IN 1782, a French immigrant named Hector Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer, “What is the American, this new man?”1 We have never stopped asking this question.
One answer, standard for generations, is that an American is someone who subscribes to the principles set out in our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America is, on this account, a creedal nation, perhaps the first in history, with Americans defined by an adherence to certain beliefs about equality, liberty, individual rights, and limited government. This idea of America as a creedal nation goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville, who found the peculiarity of our national experience—at least in relation to Europe—to be the absence of a feudal past, that is, the lack of a tradition of hierarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and serfdom (which, of course, is not quite true). What impressed him most about the American experience was what he called “the generative fact” of equality from which all else derived. We could call this Tocqueville’s Thesis. It forms the traditional core of American patriotism.
As Tocqueville outlined it, the American creed was by and large a liberal one. It grew out of the fortuitous combination of an extensive territory, a Protestant political culture, and an entrepreneurial middle class that was at liberty to pursue its economic purposes largely free of government supervision. There was a pleasing openness and even universalism about these aspirations. The American creed was understood as a product not of geography, tradition, or inheritance, but of reason. Its principles were not “ours” in any parochial sense, but the property of all who wanted to participate in the blessings of liberty. Anyone, on this account, could become an American. It requires only a willingness to express support for our founding creed and live by it. This conception of American selfhood has been developed and repeated by many of our most incisive students of politics, including Martin Diamond, Samuel Huntington, and Seymour Martin Lipset.2
Today this Tocquevillian conception of America is under assault from those who regard Americans as less a creedal people than an ethnic nation. The new nationalism, not only in America but throughout the world, is about identity rather than aspiration. Taking a page from the multicultural left, it turns the nation into the ultimate identity group. Not race, class, or ethnicity, but national identity is said to form the core of peoplehood. The people in their collective capacity are said to define the nation—but what defines the people? The concept of the people and who speaks for them is one of the most contentious in current politics. It is a weapon for defining who is in and who is out. Nationalism is by definition exclusionary. Its appeal is often explicitly xenophobic, identifying enemies—both foreign and domestic—as posing an existential threat to the solidarity and purity of the nation.
The new nationalism was given powerful expression in July 2019 at the National Conservatism Conference held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There a range of media celebrities, policy analysts, journalists, and academics sought to give voice to this newfound sentiment of national solidarity. “Today,” the conference organizer declared, “is our Independence Day”—meaning independence from neo-conservatism, libertarianism, and “what they call classical liberalism.”3 The conference was intended to replace the shibboleths of the old conservative orthodoxy, like free markets and limited government, with a new awareness of the state and national identity. “Statist doesn’t mean socialist,” Aaron Sibarium, who covered the conference for The American Interest, has written, but it does tend to view the state as the expression of the nation and the nation as the vehicle of a collective fate or destiny.4 Although the group sponsoring the conference calls itself the Edmund Burke Foundation, it seems to lack Burke’s Whiggish sense of moderation and political prudence. It aims not to preserve but to overthrow what it sees as the hegemony of classical liberalism espoused by John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, and Tocqueville. The face of national conservatism is no longer Friedrich Hayek but Martin Heidegger.
