go to war in the service of preserving democracy, and those who do so to spread tyranny.
Furthermore, patriotism can be self-correcting. It is not blind obedience but instead entails judgment and discrimination. This is what allowed certain members of the German officer class during World War II to work against Hitler while expressing loyalty for what they saw as the highest German traditions. The officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, could be accused of waiting until their plot required little moral courage—they acted to save Germany only after it was clear that the war was already lost—but we can at least say that they could have imagined no defeat worse for Germany than Hitler’s final victory. For them, the defeat of National Socialism was the truer patriotism because Nazism represented a deformation of their national traditions.19 The same could be said of those like Václav Havel or Czesaw Miosz who fought against Communism in Eastern Europe. Kateb associates patriotism with a need to create external enemies in order to prove one’s superiority. This confuses patriotism with nationalism—an understandable mistake—but the distinction between them is central to the view of enlightened patriotism I am arguing for here.
Nussbaum’s Stoic ideal of world citizenship is admirably high-minded, but it fails to account for the actual human beings who are reading her work. It fails the first test of philosophy, which is to make sense of the convictions and experiences we have in common. The idea of a world citizen is a contradiction in terms. Citizenship is a political conception, and politics presupposes laws, sovereigns, authority, duties and obligations, and peoples with bounded identities. We may find these realities regrettable, but that’s what politics is. A citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere. At the same time, Nussbaum seems to forget that Stoic universalism was not simply an ethical doctrine. It made sense only within the context of the Roman imperial state. She cites Plutarch’s On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander—“We should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbors”—without acknowledging that Alexandrian universalism was based on the destruction of the previously autonomous Greek city-states. The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius announced that we are all equal members of the great state made up of all rational beings. Was it only happenstance that this state mirrored the vast Roman Empire of which he was the emperor?
Nussbaum’s reference to Alexander reveals more than she admits. For Plutarch, Alexander was responsible for bringing the concept of empire into the lexicon of political philosophy. To those who might argue that Alexander never wrote a word on any philosophical subject, Plutarch replied that Socrates also never wrote but nonetheless is considered the first political philosopher. Alexander’s deeds were his philosophy. He had the boldness to put into practice what Plato and Aristotle had only cautiously suggested. They had posited that human beings were a species with a knowable nature or essence—the rational and political animal—but drew from this the faulty conclusion that man was intended to live under different, arbitrarily constructed city-states, each with its own laws. Alexander believed that by virtue of having a definite species-character, we were destined to live together as a single species under one universal law. On this account, humans are not so much political animals as species-beings. The only true politeia is the cosmopoliteia. Plutarch emphasized that in attempting to create a universal empire, Alexander was not driven by a vulgar desire for domination but by the purest philosophical motives of bringing the rational truths of philosophy into being, to unify theory and practice. The deeply totalitarian impulse underlying this form of cosmopolitanism is evident.20
At the same time, Nussbaum’s conception of world citizenship makes it difficult to account for our moral duties to individual human beings. Consider the case of the family. Why is it ethically important for me to give special attention to my child rather than another chosen at random? Nussbaum admits that “child care will be poorly done if each thinks herself equally responsible for all, rather than giving the immediate surroundings special attention and care.”21 This is certainly true as an empirical matter, and it has been borne out by a host of studies. But for the consistent universalist, it is hard to see why the needs of one child, even one’s own, should outweigh the needs of others, especially if those others may be far needier. If the moral universalist’s concern is not for the good of one child or one family but for humanity as a whole, why should I be especially concerned with the well-being of my own? Perhaps my time and resources would be better spent elsewhere. It is hard to see, on Nussbaum’s account of cosmopolitan citizenship, why we should prefer the welfare of our families, friends, and country over that of any other people on earth.
One version of cosmopolitanism that makes sense, if any version does, has been suggested by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.22 Appiah suggests that cosmopolitanism is composed of two contradictory strands. There is first the idea that we have obligations to others that stretch beyond the local world of kith and kin and even beyond the formal ties of shared citizenship; this might be called the universalist strand. Second is the idea that not just human life in general but also particular ways of life—cultures, peoples, nations—have meaning in and for themselves; this could be called the multiculturalist strand.23 For Appiah, there is no single metric for judging how to live, and a cultured cosmopolitanism will entail a robust sense of human diversity as a good in itself. The problem is what to do when these ideals clash. Which is to take priority: our status as citizens of the world with duties to humanity as a whole, or our allegiance to local people and communities?
