Enlightened Patriotism
“AS a nation,” Joseph Cropsey wrote, “we are rather given to asking what we are, what we stand for, what our goals are.”1 It is surprising that this is so, given that after more than two centuries, the meaning of our national existence should have become clear. How long does it take? Germans tend not to be vexed by what it means to be German, or Japanese what it means to be Japanese. Yet this uncertainty is actually not so surprising. American patriotism requires more than a common ancestry rooted in a common place. It requires reflection on the principles to which our loyalty is given. Our national oath asks us to pledge allegiance to the flag and “to the republic for which it stands.” But what does the republic stand for? This question moves American patriotism into the vexed domain of political theory. What distinguishes American patriotism from that of Germany or Japan is that America is a creedal nation based on an idea. It is not sufficient in America to express loyalty to a tradition or to the “fatherland.” One must be loyal to the set of ideas on which our traditions are based. In our country, theory and practice have been mixed together from the beginning.
American patriotism, like America itself, is exceptional. Ours is not an ethnic patriotism, born of fantasies of blood and soil, but a patriotism of ideas. In this crucial respect, America is the first truly modern nation, a nation founded on the principles of modern philosophy, not simply on history and tradition. Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is dedicated to the proposition that all men (in updated language, all persons) are created equal. The principle of equality is the cornerstone that upholds the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. From this it follows that all legitimate government is based on the consent of the governed, and that when government fails to protect our rights, it may be overturned and begun anew. These principles are said to hold true not for Americans alone but for all human beings, always and everywhere. Far from suggesting a traditional form of customary morality, American patriotism requires commitment to the highest, most universal moral principles, including truth itself.
AMERICA AS A CONSTITUTIONAL REGIME
A republic or, what we might call it today, a constitutional democracy, is a particular kind of regime. The word regime is an ancient one whose modern usage has drifted far from its original meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a regime as “a government, especially an authoritarian one.” Other definitions suggest “a system or an ordered way of doing things,” such as a detention center or a “tax regime.” The word also has a medical meaning as in a program for restoring health, such as a low-fat or low-carb regime or regimen. Caporegime designates the head of an organized crime family. The term always has a slightly ominous meaning and is generally applied to governments or programs we dislike. The term regime change came into prominence during the Iraq War to describe the overthrow of a dictatorial power.
The word regime is an English translation of the Greek politeia, a cognate of the words polis (city) and polites (citizen). The term politeia was given its most famous expression in the title of Plato’s most famous book, the Republic. Today we think of a republic as a system of representative government with periodic elections and competitive political parties. From this point of view, Plato’s Republic, which advocated governance by a class of philosopher-kings, is possibly the most anti-republican book ever written. But Plato never wrote a book called Republic. His title was Politeia. Res publica was the title of Cicero’s Latin translation of Plato’s work, and the book has retained that title ever since. For Plato, the term politeia intended to convey both a system of government and the way of life of a political community. It was the “first cause”—in philosophy, the first and most fundamental actor in a chain of catalysts—responsible for shaping the hearts, minds, and even souls of its citizens.2
The ancient regime of the city-state involved much more than the arrangement of offices or the distribution of powers. It was a tutelary community responsible for shaping what a people are and what they look up to, their gods and heroes, and what they deem most worthy of respect. In an aristocracy, the ideal character type is a person of old money—the gentleman. In an oligarchy it is the wealthy merchant or business owner. In a democracy it is the worker. Everything must somehow justify itself by one of these standards. Alexis de Tocqueville captured something of this ancient sense of the term when he titled a book The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). The term ancien régime suggested not only the laws and institutions, but also the customs, habits, and manners that made up the entire way of life of pre-revolutionary France. What was true of France was equally true of the English constitution, which writers like Edmund Burke associated with customs and practices that existed time out of mind.3
Regime analysis—established by Aristotle, handed down to Polybius, and then modified in various ways by Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and the Federalist authors—was the original form of political science. Every great political philosopher offered his own regime typology that described how many types of regimes existed, what caused them to come about, and why they declined and passed away. Our language for this kind of regime analysis has become sadly impoverished. Except for students of international relations, who sometimes distinguish among “democratic,” “authoritarian,” and “totalitarian” regimes, the focus on regimes and regime types is no longer in season.4 Yet without an adequate understanding of the regime, we cannot properly understand terms like citizen, citizenship, and loyalty. In particular we can no longer understand what distinguishes a constitutional regime—a “polity” in Aristotle’s sense of the word—with its own distinctive way of life. The regime gives us a standard by which to separate important from unimportant things.
The idea of a constitutional republic has been nurtured only under distinctive circumstances. The Greek polis, the Roman republic, the British balanced constitution, the free city-states of fifteenth-century Italy, and the representative democracies of the modern world are the only places where free government has taken root. In the modern world, constitutionalism is largely a legacy of the Anglo-American tradition—what Churchill called the “English-speaking peoples”—and the places that have been touched by it. Starting with early declarations such as the Magna Carta, the writ of habeas corpus, and the Toleration Act, and continuing to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, a consensus has slowly developed regarding the fundamentals of constitutional government, which remains an endangered species among political forms. It has had little or no purchase in the vast autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran and has achieved only limited success in Latin America, where the tradition of populist authoritarianism remains powerful.
A constitutional polity differs from all others in two respects. First, a constitution has come to suggest a legal document with a set of enumerated rights and powers, representing the fundamental law from which all other laws derive. The constitution supersedes the authority of all other laws and serves as the standard by which these laws are deemed valid. Second, a constitutional government separates the function of the state from that of society. Unlike the classical politeia, which sought to shape the entire character of its citizen body by instilling high-minded ideals of nobility and virtue, modern constitutional governments leave the business of inculcating virtues to individual initiative. A sense of patriotism is not force-fed from above but is, hopefully, nurtured from below, by civil associations, schools, and service academies.
Modern constitutions depart not only from the oligarchic model of mixed government based on the representation of the great estates of the realm, but also from the model of classical republicanism. For the classical republicans, freedom meant the right to participate in the public life of one’s community. The Greeks and Romans thought they were free because they obeyed no master other than themselves. According to Hannah Arendt, one of the chief contemporary advocates of this view, “political freedom, generally speaking, means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing.”5 Yet the appeal to a classical republican past, as even Arendt acknowledged, is based on a nostalgic longing for a lost “revolutionary spirit” no longer applicable to modern conditions.
