Reclaiming Patriotism
WHO speaks for patriotism today? Who can speak for it?
American patriotism, I have tried to argue, imposes special demands on its citizens. Ours is a peculiarly principled patriotism grounded in certain higher truths—such as the commitment to equality, the protection of individual rights, and the aspiration to freedom—contained in our most precious founding documents. These principles are not, strictly speaking, “ours” but belong to all peoples, at all times, anywhere. They are the property of humanity. But American patriotism is not defined exclusively by these commitments. It is also rooted in our history and collective memory, in the stories we tell about ourselves as a people. It is a matter not only of logos, but also of ethos. These stories tell us who we are and where we have come from, as well as who we want to be and what we aspire to. This is not to say that patriotism is a myth, but it is the collective expression of what we imagine ourselves to be. It is embedded in what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community”—the sense of collective identity that makes a people.1
Patriotism must be reclaimed today not only from its enemies but also, just as importantly, from its overzealous friends. Those on the left have largely ignored patriotism, when they have not been openly contemptuous of it. Patriotism, they argue correctly, is tied to the experience of the modern national state. But they go on to argue, utterly incorrectly, that the model of the national state is becoming obsolete. This illusion has been no doubt abetted by the emergence of the European Union as a kind of post-national state, seen by some as a model for global governance. But the form this new post-national state would take has never been clear. One day, perhaps, it may become something like a “United States of Europe,” but I doubt it. From the outset, Europe was torn between, on one hand, highly idealistic, even utopian dreams of an almost limitless democracy with open borders and seamless migration, and, on the other, a heavy-handed bureaucratic reality in which, as the socialist theorist Saint-Simon might say, “the government of persons” seems to have been replaced “by the administration of things.”2 But the fascination with a new transnational form of government, uncritically welcomed by elements of the American left, represented a kind of vacation from history—a vacation that was abruptly reversed on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the issues of war, terrorism, and national security were once again put front and center.
More recently, of course, these utopian aspirations for a new world order are being systematically dismantled by the resurgence of nationalism in Europe, Russia, India, Asia, the United States, and post-Brexit Britain. Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Modi’s India, Putin’s Russia, and Trump’s America are only the most obvious standard bearers of resurgent nationalisms. The new illiberal democracies and the strongmen who run them have effectively co-opted the language of patriotism and put it to work for their own causes. These nationalist movements have learned an important lesson: to defeat an enemy, you have to take a page from their book. The nationalist right has learned to speak the language of the multicultural left. If minorities have a right to identity politics, why shouldn’t white men, Christian evangelicals, incels, and other groups that see themselves as politically and culturally disenfranchised?
White nationalism is only the most recent (and most toxic) form of this grievance politics. For those on the left, it is not enough to denounce nationalist demagoguery. They must also endorse the language of patriotism as inseparable from a decent democracy. Is this possible any longer? For many of those on the new age left, any acknowledgement of patriotism seems the first step on the slippery slope to xenophobia and racism. After a generation of multiculturalist efforts to discredit the “we”—the common core of our national identity—all that remains is the language of victimization, a mirror image of the nationalist grievance and resentment politics it professes to despise. Whether the left is capable of learning this lesson remains very much in question.
But if patriotism must be rehabilitated for the left, it must also be recaptured from the right. These are patriotism’s excessive friends. For them, love of country is utterly unproblematic and not the contested virtue it has always been taken to be. They too often use patriotism as a wall to divide the ins from the outs. Many of them see themselves at war with relativism, multiculturalism, and identity politics, which they believe poses an existential threat to the American national character. The language of fear, invasion, and impurity remains a staple of this rhetoric. Whatever sins the advocates of multiculturalism and its various offshoots have committed, they are not enemies of the state. We were at war in Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. We are not at war with other American citizens. This language of culture war—a staple of Fox News and other vehicles of the right—has turned patriotism into a game of capture the flag, where each side feigns outrage at the other’s moral idiocies. Patriotism is not something that can be force-fed to people, much less beaten into them. It is a matter of respect for a tradition, which can be acquired only through immersion in the best that our history, literature, and political theory has to teach us. Patriotism is not about prideful self-assertion; it must always be coupled with modesty and humility if we are to live up to our highest aspirations. To love our country well, we must learn to love it moderately.