Appiah considers the case raised by contemporary advocates of moral universalism like Peter Singer and Roberto Unger.24 Is it immoral to buy an opera ticket or support a wealthy cultural institution when the money could go to relieving diarrhea in the Third World? Shouldn’t the relief of suffering always be granted moral priority? Most people would forgo a dinner at a four-star restaurant if the alternative were to save a dying child, but Appiah maintains that this is a false choice. By attributing absolute moral worth to the alleviation of suffering, Singer and Unger suggest that all choices should be judged by this single moral currency. This form of moral absolutism would quickly become intolerable if it were allowed to intrude into the most basic decisions of everyday life, Appiah explains. A world where everyone is constantly striving to repair injustice would become “a flat and dreary place.” “It was terribly wrong,” he writes, “that slaves were worked to death building the pyramids—or, for that matter, in building the United States—but it is not therefore terrible that those monuments, or this nation, exist.”25
This last statement is especially needed at a time when American history is being rewritten to make slavery and anti-black racism the core of the American experience from the very beginning. The “1619 Project” promoted by the New York Times dates the American founding not from the arrival of the first European settlers, but from the time when twenty African slaves were sold to the Jamestown Colony in Virginia.26 American history, on this account, is both founded on and marked by persistent racial oppression and hierarchy. Even the American revolution is being presented as a struggle to preserve slavery. Such one-sided moralism diminishes our founding principles and views our founders as either hypocrites or knaves. It denies or diminishes the efforts of generations of Americans—black and white—in their struggle against slavery and racial oppression. Racism is, to be sure, an irreparable stain on American national character, but it is not the essence of America. Neither Appiah nor I wish to deny the evil of slavery, but rather to argue that the world is a morally complex place and that good and evil are often found mixed together rather than neatly opposed. As Appiah puts it, “If the founders of this nation had dealt only with the most urgent problem facing them—and let us suppose that it was, indeed, slavery—they would almost certainly not have set in motion the slow march of political, cultural, and moral progress, with its sallies and retreats, that Americans justly take pride in.”27 This is a welcome antidote to the language of victimhood and persecution maintained by the new age left.
THE CASE FOR PATRIOTISM (SORT OF)
One of the few philosophers of the first rank to defend patriotism is Alasdair MacIntyre. In his seminal essay “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” originally given as the Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas in 1984, MacIntyre descends from the lofty heights of moral universalism to offer a different conception of the philosopher’s charge. “One of the central tasks of the moral philosopher,” he asserts in his first sentence, “is to articulate the convictions of the society in which he or she lives so that these convictions may become available for rational scrutiny.”28 This view gives moral credence to the complex web of affections and loyalties that we feel as historically and politically situated human beings—at least to the extent of taking these affections and loyalties seriously.
MacIntyre goes on to treat patriotism as a form of loyalty and includes it in a class of “loyalty-exhibiting virtues” such as love of family, friendship, and allegiance to clubs and teams. Central to these virtues is the importance of belonging. They cannot exist apart from the particular communities to which they are attached. Yet MacIntyre is clearly aware that patriotism should not be confused with “mindless loyalty” to one’s nation. Patriotism is a regard for the merits and achievements of one’s nation, what its values are, and what it looks up to. One’s feelings of loyalty to country are like the loyalty we feel to a spouse. A person may, for example, feel respect for the institution of marriage, but this is not to say that we feel the same love and affection for all spouses. Just as it would be ridiculous to say that I should love all spouses, so I cannot feel the same love for all nations. I may admire the skills and commitment of the French soccer team that won the World Cup, but only the French can take pride in the team as representing the best of their country. “The particularity of the relationship,” MacIntyre writes, “is essential and ineliminable.”29
Yet MacIntyre also hears the demands of a very different conception of morality that he believes has taken root in the West from the Renaissance onward. This is the view, often associated with Kant but equally at home with utilitarian consequentialists, that associates morality with the impartial spectator. From the standpoint of this rational or “liberal morality,” the specifics of who I am, who my family or friends are, and to what country I belong are of no particular moral importance. They must be “bracketed” so that they can be judged according to moral standards that should be ostensibly acceptable to all rational persons. The term “bracketing” was coined by the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl but revived by John Rawls, who used it as part of an elaborate thought experiment in which persons imagine themselves behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents them from knowing key features of their positions in society.30 This is meant to ensure that our selection of moral principles is not swayed by self-interest, bias, and partiality. Only when we agree to set our own loyalties and attachments aside can our judgments rise above the local and parochial and aspire to some moral objectivity. From this point of view, MacIntyre concludes, “the moral standpoint and the patriotic standpoint are systematically incompatible.”31
