WSJ: ‘Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes’ Review: Competing Loyalties

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the Wall Street Journal:

Today both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are testing the very definition of allegiance to one’s country….

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 emphasizes, 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 established by “reflection and choice” or “accident and force.”

Patriotism is such weak tea compared to nationalism. People rarely risk their lives for patriotism. They’re more likely to risk their lives to protect their family (and a nation is just an extended family). Academics tend to look down on nationalism, but it is the most powerful political force in the world for the past two centuries.

Yale professor Steven B. Smith writes: “There are two absolutely indispensable books on this topic. The first, by political theorist Maurizio Viroli, is titled For Love of Country. 2 This work admirably tries to disentangle patriotism from the tortured history of European nationalism. It is learned and wise but focuses entirely on European examples, and therefore it does not address the singularity of American patriotism. The other work, by constitutional scholar Walter Berns, is called Making Patriots. 3 There is much of value in this short work, but since it was written before 2001, it could not anticipate the renewed attention given to national security, immigration, and the rise of ethno-nationalism—themes that have framed recent debates over American national identity.”

Disentangling patriotism from nationalism is like disentangling margarine from butter. Butter is real and natural as is nationalism. Patriotism, by contrast, is a weak artificial construct.

Mr. Smith writes:

In 1782, a French immigrant named Hector Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer, “What is the American, this new man?” 1 We have never stopped asking this question.

One answer, standard for generations, is that an American is someone who subscribes to the principles set out in our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America is, on this account, a creedal nation, perhaps the first in history, with Americans defined by an adherence to certain beliefs about equality, liberty, individual rights, and limited government. This idea of America as a creedal nation goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville, who found the peculiarity of our national experience—at least in relation to Europe—to be the absence of a feudal past, that is, the lack of a tradition of hierarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and serfdom (which, of course, is not quite true). What impressed him most about the American experience was what he called “the generative fact” of equality from which all else derived. We could call this Tocqueville’s Thesis. It forms the traditional core of American patriotism.

To be a member of a family or tribe, do you have to subscribe to a set of principles? Of course not. Almost nobody cares about principles, but everybody cares about their interests. Citizenship is a legal category, but the feeling of belonging to a nation is non-rational and mystical like love.

As Tocqueville outlined it, the American creed was by and large a liberal one. It grew out of the fortuitous combination of an extensive territory, a Protestant political culture, and an entrepreneurial middle class that was at liberty to pursue its economic purposes largely free of government supervision. There was a pleasing openness and even universalism about these aspirations. The American creed was understood as a product not of geography, tradition, or inheritance, but of reason.

Culture, religion, politics and law are all downstream from DNA. As Samuel Francis noted: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”

Its principles were not “ours” in any parochial sense, but the property of all who wanted to participate in the blessings of liberty. Anyone, on this account, could become an American. It requires only a willingness to express support for our founding creed and live by it.

If anyone can become an American, than American has no meaning. If anyone can have sex with your wife, in what sense is she your wife? What does the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution state? “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The United States of America was created to insure the interests of its inhabitants and their posterity. At the time of the American Revolution, 85% of the American population came from Britain. America’s institutions were created by Anglos for Anglos. America’s first citizenship law in 1790 “limited naturalization to “free white person[s] … of good character”, thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks and later Asians, although free blacks were allowed citizenship at the state level in a number of states.”

Professor Thomas J. Maine comments on America’s founding:

Further, the obvious Lockeanism of the Declaration illuminates what the document means by “self-evident,” and rebuts far-right scorn of that phrase. Alt-Right progenitor Samuel Francis disdainfully comments that if Jefferson’s propositions were self-evident, “there would never have been any dispute about them, let alone wars and revolutions fought over them. No one fights wars about the really self-evident axioms of Euclidean geometry.”4 But the Declaration does not assert “these truths are selfevident”; it asserts, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”5 The claim is only that “we,” the document’s author and audience, already accept and demand no further proof of its Lockean principles, which therefore can serve as its warrant. The truths of the Declaration are presented as self evident in a rhetorical, not philosophical, sense and its argument implies no strong claims about their epistemological status. Indeed, the final language of “self-evident,” which was suggested by Benjamin Franklin during the editing process, represents a backing away from the theological and philosophical overtones of Jefferson’s original formulation, “sacred and undeniable.”6 Therefore the Declaration’s argument does not, as Francis and other critics have claimed,7 rest on the validity of Locke’s tabula rasa theory, or any theory, of human understanding or nature. Nor does the document logically assume the state-of-nature account of the origins of government, as Calhoun and other antidemocratic thinkers have argued, even though its exposition is consistent with that theory.