Modern republicanism, we have seen, is based on indirect government, where citizens participate mainly through the selection of their representatives and where the representatives are in turn controlled through frequent elections and a system of separation of powers. As both Montesquieu and the Federalist authors argued, the people may be able to judge or select their representatives, but it is the representatives’ job to refine, enlarge, and enlighten the citizenry. Constitutional regimes are those in which personal freedom—the freedom to pursue happiness as we see fit—is ensured by impersonal law, not by the collective participation of the citizenry.6
Constitutions in this modern sense are fundamentally devices for controlling power. The modern constitutional republic is unique in embodying an idea of self-restraint in the name of freedom. It is based on a distinction between private and public, between civil society and the state, between individuals acting as private persons and citizens acting as members of the body politic. This culture of separation—attacked by some, celebrated by others—is the key to modern constitutional government.7 Constitutional government is necessarily limited government. It deliberately restricts itself to certain public functions, ruling out the governance of such areas as religion, art, science, and morality. Politics is politics. It is not about telling people how to live their lives, what or how to worship, or what philosophy to adopt. But the decision to self-limit is itself a political decision. It is not written in stone or inscribed in the laws of nature. The distinction between the political and the nonpolitical is not historically fixed. It has varied across time and place, particularly with regard to religious practice and belief. The point for constitutional government is not where the line is drawn, but that it be drawn somewhere. This regime of constitutional self-restraint—like Odysseus having himself bound at the mast—is the highest form of statecraft.8
LINCOLN’S PATRIOTISM OF PRINCIPLE
What do people take pride in? To what do they owe allegiance? Many Americans, if asked, will say they take pride in their Constitution and their constitutional tradition. This pride in a text or a textual tradition forms the core of American patriotism. From the Puritans on, Americans have been a people of the book, and our patriotism has always had a textual dimension. As with any text, however, the meaning of the Constitution is not self-evident. We argue about it, and this argument—our self-questioning character—is a core aspect of American patriotism. This is what makes ours a uniquely enlightened patriotism. This is the true meaning of American exceptionalism.
No one has captured the meaning of enlightened patriotism more beautifully than Abraham Lincoln, who gave American constitutional democracy its highest and most articulate expression. In his speeches and writings, Lincoln put forward a vision of American identity that brings out the principled basis of patriotism. Consider some passages:
He [Henry Clay] loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mainly because it was a free country.
No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other man’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of a free society.
I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.9
In these brief statements, we see three features of Lincoln’s patriotism that distinguish it from all others.
First, Lincoln’s patriotism is egalitarian, and this egalitarianism derives from his reading of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration—especially its affirmation that all people are created equal—provided not only the basis for his opposition to slavery, but also the principled foundation for what it means to be an American. Equality is the moral foundation of Lincoln’s idea of self-government. It underlies his vision of America as a nation of free men and women, where no one governs another without that other’s consent. The principle of self-government is true not because it is ours but because it is “absolutely and eternally right.”
Lincoln made equality the centerpiece of his difference with Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas hoped to turn the slavery issue into a test of his doctrine of popular sovereignty. According to this theory, it was the right of the people of each state or territory in their collective capacity—as free white people—to determine for themselves (and for themselves alone) whether to permit or to forbid slavery. Douglas declared himself “indifferent” to whether slavery was voted up or down, so long as the question was decided by a democratic majority. It would be the supreme test of the general will. By removing slavery from federal jurisdiction and handing it over to the states and territories, Douglas claimed to be providing a democratic mechanism for resolving the slavery issue. But a mechanism is not a principle, and Lincoln saw the doctrine of popular sovereignty as a poor substitute for the principle of self-government.
For Lincoln, equality comes before democracy. It is what makes democracy possible. He regarded the Union not as resting on the direct expression of the popular will—an American version of Rousseau’s Social Contract—but on an “ancient faith” in the principle that all people are created equal. A slave-holding republic, one that did not respect the rights and dignity of each individual, was a contradiction in terms. Lincoln expressed his view almost as a political catechism. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”10 The difference between Douglas’s popular sovereignty and Lincoln’s idea of self-government could not be stated more strongly. The one professes not to care whether slavery is voted up or down, while the other maintains that “there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”11
Second, Lincolnian patriotism is aspirational. It is not simply an unreflective attachment to America as it then existed, but is connected to the vision of America that Lincoln hoped to achieve. This is evident in Lincoln’s comment about Henry Clay, that his love of America stemmed from its being a free country, not simply that it was his own. A core part of Lincoln’s patriotism is that it is devotion to an idea or to what we stand for as a people. This aspirational quality of patriotism is connected to an idea of individual self-development and perfection. For Lincoln, only the full development and exercise of our human faculties make citizens capable of self-government.
A central part of Lincoln’s perfectionism was the role of work, self-help, and upward mobility. Unlike the self-abnegating patriotism of the ancient world, American patriotism is resolutely individualist. Lincoln reserved his praise for accomplishments that celebrated the individual over the collective, and private achievements over public glory. He admired a land where all people could “make themselves,” where a poor boy could become the president of the United States, and where there were no artificial obstacles to self-improvement.
Lincoln’s most sustained argument regarding the prospects for moral self-improvement came in a speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee in 1859.12 Here he praised the system of free labor for providing the clearest avenue to moral and economic independence. Unlike the socialists on the left and pro-slavery advocates on the right, who saw labor and capital as locked in unremitting struggle, Lincoln told his audience that this view is false to the American experience:
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of conditions to all.13
Lincoln’s image of self-improvement is far nobler than a crude celebration of economic success and survival of the fittest. He valued material success not as an end in itself but as a vehicle to moral autonomy and independence. His earliest policies favored the Whig doctrine of “internal improvements,” by which he meant not just roads and canals—what today would be called “infrastructure”—but also moral self-improvement. He viewed the American system of free labor through the lenses of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and of course the first and still greatest American self-help story, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. These works provided the theological and ethical context through which he viewed American free labor.
The perfectionist aspect of Lincoln’s patriotism also accounts for its cautiously progressive character. He was not a progressive in the sense that he believed history was governed by a unitary direction—Progress with a capital “P”—moving mankind toward an inevitable triumph of the national spirit. Progress was for Lincoln always a matter of fits and starts, trial and error, and it was invariably subject to backsliding and future revision. He realized that the principle of equality could not have been intended as an empirical proposition, given the widespread toleration of slavery and other practices of hierarchy and domination. Rather it was proposed as an ideal, a moral aspiration that could underscore future devotion to the American regime. The American framers, he wrote,
meant to declare the right [of equality] so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.14
This extraordinary passage vividly illustrates Lincoln’s belief in the progressive character of American patriotism. Verbs like “labored for,” “approximated,” “spreading and deepening,” and “augmenting” suggest that a true patriotism is something to which we aspire. It does not allow complacency or self-satisfaction with what we are but, to the contrary, entails a lively awareness of our present imperfections and our failures to live up to what we might yet become. Lincoln always stressed human weakness and fallibility, a sense of modesty and restraint. He did not demonize those with whom he disagreed. “They are just what we would be in their situation,” he said of Southern slave owners.15 Rather than engage in a politics of friend and enemy, he showed an extraordinary capacity to empathize even with those whose principles he opposed.