What to do, then, when our local commitments and loyalties conflict with our universal duties and obligations? Can a patriot morally oppose his own country and its leaders if it engages in an unjust war, or do attachment and loyalty trump universal moral principle? MacIntyre sees this conflict as essentially irresolvable:
It is the essence of the morality of liberalism that no limitations are or can be set upon the criticism of the social status quo. . . . Conversely the morality of patriotism is one which precisely because it is framed in terms of the membership of some particular social community with some particular social, political, and economic structure, must exempt at least some fundamental structures of that community’s life from criticism. . . . But if so, the adherents of the morality of patriotism have condemned themselves to a fundamentally irrational attitude—since to refuse to examine some of one’s fundamental beliefs and attitudes is to insist on accepting them, whether they are rationally justifiable or not, which is irrational.32
MacIntyre regards it as an inescapable feature of large modern states to be torn between these competing conceptions of the moral life. While the liberal will claim that patriotism is a source of moral danger because it puts our ties to country beyond rational criticism, the patriot will claim that liberalism is at fault because it leaves the bonds of social life open to endless self-critique and deconstruction. MacIntyre concludes that each is right with respect to the other. The true danger comes when we confuse these two equally valid moralities, that is, when we present the claims of national loyalty as though they were universal claims and present the claims of reason as though they belonged to one particular nation or people. MacIntyre finds this tendency especially in the United States, which, he claims, tends to identify the cause of America with the cause of all humanity. “The history of this identification,” he concludes, “could not be other than a history of confusion and incoherence.”33
I agree with MacIntyre’s identification of patriotism as a species of loyalty to which he attributes genuine moral weight, but he is wrong to contrast this to liberal morality, at least as I understand it. What Macintyre calls liberal morality is only one version of liberalism—the version expressed by contemporary philosophers like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. For them, liberalism requires “neutrality” toward competing conceptions of moral virtue and human flourishing. The liberal state, on their view, must stand outside the domain of moral life and intervene only when necessary to adjudicate conflicts and prevent any group from tyrannizing others. The liberal state is desirable not because it promotes a specific way of life, but precisely because it does not. It is this claim to moral neutrality that has created the counter-claim that there is a moral void at the core of contemporary liberalism.
But MacIntyre confuses contemporary liberalism, and its aspirations to moral neutrality, with the classical liberal theories of philosophers like John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. For those writers, liberal morality was decidedly not neutral. It was intended to produce and justify a certain liberal ethos. From this older point of view, every community nurtures a particular kind of character and way of life. It creates a distinctive type of human being that is regarded as representative of the community. “We would be surprised,” writes Martin Diamond, “to find Cotton Mather fully formed and flourishing in the Berlin of the 1920s. We would be surprised to find a full-fledged, homegrown Oscar Wilde in old Dodge City. It is likewise most unlikely that George Babbitt would have turned up in the early Roman republic; he belongs to Zenith, the fast growing city in the Middle West.”34 Liberalism in this sense was not just a juridical theory of rights, but a full-fledged philosophy that aimed to produce certain capacities and character traits such as independence, fair play, acceptance of moral responsibility, and critical self-reflection—a distinctive canon of liberal virtues that characterize a particular kind of moral community, what might be called a bourgeois society. They also provide the basis for the conception of enlightened patriotism that I want to defend later on.
MacIntyre’s distinction between the morality of patriotism and the morality of rational principle suggests that there is something irrational about patriotism, that it belongs to a lower-level morality—a morality of folk tales and communal ties. He invokes the Hegelian distinction between Sittlichkeit (customs, habits, manners) and Moralität (reason, principle, impartiality) to make his point. The besetting sin of American patriotism is to have conflated these two different moralities. Attempting to give our merely local or municipal patriotism a universal coloration, MacIntyre believes, is bound to induce incoherence.
