Whatever happened to patriotism?
In yesterday’s thread on a poll indicating a steep decline in patriotism in the US, commenter “charles” wrote:
That is one thing that makes polls like this so disheartening; if more and more people believe that love of one’s country and the continuation of that love to be to work/fight for one’s country doesn’t matter then our liberty and future generations’ liberty can be gone. Once gone it is harder work to bring it back than to have worked to keep it alive in the first place.
I remember years ago in graduate school I took a history class as an elective. One day it was very surprising (and very sad) to learn that I, and another student who was an undergrad in our grad level course, were the only ones to believe that patriotism was a good thing. Everyone else in class, including the professor, thought that patriotism was nothing more than jingoism and always – ALWAYS – led to fascism. So, not only did they think patriotism didn’t matter; they believed that it was a bad thing.
In that same thread, commenter “Le Mot Juste” posted a famous (or once-famous) section of a poem by Sir Walter Scott that begins “Breathe there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself has said/This is my own, my native land!” And also in that thread there was this observation by commenter “JJ” on traveling and then returning home:
I retired 30 years ago. My wife and I have used our pass travel privileges to see quite a bit of the world. Last count it was 52 countries. We have learned a great deal from our travels. Magnificent geography, different customs, occasionally an ambience you won’t find in the U.S., a sense of history you can’t get from the “new world,” and how truly different and difficult life is for many people in far flung countries…
All that said, we never failed to appreciate coming home to the country we love. We’re not perfect, but our Constitution provides us with a plan to improve, if we follow it. Unfortunately, there are many who don’t like the Constitution because when it’s followed, it is hard to dominate the citizenry. At least that’s the way it looks to me.
People who don’t appreciate the USA need to open their minds to the realities of the world.
All of this reminded me of an old post of mine, which follows in slightly-edited form.
The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned in school.
It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.
Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades. I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.
Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:
If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…
A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.
But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.
So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading during the last year in particular. But even though things are looking dim for both liberty and courage these days, it is not over.
When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:
I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).
The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.
The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.
And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.
We certainly feel the threat now, don’t we?
[NOTE: I will add that in grade school my class was made to memorize the Sir Walter Scott poem. I very much doubt there’s a class today given that assignment.]
People skeptical of patriotism like to quote Dr Samuel Johnson’s “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. But Dr Johnson was not condemning patriotism, as Boswell goes on to say, “…he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.”
Good example is we have Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville holding up general and flag officer promotions because the DOD is paying service members to travel for abortions. And right on time, red-blooded patriot Senator Chuck Schumer says
“One senator — just one single senator, my colleague from Alabama, Sen. Tuberville — is blocking all general and flag officer confirmations, taking our military, our national security, our safety hostage.”
Senator Tuberville, why do you HATE AMERICA? Lol. How can we expect America to fight effectively if the generals don’t have all the gold braid and stars that strike such fear into our enemies and reassure our allies?
Now there are people who will wrongfully invoke their own patriotism, or attack your patriotism, who are not themselves scoundrels. But scoundrels can generally be counted on to do it.
See also “Won’t someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN?”
As it happens Dr Johnson had written a pamphlet, The Patriot, where he defined it: ‘a patriot is he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest.’
And in his Dictionary he had defined it “one whose ruling passion is the love of his country.”
Neither sounds particularly scoundrelly.
are we the land of the free and the home of the brave, increasing there are large swaths of this country that are no longer, I say that with great sorrow,
I thought at once of C.S. Lewis’ remarks about patriotism in the first chapter of his book The Four Loves, patriotism being discussed in the chapter on “Likings and Loves for the Subhuman”: Lewis distinguishes three levels of patriotism– 1) love of home simply because it is one’s home and has unique qualities– which allows foreigners to love their homelands just as much. Lewis uses the example of the Frenchman who loves his café complet as much as the Englishman prefers eggs and bacon– “Why, God bless him and let him have it– home would not be home unless it were different.”
2) Attachment to a particular image of one’s country’s past as it lives on in popular stories about it : “I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination; the great deeds of our ancestors. Remember Marathon. Remember Waterloo. ‘We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke.’ [For Americans, of course– the key words are Bunker Hill and Valley Forge; Remember the Alamo; Remember the Maine; and Remember Pearl Harbor.] This past is felt both to impose an obligation and to hold out an assurance; we must not fall below the standard our fathers set us, and because we are their sons there is good hope we shall not . . . This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings . . . But who can condemn what clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help?”
and 3) The “third thing [which] is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, ‘But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?’ He replied with total gravity—he could not have been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar—’Yes, but in England it’s true.’ To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend (God rest his soul) a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can however produce asses that kick and bite.”
Lengthier excerpt here: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/reflections-october-2019/
So for Mann we would say something like in answer to the question “what happened?”: the cruel absurdities of the manifestations of The Great War was what happened. Yes the Nazis came along in train, but the killing blow to the prior dispensation had already been dealt for Mann.
The perils of amoral nationalism probablly manifested itself in WWI, and has been a tool used by the utopian Socialists and Communists (Imagine – J.