Mr. Smith writes:

Today this Tocquevillian conception of America America is under assault from those who regard Americans as less a creedal people than an ethnic nation. The new nationalism, not only in America but throughout the world, is about identity rather than aspiration. Taking a page from the multicultural left, it turns the nation into the ultimate identity group. Not race, class, or ethnicity, but national identity is said to form the core of peoplehood. The people in their collective capacity are said to define the nation—but what defines the people? The concept of the people and who speaks for them is one of the most contentious in current politics. It is a weapon for defining who is in and who is out. Nationalism is by definition exclusionary. Its appeal is often explicitly xenophobic, identifying enemies—both foreign and domestic—as posing an existential threat to the solidarity and purity of the nation.
The new nationalism was given powerful expression in July 2019 at the National Conservatism Conference held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. There a range of media celebrities, policy analysts, journalists, and academics sought to give voice to this newfound sentiment of national solidarity. “Today,” the conference organizer declared, “is our Independence Day”—meaning independence from neo-conservatism, libertarianism, and “what they call classical liberalism.” 3 The conference was intended to replace the shibboleths of the old conservative orthodoxy, like free markets and limited government, with a new awareness of the state and national identity. “Statist doesn’t mean socialist,” Aaron Sibarium, who covered the conference for The American Interest, has written, but it does tend to view the state as the expression of the nation and the nation as the vehicle of a collective fate or destiny. 4 Although the group sponsoring the conference calls itself the Edmund Burke Foundation, it seems to lack Burke’s Whiggish sense of moderation and political prudence. It aims not to preserve but to overthrow what it sees as the hegemony of classical liberalism espoused by John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, and Tocqueville. The face of national conservatism is no longer Friedrich Hayek but Martin Heidegger.
To be sure, there is nothing inherently illiberal about national identity. The nation-states that came of age in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the original homes of modern liberal democracy. National identity was seen to provide emancipation from the suffocating parochialism of family, religion, tribe, and clan. The term “liberal nationalist” was by no means an oxymoron; it could easily be applied to leaders as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, William Gladstone, Giuseppe Mazzini, Theodor Herzl, Walter Rathenau, and Chaim Weizmann. 5 Nationalism took a wrong turn only when (as inevitably seems to happen) it came to be regarded as the sole source of a person’s identity, a way of separating “us” from “them”—when it came to require a deep rootedness in a particular people and place, conferred by ethnicity, race, or religion. One of the National Conservatism Conference speakers, employing a claim that has since been widely repeated, alleged that nationalism is “an integral part of human nature,” common “to all human beings in all times and places.” 6 This would no doubt sound like a cruel joke to the millions of people who have been uprooted and rendered homeless by wars of national liberation. The idea that nationalism is as old as human nature would be disputed by every serious student of the topic. Nothing about nationalism is inherent to human nature, because the nation-state itself is a distinctively modern political form.

To claim that the National Conservatism Conference regarded Martin Heidegger as the face of national conservatism is absurd. Where did the conference do that? Who thinks Heidegger is the face of nationalism? Hardly anybody outside the academy understands Heidegger.

I get that the good Yale professor loathes Yoram Hazony and company, but does that justify lying about them? And I am not one who shies away from vigorous Hazony criticism. This is a good critique, for example.

What examples do we have in history of a people united around a creed? This is absurd. It is an impossibility. This is not how human nature works. For example, the Jews did not develop a creed until they had been around approximately 3,000 years, and even then every one of the Rambam’s 13 essential principles of the Jewish faith were denied by leading rabbis. I converted to Judaism in 1993 and have rarely noticed any Jewish interest in theology. I’ve never had a rabbi, for example, ask me what I believe about God. I’ve never had a serious chat with Orthodox Jews about moshiach.

There has never been a nationalism that has not centered on identity. It would be a contradiction in terms.

Mr. Smith asks, “What defines the people?” Well, what defines love? What defines family? What defines spiritual? Many of the words most filled with meaning have inexact definitions. A nation is a non-rational mystical concept whose definitions are imperfect.

When has nationalism been the sole of identity? That’s a straw man. Separating “us” from “them” has always been the basis of politics. Nationalism has never required deep rootedness in religion. All it requires is a sense of extended family. Religious enmity is usually just disguised racial enmity such as between Jews and Palestinians and Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. These are at core racial conflicts. Protestants and Catholics don’t hate each other in Ireland over different types of theology.

Mr. Smith writes: “Nothing about nationalism is inherent to human nature, because the nation-state itself is a distinctively modern political form.”

One does not need to have a state to have national feelings. Jews had national feelings before they had the modern state of Israel. Allegiances shaped by blood relations have always been inherent to the human condition, what is now known as “nationalism” is just one manifestation of this.

Mr. Smith writes: “This book is an attempt to reclaim patriotism—not nationalism—as the most fundamental political virtue. Patriotism, in the most rudimentary sense, is a form of loyalty to one’s own, one’s people, one’s community, but especially to one’s constitution or political regime.”

Good luck with that. I can only imagine the excitement that loyalty to a constitution and a political regime is going to engender. What normal person is going to love the state? As an Orthodox Jew, I can’t love any state, for example, that legislates same-sex marriage or promotes a transsexual agenda.