Lincoln recognized that moral improvement would not be accomplished without heroism and struggle. This meant subordinating our immediate interests to the larger cause of freedom. “It is for this the struggle should be maintained,” he told the members of an Ohio regiment. “The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”16 In a stirring letter, he expressed his gratitude to the Workingmen of Manchester, England, for supporting the Northern cause even at the cost of great hardship to themselves. “It has been often and studiously represented,” he wrote, “that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on slavery, was likely to obtain favor in Europe.” But the workers had resisted the pull of self-interest, which favored the support of Southern cotton. “I cannot but regard your decisive utterance upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”17
Finally, Lincolnian patriotism is inclusive. It is not the exclusive property of one people or one race, to be hoarded and jealously conserved. His writings continually emphasized the open character of the American republic, in contrast to the nativists and nationalists of his period. Lincoln’s American republic is not defined by religion, race, or ethnic identity, but by the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln offered an enlarged reading of the Declaration, applying its language to a broader segment of mankind than did the North Americans of British descent who were already here in 1776. The American republic, in Lincoln’s view, was the first nation built on the goal of awakening people everywhere to their right to free government. In an extraordinary statement of moral universalism in his speech on the Mexican War, Lincoln claimed that “any people, anywhere, being inclined to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better” have the right to do so. “This is a most valuable—a most sacred right,” he concludes, “a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”18
Lincoln’s enlarged republicanism took the immediate form of opposition to the nativist and anti-immigrant policies of the American Party or Know-Nothings—the Trumpists of his era. For the anti-immigrant fervor that swept over America at mid-century he had nothing but contempt. “Our progress in degeneracy,” he wrote to Joshua Speed, “appears to me to be pretty rapid.”19 Rather than acquiesce in the exclusion of not only blacks but also foreigners and Catholics from the principles of the Declaration, Lincoln claimed he would rather emigrate to some country, perhaps Russia, “where they make no pretense of loving liberty” and “where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”20
Lincoln’s inclusive conception of America further revealed itself in his treatment of recent immigrants, many of whom had sought refuge from a wave of political repression in Europe after Germany’s failed revolution in 1848. In Chicago he noted that the fraction of Americans who could trace their bloodline back directly to the founding generation was growing smaller over time. But rather than deplore this fact, Lincoln welcomed those of recent ancestry to the table. What makes a citizen is not direct genealogical descent from that race of “iron men” but adherence to the principles for which they contended. The principle of equality, “the father of all moral principle,” is “the electric cord” that unites all “liberty-loving men.”21
We hear the same language in Lincoln’s speech to a group of German immigrants in Cincinnati. He esteemed the Germans and other foreigners, he said, no better or worse than any other people. Yet he added that it is important to remove obstacles or “weights” to their enjoyment of the rights of citizenship. “It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles—the oppression of tyranny—to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke, than to add anything that would tend to crush them.”22 The language of lifting weights and burdens from the shoulders of those who are suffering clearly connects back to the Puritan notion of a “calling” and a quest for salvation from the burdens of original sin. But for Lincoln, the original political sin is inequality, and the mission of the American republic is release from that fallen state.
PATRIOTISM AS ETHOS
Patriotism is a species of loyalty, and loyalty, I suggested earlier, is the first virtue of social institutions. Without it, our collective life could not last one day. Care and loyalty are of a piece: loyalty is an affirmation of what we care about, and our cares are not momentary whims or desires but a structure of loyalties. Our cares make our lives more than a series of disconnected events, and provide a sense of wholeness and meaning. What we care about defines the kind of person we are, or wish to be.
In an essay titled “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile,” Judith Shklar distinguished loyalty from both obligation and fidelity. Obligations fall under what Max Weber called “legal-rational” forms of authority. They describe rule-governed conduct and refer specifically to laws and large-scale bureaucratic institutions like corporations and government agencies. Fidelity, by contrast, is a personal commitment, a private relation to particular individuals. Marriage demands fidelity, while institutions like the state impose obligations. Obligations generally come from above, while fidelity is an internal choice. Loyalty, however, represents a different category of commitment altogether. “What distinguishes loyalty,” Shklar wrote, “is that it is deeply affective and not primarily rational. . . . If obligation is rule driven, loyalty is motivated by the entire personality of the agent.”23 Loyalties go deeper than obligations and further than fidelity. Causes, political parties, ethnic groups, and nations demand loyalty. Obligations are duties we must obey whether we wish to or not. Loyalty is “a commitment that is affective in character and generated by a great deal more of our personality than calculation or moral reasoning. It is all of one that tends to be loyal.”24
Patriotism is a form of what I have called constitutional loyalty. It is not simply loyalty to the people of the United States, but also loyalty to a particular constitutional form that we call liberal democracy or constitutional democracy. A change of constitution—not just a change of administrations—would require a change of loyalty. A fascist or communist America would no longer be the regime established by the Constitution and therefore would no longer serve as the basis of citizen loyalty. A fascist America would not only require institutional changes from the top—power concentrated in a duce like Mussolini or führer like Hitler—but also changes from below. The qualities admired in a fascist regime—order, discipline, hierarchy, and authority—are not those admired in a liberal democracy: freedom, equality, rights, and consent. A fascist America is not inconceivable. It would be the same country, but a different America.
The constitutional loyalty I have described may sound like what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus).25 This is a specifically German phenomenon that arose in response to the hypernationalism that had produced the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Constitutional patriotism, Habermas hoped, might form the basis of a postwar German national identity focused on loyalty to the basic law (Grundgesetz) of the German Federal Republic. Patriotism would be associated no longer with militaristic doctrines of “blood and soil” but with the defense of rights and legal procedures. This new patriotism would take the form of loyalty not to the fatherland but to the “public sphere,” where citizens engage in offering public reasons for their political preferences.