Patriotism—the kind of patriotism for which I have argued—is not about imposing litmus tests for who is in and who is out. I have come to believe it must be taught. Patriots are not born; they are made. This is why the most serious students of patriotism have always regarded its teaching as inseparable from the cultivation of character and judgment. But where are such teachers to be found today, and—to ask the question posed brilliantly by Karl Marx—who will educate the educator? In our current environment, as always, the best teachers are old books. Patriotism can be taught only through a long and deep engagement with the founding texts of our political tradition. Although much of our political life seems distinctively unintellectual if not anti-intellectual, American patriotism has always been part of a textual tradition that goes back to the Puritans and includes works like Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, the Federalist Papers, Franklin’s Autobiography, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, and Lincoln’s great speeches and letters.
Several features of American identity, taken together, can form the basis of a patriotism in which we can take reasonable pride. This is not to say that our identity is infinitely malleable. It is circumscribed by our regime—the constitutional existence that has shaped our national character. This regime has been by and large a liberal one, in the older philosophic sense of a community based on limited government, rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, and an appreciation for individual freedom and initiative. To be sure, this definition of liberalism may not differ in content from the definition of conservatism. I would argue that a conservative today is someone who seeks to maintain what was best in the older liberal tradition and prevent it from succumbing to its most dangerous tendencies.
American patriotism, I have argued, is unique in its self-questioning character. To be an American means to participate in a great centuries-long debate over what it means to be an American. Our founding documents are only the opening premises of an argument that has been modified and developed over subsequent generations of thought and practice. American patriotism is like a great symphony with many different parts and sections, or perhaps more like a jazz standard played by a great musician like Bill Evans or Miles Davis. These virtuosos may improvise endlessly, depart from the score in ways that may be unintelligible to the ordinary listener, but they inevitably return to the basic melody. Among the themes that constitute our national symphony, I would include the following.
Equality
The promise of equality is the cornerstone of the American experience. Our founding document begins with the recognition that all men are created equal—a term that is now interpreted more expansively than in the eighteenth century—and this has been the defining premise of our national existence ever since. There has, to be sure, been much debate over equality’s meaning. Does it apply only to our possession of certain formal rights to life, liberty, property, and so on, or does it guarantee some standard of material well-being, like a guaranteed minimal income, health care, and education? There is no algorithm for determining how much equality or what kind of equality is compatible with a decent society. The standard will clearly depend on our degree of affluence and economic development, as well as our sense of the rights and responsibilities of government. But equality should remain our lodestar, our true north.
It is often argued that the pursuit of equality is at odds with another cherished American principle, the exercise of liberty—or that freedom and equality are goals in a zero-sum game, where the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Tocqueville clearly believed this. He thought the “passion” for equality would eventually overwhelm the desire for liberty. “Not that people whose social state is democratic naturally despise liberty, they have an instinctive taste for it,” he wrote. “But liberty is not the principal and constant object of their desire. What they love with a love that is eternal is equality. . . . Nothing could satisfy them without equality and, rather than lose it, they would perish.”3
Writing during the Jackson administration—the first to embrace a robust egalitarianism, at least for white males—Tocqueville may have had cause for worry, but this is still, I believe, the wrong way of posing the problem. Equality and liberty are not so much at loggerheads as they are mutually supportive aspects of our national life. Equality, as both Jefferson and Lincoln understood, is the first premise for the exercise of our basic freedoms. The kind of equality that Tocqueville cared most about was neither equality of opportunity (favored today by Republicans) nor equality of result (favored by Democrats), but a recognition of common human dignity. Ours is a regime that values the equal moral dignity of every human being, however humble, and this should be something of inestimable value for every American.
Rule of Law
“All lawful things are somehow just,” Aristotle wrote.4 He understood that law could not provide perfect justice—hence the qualifier “somehow”—but that without law, there would be no room for justice at all. More than any other quality, the rule of law permits social stability and a sense of fairness. Law prevents, within limits, the abuse of power both from above and from below. It creates an environment of stable expectations in which citizens can safely and securely pursue their ambitions. America has been from the outset a rule-of-law regime. With the exception of the Civil War, our constitutional tradition has provided for order and stability that can be found only where the law is respected.
Our system of law derives in part from the common law tradition that we inherited from Great Britain, especially in the importance we assign to custom and precedent. Our legal code based on the Constitution has been elaborated over the course of our national existence by our most prominent lawyers, judges, and legislators. Americans can justly take pride that their legal system has survived intact for well over two centuries and today may yet stand as a bulwark against a resurgent populism.
Limited Government
Ours is a constitutional democracy, which means it is a form of limited government. This distinguishes it from the classical politeia, which was in principle all-encompassing. The ancient politeia was a tutelary community. There was no aspect of life, however intimate, that was not at least in principle subject to supervision and control. The ancient republic, as Montesquieu noted, was a kind of tutelary despotism where citizens became servants of a common purpose and all submitted to common instruction.