To be sure, there is nothing inherently illiberal about national identity. The nation-states that came of age in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the original homes of modern liberal democracy. National identity was seen to provide emancipation from the suffocating parochialism of family, religion, tribe, and clan. The term “liberal nationalist” was by no means an oxymoron; it could easily be applied to leaders as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, William Gladstone, Giuseppe Mazzini, Theodor Herzl, Walter Rathenau, and Chaim Weizmann.5 Nationalism took a wrong turn only when (as inevitably seems to happen) it came to be regarded as the sole source of a person’s identity, a way of separating “us” from “them”—when it came to require a deep rootedness in a particular people and place, conferred by ethnicity, race, or religion. One of the National Conservatism Conference speakers, employing a claim that has since been widely repeated, alleged that nationalism is “an integral part of human nature,” common “to all human beings in all times and places.”6 This would no doubt sound like a cruel joke to the millions of people who have been uprooted and rendered homeless by wars of national liberation. The idea that nationalism is as old as human nature would be disputed by every serious student of the topic. Nothing about nationalism is inherent to human nature, because the nation-state itself is a distinctively modern political form.7
This book is an attempt to reclaim patriotism—not nationalism—as the most fundamental political virtue. Patriotism, in the most rudimentary sense, is a form of loyalty to one’s own, one’s people, one’s community, but especially to one’s constitution or political regime. Patriotism is far older than nationalism, but it is also more endangered and subject to abuse. It is frequently identified with or subsumed under the nationalist rubric, even though the two speak in very different intellectual and emotional registers. What seems to me to be missing among the new nationalists is any sense of what makes American patriotism unique. It is not based on European beliefs about “blood and soil,” or biblical beliefs about attachment to the land, but from the beginning has contained a deliberative and self-questioning character. American patriotism is not only a statement of who we are, but also an aspiration to what we might become. To be an American is to be continually engaged in asking what it means to be an American.
Unlike nationalism, which can trace its origins back to the European Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and whose early leading theorists were figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Herder, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, patriotism has no single point of origin or founding text. It is an old, even an ancient, disposition, but for that reason is harder to identify and define. The words patriot and patriotism go back to the Greek patris (place of one’s ancestors) and the Latin patria (fatherland). Both are inseparable from the word politics. Patriotism, as the name suggests, is associated with love of country where this means a due regard for our collective values, what we look up to as a people. It is an expression of our highest ideals and commitments, not only to what we are, but also to what we might be. It is devotion to the republic and the way of life for which it stands.
Nevertheless, the idea of patriotism remains contested, possibly our most contested virtue. This goes back to the beginning. The ancient philosophers—Plato and Aristotle—held that love of country occupies a second-best alternative to the love of the good. The political life or life of citizen virtue was held to be inferior to the life of the philosopher or the life of intellectual virtue. This demotion of patriotism was carried on by the early Christian polemicists who argued that the city of God, not the earthly city—the church, not the state—was the highest locus of human loyalty. The first thinker of note to consider patriotism as an uncontested good was Niccolò Machiavelli—who I realize is not the most respectable authority. “I love my country more than my soul,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori.8 Since we know that Machiavelli did not believe in the soul (anima), this does not seem to have been a real trade-off, but his point is that spirited love of country will substitute for any principle above or beyond one’s country.
Like every form of love (or loyalty), the love of country is partly determined by the object of its affection. Patriotism is not an unreflective acceptance of “my country right or wrong” but depends on our country’s meeting certain standards of conduct. “To make us love our country,” Edmund Burke wrote in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, “our country ought to be lovely.”9 But what if our country fails to meet those standards? Then what? Patriotism, as I will argue, is never simply blind devotion but is always informed by reason and judgment. These qualities demand not just deliberation but action when we fall short of our own expectations.
There is also the question of what makes love of country an admirable sentiment. In his famous “Funeral Oration,” Pericles exhorts his fellow Athenians to “feed your eyes” upon the city until “love of her fills your hearts.”10 Does love of country as a form of erotic attachment force us to ignore the flaws in the beloved? Hannah Arendt once wondered whether it is even possible to love an abstraction like a country consisting of millions of people one can never know.11 Isn’t love something we can only express toward individuals? What if love of country conflicts with other forms of loyalty to family, friends, or religious communities? As any reader of Sophocles’ Antigone would immediately recognize, the conflict between loyalty to family and loyalty to country is as old as Western literature. These are just some of the questions that I intend to address in defense of what I want to call enlightened patriotism.
I do not mean that patriotism is on the verge of disappearing—far from it—but in educated circles it has come to seem morally questionable. Attend any sporting event and you will see thousands of patriotic Americans rise for the singing of our national anthem, but raise the issue of patriotism on a college campus and the first thing you will likely hear is Samuel Johnson’s barb about its being the last refuge of a scoundrel.12 At the very least, this points to an alarming disconnect between everyday American citizens and our educated elites. On campus, patriotism is seen as an unenlightened preference for one’s own at the expense of a more enlightened, cosmopolitan point of view. It seems like a primitive sentiment, one tied to nationalism; chauvinism; an aggressive, militaristic mind-set; and a desire to dominate other people or at least proclaim the superiority of one’s own ways over all others.
