Patriotism in Time

Patriotism in Time:

I have written more about patriotism in these pages than is easy even to link to; all of you know how to use Google if you are curious about what has been said. Still, I note with some pleasure this piece by Peter Beinart in Time Magazine. It attempts to compare what he calls liberal and conservative ideas about patriotism, but finally asserts that the conservatives are right -- as long as they don't go too far with it.

Actually, conservatives are right absolutely on this particular matter. "Patriotism" is a word with an etymology, as we discussed very recently, while debating just the same question Beinart treats this week. The meaning of the thing is encoded in the word itself.

If America is a woman, she is your mother.

You should love her because she bore you into the world, and gave you every chance you had as a youth. You should love her because she defended you, nursed you while you were weak, and gave you a chance to grow strong. You should love her without failing because it is your duty, and because no man can hate his mother without destroying a part of himself.

Of course, "patriotism" is from the Latin patria, in turn derived from Pater, which means "Father." Still, it is usual to think of America as being a woman, in part because the name takes a feminine form. Whether you love her as a mother or as a father, however, love her that way.

Beinart quotes JFK in citing Faust:

He liked to cite Goethe, who "tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.'" Americans risked a similar fate, Kennedy warned, "if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress ... Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future."

But this is a misreading of Faust. Faust was damned on the point only because he had the arrogance to claim that nothing could be good enough for him. Like the modern antipatriot, judging America as too flawed to merit his loyalty, it was his arrogance that doomed him. He believed he could see all the possibilities of creation, as the antipatriot believes he understands fully all the issues he judges from America's history: neither allows doubt that they could be mistaken. Demons work on such pride.

It was not the love of the moment that doomed Faust, but his arrogance in believing that creation could not make a thing or a moment that could merit that love. And yet you may find love like that in the street. Look at Chesterton's poem, Femina contra Mundum, in which he describes the words of a man called to Judgment; and the man has looked on a woman through a cottage door left carelessly open, and weighed the stars and mountains worth less than her:

'For I had weighed the mountains in a balance,
And the skies in a scale,
I come to sell the stars -- old lamps for new --
Old stars for sale.'

Then a calm voice fell all the thunder through,
A tone less rough:
'Thou hast begun to love one of my works
Almost enough.'

That is the love that pays this debt, this debt for everything you are or could have been; the debt for nurturing you in your weakness, giving you whatever strength you have, whatever wisdom. If you will not recognize your personal liability for that debt, you are not a patriot.

You could still be right -- George Washington had many virtues, and was surely correct in his undertakings, but one thing he cannot claim is to have lived as a patriot of his king and country. We do not esteem him less for that. If a nation sets aside the natural rights of mankind, it becomes a tyranny, and not patriotism but separation or destruction is the duty of its citizens. This view is the birthright of Americans, and it is a longstanding complaint of mine against our hard left that they will not accept it. If America is as bad as they so often claim, they have duties beyond mere complaint. If she is evil, fight her. If she is not, fight for her.

Those who whine on the sidelines are the ones I detest. Even William Ayers at least fought, in his way. I wish he had been hanged for it, but I respect him ten times as much as I do any number of beardless men I have met who did nothing but snark about 'America's sins,' as if they too had lived two hundred years, and could judge her as a peer. At least Ayers had courage enough to fight as well as talk, and that redeems him somewhat.

America is a fighting faith. Beinart gets that right:

So is wearing the flag pin good or bad? It is both; it all depends on where and why. If you're going to a Young Americans for Freedom meeting, where people think patriotism means "my country right or wrong," leave it at home and tell them about Frederick Douglass, who wouldn't celebrate the Fourth of July while his fellow Americans were in bondage. And if you're going to a meeting of the cultural-studies department at Left-Wing U., where patriotism often means "my country wrong and wronger," slap it on, and tell them about Mike Christian, who lay half-dead in a North Vietnamese jail, stitching an American flag.

With that, I have no argument at all. A true patriot must love his country enough to want to leave it to his sons as he got it from his fathers, pure, with its ideals as well as its physical attributes intact. If anything, he should wish to perfect it, extend it, and make it ever purer.

What I like best about his formulation is that it puts the actor in an eternal fight for his nation. When he goes here, he should fight this way for her; when he goes there, fight for her that way.

That's the thing, the real thing. It is the love that stands off the world.