Wilfred M. McClay is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and a contributor to the volume “The Civitas Collection 250,” edited by Richard M. Reinsch II, from which this article is adapted.
The thing we call “America” has never lacked for arguments over its self-definition. One could produce a shelf of books about them. But one of the most important discussions is the debate over whether the United States is a nation of creed or of culture — between, on the one hand, an understanding of America chiefly as the embodiment of universal principles — the rights to life, liberty, property, religious and intellectual freedom, and security in one’s person — and, on the other hand, an understanding of the country as a particular place: a homeland made up of a people with a particular history and with institutions that are not easily transferrable to peoples who do not share that culture and that history.
Since World War II, the debate has tended to favor the former position. This has been especially true among the college-educated, who have been taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that American patriotism is a dangerous and narrowing sentiment. If one spoke favorably of patriotism, it was always paired with a domesticating modifier: informed patriotism or reasonable patriotism, not the hairy and untamed autochthonic beast roaming the land by itself.
The belief that America is best understood as an idea rather than a specific place, however, has allowed for a moderate form of liberal patriotism. The philosopher Richard Rorty articulated this idea in his 1998 book “Achieving Our Country.” The title succinctly conveyed its argument: that “America” is an ongoing ideal not yet fully realized — that, Rorty wrote, “the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln’s hopes.” The idea, not necessarily the place, deserved Americans’ loyalty.
Yet this hope did not bear up under scrutiny.
You “cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact,” Rorty declared. “You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.”
The last two sentences are startling. There is a big difference between saying that the great achievements of the founders are fragile and ever in need of support, and saying that the country does not exist yet, because it does not yet correspond with the dreams of enlightened intellectuals.
Nobody is born into a vacuum. Everyone has a specific father, mother, family, neighborhood and city. One’s duties are to them, rather than the father, mother and others that one would have preferred, had one been able to create the universe in a manner more after one’s own heart. One cannot withhold oneself from these many connections, including one’s country, until they meet the highest standards of purity. One cannot reinvent the world first and only then begin to live in it.
Love of country constitutes an enormous emotional and spiritual resource, to be drawn upon in all the endeavors of one’s life by those fortunate enough to have it. Such love is not synonymous with complacency. Nor is it synonymous with a particular ideology or political identification. But it is incompatible with the idea of America as an entity yet to be achieved.
The idea of America, like all great experiments, means nothing unless it is undertaken for the sake of what is not experimental. It cannot refuse attachment to the actual, existing political entity in which one lives and moves and marries and raises children, and for whose sake one’s forebears strove and fought and sacrificed.
Even so, evidence for the abstract kind of patriotism can be found at the very beginnings of the history of the United States. Alexander Hamilton contended in the Federalist Papers that the American nation was destined to be a test case for humankind, deciding whether it is possible for good governments to be constituted by “reflection and choice,” rather than relying on “accident and force.” Such a mission, he added, should conjoin “the inducements of philanthropy” — the love of humankind — “to those of patriotism” in the hearts of those hoping for the success of the American experiment. The particular mission of America, in his view, was part of the universal quest of the West and of humanity.
This aspirational universalism is a key part of American national self-consciousness. If Americans abandoned it, the U.S. would no longer be itself. But universalism has its limits and its pitfalls, of which Americans ought to be equally aware. It cannot alone explain what makes America what it is, and why its people love it.
The Gettysburg Address, for instance, is not only about the abstract principles of democracy. What makes it such a moving speech is the way President Abraham Lincoln grounded it in a tribute to the honored dead, whose deeds have consecrated the ground upon which they fought, and from whose sacrifice and suffering the rest of the American people are to take their bearings henceforth. In the loom of Lincoln’s masterful rhetoric, creed and culture are woven together seamlessly.
This non-creedal aspect of American patriotism is not always well articulated. One will have the best luck searching for it in popular culture, songs and stories. Indeed, Rorty would have done well to pay more attention to the music of the Popular Front, the fragile coalition of Communists, socialists and liberal democrats during the 1930s and ’40s, which gave birth to powerful songs such as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” written in 1940, or Yip Harburg’s haunting 1932 ballad “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” These songs appealed to the patriotic heart while decrying the inequities of the status quo.
But the power and reach of such music could not compare with that of the canonical American patriotic songs, in which a sense of home is ever present. “The Star-Spangled Banner‚” recognized as the national anthem in 1931, speaks not of the universal rights of man, nor the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, but of the American flag. 1910’s “America the Beautiful” mingles invocations of the American land with memories of military and religious heroes, as well as calls to lead lives of virtue and brotherhood. And there is little else but images of land and echoes of Heimat in Irving Berlin’s 1938 “God Bless America” — “Land that I love” and “My home sweet home” — which has enjoyed a surge of popularity in the years since 9/11.
That the composer of this last song, one of the formative geniuses of American popular music, was born in Czarist Russia with the name Israel Baline is both amazing and entirely appropriate. Even immigrants — who shared neither descent, nor language, culture or religion with the founders — could find a way to participate in the United States, not merely as an idea, but as a home, a place where they could be born again. Their experience illustrates the distance between actual American patriotism and the provincial or “blood and soil” nationalisms to which it is often ungenerously compared.
The debate between America defined as an idea and America defined as a home should not be based on the false premise that it is possible to be entirely one or the other. Instead, there is a vital and living tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals, which so often form the propulsive force behind the nation’s aspirations and reforms, and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture and the land. Yes, there are, and always will be, differences in emphasis. Let the debate between them continue! But the fact remains that both have a place, and neither will flourish here without the presence of the other.
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