Things were not always this way. Colleges and universities were once considered the custodians of our most important civic values. Fields like history, political science, and literature were thought of as preparation for a life of national service. Patriotism is a learned disposition. It is not indoctrination into an ideology, but a component of an educated mind. The proper love of country belonged to a literary tradition that might include Shakespeare’s great patriotic speech in Richard II (“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”); in an American context it included works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, all of which taught generations of students what it means to be an American. Today this canon has expanded considerably to include works such as the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
At Yale University, where I have taught for more than thirty years, we are surrounded by plaques and memorials dedicated to the men and women who have given their lives for their country. The great rotunda in Woolsey Hall has inscribed on its walls the names of all the Yale graduates who have died in every war since the American Revolution, including those who lost their lives fighting for the Confederacy. The cenotaph in Beinecke Plaza commemorates Yalies who gave their lives in World War I, and behind it, the names of the great battles of the war are etched on the entrance to the Commons. Over the Memorial Gate at Branford College, where I was master for fifteen years (although we no longer use that title), is an inscription that reads “For God, for Country, for Yale.” When students read this today—if they read it all—it seems no more than a quaint reminder of a benighted past.
The question of patriotism is even more urgent now than in the days and months after 9/11. Then we were attacked by an external enemy, someone we could rally against, even if the subsequent “War on Terror” squandered the moral capital we had accrued after the fall of the Twin Towers. But today we are confronted with an even more difficult and elusive enemy—ourselves. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” the old Pogo cartoon says. The election of 2016 was a watershed moment. It divided the country nearly in half, not just on the question of who should be the president, but on the even more vital question of who should count as an American. This challenge has only been exacerbated by recent events. The call to Make America Great Again, echoed by one part of our citizenry, is answered by the call that Black Lives Matter from another. These are the polarized ends of our political spectrum. Not for the first time, we find ourselves deeply divided over the very question of what it means to be an American. We are a country at peace (at least for the moment) but find ourselves increasingly at war over our national identity.
Today it is necessary to reclaim patriotism from two contending dispositions. The political right has weaponized patriotism, turning it into a litmus test for determining who is a real American, and the political left has largely anathemized it as unnecessary, undesirable, or both. On the right, patriotism has become indistinguishable from nationalism. Patriotism and nationalism, I will argue, grow out of a similar need to belong, but they move in quite different directions. Nationalism inevitably becomes a language of exclusion, of separating “ins” from “outs,” while patriotism is a sentiment of gratitude and appreciation for who we are and what has made us. On the left, the critics of patriotism range from multiculturalists, who have fostered a sense of grievance politics, to globalist elites—the kinds of people who attend the Davos conference and similar events for international businessmen and celebrities—who regard things like place and country simply as a cost of doing business. America today, Singapore tomorrow.
Both of these extremes are dehumanizing. The first sees national identity as rooted in a life-and-death struggle against some “other”—the foreigner, the stranger, domestic enemies of all sorts—who is said to threaten our very existence as a people. The term “white nationalist” makes perfect sense; the term “white patriot” is an oxymoron. The nationalist views the world as a jungle full of deadly threats. The patriot regards it as a garden that needs tending and pruning, to be sure, but that provides a home and sense of place. The second extreme views our identity either as rooted in certain forms of racial and ethnic solidarity or as soaring gloriously above politics and nationhood to embrace a vision of globalized humanity. Multiculturalism has turned our national narrative into a cacophony of conflicting voices; cosmopolitanism has left ordinary citizens bereft of what makes life a coherent and meaningful whole. Neither view captures the specificity of what it is to be an American and a patriot. This book, a defense of patriotism in an age of extremes, is a work for the rest of us.