But MacIntyre’s defense of patriotism as a form of local, customary morality is based not only on a misreading of Hegel but also, more importantly, on a misreading of patriotism. Hegel’s stated views are in fact closer to the conception of enlightened patriotism that I want to defend. In his major work of political theory, the Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel describes patriotism as a “political disposition” (politische Gessinung) that is based on truth.35 In calling patriotism a disposition, he means that it is more than an occasional desire or passing whim; it is rooted in certain stable features of human character. In suggesting, further, that this patriotic disposition is rooted in truth, he does not mean that it corresponds to some external reality but that it expresses a personal desire—a rational desire—to be part of a society that shares one’s interest in freedom. Patriotism is an affect, but it is a rational affect because it aspires to freedom. This suggests that a true and effective patriotism cannot be based simply on the accident of birth. It requires institutions that reflect a civilized social order based on law and the guarantee of rights. Hegelian patriotism is a form of Bildung or moral education that may begin as a matter of trust and habit, but it gradually passes over into rational self-awareness.36
Hegel makes a second point about patriotism as well. In the remark added to paragraph 268 of the Philosophy of Right, he calls it a mistake to consider patriotism only as “a willingness to perform extraordinary sacrifices and actions.” Patriotism is not something expressed only in times of war and national crisis; it is required under “the normal conditions and circumstances of life.” It is a quiet virtue, which does not demand continuous acts of heroic self-sacrifice, but rather a willingness to be “tried and tested in all circumstances of ordinary life.” He chastises those who would preserve patriotism exclusively for times of political crisis while ignoring their day-to-day civic duties. Most patriotic activities, such as standing during the national anthem, take place in the realm of everyday life. “But just as human beings often prefer to be guided by magnanimity instead of by right,” he writes, “so also do they readily convince themselves that they possess this extraordinary patriotism in order to exempt themselves from the genuine disposition or to excuse their lack of it.”37 Hegel does not mean to deny the occasional need for wartime sacrifice—although he believed such occasions would become increasingly rare—but to argue that we should not mistake the extraordinary case for the everyday need for the patriotic disposition.
I want to consider one more example, Michael Walzer’s essay “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American?’ ” from 2004. Walzer begins from the premise that American patriotism is by definition something of an anomaly. “There is no country called America,” he begins. “We live in the United States of America and we have appropriated the adjective ‘American’ even though we can claim no exclusive title to it.”38 Unlike countries where families can live for generations without their members gaining full citizenship—Japan or Germany, for example—virtually anyone can become an American. America is not, and has never been, a nation-state in the European sense of basing its citizenship on an ethnic majority or religious affiliation, even though people have sometimes tried to do this. Rather, what identifies America is our sense of “manyness,” not in some mystical trinitarian sense but because of the pluralism that constitutes American national life.
Walzer sees an ongoing tension or argument over what constitutes American patriotism. From one side, there is a “republican” or what could be called Rousseauian tendency to view America along the lines of a classical patria or fatherland. Although American republicanism (not to be confused with the political party) has taken many forms, Walzer associates it with the Know-Nothing or “nativist” party of the mid-nineteenth century. Alarmed at the sudden influx of German and Irish Catholics, the Know-Nothings were the first to attempt to establish cultural markers for what made an American. These markers were racial and ethnic—the original conception of the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant)—and would later be used to justify harsh restrictions on immigration as well as the creation of everything from the House Un-American Activities Committee to the American Legion.