Constitutional government, by contrast, imposes on itself a distinction between the public and the private, between citizens as members of the state and individuals as members of civil society. This separation of state and society remains one of the most precious achievements of modern liberal democracies. It creates a zone of freedom where individuals can pursue their own lives without supervision or surveillance. This achievement cannot be taken lightly. The self-restraint of modern constitutional government is a heavy burden. The Constitution not only restrains the role of the people through the institutions of representation and election; it also restrains the legislators through the separation of powers. The effort to bind the hands of the state—the Ulysses at the mast problem—has proved the most recalcitrant problem facing any constitutional democracy.
Pluralism and Respect for Diversity
By setting limits to what government can do, we create a robust sphere of private freedoms—civil society—in which men and women may pursue their activities, alone or together, without fear of surveillance by either the government or their neighbors. Limited government recognizes the need for a considerable degree of reasonable pluralism within the community. By “reasonable pluralism” I mean what James Madison meant: that any society of any size will consist of different groups, interests, and factions that jostle and compete for power and influence. Only a society that contains room for this kind of pluralism can guarantee the mutual restraint necessary for freedom. Politics is the business of balancing and adjudicating between competing interests so that none gets so powerful that it can oppress the others.
This reasonable pluralism is not only an inevitable feature of the American moral landscape; it is a desirable one, too. We should not merely tolerate diversity—we should actively embrace it. We are a nation of immigrants. This is not just a fact but also a value that adds to the meaning and richness of our national experience. Allan Bloom enjoyed telling the story that when Franklin Roosevelt addressed a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution—the most conservative, if not reactionary, American organization of the era—he greeted them as “fellow immigrants” as a reminder that unless you are a native American, no matter how long we’ve been here, our families came from somewhere else.5
Diversity has regrettably become one of the great shibboleths of contemporary moral propaganda. In some quarters, especially colleges and universities, it seems to be the only standard worth considering. The university where I teach now has a dean of diversity, supported by an army of diversity enforcers. Every new appointment must be vetted for how much the candidate contributes to the university’s diversity profile. The bar is set higher for some and lower for others, contributing to an atmosphere of hypocrisy and mendacity. There is no doubt that Yale is an infinitely better place for its admission of female, Jewish, African American, and Asian students—but to be told that “diversity is excellence” is either bureaucratic cant or bad logic. Everything is what it is and not something else. Diversity is diversity and excellence is excellence. Diversity may contribute to excellence or it may not, but to claim that the two are identical is simply wrong. As a friend of mine once said, diversity has come to mean “look different, think alike.”
Rightly understood, diversity is a cherished American value. We celebrate our diverse origins and points of view and believe that all have contributed in some way to making us what we are. But diversity has come to be identified almost exclusively with racial and ethnic difference. These are important components of diversity, but they are not the whole story. We differ not only in race but also in religion, political perspective, physical and athletic prowess, age and experience, intellectual excellence, moral capacity, geography and culture, and creative and artistic potential, to say nothing of class and economic development. These are all indices of human difference that we should consider as crucial aspects of the American family.
Culture and the Arts
A common complaint made from both the right and the left is that America has produced a cultural wasteland or, in some of the more extreme formulations, is a cultural wasteland. Two German philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, deplored the “culture industry” of Hollywood as a form of ideological thought control. They may have been the first to indict an American icon like Donald Duck for teaching the futility of resistance to the conditions of modern capitalist society.6 On the conservative side, Patrick Deneen believes that liberal democracy has declared war on culture. The antidote to this “anti-culture” is said to be a return to small communities, sometimes called the “Benedict Option”: a voluntary withdrawal into traditional forms of rural and patriarchal life.7 The one considers modern culture nothing more than “mass deception” designed to ensure docility, while the other views it as having created a world of mass standardization and uniformity.
Both of these opinions are so tone-deaf to American culture as to beggar description. America’s culture of the arts and sciences is perhaps our greatest asset, apart from constitution and law. Our cultural life testifies to a vibrancy of civil society and the wisdom of allowing art, music, literature, and science to develop autonomously, outside the scope of political supervision. American colleges and universities, once little more than seminaries for the elite, are today the source of cutting-edge scholarship in virtually every discipline and their doors are open to an increasingly larger number of students from all walks of life. American literature, which Tocqueville found virtually non-existent on his arrival, was nurtured into its own, full-fledged art form by a host of luminaries, from Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson to Updike, Bellow, Morrison, and Roth. Our Nobel Prize winners in every field of endeavor have made not only America but the world a better and safer place. Jazz, blues, R&B, rock, and hip-hop have taken elements of the African American experience and turned them into something of worldwide wonder and appreciation. Hollywood films by directors like John Ford, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese have produced cultural jewels of imagination and intelligence. The list is nearly endless.