Philosopher Michael Huermer is much more in touch with reality than Steven Smith. Mr. Huermer writes:

Almost all societies have been highly ethnocentric. They teach their members that their own society is the best in the world. That their values, their institutions, and their traditions are the morally correct ones, and better than those of any other society.

…Maybe it’s because cultures that do not strongly endorse themselves are not stable. If people don’t believe their culture is good, they aren’t loyal to the society. They won’t act to preserve it, and they won’t sacrifice their interests to follow the social rules. Maybe those societies fall apart, get taken over by other societies, or just keep changing until they reach a stable, self-endorsing culture. That would explain why we don’t see a lot of highly self-critical human cultures.

…Here is another plausible way of eroding norms: directly, verbally attacking the foundations of one’s own society. Preaching that the society is founded on fundamentally evil values, that large parts of that society have no reason to be loyal to the whole, that its institutions are fundamentally just a sham designed to take advantage of most of its members. One can at the same time sow division by teaching that a certain group or groups in that society are viciously abusing other groups and are the cause of most of the latter groups’ problems.

…Why shouldn’t we undermine the norms and institutions of our society? Briefly, because we, here and now, are living in about the best situation that human beings have ever experienced in the history of our species.

…There aren’t any prominent elites in our society who are busy undermining our norms and institutions in the way I just described, are there?

Of course there are. Maybe most of the elites, in fact. Think about the 1619 Project. Its point is not simply to combat contemporary racism. Its point is to destroy the image of America for Americans – to convince us that our nation was always evil to its core. We used to teach students that our nation was founded on ideals of freedom and democracy; now we say that injustice and oppression are the foundation of our society.

The 1619 Project isn’t an isolated case. It is in line with the “Woke” narrative about America. It’s just one more example of their story that America is fundamentally evil.

What effect does this have on Americans? We don’t really know. But it’s plausible that it might have the effect of undermining respect for our norms and institutions. Some people explicitly take America’s allegedly oppressive and evil nature as a justification for rioting and looting. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t a good reason for rioting, etc., because much of human behavior is not terribly rational. After you hear enough messages about how the social system you live in is unjust and doesn’t deserve your loyalty, maybe you start to feel less loyalty to society in general, less respect for social norms in general. That’s especially true if what you’re told is that the society is founded on oppression of your group. So one can expect the Woke narrative to especially undermine respect for our norms and institutions among minorities.

What about conservatives and white people? What effect does the Woke narrative have on them? First, when they see disorder on the part of other groups, that probably encourages them to engage in similar behavior. If leftists are rioting, rightists will soon start rioting, and vice versa. Second, when they hear that their nation’s supposed noble ideals – freedom, democracy, equality, etc. – are all just a sham, that might cause them to revert to some much less idealistic values, like pure tribal loyalty. For most ordinary human beings, turning against their own group is not a live option. If they are told “Your group is inherently racist,” and they believe it, they will sooner embrace racism than renounce their own group. Tribal loyalty is ingrained in the human mind more deeply than loyalty to objective moral values.

All of this is terrible for America. It’s also especially bad for minorities. Success in any society does not flow from rejecting the norms or hating the majority. Those things are pretty sure paths to remaining marginalized and impoverished. That’s why Woke ideology is one of the worst things you could teach to minorities.

No doubt some people are going to say that they don’t know what I’m talking about, that they’ve never seen any divisive discourse from the left, and that SJW’s have no hostility for the majority of their society. So here are some actual quotations that illustrate what I’m talking about:

“Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

“The world could get by just fine with zero white people.”

–Sarah Jeong, NYT columnist (https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/acceptable-racism)

“OK, officially, I now hate white people.”

–James Livingston, Rutgers University professor (https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/01/rutgers-prof-officially-hate-white-people/)

“All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

George Ciccariello, Drexel University professor (https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/health/drexel-professor-white-genocide-trnd/index.html)

“Some white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole.”

–Irami Osei-Frimpong, University of Georgia grad student TA (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/04/u-georgia-grad-student-says-hes-under-investigation-his-comments-about-race-now)

This sort of thing does not bode well for our society, nor for the individuals who pick up those attitudes from the woke elites. You may get by with those attitudes if you’re in academia, but they won’t serve you well in the wider society, to say nothing of the harmful effects you’re likely to have on people around you.

…Our proposals for how to address injustices in our society should not themselves be unjust or chaotic. They should not, e.g., include harming random people or engaging in random acts of violence. I address this to extremists of both the left and the right. Random destruction is extremely unlikely to fix any specific problems that our society has. It just moves us toward chaos.

Stanford psychologist Fred Luskin is also more in touch with reality than Steven Smith. Mr. Luskin says: “What our brain does best [is] find out what’s wrong with this world…by highlighting danger and problems…”

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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