In opposition to the republican emphasis on unity, Walzer locates our distinctive national identity in the tradition of American pluralism. Drawing on the work of the Progressive-era sociologist Horace Kallen, Walzer views the hyphenated American as the exemplar of American national character. In a classic essay titled “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” (1915), Kallen took issue with the view that American identity required a melting down of all ethnic and cultural differences. The older “melting pot” image of American identity—so named after the novel by Israel Zangwill in which all ethnic origins and particularities are gradually blended into a common culture—has been accused, not without justification, of providing a pretext for white Anglo-American hegemony. America, Kallen argued, is instead “a democracy of nationalities” in which “each nationality expresses its emotional and voluntary life in its own language.” He regarded the assertion of ethnic differences as an essential bulwark against the debilitating effects of mass culture.39
For Walzer and Kallen, being an American means embodying the contradiction between the common or universal requirements of democratic citizenship and the recognition of the cultural and ethnic particularities that characterize civil society. Where they differ is that Kallen believed that we cannot escape our inherited identities. “Whatever else [a person] changes,” he wrote, “he cannot change his grandfather.” Walzer takes the more postmodern view that our identities are pliable. Being an American may be to embrace or reject the past, but above all it means the ability to fashion our own identities.40 Pluralism is either the price we pay or the advantage we accrue from belonging to an immigrant society. “Pluralists,” Walzer writes, “do not make good republicans—for the same reason that republicans, Rousseau is the classic example, do not make good pluralists. The two attend to different sorts of goods.”41
Walzer might have stopped at recognizing republicanism and pluralism as the two competing strains of American patriotism, but he goes further. The republican ideal, he suggests, is a fraud. “Republicanism is a mirage, and American nationalism or communitarianism is not a plausible option; it doesn’t reach to our complexity.”42 The unitary republic, modeled to some degree on the classical city-state, is simply false to American experience. Its attempt to make a one out of many—the original meaning of e pluribus unum—ends up sacrificing the many to the one. To be an American means always to live in conflict with oneself—and this, for Walzer, is a good thing. “It isn’t inconceivable that America will one day become an American nation-state, the many giving way to the one,” he speculates, “but that is not what it is now; nor is that its destiny.”43
Walzer’s conception of the hyphenated American offers a useful corrective to the often coercive aspects of the republican tradition with its unitary model of citizenship. But Walzer misidentifies the source of this republican strand in our history. It was not a creation of the Know-Nothings but is derived from the English political thought of the seventeenth century. Consider John Jay’s description of American national identity in the second Federalist Paper:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs and who . . . have nobly established their general liberty and independence.44
“This country and this people seem to have been for each other,” Jay concluded.
To be sure, this was an overstatement even when Jay wrote it. Americans have never been one people descended from common ancestors, speaking the same language, and practicing the same religion. At the time of the founding, America included Congregationalists, Catholics, Quakers, Jews, and others, many of whom spoke Dutch and French. There were millions of African Americans and Native Americans who were left out of Jay’s description of “one united people.”
But if the republican model goes too far in sacrificing the many to the one, Walzer succumbs to the opposite vice, sacrificing the one to the many. All that remains of our national ethos is a watery commitment to toleration as a form of “muddling through.” America is not just a congeries of multiple identities but a people with a history and set of public loyalties, an articulation of what we are and what we aspire to be. More than simply the sum of our differences, the American regime is the expression of our character as a people and a nation. It is our constitutional ethos that has survived and given shape to something called the American way of life.
To understand what patriotism means in an American context, it helps to consider some history.
The term patriotism did not enter the English-speaking world until the sixteenth century.45 Even then, it was a purely descriptive word that meant a “compatriot,” someone living in or coming from one’s own country. Our modern evaluative sense of the term did not appear until later. The terms patriot and patriotism do not occur even once in the works of Shakespeare, who commanded a greater vocabulary than any other English-language author. The word patriot was often modified by adjectives like “good,” “true,” or “worthy” to describe a good citizen or true lover of country. That is how it appeared in 1611 in the preface to the King James Bible, where the translators asked, “Was Catiline therefore an honest man or a good patriot that sought to bring [his city] to a combustion?”46
The language of patriotism entered English political discourse through the “Commonwealthmen,” who opposed what they regarded as the tyranny of the crown and the ministerial usurpation of power. Works like James Harrington’s Oceana (1656), Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698), and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) offered an image of England as an idealized republic based on virtue, economic equality, frugality, and political liberty. Sidney was a direct descendent of Harry Percy, the model for Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV, Part I, and we can see from his opposition to the restored Stuart monarchy that he inherited his great ancestor’s fiery nature. After Sidney was executed in 1683 for his involvement in the Rye House Plot, patriotism was linked further to the cause of political resistance and martyrdom. The patriot was someone willing to die for his country, and the Commonwealthmen often celebrated tyrannicides like Brutus and Timoleon. Borrowing the language of Machiavelli and Florentine civic humanism, these oppositional figures extolled the ancient British constitution as enshrining a republic of virtue in which none of the three estates of the realm—kings, lords, and commons—was able to exercise sufficient power to tyrannize the others.47
The concept of patriotism came into its own only at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Revolution Settlement of 1688 created the conditions for the emergence of the first two modern political parties—Whigs and Tories—to contest for political power. Whiggism was an entirely English tradition that has no precise counterpart elsewhere, even though an American political party of that name flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century.48 In recent years, the term has fallen on hard times as something synonymous with bourgeois liberalism, although its origins were more aristocratic. It is far more complex than Toryism, which Samuel Johnson defined as adherence “to the ancient constitution of the state and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England.”49 The Whigs were defenders of liberty, parliamentary government, and the rights of Englishmen. They were able to combine intellectual liberalism with religious agnosticism and (occasional) skepticism about the monarchy. “What constitutes Whiggism,” one writer has said, is “the inbred attitude of a ruling oligarchy whose loyalty was solely to parliamentary government as such, coupled with almost total indifference to the precise content of policy or legislation.”50 The last known specimen of an English Whig died in captivity around the time of World War I.