Invention and Discovery
In 1859, Lincoln gave a “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions” in which he predicted that America would be the land where the scientific Enlightenment came to fruition. In celebrating the Enlightenment’s ideal of scientific discovery as the key to human progress, he particularly noted the connection between scientific and technological innovation and economic development. By adding the profit motive (“the fuel of interest”) to the habit of innovation (“the fire of genius”), America could enrich itself while contributing to mankind’s collective well-being.8
These predictions have largely come true. America has been a land of unprecedented scientific and technological revolution. From Benjamin Franklin and Robert Fulton to Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, our scientists and inventors show the American imagination at its best. Not that these developments have been without cost. They have forced us to confront the moral dangers of genetic engineering, the hazards of nuclear waste, and threats to individual privacy from the internet. Yet as Ronald Reagan used to say when he was the pitchman for General Electric, “progress is our most important product.” American patriotism is aspirational, and the cultivation of our scientific and technological imagination remains the best guarantor of human progress.
Economic Development and Opportunity
America has been a capitalist democracy ever since the year when, by happy coincidence, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence were published within a few months of each other. From the outset, the protection of property has been one of the central aims of government. Yet the protection of private property does not entail a system of unfettered laissez-faire. The framers were not libertarians. They thought deeply about justice and the common good, and they did not believe that the market and market incentives were the sole determinants of human behavior or that wealth was the single promoter of human happiness. The market is an instrument for the generation of wealth and the distribution of goods and services. It is not the answer to every social problem.
Capitalism’s critics have always viewed it as a system of heartless exploitation, but it has brought greater affluence to more people worldwide than any other economic system. To be sure, capitalism needs to be tempered by concerns for economic fairness and social justice. Yet the free flow of capital has always been an indicator of upward mobility. The dangers of an emergent oligarchy, much in the news of late, are not to be taken lightly. But the alternative to markets is a cure worse than the disease. Socialism builds in inefficiency and corruption. The waste of resources grows worse over time, eventually resulting in a system of pervasive dishonesty and distrust.
The downside of capitalism is that when insufficiently regulated, it creates both massive inequality and financial instability. The solution is not to abandon markets, but to make them work better for all Americans. The emergence of an entrepreneurial middle class at liberty to pursue its economic aims has created immense wealth that has improved the lives of billions. Americans have always preferred inequality in affluence to equality in poverty.
Individualism
American patriotism is special, if not unique, for recognizing the value of the individual and of individual achievement. We do not insist on the subordination of the individual to the state or to the collective will of society. We celebrate people for their individual contributions to society. Our heroes certainly include famous political leaders and military commanders, but more often we celebrate scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs who contribute to our individual and material well-being.
Individualism landed in America with the Pilgrims. The Puritan theology pictured the individual standing alone before God. Benjamin Franklin secularized this vision by showing how, through initiative and hard work, we can make something of ourselves, leave the world a better place, and get rich in the process. This was the Puritan idea of a calling without the Puritan sense of guilt. This eminently worldly conception of the individual was deepened by Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist movement, which taught a rebellious non-conformity, a libertarianism that kept society at arm’s length, and a call to each individual to develop our true selves, or what Emerson called our individual “genius.” This expressive individualism found its later voice in the poetry of Walt Whitman—America’s first poet of genius—and heirs like Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan. Whitman was America’s first bohemian. With his open shirt and big floppy hat, he defined our image of how a poet sounds and looks. He has also been called the greatest poet of democracy. “If you are American,” Harold Bloom wrote in his introduction to Leaves of Grass, “then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse.”9
America is the land where individualism remains strong and celebrated, yet we are all too familiar with its pathologies. Tocqueville feared that a culture of individualism would erode our capacities for civic life by turning us back on ourselves, producing a nation of loners. “Individualism,” he wrote, “is a reflective and tranquil sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men and withdraw into the circle of family and friends.”10 More recent social scientists have borne this out, charting a marked decline in American involvement in clubs, leagues, and civic associations. This anomie is no doubt the deeper cause of the alienation from civic life that is responsible both for our apathy and loneliness and for the sporadic outbreaks of violent rage that have so shaken our bonds of public trust.11
Few would argue, I hope, that the answer to these problems is to turn away from our ethos of individualism. The answer is that individualism, like any good, needs to be tempered by other aspects of our national creed, those that emphasize faith, service, and loyalty. Some form of required national service would greatly improve our current moral environment, where people want to contribute but may not know how.12 This service could include everything from military service to teaching in a public school, working in a national park, or helping out in an underserved community. Public service would give each citizen a sense that “we are in this together” and reinvigorate our national faith. It would encourage a sense of equality without imposing an ideology of egalitarianism.
