Reflections on Patriotism & Anti-Americanism

I recently pointed out the ambiguity in which the term “racism” is bathed. Today, I would like to consider two other terms that have played no small role in our political vocabulary, but which are no less ambiguous. They are “patriotism” and “anti-Americanism.”

Since I am interested in the former only as it has found expression in the context of America, whatever these terms may mean, they must be treated as opposite sides of the same coin: to be genuinely “anti-American” is to be unpatriotic, for American patriotism consists in love for, not animosity toward, America.

An American patriot loves his or her country. I don’t believe anyone would take exception to this proposition. But what does it really mean?

Doubtless, the vast majority of contemporary Americans to whom this question is posed -- and virtually all Republicans and Democrats -- will reply that the American patriot is one who has an unwavering commitment to the “principles” or “ideals” of “liberty” and “equality” on which this nation was founded and that are encapsulated in our “national creed,” the Declaration of Independence. I find this conception of America -- as a society constructed in accordance with abstract, tradition-neutral propositions -- to be self-delusional, but for present purposes that is irrelevant. American patriotism must be something other than this.

The “self-evident” and “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that are held to express a principle or ideal of equal worth to which American patriots are allegedly devoted are purportedly universal in scope. Both the rights themselves as well as the knowledge of them are possessed by all people in all places and at all times. What this means is that, theoretically at least, every human being on the planet could be just as committed to these “principles” of “the American Founding” as Americans themselves. Surely no one would deny that there are in fact millions of non-Americans that do indeed profess such commitment. After all, the presumption that Third World immigrants share this universalistic vision is what prompts Democrats and Republicans to labor inexhaustibly, attempting to convince the majority of Americans to relax immigration restrictions, and it is the presumption that this vision is what keeps the majority of Arabs and Muslims subscribing to the notion that Republicans, under President George W. Bush, try to elicit support for their “democratizing” efforts throughout the Middle East.

But if to be an American patriot is to embrace principles that are universal in origin and scope, and if non-Americans embrace these very principles, then it follows that they are American patriots! You see the problem? Love of country, like love of family and love of friends, is a local, not a universal, affair. The family man is not a man who has sworn to uphold “principles" that all “family men” in all places and at all times are equally committed to upholding; the “family man” is the man who exhibits devotion, fidelity, and love to his family. It is the tireless partiality he shows toward his own family that prompts us to laud him as a family man. Similarly, the American patriot loves his country not because of the universal principles that it supposedly affirms, but because it is his country.

The American patriot knows that his country, not unlike his family and his friends, has faults. But just as he loves his relatives and friends no less for their faults (after all, he is well aware that he has defects of his own), so he loves his country no less for its shortcomings. His country is his home. It is from its history, its institutions, its customs, its laws, and its people that the patriot draws his very identity as the unique person that he is.

The patriot will steadfastly resist evaluating his country in terms of ideal canons of “perfection.” A man who spares no occasion to condemn his wife and children because they have failed to satisfy his ideal of perfection is a tyrant, and one who judges his friends as such is ignorant as to what friendship is. Similarly, a man who relentlessly criticizes his country because he believes that it has failed to live up to some utopian ideal by which he is seized loves not his country, but an abstraction that is the product of his imagination, not a being of flesh and blood (so to speak), but a phantom.