The modern conception of patriotism emerged out of the Glorious Revolution, which established the conditions of a free constitution to which loyalty was owed. This newfound sentiment of national loyalty was astutely described by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury and a pupil of John Locke. In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), he described love of country as devotion to a free constitution. “Of all human affections,” he wrote, “the noblest and most becoming human nature, is that of love to one’s country.” This marked the difference between a people “enjoying the happiness of a real constitution and polity by which they are free and dependent” and a mere multitude held together by force.51 The grandson of the founder of the Whig Party, Shaftesbury regarded the Revolution Settlement as a social contract where ideas of balanced government, religious liberty, and the rights of Englishmen would form the basis for Whig supremacy in the following century. The people’s loyalty, he continued, was not to the land or the soil but to the constitution insofar as it enlarged and confirmed the sphere of human liberty.
Shaftesbury’s patriotic sentiment was challenged by critics who saw Robert Walpole—the first modern prime minister—and the “big wigs” as plotting a nascent tyranny. The concept of patriotism was originally associated with the English “country” party, which claimed to represent the interests of the entire country against the machinations of the court.52 Although Walpole’s era was welcomed as an age of peace and stability after a century of almost continuous religious conflict—it came to be known as the new Augustan age—it also generated deep undercurrents of resentment at what some saw as the usurpation of parliamentary power by a corrupt ministerial elite. In the eighteenth century, “corruption” had a technical meaning not unlike what would later be called “patronage”: it meant the employment of lesser officers of the state to secure their loyalty to their patrons. The label of patriot also fell into discredit. It came to mean someone who feigns devotion to his or her country but whose actions are false or hypocritical. The negative sense of patriotism arose largely due to its oppositional meaning. As Thomas Macaulay would later write about the Walpole administration, by 1744 “the name ‘patriot’ had become a word of derision.”53
It was the Tory polemicist Henry Saint John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, who gave the term patriot its modern political currency. Bolingbroke is chiefly remembered today—if at all—as the butt of Edmund Burke’s jibe, “Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?,” although it was clear that Burke had read him carefully.54 In both “On the Spirit of Patriotism” (1736) and “The Idea of a Patriot King” (1738), Bolingbroke described a patriot as someone who supports the national interest, not the particular interests of the court or the administration. A healthy political order will be without parties, but under a corrupt system, it is up to the patriot to stand in virtuous opposition to the king and his ministers. To be a patriot in Bolingbroke’s sense was to be above party, to speak for the nation, a view that received its canonical expression in George Washington’s “Farewell Address.”
