The dark blot on our nation’s history that was Roe v. Wade has been removed. On this most American of holidays, that’s something to cheer.
The dark blot on our nation’s history that was Roe v. Wade has been removed. On this most American of holidays, that’s something to cheer.
T he overturning of Roe v. Wade will mark a historic turning point for American patriotism.
American patriotism hit its nadir during the flag burnings in 1970s Vietnam protests. American patriotism revived with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War. But even as many Americans celebrated, others felt that the writing was already on the wall. The analogy between our own epoch and the decline of Rome, for example, was much discussed in the 1990s. One of the main contributions to this discussion was After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, published in 1981 but with a long scholarly half-life (persisting into the present). MacIntyre wondered if things were so dire that we needed a “Benedict Option”:
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead — often not recognising fully what they were doing — was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettleable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.
For a while, such talk seemed misplaced. American patriotism continued through the ’90s, then surged after the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11. But there was a steady decline in subsequent years, as crisis after crisis reduced America’s faith in itself. And then it seemed to implode completely in summer 2020, amid Black Lives Matter protests with rioters attacking American monuments across the country. The 1619 Project threatened to erase even the Fourth of July as a national holiday. Even some conservative millennials turned on the American Founding, declaring that there was a direct intellectual lineage from Francis Bacon and John Locke to the Supreme Court’s 1992 proclamation in Casey v. Planned Parenthood of radical individualist autonomy: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Always, for Christians trying to ride the waves of proper patriotism, intent on “giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” there was the dark blot on our history of Roe v. Wade: the legalized destruction of millions of innocent children’s lives in utero.
Then came the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in Dobbs; four justices joined Justice Alito in shredding Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood into so much confetti. “Today, another half century later, more than half of the States have asked us to overrule Roe and Casey. The dissent cannot establish that a right to abortion has ever been part of this Nation’s tradition.”
Throughout Alito’s opinion, there is a steady drumbeat of the appeal to “our Nation’s history and tradition.” The spirit of Russell Kirk rises from the grave in the appeal to Magna Carta, 700 years of the Anglo-American common law tradition, Henry of Bracton, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Matthew Hale, and Blackstone’s Commentaries, and 35 of the 37 state constitutions in effect at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment.
Similarly, Russell Kirk’s classic Roots of American Order (1974) made the case for thoroughly grounding our understanding of American civilization in the older and more-venerable Western civilization — the extraordinary intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and political heritage of the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman world. American history and tradition rests on the pillars of five cities, according to Kirk: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia.
“The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” did not spring from the ingenious pen of Thomas Jefferson but flowed from a natural law tradition inkpot that was 4,000 years old. Jefferson’s forebears were moderns Locke and Sidney, but also ancients Aristotle and Cicero. A man as “illiterate” and uneducated as George Washington had a copy of Cicero’s On Duties in his library.
And when Martin Luther King looked back at “our Nation’s history and tradition” in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he filled in the missing medieval middle in the intellectual lineage Jefferson had sketched, citing Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on natural law.
Which brings us to how we Americans celebrate the Fourth of July. One of the weirder traditions that has cropped up in Fourth of July celebrations is the annual playing of the 1812 Overture. Yes, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Americans like to eat hotdogs and corn-on-the-cob while timing the grand finale of their fireworks display to the gawdawful bonkers of the last five minutes of the 1812 Overture, which call for live cannon, cymbals, drums, and “the bells of all Mother Russia.”
How this became a Fourth of July tradition is a circuitous tale, and most people just settle for the idea that Americans like loud noise. It does, from one view of the American founding, seem ironic that we love to play the greatest 19th-century anti-revolutionary overture to celebrate our revolution. It does seem a little loopy to cheer the red, white, and blue fireworks as “God Save our Gracious Tsar” beats down the liberte, egalite, and fraternite of “La Marseillaise.” But that’s what Americans do.
And that is what America has done ever since Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was banned by the communist regime after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. It started with an annual performance at Lowell House, Harvard. The college had even purchased the bells of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow — sold by the Bolsheviks on the black market to fund their regime — to toll when the score called for “the bells of all Mother Russia” at the end.
Next thing you knew, the Boston Pops had picked it up for their outdoor concert along the Charles River, with guys in Minutemen costumes to light the live cannon timed to the fireworks. Radios broadcast the Philadelphia, the Cleveland, the Los Angeles harmonic symphonies vying with each other for the best historic live cannon. No American patriotic concert is complete without the 1812 Overture.
Does this mean Americans are berserk? Or, rather, is there profound wisdom in such displays, which recognizes that the American Revolution had little in common with the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution? In our revolution, property was not confiscated, the clergy were not exiled, marriage was not redefined. July 4, 1776, was “a revolution not made but prevented.” The separation and balance of powers that Solon, Polybius, Cicero, and the British parliamentary government had sustained was rescued to fight another day.
So as you crack open a cold beer and run up the American flag, blast the 1812 Overture! Like the story of Tevye, fleeing Russia with his “Tradition! Tradition!” in his knapsack, or Aeneas fleeing Troy with the gods of his hearth and home on his shoulders . . . it is all just part of “our Nation’s history and tradition.” If we chart our new course by the Dobbs decision, it looks like we are back to the hard slog of shoring up, rather than opting out of, our regime.