{"id":137722,"date":"2021-03-09T11:33:17","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T19:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=137722"},"modified":"2026-05-13T13:25:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T21:25:45","slug":"wsj-reclaiming-patriotism-in-an-age-of-extremes-review-competing-loyalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=137722","title":{"rendered":"WSJ: \u2018Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes\u2019 Review: Competing Loyalties"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Wall Street Journal<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Today both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are testing the very de\ufb01nition of allegiance to one\u2019s country….<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A more \u201chumane\u201d and \u201cbenevolent\u201d sense of patriotism began to emerge in the 17th and 18th centuries, Mr. Smith argues. It sprang from the \u201ccivilizing effects\u201d of increased commerce among the European nations, which cultivated an enlarged set of relations that fostered prosperity; it didn\u2019t 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\u2019s country for being able to live within such a system.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cethos\u201d that nurtured their liberties\u2014not because they had inherited them but because they had chosen them. The opening paragraph of \u201cThe Federalist Papers\u201d proclaims that the key question facing \u201cthe people of this country\u201d is whether good government can be established by \u201creflection and choice\u201d or \u201caccident and force.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Yale professor Steven B. Smith writes<\/a>: “There are two absolutely indispensable books on this topic. The first, by political theorist Maurizio Viroli, is titled For Love of Country. 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. 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\u2014themes that have framed recent debates over American national identity.”<\/p>\n

Disentangling patriotism from nationalism is like disentangling margarine from butter. While margarine is an artificial construct, butter is as normal and natural as nationalism. Patriotism, by contrast, is weak tea compared to nationalism.<\/p>\n

Check out the blurbs for this book:<\/p>\n

\n\u201cSmith 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.\u201d\u2014Leslie Lenkowsky, Wall Street Journal<\/p>\n

\u201cLike you perhaps, I still regard myself as an extremely patriotic person. Which is why I so admired . . . Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. It explained my emotion to me, as it might yours to you.\u201d\u2014David Brooks, New York Times<\/p>\n

\u201cSmith has drawn intelligent distinctions. . . . [His] book will help prevent patriotism from fading to something only dimly remembered.\u201d \u2014George Will, Washington Post<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a cultural moment marked by divisions surrounding issues of race, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, economic disparities, and a host of other challenges, Smith\u2019s book is deeply necessary. . . . A needed light while we walk together on a dark path.\u201d\u2014John D. Wilsey, Christianity Today<\/p>\n

\u201cSmith makes a convincing case for patriotism\u2019s morality.\u201d\u2014Johann N. Neem, Los Angeles Review of Books<\/p>\n

\u201cA penetrating examination of the meaning of patriotism. . . . A well-argued call for civic renewal.\u201d\u2014Kirkus Reviews<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could not be a more timely or necessary work.\u201d\u2014Gabriel Schoenfeld, American Purpose<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a brave man who takes on the vital and necessary task of defining and defending patriotism from the left. Professor Steven Smith rises to the challenge, making a nuanced but forceful case in concise and compelling prose.\u201d\u2014Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World<\/p>\n

\u201cSteven B. Smith brings a wonderful blend of learning and lucidity to the most important question of the day: What does it mean to be American? At a time when Trumpian conservatives have revived the ethno-nationalism that runs like a dark stain throughout our history, and when many progressives regard the nation\u2019s founding principles as little more than hypocrisies, Smith\u2019s appeal to a patriotism of liberalism is as refreshing as it is vital.\u201d\u2014Robert Kagan, author of The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World<\/p>\n

\u201cIn contrast to those who see only a choice between xenophobic nationalism or radical anti-Americanism, Steven B. Smith shows how American patriotism can be a partnership in pursuit of a more perfect union. A valuable book that blends cosmopolitan learning with a deep understanding of what is best in America.\u201d\u2014Rogers Smith, author of That Is Not Who We Are! Populism and Peoplehood<\/p>\n

\u201cSteven Smith decouples patriotism from nationalism and reclaims a viable conception of patriotism from its critics on the left and right. Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes is a clearly written, historically informed, and utterly necessary book for our troubled times.\u201d\u2014William A. Galston, Brookings Institution<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mr. Smith writes in his new book Reclaiming Patriotism<\/a>: <\/p>\n

In 1782, a French immigrant named Hector Saint-Jean de Cr\u00e8vecoeur asked in his Letters from an American Farmer, \u201cWhat is the American, this new man?\u201d 1 We have never stopped asking this question.<\/p>\n

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\u2014at least in relation to Europe\u2014to 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 \u201cthe generative fact\u201d of equality from which all else derived. We could call this Tocqueville\u2019s Thesis. It forms the traditional core of American patriotism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

National feeling is real. It is also coalition vocabulary. The Anglo-Saxon Englishman of 1500 did not feel British. The Scottish Highlander of 1700 did not feel one nation with the Lowlander. American national feeling had to be manufactured against colonial regionalism through Revolutionary War service, common newspapers, common heroes, and common enemies. The nation became real through the work of making it real. Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) called this imagined community. The label sounds dismissive but it is not. The imagining is psychologically powerful and politically real. It is also constructed, and the construction is coalition work all the way down. Hazony’s covenantal frame and the blood frame are both ways of giving an emotional substrate to a coalition that needs an emotional substrate to hold.<\/p>\n

Mr. Smith writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Its principles were not \u201cours\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/a> “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.”<\/p>\n

Professor Thomas J. Maine comments on America’s founding:<\/a><\/p>\n

Further, the obvious Lockeanism of the Declaration illuminates what the document means by \u201cself-evident,\u201d and rebuts far-right scorn of that phrase. Alt-Right progenitor Samuel Francis disdainfully comments that if Jefferson\u2019s propositions were self-evident, \u201cthere 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.\u201d4 But the Declaration does not assert \u201cthese truths are selfevident\u201d; it asserts, \u201cWe hold these truths to be self-evident.\u201d5 The claim is only that \u201cwe,\u201d the document\u2019s 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 \u201cself-evident,\u201d which was suggested by Benjamin Franklin during the editing process, represents a backing away from the theological and philosophical overtones of Jefferson\u2019s original formulation, \u201csacred and undeniable.\u201d6 Therefore the Declaration\u2019s argument does not, as Francis and other critics have claimed,7 rest on the validity of Locke\u2019s 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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mr. Smith writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

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\u2014but 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\u2014both foreign and domestic\u2014as posing an existential threat to the solidarity and purity of the nation.
\nThe 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. \u201cToday,\u201d the conference organizer declared, \u201cis our Independence Day\u201d\u2014meaning independence from neo-conservatism, libertarianism, and \u201cwhat they call classical liberalism.\u201d 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. \u201cStatist doesn\u2019t mean socialist,\u201d 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. Although the group sponsoring the conference calls itself the Edmund Burke Foundation, it seems to lack Burke\u2019s 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.
\nTo 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 \u201cliberal nationalist\u201d 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\u2019s identity, a way of separating \u201cus\u201d from \u201cthem\u201d\u2014when 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 \u201can integral part of human nature,\u201d common \u201cto all human beings in all times and places.\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n

Another Heideggerian. Spare me the honor of being associated with that swamp.<\/p>\n

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) July 5, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n