In Defense of (American) Patriotism–Part 3

Ideals, Love, and Responsibility

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.

Dauphin, Henry V, Act 2 Scene 4

by Micah E. Weiss

In my first essay on this topic, I suggested that unlike brash pride, or performative shame, gratitude was how we Americans can choose to approach patriotism.  In my second, I suggested that we can tell the story of America honestly, without abridgement or edit or censure, by owning our villains in all their kinship to us, and by balancing them with the men and women of our collective past who have been our heroes.  I tried to make the case that our history is essentially a story of who we are now, and if we don’t allow our heroes to stand in contrast to our villains, if we favor the darkness over the light, or vice versa, and if we fail to show gratitude and appreciation for the battles fought–some lost, some won–then we are pretending that we are somehow at a remove from that history, instead of being a part of it as it continues on into our own future.   

Both essays were an attempt to persuade you that Patriotism is not a vice, and that it shouldn't threaten us to admire great men and women.  It is a sad state of affairs in our cultural history wherein I would have to do that, mainly because too many people today are convinced that either Patriotism generally, and certainly American Patriotism, is categorically an evil.  I do not think it is necessary for me to throw the myriad polling data into this essay for most readers to understand that I am speaking of a relatively fashionable anti-patriotism mostly on the left.  I hope that I have convinced someone (anyone?) that at the very least, Patriotism does not have to come in the form of nationalistic lies or bone-headed ignorance.  I have been teaching American History for over ten years, and I hope that I teach it with balance.  I can cite chapter and verse of the many evils Americans have perpetrated–I have read Naomi Klien, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, as well as actual historians who pull no punches when it comes to the horrors of our past.  I hope that most of my former students would attest that I, too, pull no punches on my own countrymen and our shared history.  It was during the many sojourns I took to learn the content of my curriculums that I realized that much of the flawed discourse was a trick of language.   In an essay I wrote last summer on the Personification Fallacy, I proposed that it is lazy grammar that has anthropomorphized America into a sentient being–an idol of worship or a straw man to burn, depending upon the political agenda of the person making the argument.  As I argued in that essay, once America-as-being (or any large country or culture) is transformed back into the human actors within their historical contexts, suddenly the fanatical pro or anti patriotic positions soften to a nuanced understanding of history.  

I have essentially given only arguments in favor of tolerating patriotism in people such as myself, who otherwise might be dismissed as alternatively naive from ignorance or maliciously jingoistic.  Now that all of that is on the table, I wish to make an affirmative case for Patriotism.  In short, I wish to challenge you to consider that you should be patriotic, because it is virtuous to be so.  

1. Ideals and responsibility

When I express patriotism in educational circles, both at my school and others, and in other social settings, I express that America stands for beautiful ideals.  After the surprised look on my interlocutor’s face gives way to a certain level of understanding, I often hear the remark: “Well, America’s ideals are wonderful, but. . .” and then they trail off, or delve into a litany of grievances.  I do love the subtextual conversation that doesn’t take place when this happens, and all that is implied with that italicized word “ideals.”  Right below the surface is a series of really interesting presuppositions that most busy adults never really unpack between conversations about work or the next bit of streaming content that “you simply must see!” 

When people merely acknowledge that the “ideals” of America are noble, not only are they implying that those ideals are collectively hypocritical, or historically hypocritical, but they are also expressing a crypto-patriotism fearful of criticism.  The argument might go something like “American ideals such as freedom and liberty have always been there, except that slavery was enshrined in our founding documents.”  This is all true.  But it misses the central point of what an ideal really is.  Our country's history of slavery merely puts it in line with every other nation-state and kingdom extant at the time, and nearly every nation-state, kingdom, and empire in all times prior to the 19th century to varying degrees.  So the “ideals” sentiment needs to be put in that logical context, and begs not the question “What makes the United States similar to other nations?” but rather “What makes the United States different?”  And the difference was in the ideals.  Inherited from the British–who I will grant, got there a generation before we did–the American ideal of liberty from the moment of the country’s founding gave individuals with moral clarity an American argument in the fight for abolition.  One could be both American and abolitionist in the most elementary sense.  Though there were certainly other interpretations of being American that did not include such an idealized sense of liberty for all, it is only as a direct consequence of the founders’ stated ideals that there were men and women who saw themselves as patriotic and cleaved to the ideal of liberty for all, that slavery itself came to an end.  