Habermas’s conception of constitutional patriotism expresses an admirable desire to come to terms with the German past while also recognizing that people care deeply about national honor. He wants to distance patriotism from the tortured history of German nationalism, but it is not clear that patriotism can survive when it is so completely shorn of the culture that makes it possible. Habermas makes commitment to legal formalities and procedures the basis of political legitimacy. But such a thin theory of patriotism lacks the affective connotations of pride, service, and loyalty that bind together members of a nation and make them citizens. Patriotism is more than devotion to a set of constitutional procedures. It requires affection for a way of life—for the mix of moral and religious practices, habits, customs, and sentiments that makes a people who they are. Patriotism without ethos is an empty shell. It is a kind of patriotism that only a constitutional lawyer could love.
My idea of an ethos patriotism is based not just on dedication to principle, but also on loyalty to the republic. An ethos is a manner of both thinking and feeling. And the idea that patriotism is not just a matter of the head but also of the heart suggests that it is deeply ingrained in our moral sentiments and dispositions. It is what Tocqueville called a “habit of the heart.”26 Tocqueville’s appeal to the heart clearly drew on the work of an earlier French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who believed that knowing is a matter of both reason and faith. Reason alone is not enough. Our deepest beliefs and commitments cannot be rationally demonstrated; they are prior to reason and held as a matter of faith. This is not to say that they are religious faiths, but they grow out of certain pre-rational or pre-theoretical commitments that cannot be fully articulated. “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know,” Pascal wrote in his Pensées (1670).27
Loyalty to ethos suggests more than devotion to principle.28 An ethos provides the moral horizon within which we live and act. It is the character-based habits and dispositions that constitute a society’s way of life, everything from our perceptions, feelings, and beliefs to our cuisine, body language, posture, and accent. The ethos of a person or a community designates those characteristics or habits that define a settled manner of behavior. If I say that “Rebecca is generous” or “John is miserly,” I am referring to relatively fixed character traits that are the product of upbringing and habituation. Over time, these become features of our personalities, by which I mean they are not simply a bundle of whims and desires, but a stable structure of character traits that define us. Actions that proceed from an ethos are not biologically implanted at birth but the product of training, habit, and education, and they make us what we are.
The ethos of a society embodies those traits of character that are normative for the community. Those human beings who best embody the admired traits and characteristics are deemed best fit to occupy positions of public trust. By regarding certain character traits as admirable or worthy of emulation, every regime implicitly designates some specific human type—whether the aristocrat, the priest, the warrior, the entrepreneur, or the common person—as superior. The ethos describes the character or tone of a regime, what it finds worthy of admiration, what it looks up to. This is not only a question of what kinds of persons and personality traits are deemed desirable, but what kinds of actions and polices are worthy of respect. American men and women fighting a war to put an end to slavery, establishing a Marshall Plan to help our impoverished allies, volunteering in our military services, and teaching in some our neediest communities—these all speak to what is best in American patriotism.
Patriotism, in short, requires not only an understanding and appreciation for a set of abstract ideas, but also their embodiment in a particular history and tradition. Logos and ethos, principle and habit, are two sides of the same coin. To ask which comes first—the principles that govern a regime or the moral habits that sustain it—is to pose a false question. Both are essential elements of an enlightened patriotism. To love one’s country well is to love its founding principles but also the way of life in which those principles are embodied. I may feel an affinity for France’s language, its food, its countryside, and its culture, but I cannot love France the way a French person does. I can never feel the way a French woman feels when she hears the Marseillaise. In another scene from Casablanca, Yvonne, who has been consorting with a German officer, joins in singing the “Marseillaise,” drowning out the other Germans who are gathered around the piano singing “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Her tears show that she has rediscovered her identification with Free France.
The ethos of a people—its national character—is determined in a variety of ways. It can be shaped by material factors such as climate and geography, as Montesquieu famously argued; by economic technology and “modes of production,” as Marx believed; or by its laws and institutions, as Tocqueville proposed. When he studied the American regime in Democracy in America, Tocqueville started first with the formal political institutions enumerated in our Constitution (the separation of powers, the division between state and federal authority, and so on), but then went on to look at such informal practices as American manners and morals, our tendency to form small civic associations, our religious life, and our peculiar defensiveness and tendency toward bombastic moralism. This last quality led Tocqueville to complain that there was “nothing more irritating in the habits of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans.”29
The idea of ethos patriotism runs into an evident difficulty. Doesn’t loyalty to one country or way of life contradict the principles of equality and moral inclusiveness that are also essential to American patriotism? How can I regard all persons as equal if my loyalties are to my country alone? Where is the line between what we owe our fellow citizens and what we owe to fellow human beings who may be suffering? Some version of this question is at the core of our current debates about border security and immigration. Are we at bottom a nation of immigrants who welcome the stranger—“your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—or do we require a border wall to protect our national sovereignty? How broadly or narrowly do we define our regime? Where do we draw the line? If we define ourselves too broadly, we risk losing our ethos; if we define ourselves too narrowly, we risk losing our humanity.
The fear is that ethos patriotism leads to an insular vision of fortress America, an embattled island in a sea of moral and political chaos. This is not irrational. The world is a dangerous place, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. Nevertheless, loyalty to country does not require me to be indifferent, much less hostile, to the needs of others. It is not like the unyielding mafia code of omertà. Loyalty to country less resembles loyalty to a team—if my team wins, the other must lose—than it does family loyalty. Loyalty to family does not require me to think that my family is better than all others. What would such a claim even amount to? I may love my family best, but this does not require me to despise others. It does, however, require me to give some moral preference to my family. My preference for my child, my wish to see him get into a good school, have a satisfying career, prosper, and succeed, is not some immoral desire to see him win at all costs, much less a wish that others should fail. I would rather be failing in my duty as a parent if I were to regard his interests behind some artificial veil of ignorance. At the same time, I would equally fail if I did not try to instill in him some conception of fair play and justice.
What is true of loyalty to family is true of loyalty to states. Partiality for my own country need not mean indifference or hostility to others. Except in war, we rarely find ourselves locked in a zero-sum game where what’s good for one is bad for the other. There is nothing shameful in attending to the interests of American workers and farmers first. We look after others better when we first look after our own. Every state is to some degree a welfare state, and its first obligation is to attend to the welfare of its own citizens. Hillel’s famous dictum, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me,” is a statement not only of individual responsibility but also of social obligation, one that puts fellow citizens at the top of our list of priorities. This is not a recipe for isolationism or economic protectionism. The well-being of our own country, like the well-being of our neighborhood, depends on the well-being of the people around us. No person is an island—and neither, really, is any country. Adam Smith argued that the best hope for securing our own well-being is to encourage the wealth and freedom of those around us. The peace and prosperity of Mexico and Canada are more likely to enhance our freedom and security than diminish them.
