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For criticizing H.R.1,
he is accused of
spreading Donald
Trump’s ‘big lie.’
MAIN
STREET
By William
McGurn
A
lmost two decades ago, I received a letter from a
young man serving in AmeriCorps, the civilian
national service program. At the time, I headed the
agency that ran the program. After 9/11, President Bush
had called on Americans to serve their country, to “fight
evil by doing good,” as he put it, and he mentioned
joining AmeriCorps. The response almost overwhelmed the
AmeriCorps budget.
My correspondent was not buying it. He wrote that we
in government were wrongly assuming that AmeriCorps
members were motivated by “a strong sense of patriotism
and love for America.” But he lacked “such patriotism,” he
said. He believed that the United States had many failings,
and he had joined AmeriCorps to battle them. He thanked
my agency for allowing him the “opportunity to take up
this fight.”
As Steven B. Smith shows
in “Reclaiming Patriotism in
an Age of Extremes,” history
provides more than a few
examples of Americans who
were both patriots and
critics—the combination is,
one might say, a tradition.
In his short but wide-ranging
survey, Mr. Smith, a political
philosopher at Yale
University, explains how a
distinctively American version
of patriotism developed and
why it is still valuable in an
age when other conceptions
of loyalty compete with it.
To the AmeriCorps member, and to many others,
patriotism has meant not so much love of country as
unquestioning devotion to it. The idea is neatly expressed
by the phrase “My country, right or wrong,” often
attributed to naval officer Stephen Decatur but actually
said in the 1870s by Missouri Sen. Carl Schurz, who added:
“if right, to be kept right, and if wrong, to be set right.”
Through most of history, and in many places today,
group loyalty lacks this element of critique or dissent.
What matters most are ties of birth, belief, custom and
language. The classic example of such loyalty, Mr. Smith
notes, is ancient Sparta, whose citizens were socialized
under a strict set of laws that stamped out individuality
and bound them together even unto death, as at the Battle
of Thermopylae.
A more “humane” and “benevolent” sense of patriotism
began to emerge in the 17th and 18th centuries, Mr. Smith
argues. It sprang from the “civilizing effects” of increased
commerce among the European nations, which cultivated
an enlarged set of relations that fostered prosperity; it
didn’t depend on personal attributes such as nationality
or religion. In this context, patriotism remains a virtue,
but a lesser one: It is simply, as Adam Smith explained, a
sense of gratitude to one’s country for being able to live
within such a system.
To this modern sense of patriotism, Mr. Smith empha-
sizes, the framers of American government added the
idea of consent. Americans, the framers believed, should
be grateful for the laws, institutions, traditions and other
aspects of the “ethos” that nurtured their liberties—not
because they had inherited them but because they had
chosen them. The opening paragraph of “The Federalist
Papers” proclaims that the key question facing “the people
of this country” is whether good government can be estab-
lished by “reflection and choice” or “accident and force.”
That is why, according to Mr. Smith, deliberating and
deciding are at the “core” of American patriotism. To be a
loyal citizen is to engage in the process, difficult though it
may be, of trying to make the American government and
the “ethos” of American life better able to protect national
values such as liberty and equality. Since many opinions
exist about the “right” and “wrong” ways to do so, the
patriot can never rest. And critics can be patriots too.
Mr. Smith sees nationalism and cosmopolitanism as the
two main alternatives to patriotism in today’s world. The
first, which he defines as an unquestioning allegiance to
one’s country, he deems inherently “exclusionary”—one
has either the right kind of national identity or not. In its
extreme form, it invites us-against-them battles for
dominance. As for cosmopolitanism, it envisions a world
of allegiances to no specific country but rather to a set of
humanitarian ideals that transcend borders, as though the
interests and traditions of people in particular places don’t
matter. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are, Mr.
Smith rightly says, not so much alternatives to patriotism
as distortions of it.
Yet Mr. Smith has relatively little to say about how
patriotism can compete with its rivals. If it depends on
“reflection and choice,” what happens when the public is
less capable of reflecting and choosing, or less willing?
Going back to the framers themselves, the traditional
American response has been to call on schools to prepare
young people for citizenship. (Just last week an
impressively broad-based group, including six former
education secretaries, offered a blueprint for teaching
students to be more engaged citizens in a democracy.)
But generally, as Mr. Smith notes, the current intellectual
atmosphere, not least in the universities, makes teaching
civics and history more difficult.
Mr. Smith suggests another possibility, borrowing an
idea from William F. Buckley Jr., who argued that young
people should be asked to show their “gratitude” to the
United States by devoting a period of time to national
service. But existing programs, like AmeriCorps, provide
little evidence that national service does much to enhance
civic knowledge and patriotic sentiments. Perhaps it is
enough that Mr. Smith superbly illuminates the
distinctiveness of the American idea of patriotism and
reminds us of how important patriotism is, and how
essential to making America better.
Mr. Lenkowsky, a professor emeritus of public affairs
and philanthropic studies at Indiana University, served as
chief executive of the Corporation for National and
Community Service from 2001 to 2003.
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