This is how Ideals work.  They are guideposts rather than realities–and they are in many ways asymptotic pursuits–perhaps growing ever smaller, but never reaching zero.  As I noted in an early essay, slavery is still with us, and our lack of vigilance in that regard is a much more significant problem than the slavery of centuries past.  Adhering to the best ideals of our cultural heritage leads to accepting responsibility for making those ideals a reality.  This is an act of Patriotism.  

It is almost absurd that I should have to point this out to otherwise intelligent and educated people, but the idea that once the ideal is stated it should instantly be realized, and that all else is hypocrisy, is irrational, lazy, and ahistorical.  Far be it from me to look into the hearts of others, but I cannot help but see this kind of cognitive distortion as an act of moral detachment, that if one just hates America enough, one will somehow be absolved of benefitting from the evil acts in our shared history.  This ideology-from-guilt acts as a relief from responsibility rather than an acceptance of responsibility.  True ideals, ideology-from-morality, demands that we take responsibility in our own epoch to make real what can never be fully realized.  Wise ideals, so often sneered at in our time, are not utopian, because the holding to them, the fight for them, never does end.  Murder cannot be eradicated, theft will be here always, bigotry will persist in new forms with every generation, and so the ideals of the inalienable rights for all mankind to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness needs to be fought for anew as the ages turn.   Loving those ideals is the only way to maintain the fight.  

2. Love and Responsibility

Then there is love of country.  This, on its face, seems obvious, but the way it relates to responsibility is not often enough connected to love of country.  In human history, it is most common for peoples and nations to think of one’s country as a parent, one's Fatherland or Motherland.  Here I would propose that, as Americans, we turn that around and instead, begin to consider our nation as we would our children.  

The United States of America is both old and new.  We have one of the oldest continuously functioning governments and constitutions on earth, and yet are still, compared to many nations, one of the youngest “peoples” and cultures.  Who could compare our people’s sense of self as a people to that of dozens of nations in Asia, Europe, or much of the Middle East, where most countries are essentially Ethno-states, many with millenia-long histories.  What is an American with a few hundred years of a past compared to an Egyptian, an Englishman, an Italian, or Chinese; what is an American identity shifting and changing with an eye always on the future and change, compared to that of a French or Japanese identity rooted in the land and the past?  

In many ways we Americans are midwives of newborn ideas.  In keeping with the question, “What makes us different?” I am always put in mind of the quote from Abraham Lincoln “I don’t know who my grandfather was, I am much more concerned with who his grandson will be.”  This is an American ideal (as usual, imperfectly realized) that set us apart from the rest of the world upon our founding and exemplified as early as when Franklin and Hamilton rose from poverty and obscurity, on their own merits.  Lincoln, though, the dirt-floored-cabin-born rustic with barely an 8th grade education, may be the apotheosis of that reality–and it is right and poetic that he would be the man most responsible for eliminating that last vestige of the old world, slavery, the ultimate expression of birth-is-destiny.  Lincoln is the hero in many ways, not so much in his successes, not so much in the accolades he well deserves, but in the ideal that family is not fate, that parentage is not karma, that the future is at least somewhat what you make of it.  This is one of our ideals, and the defining ideal for how we should look at our nation.  

3. You are American

The myth of our founding is of a son casting off the father, England, and thus began the turning of the wheel of who we are, and how we should see our country: as our child.  Loving one's child means taking responsibility for it.  That means being honest, tough, and fair; but also loving and caring and nurturing for the future of that which will leave us behind.  Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom,” but that birth did not just come on the bloody field at Gettysburg; it is a birth that encompasses our entire lives, and we are the midwives for the America of the future.  

Because, quite simply, you are American, and you have American children.  You should not hate them.  One last time, I am amazed at how obvious this is.  In this way, anti-patriotism is a form of self-hatred, and patriotism is a form of loving one's children–with the hope that they will, in some way, continue the work-in-progress that is The United States of America.   Since our nation is definitionally not a monolithic sentient being, then everyone who was ever an American defines at least a part of the story.  You are every bit as American as any other American Citizen from the greatest heroes to the most ignoble villains.  No one gets to be more American than you or your children.  

It is awfully tempting to challenge the anti-patriot thusly: if you hate it that much, why do you associate with it?  However, love-it or leave-it has always been the jingoists’ call from their own insecurities.  I have more patience, tolerance, and faith in you.  I would simply ask you to not hate yourself, or your children.  Now, more than ever, we need those who love America to go deep into the ideals that make us different.  I invite you to join me.