Once again, the fear is that ethos patriotism will lead to an over-inflated love of country. It will make us overlook unflattering facts about ourselves and act on illusions rather than hard moral truths. Patriotism, we are told, inevitably becomes “bad faith.” But this is to mistake a distorted conception of patriotism for its essence. Patriotism can be self-critical. Consider the belated recognition of war heroes who had been overlooked due to their race, but were then awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor decades after their actions. What does this demonstrate, other than an enlarged conception of who belongs in the American family?
Patriotism requires us not only to take justified pride in our country’s accomplishments, but also to feel justified moral shame at its shortcomings. I may regret injustices committed by other nations (and other families), but I do not feel shamed by them. Why is it that so many Americans feel a sense of righteous anger when confronted with acts of racial injustice if not because it violates some deep feeling of what we are as a people? We are not shamed about things to which we have no emotional connection. Pride and shame are the two sides of loyalty, and patriotism is inconceivable without them. As Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey remarked in an interview with the New York Times editorial board, “if this country hasn’t broken your heart, then you don’t love her enough.”30
What Americans take pride in is the character of our regime, our constitutional existence, which is inseparable from our history. Any true and effective patriotism has its foundation in a people’s collective memory, in what we think of ourselves and in the story we tell. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” are the final words of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton. How we tell our own story provides the ground of a common national memory, in how we come not only to understand but also to feel our lives together. It is in recollection of a shared history—the locus of a collective destiny, of common misfortunes and triumphs—that the bonds of a nation and a people are forged. Symbols and rituals are as important as concepts and principles. In fact the two require one another. Symbols without principles are empty; principles without symbols are blind. “We need symbols to stand in for God and country,” Eric Felten writes, “to make our devotion to them as tangible as is our love for the people we see.”31 These symbols, like the flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance, may simply be ceremonial affirmations that over time become routine, but routines, such as standing when the ark containing the Torah is opened, are crucial reminders of something of incomparable worth and dignity.
No discussion of patriotism would be complete without some passing reference to Edmund Burke. Burke understood that patriotism is rooted in the love of the particular. “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon,” he wrote in a famous passage, “is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of country and to mankind.”32 There has been considerable debate over just what Burke meant by “little platoon.” The phrase has been used, especially in conservative circles, to attack “big government” and “regulation.” Burke used the image to indicate the birthplace of moral education. Almost two hundred pages later, he identified the family as the first and most important of the little platoons that would secure the social bonds of sympathy, civility, and patriotism:
We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.33
The striking feature of this passage, in contrast to the way Burke is often read, is that he does not rule out the love of humanity as a legitimate aim or moral aspiration. He is not like Joseph de Maistre, a godfather of later European nationalism and even fascism, who in an almost equally famous passage declared: “In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc. thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be a Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”34 Unlike Maistre, Burke did not embrace the local in order to negate the universal. The “little platoon” was a point of departure, not a destination; it was the first step by which we climb the ladder of humanity. Yet Burke was not altogether clear about what he meant by this passage of ascent. Does it suggest an embrace of humanity and humanitarian goals not so distant from the position of his nemesis Richard Price (against whom the Reflections was written)? Or does it extend only as far as concern for neighboring kingdoms like France, when they suffer a derangement of their traditional orders? The latter is the more likely reading. The danger comes from those who, having ascended to the top of the ladder, proceed to kick it away.35
Patriotism, then, is a species of love or appreciation. But love of what? How can one feel love or gratitude to millions of people whom one cannot know? The love that patriotism entails is best described as loyalty, and we can be loyal only to something particular. Loyalty to family, friends, teams, causes, even to institutions, is ordinarily taken to be a virtue. Why should loyalty to country be any different? It does not require me to treat my country as superior to others. I can be loyal to friends and family without thinking that they are better than other people. In some respects they may be worse, but this does not diminish them in my eyes. Loyalty is more akin to gratitude. We are grateful to particular people and groups for making us who we are. Our loyalties define our identities and give us character. We cannot have nonspecific loyalties lest we become like the social scientist who said he wanted to get married but to no one in particular.
This issue was at the core of the acrimonious debate between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt over the publication of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.36 In covering the trial for the New Yorker, Arendt had subjected the Israeli tribunal and even the testimony of eyewitnesses to withering criticism, questioning the very legitimacy of the proceedings. Scholem regarded her detachment as a betrayal, expressed at a time when the wounds of the Holocaust (which he preferred to call the “Catastrophe”) were still fresh. Under the circumstances, he asked, would it not have been proper to show a little moral sympathy for people operating under such dire circumstances? Scholem accused Arendt of lacking Ahavat Yisrael, a proper love for her own people, the Jewish people. “In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I find little trace of this,” he wrote. “In circumstances such as these, would there not have been a place for what I can only describe with that modest German word—Herzenstakt [tact of the heart]?”37
Arendt loftily replied that she could not love an abstraction like a people, only individual persons. “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective, neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.” Furthermore, she argued, as a Jew herself (“one of the indisputable factual data of my life”), she regarded love of the Jewish people as “something rather suspect.” “I cannot love myself or anything I know which is part and parcel of my own person.”38
This is absurd. There is in this statement more than a residue of Arendt’s fascination with Augustine and his intense hatred of the flesh and everything connected to it. Augustine taught that all sin comes from love of the body, which we must transcend if we are to become worthy of God’s grace. Why is it wrong to love oneself and those most closely related to us? It can be so only if one believes that love must somehow be wholly self-denying and must rise above the “factual data” of one’s own history and identity. Yet the Bible commands “love your neighbor as yourself,” suggesting that a healthy self-love is at the bottom of the ethical command to love others (Leviticus 19:9–18; Mark 12:30–31). We cannot learn to love others unless we first know how to love ourselves and those closest to us. No one believes that love for one’s people is like a personal friendship or love for a parent or spouse. Love of one’s people means having proper gratitude for who we are and what we have become.