Lennon). As has Imperialism and the dread American Hegemony.
chuck u reminds of that other line by johnson ‘about counting spoons’
Circa 2008 I was reading an article by a British guy who was trying to expose an organization called ” Common Cause” that was working to destroy British National Identity in order to promote the EU. He was saying that they would have conferences that British Government workers would attend and when they came back from these conferences they were pro EU. He even went so far as to alleged that the appearance of grotesque art in public places in Britain was being done to destroy British pride in their own nation.
Now, what do you think the widespread criminality, homelessness, etc is really meant to do? Perhaps part of it is to make kids think America is not a great country.
That British man was also claiming that the organization ” Common Cause” was working in America. About that time I started noting references made by politicians to the phrase, not necessarily, the organization, ” Common Cause”.
@PA+Cat:Lewis distinguishes three levels of patriotism
I appreciate you quoting that. His third patriotism is the only kind I ever find objectionable, but usually more of an annoyance, and “asses that [may] kick and bite” is a pretty apt description of those who fall into it.
Greatness is as greatness does, and there’s lots of nations that can lay claim to great deeds. Since there are many kinds of great deeds and they are not easily commensurable, picking one nation or people out to be “the greatest” is invariably ignorance (not knowing that other nations have done great things) or special pleading (defining your own claims to greatness as the weightiest ones and rating other nations’ claims as of lesser importance).
Certainly there are measures like “the biggest” or “the most populous” or “the highest GDP”, where you can lay out all the nations in an order and someone has to be on the top, but there’s no moral dimension to that.
I’d mind it less if invocations of national greatness weren’t so often accompanied by demands for large expenditures of tax money and/or the blood of our young men and women… but most of them mean well.
I recall during the run-up to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that an announcer called cheering for your country’s athletes jingoism. Of course, he was specifically talking about US citizens rooting for the home team. At the time I was stunned that anyone was that open about their globalistic tendencies. It’s blase’ now.
it’s not merely patriotism, but God Family et al,
@miguel:that other line by johnson ‘about counting spoons’
For the benefit of those not quite so laconic as you:
I described to him an impudent fellow from Scotland, who affected to be a savage, and railed at all established systems. JOHNSON. ‘There is nothing surprizing in this, Sir. He wants to make himself conspicuous. He would tumble in a hogstye, as long as you looked at him and called to him to come out. But let him alone, never mind him, and he’ll soon give it over.’
I added, that the same person maintained that there was no distinction between virtue and vice. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, if the fellow does not think as he speaks, he is lying; and I see not what honour he can propose to himself from having the character of a liar. But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.’
Neo refers to our national anthem in the body of this post: And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.
I think there is a connection between Key’s focus on “the star-spangled banner” as a symbol of the country and a long-standing respect for the flag among Americans. Tim Marshall, a British author of a book about the power of flags, notes that Americans take their flag very, very seriously: for example, it is never dipped to the head of state of another country:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXAQFvro7GU&ab_channel=InsiderBusiness
This refusal to dip the flag can be seen very clearly at 1:10 in an old British video of the parade of the athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics: the American flag bearer is holding the flag as bolt upright as he possibly can, while the other male athletes hold their hats over their hearts– needless to say, Hitler was not pleased.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4clb83HBeU&ab_channel=BritishPath%C3%A9
Last, one of the most iconic images from any American war is the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945. Here it is in slow motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLCupx1UExg&ab_channel=AiirSourceMilitary
A number of people commented online that the reason why the singing of our national anthem at the memorial service in St. Paul’s Cathedral after 9/11 and Elizabeth II’s ordering the Grenadier Guards to play it during the changing of the guard on 9/12/01 was so moving is precisely the anthem’s origin in our second war against the former mother country. At least we were able to stand together when it mattered most.
Patriotism. I learned what it was during WWII. It was meatless meals, it was collecting paper, cardboard,
tin foil, scrap metal, and buying savings stamps that became War Boinds when enough stamps were saved.
It meant seeing families with Gold Stars hanging in their windows and knowing there was grief in that home. It meant treating those families with special kindness.
It was seeing young Air Corps pilots and crew members who knew they were soon going to be attacking Japan in their B-29 aircraft and seeing the light of determination in their eyes.
It was seeing men from my hometown return with serious wounds and disabilities. And seeing them cope with their new realities.
It was knowing that if the war lasted long enough, I would be called up. And wanting to serve because I saw how the men of my hometown stepped up to go to war when it began. It was knowing that this country, just emerging from the Great Depression, was worth fighting for.
I’ve never lost those feelings. I understood when the Cold Ware began that the Communist powers wanted to gain as much power over the world’s natural resources as they could – so they could control our economy and bring us to heel. I saw the doctrines of stopping Communist expansion as a necessary evil and was willing to serve when my time came.
We won the Cold War but are losing against the expansion of Communism. They have infiltrated us and are working to take us down from within. Patriotism today means standing against those who want to destroy our Constitution – both the leftists and their useful idiots.
There is no place to go. The other nations of the Anglosphere are now mostly being governed by authoritarians. Patriotism means standing up here and now for the Constitution.
