First, I don’t got much this week (fireworks shock), so you should read this.
Second, just because of what week it is, I’m thinking about the age old question of patriotism vs. nationalism. Gemma has written about this a number of times, and I’ve basically agreed with everything she’s said on the subject. The idea that it is possible to have a pride – a wholesome, useful pride at that – in one’s country, without slipping into an irrational and destructive sense of entitlement and superiority. How does one best define each term, and where does one draw the line? More, how is it possible to have a sense of pride in something as abstracted (if not abstract to real-world consequence) without that pride implying at least a sense of entitlement and superiority?
This is frequent line of inquiry for me. My extended family, while spread somewhat broadly along the political spectrum, has always been basically patriotic. They have worked for large American companies, and multiple generations have served in the military (my generation is the first in recent memory to do neither). And this is the time of year to be patriotic, after all.
On the other hand, this is a week in which the supreme court has shot down over fifty of a desegregating precedent (first enacted during the Eisenhower administration), over one-hundred years of an antitrust precedent (enacted during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration). Conservative senators have shot down a proactive, sculpted-by-committee-and-compromise, and above all necessary immigration reform. Most insignificantly, but most prominently in the news, the president commuted the sentence of the sole member of his administration who has had any commupance whatsoever for their long list of illegal and sabatory actions. It may not be comparatively significant, but it is still enough to make me grind my teeth. It is, therefore, a difficult week on which to be patriotic.
I am, ultimately, patriotic.
All the way back to Plato, we are culturally primed to make a sharp division between theory and manifestations. In terms of patriotism, or religion, or art, or any number of other fields featuring the collision of ideas and their expression/execution, we gain flexibility if we can recognize the value of an execution that is automatically flawed. This isn’t a political argument per se; I’m not getting into that whole evolution vs. revolution thing. I’m saying that if we are willing to accept compromise as an inherent feature of any manifested system, an expected trait as opposed to undesired flaws or noise, we pick up some flexibility as to what we can say and who we can be. And, honestly, I think we have a more accurate picture of the world we live in.
An easy example of this flexibility is one that most Americans use reflexively.
After all: the 4th of July is a commemoration of July 4th, 1776, the year in which we declared our separation from the British Parliament and poor, old, deranged, taxing-and-searching-and-seizing King George III, which the Declaration condemned in a list of “he has” that went on at length. And yet, while the colonists were subjected to a genuine deprivation of civil liberty, George III’s “search and seizure” couldn’t hold a candle to our two hundred year legacy of treaty beaking with Native Americans. Nor did his deprivation of Free Speech really deprive American colonists of their “inalienable rights” so much as the colonists themselves did through their continuance of chattel slavery. Slavery has been a common feature of most of recorded history, but the American system was particularly dehumanizing in that it legally and explicitly denied the humanity of slaves, which is how we produced such abhorrant legislation as the 3/5 rule. For that matter, our much-lauded support from France and elsewhere is nothing to wonder at; they were British rivals who wanted to compromise England’s naval and economic power. A couple decades later the French were ready to declare war on the U.S. themselves. Let us not forget that American unity was fermented as an economic interest, since the colonies had a mobile and powerful middle class who would benefit from shedding the strict British taxation. They therefore initiated a democracy that defined and protected their rights more broadly than a monarchy, but still narrowly enough that only one in approximately fifty citizens was allowed the vote. The whole American Revolution, from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, embodied so many contradictions that it could (and often was at the time) labeled hypocritical by its opponents.
The other side of it is that almost all of the good things that we say about the American Revolution are also true. Western Civilization hadn’t produced a functioning democracy since ancient Greece and perhaps some Swiss city-states (I say “functioning” because we are technically a republic, not a straight democracy). The constitutional protection of civil liberties for all citizens had been virtually unheard of. Certainly, there had never been a functioning democracy taking in such diversity and numbers of people over such a large area. While France struggled to follow in our footsteps, their own revolution stalled after bloody insurrection, and their own “functioning democracy” was postponed for another century. On the other hand, our own victory against England was a legitimate David vs. Goliath case. For this reason, we were the default model for aspiring democracies, and even where they improved upon our system (eg. losing the electoral colleges), flaws are conspicuous in any prototype.
Intuitively, these two paragraphs essentially contradict each other. I ought not to forget the former nor to neglect the latter. Both arguments ought to be anticipated and considered as two sides of the same coin. The United States was brought into the world as a power immediately competing with more powerful states overseas. These were grappling with social unrest of their own, in fear of insurrection, and so the establishment of the United States posed a double-risk: economic/cultural and cultural. In the United States itself, this sense of tenuous existence, of maneuvering along a brink, coupled with a slave-based economy on the south, a land-starved economy in the north, abundant natural resources to the West and the capacity to seize them whenever we wanted.
I’m not writing to justify any of our past sins, but to place them in context. Where/whenever the first functioning democracy was, it was bound to be heavily circumscribed by mitigating circumstances. I can feel shame, therefore, regarding the founding fathers and the creation of this nation for everything they did wrong, for the problems they did not fix, and for those which they increased. That is, perhaps, what a diligent and faithful and patriotic citizen ought to do on the 364 days. And yet, looking back at this group of people, and at this nation at a whole, and at what they accomplished together, it ought to be possible to acknowledge and to take pride in all of the positive. To exemplify and to try to live it. Patriotism ought not to be an oversimplification of history or an abjuration of guilt. It ought to be a shared and acknowledged pride in just intentions and just actions. Patriotism ought, above all, to strive to expand and purify and participate in the most rigorous, self-reflective, honest, and humble of the qualities that emerge in the basis of our shared heritage. That, itself, is sufficient justification for tracking a heritage at all.