The love to which I think Scholem is referring, and to which Arendt seems peculiarly tone deaf, is best conveyed by the Yiddish term Mishpocheh. Mishpocheh means family, but more than immediate family members. It includes extended relations, fellow citizens, and others from the same country. Mishpocheh may not even be personal acquaintances, but we know them when we see them—by their dress and habits, by their voice and inflection, by their body language, and by a whole host of subtle and not-so-subtle clues. Such people are not necessarily intimates, but they are not entirely strangers. We are inclined to extend to them a level of trust that we do not extend to others. Our sense of what it means to be a people with an identity and a history is inseparable from this concept. I am reminded of a joke told by Leo Rosten in his immortal The Joys of Yiddish. The Chase Manhattan Bank used to use for its advertising slogan “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan,” to which the Bank of Israel responded: “But here you have Mishpocheh.”39
CONFLICTING LOYALTIES
The theme of patriotism is invariably connected with the problem of conflicting loyalties. Our loyalties are never one-dimensional. As creatures with multiple identities, we are bound to have multiple allegiances—the condition that underlies Horace Kallen’s and Michael Walzer’s conception of America as a land of multiple identities. Unless we have only one friend, our loyalties to our friends will almost inevitably conflict; these loyalties may be at odds with our loyalties to family; and our loyalties to family may conflict with our loyalties to country. How is one to decide which takes priority? Does love of country trump all other loyalties? Or do the obligations of personal friendship trump patriotism, as E. M. Forster argued? Is there some metric or standard by which we can compare these loyalties? It might be best to start with some examples.
One example often invoked by philosophers comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism.40 He tells the story of a former student living in France in 1940 who came to him with a dilemma. The young man was torn between joining the Free French forces in London or staying home with his ailing mother, who was grieving over the death of another son who had recently been killed in the German invasion. He realizes that if he stays at home, his actions will have real, tangible effects for his mother, but if he leaves for England, he may never reach his destination, he could be assigned a meaningless desk job, or his sacrifice may ultimately be for naught. Is it preferable to act for the benefit of one single individual, or for a larger collective like a community or a state? Is his first duty to family or to the resistance?
Sartre’s point is that there are some situations—we could call them tragic—where our duties simply conflict, and no recourse to moral rules will help. If the man leaves home to join the resistance, he will fail in his duty to his mother; if he stays home to care for his mother, he will fail in his duty to his country. In either case, he must disappoint one side or the other. The point is that both are right. Either choice—defend your country, help your parents—could be turned into a universal law, but it is not evident that one is morally superior to the other. What to do? Sartre’s rather disappointing response is that there is no one right thing to do, that duties are in conflict and no moral theory can provide the right answer. One must simply choose and accept responsibility for one’s choice. This is what existentialism teaches.
Sartre has created a perplexing ethical dilemma, but his way of posing the problem is false. On his view, the young man resolves his dilemma through a radical act of choice, either remaining at home to help his mother or joining the resistance in its struggle against his country’s enemies. But Sartre does not consider that the choices we make are never simply free acts of the will. They are never simply about what to do, but also about what sort of persons we wish to be. Our choices express our character, and this is not something we have created entirely by ourselves. It emerges out of the entire background of moral conditions that have made us who we are. As Heraclitus put it, “a man’s ethos is his destiny.”
A clearer example of what I mean comes from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather film trilogy. At the end of Godfather II, there is a flashback scene where the Corleone family is gathered around the dining room table in anticipation of a surprise birthday party for the family patriarch. It is shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the conversation turns to the surge of military enlistments that followed. “They’re saps,” says Sonny, the family’s heir apparent, “because they risk their lives for strangers.” When Michael, the younger brother, then attending Dartmouth College, protests that they risk their lives for their country, Sonny snaps, “Your country ain’t your blood. You remember that.” After Michael reveals that he had enlisted in the Marines earlier that day, Sonny furiously berates him—“Did you go to college to get stupid?”—for risking his life for anybody not in the family.41
The two other brothers each react according to their character. Tom Hagen, Michael’s half-brother and the family lawyer, regards the matter as a purely transactional arrangement. The attack, he says, should have been expected after the oil embargo. He tells Michael that his father pulled a lot of strings to get him a deferment. Fredo, clueless as usual, offers his hand in congratulations. Only Sonny represents the ancient ethic that holds the family—ties of blood and kin—as the highest form of obligation. According to this ethical view, what one takes pride in is what most immediately touches one’s family and sense of family honor. This ethic would make immediate sense in the world of Sophocles’ Antigone. At the end of the scene, we see the family united in celebration of Don Vito’s birthday, but Michael remains alone. What is he thinking? I suggest that he is reflecting on the tension between his identities as a member of the Corleone family and as a first-generation American citizen. Which will have the greater pull—the ties of blood and family, or the ties of national identity? As a young man, Michael opts for country, but as the saga plays out, we learn that the ties of clan and family ultimately prove stronger. The story reveals the person Michael has been all along, only he did not know it.42
These two examples pit family loyalty against patriotic loyalty. The third example I want to consider measures patriotism against religious loyalty. This conflict has deep roots in the Western tradition. The early Christians were well aware of the tension between love of the earthly city and of the heavenly city. Jesus’s solution, that one should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Mark 12:17), sounds good in theory but does not tell us exactly what is owed to either. The stories of martyrs like Rabbi Akiva and Sir Thomas More provide vivid examples of the conflict between religious duties and the demands of state. Both Machiavelli and Rousseau warned that one could not be both a good Christian and a good citizen. Patriotic duties are to one exclusive people, while Christian duties are duties to all human beings simply because of their humanity. In more recent times, the accusation of “dual loyalty” was raised against John Kennedy, a Catholic, when he ran for president in 1960, and again against Joseph Lieberman, a Jew, when he was the vice-presidential nominee in 2000.
The case I want to consider comes from Philip Roth’s short story “Defender of the Faith.”43 In this work, set in the final months of World War II, a decorated combat veteran, Sergeant Nathan Marx, has been redeployed from the European theater and assigned to a training base in rural Missouri. Shortly after he arrives, he is approached by a young trainee, Sheldon Grossbart—a fellow Jew from the Bronx—who asks for an intervention on behalf of the three Jewish soldiers in the company. There is a weekly cleaning of the barracks scheduled for Friday nights, Grossbart explains, when the three of them should be attending sabbath services, but they don’t want to be seen as slackers. Marx is uncomfortable with the request for an exemption, but he reluctantly intervenes on their behalf. When he attends the service himself, he sees that only one of the three recruits, Mickey Halpern, has any sense of the occasion. The others are talking and laughing during the rabbi’s sermon. Moreover, Marx’s benevolence opens the door for further requests. The situation comes to a head when Grossbart persuades Marx to let the three of them attend a belated Passover Seder at the home of one of their relatives in Saint Louis, but Marx later discovers that they had all gone to dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
The denouement of the story occurs when the troops are ready to receive their assignments. Against his better judgment, Marx has revealed to Grossbart that he is being deployed to the Pacific, but later finds out that Grossbart has used his influence with another superior to get himself a non-combat assignment in New Jersey, claiming that he needs to be near his ailing father. Realizing that he has been manipulated, Marx intervenes and has Grossbart reassigned to a combat zone. When Grossbart discovers the change of orders, he angrily confronts Marx, calling him an anti-Semite. “You owe me an explanation,” Grossbart demands, to which Marx replies, “Sheldon, you’re the one who owes explanations.”