Faith and Hope
We are, as I have emphasized throughout, a people of the book. Our reverence for beginnings is a legacy of the Puritans, who saw themselves as building a new Jerusalem in the wilderness. Our regard for our national founding is rare among modern nations. We speak reverentially about the Founding Fathers (usually capitalized) and celebrate them in books, plays, and songs. Loyalty is a form of gratitude to those who have helped us become what we are. Gratitude is a natural human sentiment. When it is expressed to parents and family, it takes the form of love; when expressed to country, it is patriotism.
Loyalty and faith are inseparable from religion, yet are not quite the same thing. A people are judged by their gods and heroes, by what they look up to. American patriotism is a constitutional faith rooted deeply in our very human need for hope. Hope and faith are inextricably bound together. “Religion,” Tocqueville wrote, “is . . . nothing other than a particular form of hope, as natural to the human heart as hope itself.”13 This is not something we can do without. “Hope,” Alan Mittleman has argued, “is a civic virtue in a democratic age.”14 Like loyalty, it is an excellence of character without which our institutions and way of life would lose their reason for being and collapse. “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things,” Andy Dufresne writes to his friend Red in the Stephen King story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” “And no good thing ever dies.”15
Our constitutional faith is a form of hope, a religion based not in revelation or belief in providence but in the whole complex of rituals, symbols, and practices that have established our identity over time. It is this constitutional faith that sustained Lincoln’s belief that despite slavery and war, American democracy remains “the last best hope of earth.”16 It is, furthermore, a faith that does not belong to any one faction or sect but is eminently democratic. Anyone who shares hope for America and faith in America may participate. But this hope and this faith are very different from the hope and faith of a believing Christian or Jew or Muslim. Faith and hope in America are not based on divine promises.
Exceptionalism
Finally, American patriotism is exceptional. The idea of exceptionalism may be the most controversial aspect of American political identity. “Only in America” we often hear people say in mock wonder, indicating some sense of the exceptional. In what way, though, is America unique, and does this belief necessarily lead to a triumphalist assertion that America is somehow better than all other nations? My sense is no. America is exceptional in the sense that Seymour Martin Lipset had in mind when he called it “the first new nation.”17
Lipset meant that America was the first, and perhaps still the only, nation founded on a creed. We are a creedal people. The American creed, summed up in such ideas as equality, liberty, individuality, and pluralism, formed the basis for what later became known as the philosophy of liberalism or classical liberalism. Other nations—England, France, even Germany—have had liberal traditions, but only America was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. This could never be said of the nations of the Old World.
A belief in American exceptionalism by no means provides a blank check to export democracy, to rule other peoples, or to convert them to our way of life. It is the very opposite of the neo-conservative policy of bringing regime change to nations whose governments we don’t like. Exceptionalism is rooted in the biblical idea of chosenness, and chosenness without humility can lead only to blasphemy and hubris. This sense of exceptionalism was understood better by our Puritan ancestors than by their successors. They saw themselves on an “errand in the wilderness,” tasked with creating a “city on a hill,” not as the spearheads of Manifest Destiny or as making the world safe for democracy.
American exceptionalism has never lost its aspirational quality. It is a quality expressed by one of our great national poets, Bruce Springsteen, in his anthem “Land of Hope and Dreams”:
This train carries saints and sinners
This train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls
I said, this train dreams will not be thwarted
This train faith will be rewarded
This train hear the steel wheels singin’
This train bells of freedom ringin’
There is no good idea that cannot be abused, and this is especially true of patriotism, which seems to bring out both the best and the worst in people. If critics on the left have routinely disparaged any display of patriotism as an announcement of xenophobia and nationalistic chauvinism, bullies on the right have been quick to depict any questioning of America as somehow un-American and unpatriotic.
America is, I believe, the only country where words like “Americanization” and “un-American” are in common use. To the best of my knowledge, no other European language has corresponding words. But if patriotism misused can be harsh and punitive, when rightly expressed, it can also be elevating and ennobling. American patriotism at its best does not rely on indoctrination but on teaching and supporting the virtues of civility, respect for law, respect for others, responsibility, honor, courage, loyalty, and leadership—all virtues worth having and keeping.