The landmass the 50 United States, and Guam and Puerto Rico, occupy is amazing. Beautiful, stark, lush, frozen, tropical, green, brown, blue… Full of natural resources, precious stones, timber, wildlife… It is understandable that many citizens feel a sense of attachment to this land and an appreciation for what it is on a physical level.
All U.S. citizens should recognize that they have inherited an extremely rare gift. Throughout most all of human history and among most all humans, societies are/were organized under might makes right. Someone or some body assumes authority as “the state” and determines how everyone else will live. There are the rulers and the ruled.
After winning the war of independence from the British monarchy the first Americans reasoned to the correct conclusion that all men and women are free. Rights are innate and do not extend from rulers. Society should be organized around the consent of those free individuals.
This is undeniably and irrefutably correct. It has been correct for all of human history. Invariably a despot comes along and tries to enslave the people, and conscript them to his will.
Americans have every right to feel a sense of pride that they live in a nation that respects individual sovereignty. And Americans should always cooperate to eliminate any force that tries to subjugate individuals. Even when that force marches under the symbol of the star spangled banner.
RTF says, “Invariably a despot comes along and tries to enslave the people, and conscript them to his will.”
Then you should be pleased that the QAnon shaman was released from prison today:
https://nypost.com/2023/03/30/qanon-shaman-jacob-chansley-released-from-prison-14-months-early/
Of course the obvious question is why Chansley was locked up at all– too many despots and wannabe despots in our own federal government.
The push for internationalism and the opposition to nationalism has been the foundation of communism from the beginning. Patriotism is bad because it tends to work against communist victory.
The theme song of communism is The Internationale. Officially adopted in 1887.
All the usual suspects [news media, universities, K-12 education, Hollywood, unions, Democrats, publishing, et al} deride patriotism in the USA because all the usual suspects are, at core, commies.
I think an important component to the idea of nationalism is national sovereignty. It’s what I and many, if not most people mean. We’re not looking to other countries to decide how and why our country should be governed.
Add to that the idea of America First– we take care of our own citizens and then, with our bounty take care of others around the world. It’s not a selfish sentiment though. We may sacrifice our own well-being to come to the aid of our friends and allies, as they would do for us.
Is some of this a reaction to the globalist sentiment by some or many of our betters? No doubt.
My wife had been an exchange student during the late sixties in Norway, and after we married we returned to visit her host families. It was remarkable the difference in attitudes between the Norwegians who remembered WWII and the younger, college age folks. The college age were critical and almost hostile to us because of Vietnam. The older folks were still grateful for what America had done during the war.
Patriotism toward what?
This ain’t the country I was born in.
Life began for me in Gettysburg not long after my dad and his brothers served in World War II.
10 years after.
For context, it’s been more than 20 years since 9-11 and I bet it’s still fresh in your mind.
I came from a long line of soldiers and knew from the beginning that I would be one too.
I served my time and then set forth on building my own little slice of the American Dream.
It was a lifelong journey and no goal was ever established other than just being a decent person.
During the past 50 years I have observed the people in charge encourage the “huddled masses” of the world to come here, preferably illegally, and soak up the efforts of the citizens toil. Never encouraging them, let alone require of them, to assimilate into the national fabric. The “melting pot” as it were.
A half century later we now live in a country with 200 different “cultures” celebrated at the cost of unit cohesion – patriotism.
Us natives still feel our patriotism but also see it being squeezed out of society at large in so many ways.
I suspect in the near future patriotism will be banished and punished as a hate crime.
Just yesterday at the ATM machine my bank required me right up front to choose whether to continue the transaction in english or spanish, and this is in a very small rural community where little to no spanish people live.
Where is the patriotism in that last sentence?
I find the English/Spanish thing to be very, very annoying. This is an English speaking nation. If I were to move to Germany, learning German would be pretty high on my List of Things To Do.
Having worked overseas on extended hitches for over 25 years, and in some real sh*thole countries, I can say that I never once did not say my prayers of gratitude upon returning to the US after the hitch was done. Never once.
If we want to see a resurgence of patriotism, the easiest way is compulsory foreign service for a couple of years for the young people. You could make it voluntary at first, and offer incentives to generate interest and momentum. But the best way to make people understand what a winning lottery ticket they’ve been gifted at birth is to give them something to compare it to.
Its pretty simple, those on the left saw our Religion, our Patriotism, and many other fundamental aspects of our American civilization/mindset as obstacles to their gaining power so, they had to either be perverted, parasitized, or destroyed–see contemporary education).
}}} no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect.
Yes, Neo, but that’s the entire point of the Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis…
These impossible demands are, by their nature, often demands that things be perfect, or they might as well not “be”… Equating “not perfection” with whatever happens to be the goal of the Left at the moment.
For all their demands for, and claims of, “nuance” and “non-binary”, it’s really amazing how often the approach of the Left is absolutely binary.
I’d make a thoroughly detailed argument that this has been going on, in one form or another, since the 1920s, but there’s no question that Teh One was raised and sauteed in it…
Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html