Bolingbroke put forward an idealized image of a Machiavellian prince as something like the father of his country.55 His idea of the patriot king was meant to stand in explicit contrast to the pervasive corruption under George II. The central feature of the patriot king was that he was above faction. “To espouse no party, but to govern like the common father of his people, is so essential to the character of a Patriot King, that he who does otherwise forfeits his title.”56 For the true patriot, then, the spirit of party or faction is the great evil to be avoided. “The true image of a free people,” Bolingbroke wrote, “is that of a patriarchal family, where the head and all the members are united by one common interest, and animated by one common spirit.”57 For Bolingbroke, parties are to politics what sects are to religion: sources of conflict and dissension. To ensure the nation’s liberty, then, a monarch must act in a national spirit rather the spirit of party. Once a monarch rules in the name of a faction, he becomes a tyrant and his government is a conspiracy. The true patriot will know how to use parties to his or her advantage. “He may favor one party and discourage another upon occasions wherein the state of his kingdom makes such a temporary measure necessary but he will espouse none, much less will he proscribe any.”58
Bolingbroke helped to legitimize the idea of a loyal opposition, a party that stands for king and country even if it is opposed to the current administration. It was through this language of patriotic opposition that the concept of patriotism entered American political discourse in the years before the revolution. As Gordon Wood has noted, Americans read and borrowed promiscuously from virtually every English writer, Whig and Tory alike.59 To be a patriot in the American setting meant to oppose British authority, not only the king but also the parliament and the entire apparatus of British imperial rule. The revolution divided Americans between “patriots,” who supported an independent republic, and “loyalists” or Tories, who defended the mother country and the English constitution.
The founding generation vigorously debated whether the new republic should imitate the British model of balanced government, giving institutional voice to distinct classes and interests, or whether the nation should embrace a more democratic vision of popular control. The British model was favored by John Adams, who saw the American experience largely as a continuation, albeit in purified form, of the English constitutional tradition of a mixed government that represents society’s different socioeconomic orders. This form originated in Rome, with its distinction between patricians and plebeians, and was emulated in the British model with its divisions between the king, the lords, and the commons. What Adams and others failed to see (or chose to ignore) was that the mixed constitution was little more than an oligarchy in disguise. The nobles or “gentlemen” stood midway between the king and the commons, giving them the greater share of power and influence.60
Not all patriots saw the revolution as restoring traditional English liberties under a balanced constitution. Modern republicanism, in contrast to the model of the mixed government, bases its assertion of the people’s sovereignty on the doctrine of human equality—that all are endowed with the same rights. For the more radical republicans, like Jefferson and Tom Paine, the American revolution was more than a restoration of a previous constitutional forms. It represented a first in human history. America would be a republic, a term borrowed from Roman political vocabulary, but something hitherto unimagined: a democratic republic based on the philosophy of John Locke. Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, embraced such Lockean ideas as the laws of nature, “unalienable rights,” government by consent, and the right of revolution. Locke, once celebrated as the champion of individual liberty, the right of property, and limited government, has recently been anathematized for founding a regime based on hedonism, materialism, and an ethic of heedless individualism. Yet for all of his contested legacy, Locke is still America’s philosopher king. Even those who rail against his influence implicitly admit it.61
Jefferson and Paine simply adapted Locke’s philosophy of rights to American circumstances. Yet for all their similarities, they interpreted these circumstances differently. In his great public letter to Henry Lee, written near the end of his life, Jefferson described the Declaration as an attempt “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject” and “to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” By “the common sense of the subject,” Jefferson said he meant the Whig sentiments that favored independence from Britain. The Declaration, in his view, did nothing more than “harmonize” the sentiments of the day as expressed in letters, pamphlets, and “the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”62
Paine, by contrast, tended to view the revolution not as something specifically American but as a world-historical event in which government, for the first time, was based on the theory of human rights. The American revolution, in his view, was the first step in a series of world revolutions. “The independence of America,” he wrote in The Rights of Man, “was accompanied by a Revolution in the principles and practice of Governments. . . . Government founded on a moral theory, . . . on the indefeasible hereditary Rights of Man, is now revolving from west to east.”63
The challenge facing the young republic was how to maintain a sense of patriotism once independence had been won. If patriotism was connected to the cause of the revolution, what was the need for it once the republic had been secured? And what kind of republic would it be? The framing of the Constitution put this debate in sharp relief. The Anti-Federalists, so named because they opposed the new Constitution, remained loyal to the ideal of small-state republicanism sanctified by the classical tradition of Xenophon, Aristotle, and Cicero and extolled by the English Commonwealthmen like Harrington and Sidney. On this account, republics were possible only in small territories with relatively homogenous populations. Small territories were necessary for self-government. In a large state, the center of government must necessarily be distant from the people it is supposed to represent, and thus impossible to hold accountable to its electors. At the same time, it was assumed that any people who were to govern themselves must be relatively homogenous in their manners, habits, and customs. A republic is not only a set of institutions; it represents an ethos, a shared way of life, that is possible only among people with common moral habits and dispositions. A national government would end up imposing crudely uniform rules on peoples with very different local characters.