He scowled. “To you?”
“To me, I think so—yes. Mostly to Fishbein and Halpern.”
“That’s right, twist things around. I owe nobody nothing, I’ve done all I could do for them. Now I think I’ve got the right to watch out for myself.”
“For each other we have to learn to watch out, Sheldon. You told me yourself.”
“You call this watching out for me—what you did?”
“No. For all of us.”44
“You’ll be alright,” are Marx’s last words before he turns away.
“Defender of the Faith” was one of Roth’s most controversial stories. Many readers attacked him for invoking an anti-Semitic stereotype. Roth defended the story as presenting a universal problem, played out in one particular religious context. “The story,” he wrote, “is about one man who uses his own religion, and another’s uncertain conscience, for selfish ends; but mostly it is about this other man, the narrator, Marx, who, because of the complexities of being a member of his religion, is involved in a taxing, if perhaps mistaken, conflict of loyalties.”45
The story asks who is “the defender of the faith” and what faith is being defended. Should Marx have stood by a fellow Jew, or did he do the right thing in giving no special preference to a co-religionist and even intervening to make sure he was assigned to a combat zone? Marx says he did it “for all of us.” But who is the “us”—fellow Jews? Americans? The faith for which Marx acts, I suggest, is faith in America, or in the belief that no one’s religion should lead to either special burdens or special exemptions. He is an old-fashioned patriot. In his refusal to let Grossbart use his religion to avoid combat, he affirms his faith in the value of equality. This is the force of Marx’s “all of us.” In the end, Marx is the true defender of the faith. His faith in America, even above religious ties, demonstrates the kind of constitutional faith that was the core of Roth’s patriotism—and is the core of mine.46
These examples are all instances of what lawyers call “hard cases,” and like all such cases they are fortunately the exception and not the rule. There is an old legal maxim that hard cases make bad law. It is dangerous to generalize from the extreme example to try to make a rule that covers normal circumstances. Such examples may be useful for purposes of clarification but less so as a guide for moral practice. In ordinary life we are rarely called on to choose family over country or country over faith. The good news, then, is that such conflicts are not the stuff of ordinary moral experience. The bad news is that there is no algorithm for determining the outcome when such conflicts do arise, as they inevitably will. Should the conscientious objector honor his faith that says not to kill, or honor his country that demands his service?
This dilemma was addressed by Lincoln at the height of the Civil War when he replied to Eliza P. Gurney, a Quaker who visited him in the White House in September 1862 to discuss the dilemma faced by the Friends, who supported Emancipation but were opposed to war. Lincoln seems to have been deeply touched by the meeting with Gurney. She had not come to hector the president, but to pray with him for divine guidance. In a moving letter written almost two years later, Lincoln expressed sympathy with their dilemma: “Your people—the Friends—have had, and are having, a very great trial. On principle and faith, opposed to both war and oppression, they can only practically oppose oppression by war. In this hard dilemma, some have chosen one horn and some the other.” While he recognized the conflict of loyalties between the demands of faith and duty to country, he refrained from interjecting himself in this dilemma. “For those appealing to me on conscientious grounds,” he wrote, “I have done, and shall do, the best I could and can, in my own conscience, under my oath to the law.”47 Even Lincoln, the commander-in-chief, could not entirely find a way out of this dilemma.
When is patriotism not enough? I am not writing here of a conflict of loyalties where two courses of action might be equally legitimate. I am instead asking when is resistance to one’s country morally required, and can resistance be squared with patriotism? We sometimes hear the slogan “My country, right or wrong,” but we must be careful how we understand it. When is it ever right to do wrong? The phrase, uttered originally by the naval officer Stephen Decatur as part of an after-dinner toast, is most famously associated with Carl Schurz, a Union general who fought in the Civil War and was later a U.S. senator from Missouri. Originally a refugee from Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, Schurz was attacked on the Senate floor for being insufficiently patriotic. “My country right or wrong,” he replied, “if right, to be kept right; if wrong to be set right.”48 The question Schurz’s comment raises is how to correct one’s country when it is in the wrong.
The idea of civil disobedience goes back to ancient Greece. Socrates, as I mentioned, was tried and found guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods of the city. His denial of the charge, but also more importantly his proud refusal to submit to what he believed was an unjust law, has become a timeless model for the citizen’s right to resist.49 Yet even while he resisted the laws, Socrates was willing to submit to their authority. In the Crito, he gives a number of reasons for his refusal to let his friend Crito help him escape and avoid a death sentence. He speaks of the law’s role in shaping his character and in providing for the community’s stability and happiness:
Are you so wise that you have been unaware that fatherland is something more honorable than mother and father and all the other forebears, and more venerable and more holy. . . . And that this is just and that you are not to give way or retreat from your station, but that in war and in court and everywhere, you must do whatever the city and fatherland bid, or else persuade it what the just is by nature?50
In choosing to remain and drink the hemlock, Socrates showed what it was to die a philosopher’s death. His acceptance of the jury’s verdict has turned him into a martyr for the cause of free speech, comparable to Jesus, Galileo, Sir Thomas More, and Baruch Spinoza.
More than any other country, America has made the right of resistance intrinsic to patriotism. Our country began with an act of resistance to the authority of the British Crown, and the right of rebellion is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Yet Jefferson invoked this right cautiously. “Prudence, indeed,” he wrote, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”51 The act of resistance, much less rebellion against the government, is not to be undertaken lightly. In language we have seen before, he acknowledged that habit and custom will discourage most people from invoking this right on every trifling occasion. “All experience hath shewn,” he continued, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” His advice to future advocates of civil resistance seems to be to approach with caution.