The Anti-Federalists drew much of their ammunition from the older Whig tradition that regarded a small republic of yeoman farmers as the bedrock of political independence. Their hero was Jefferson, the great advocate of small-state republicanism. The Anti-Federalists were much stronger egalitarians than their Federalist rivals, who valued a diversity of factions and interests. Large states produce luxury, a term that for much of the eighteenth century was synonymous with venality and corruption. Only small states were likely to maintain a society without extremes of wealth, influence, or education, one that produced the kind of moderation—some would call it mediocrity—necessary for a simple, sturdy, and virtuous people. To the Anti-Federalists, the republic was as much a school of citizenship as a plan for government.64
The Federalists, as I will develop more fully later, did not so much draw on an older tradition as create a new one. Anyone tempted to view the Federalist Papers simply as a set of newspaper editorials intended to justify the new Constitution (which, of course, they were) seriously underestimates the work. In these papers, the Federalists set out a conceptual innovation as revolutionary as anything ever attempted in the history of political ideas.65 When the Federalists used the term republic, taken from the Roman res publica or public thing, they were both self-consciously reviving an ancient concept and endowing it with an entirely new meaning. The common wisdom of the age, expressed by Montesquieu, was that republics belonged entirely to the past. They were simply inapplicable to modern conditions, and any attempt to bring them back to life, as the English tried to do during the Interregnum, could only bring disaster. With the exception of small, rustic outposts like Switzerland, modern states were held to be monarchical. The Federalists argued otherwise. They sought to use this ancient political form, revived by the English commonwealth tradition, to create a new constitutional republic or, as we would call it today, a liberal democracy.
The Federalists’ novel proposal for a large extended republic (which the Anti-Federalists considered a contradiction in terms) envisioned diverse factions and interests competing within representative institutions designed to create checks and balances on power. This was a new theory of statehood that referred to no previous model. The Federalists’ vision was as much an aspiration as a description, since there was not yet any existing reality to which their ideas fully conformed. At the same time, they did not create a new constitutional order out of thin air. They transformed the meaning of existing terms in order to address problems that their predecessors had failed to solve. This idea of a republic extensive enough to represent the interests of the diverse factions found in large states, but without the disadvantages of concentrating power in the hands of a distant ruler, was a first in the history of political theory. It has rightly been called the “Madisonian Moment.”66
The Federalists realized that a new kind of republic would require a new kind of patriotism. It could no longer be the stern, self-sacrificing devotion that the older civic republicanism upheld, or a Roman attachment to land and soil. It would have to be more in keeping with a society based on individualism, enlightenment, self-interest, and commerce, as well as on such universal principles as equality and the rights of man. The specifically American form of patriotism required a unique combination of particularism—loyalty to the Constitution and the republic—and universalism, that is, commitment to equality and rights. How to square this circle?
No one understood this dilemma better than Alexander Hamilton, who argued that America was the first nation to be founded not on history or loyalty to tradition, but on an idea or principle, the idea of self-government. America was an experiment that would test, possibly for all time, the viability of republican government. We find this thesis boldly stated in the first paragraph of the first Federalist Paper:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.67
At the core of American patriotism, then, is this idea of reflection and choice. American patriotism has a rational and deliberative component that cannot be reduced to a morality of custom and tradition (as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued). Reflection and choice are not just on display at moments of high constitutional decision-making, but are day-to-day aspects of the patriotic disposition. It is this disposition that has given American patriotism, at its best, a uniquely critical and self-questioning character. America may be the only country where the question “what is it to be an American?” is a continual topic of discussion. To question America is not to be un-American, but part of being an American. What is American history but a series of debates over the meaning of our national identity? Such a dialogue is, to my knowledge, nonexistent in any other country. The debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Whigs and Jacksonians, Lincoln and Douglas, Wilsonian internationalists and “America First” isolationists, and today’s multiculturalists and Trumpean nationalists, all testify to the contested and to some degree unfinished quality that gives American patriotism its distinctive shape and vibrancy.