The tradition of dissent has not always followed Jefferson’s warning. Our most famous case for dissent, Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849), defended the individual’s right to withdraw support from government when the government’s actions violate the conscience. For Thoreau, this line was crossed in the American war with Mexico and the annexation of Texas, which he saw as little more than a land grab. Refusing to pay taxes to support an unjust war, Thoreau was arrested and spent a single night in prison—not exactly the stuff of which heroes are made, but enough to give him a new understanding of the individual’s relation to government. Written just over a decade before the Civil War, “Civil Disobedience” suggested that the individual can withdraw his support from the state as easily as a state can withdraw its support from the Union. No one, Thoreau argued, is bound to particular acts of government unless one wholeheartedly consents to them, not just through public acts like voting or paying taxes but also internally, through the inner voice of conscience. To give support for policies that do not attain this standard of inner agreement is to risk hypocrisy, that is, the loss of moral integrity. Thoreau’s goal was not so much to effect some change of policy or law but to prevent the individual’s complicity in evil. Thoreau took his minor act of defiance as basis for principled opposition. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume,” he declared defiantly, “is to do at any time what I think right.”52
Americans take justifiable pride that “Civil Disobedience” has had worldwide resonance, touching everything from Gandhi’s opposition to British imperial rule in India to Martin Luther King Jr.’s opposition to segregation in the South. Yet the appeal to conscience can be a slippery slope. It is in the nature of conscience to admit of no public standards for verification. “Let your conscience be your guide” may be sound moral advice, but it is a notoriously unstable basis for political decision making. Conscience invariably speaks to different people in different ways. The politics of conscience in America has inspired everything from the abolition movement to opposition to the Vietnam War to the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue licenses for gay marriages. How do we know when appeals to conscience are sincere expressions of a person’s deeply held moral and religious beliefs, and when they are just a mask for bigotry and self-interest? One person’s voice of conscience may be another’s hypocrisy. The elevation of conscience as a principle of civil resistance may provide a momentary moral high for its advocates, but it makes shared political life impossible.
A better alternative to Thoreau’s conscience politics is Jefferson’s appeal to prudence. The Declaration begins not with an appeal to the rights of conscience, but with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Opinion and prudence are its guiding principles—as is evident from the word “Declaration” in the document’s title. “Declaration” can mean two things. The first and more obvious is that it announces some factual condition, in this case our separation from Great Britain; the second is the explanation of the action that brought that condition into being. The Declaration contains both the performative utterance of declaring independence and, as importantly, the reasons that will give that act legitimacy in the eyes of the world. The text is not only declaratory but explanatory. Accordingly, the Declaration was addressed not simply to the king or the parliament or even to other Americans, but to “a candid world” that might judge for itself.
Jefferson based the colonists’ right of rebellion on his faith in the supremacy of reason in politics. The reason to which the Declaration appealed was practical or prudential reason, the kind of knowledge suitable in assemblies, courts of law, and other fora where judgment can be exercised. Prudential knowledge is, above all, a form of know-how, an expertise that is principled but cannot be precisely formulated in rules and axioms. It is knowing the right thing to do given the situation: when boldness is required and when moderation is the appropriate response; when we find ourselves in a moral crisis and when it is simply politics as usual. Prudence is a worldly wisdom that can be gained only through practice and experience. Prudence may indeed dictate, but it requires us to give public reasons for our actions and not just assurances of good intentions and a pure heart. It means knowing how to operate within existing constraints, but also how to improvise and expand on the limits of the possible.
Patriotic resistance at its best—the kind shown in Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy of non-violent resistance—is the highest expression of political responsibility. It rejects moral grandstanding and is closer to Socrates’s willingness to oppose an unjust law but also submit himself to its authority. Thoreau, when he claimed to speak not as a citizen but “absolutely and as a private man,” put himself outside the political community. His appeals were not so much political judgments but laws of the heart. He speaks for personal integrity, not political responsibility. His moral absolutism is totally at odds with the ethic of responsibility displayed by our greatest civil dissenters, including figures like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, and the Hollywood Ten, and more recently by the peaceful demonstrations protesting the murder of George Floyd.
“An unjust law is no law at all,” Thomas Aquinas wrote, in words that were repeated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “A law that degrades human personality is unjust,” King wrote.53 Those engaged in non-violent protest against unjust laws were prepared to accept the judgment of the law as the price of civil disobedience. They did not challenge their country because it failed to live up to their own standards of private rectitude, but because its actions were not consistent with its own best traditions and aspirations. This is patriotism of a very high order.
The difference between conscience and judgment was best developed in the classic essay “Politics as a Vocation” by the great German sociologist Max Weber.54 Weber distinguished between two types of political ethics, “the ethic of absolute ends” and “the ethic of responsibility.” By an ethic of absolute ends, Weber meant something like Thoreau’s conscience politics. It is an ethic of pure intentions, of clarity, simplicity, and transparency. Its central aspect is a belief in the absolute moral rightness of its cause. Kant, the paradigmatic believer in the ethic of conscience, approvingly quoted the Roman adage fiat iustitia, pereat mundus: let the world perish, so long as justice prevails.55 On this account, we should act according to justice no matter what the consequences. Among the heroes of this ethic, Weber counted Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Christian pacifists, as well as the revolutionary socialists of his own time, who put the purity of their causes before the interests of their country. “The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends,” Weber wrote, “feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not squelched.”56
An ethic of responsibility, by contrast, meant to Weber an ethic of prudence and judgment rather than conviction and commitment. One is answerable for the consequences of one’s actions, and the ends do not justify the means. This is an ethic attuned to the facts of human fallibility and the imperfection of human knowledge. It is an ethic of service rather than rebellion. It resists the moral self-righteousness that embraces such slogans as “protest is the highest form of patriotism” and that sees virtue in continual resistance. Its heroes are what might be called institutional patriots, those who accept the responsibilities of public life and the inevitable compromises that politics requires. An ethic of responsibility, rather than betting on all or nothing, asks how much or how little. Responsible patriots are concerned instead with the best way of preserving institutions and handing them down intact as, in the words of Burke, “an inheritance from our forefathers” to those who are yet “to be born.”57
Weber frequently presented his ethic of absolute ends and ethic of responsibility as irreconcilable moral viewpoints, and he saw no way of determining which alternative one should adopt. But these two poles are more often connected than separated. Weber’s famous essay ends by praising the person who can look reality in the face, accept responsibility for the consequences of action, and still act with a sense of integrity. “It is immensely moving when a mature man—no matter whether old or young in years—is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ ”58 Only a person capable of combining judgment and the need for responsibility with a commitment to moral principle can be said to have a “calling for politics.”
It is this combination of an ethic of absolute ends and an ethic of responsibility, of principle and prudence, that marks the spirit of patriotic dissent. It captures what is best in the examples of resistance to tradition and authority set for us by Socrates, Jefferson, and Martin Luther King Jr. It is what speaks best to the American tradition of civil disobedience.