Steven B. Smith’s Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes judiciously performs the needed task of recalling why the natural love and piety most of us have for our respective countries is not only decent but virtuous. Proceeding in Socratic fashion, Smith asks, “What is patriotism, and who is a patriot? Does patriotism require us to affirm ‘my country right or wrong’ or to protest at injustice?” Is patriotism really a virtue, or is it something we should progress beyond? And how do we manage the inevitable conflict of loyalties among country, family, and faith? These questions form the core of a set of extended reflections on patriotism and on its heretics and critics.
Smith defends an enlightened patriotism, which he is keen to separate from nationalism. The latter, according to Smith, is an ideology that becomes “the sole source of a person’s identity, a way of separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’” Nationalism, in this view, distorts the citizen’s attachment to country by insisting that “national identity is the core of peoplehood.” This means that nationalism is the ultimate form of identity politics, Smith says.
Patriotism, Smith writes, “is an old, even an ancient, disposition,” and, for that reason, “it’s harder to define.” “Patriot” and “patriotism” go back to the Greek patris (place of your ancestors) and Latin patria (fatherland). Smith adds that both words “are inseparable from the word politics.” This lineage implies that patriotism, rather than being a dysfunctional quality of misplaced aggression or a pitiable sentiment that rubes indulge, is actually rooted in the nature of the person. Following Aristotle, Smith says we are political animals who necessarily form attachments to laws, history, symbols, and memories that contain the record of our nation’s formation and development. Does it not stand to reason then that the patriotism expressed by citizens contains their “highest ideals and commitments” and their “devotion to the republic and the way of life for which it stands”?
Patriotism has been “contested” since the beginning and remains so in the hands of contemporary thinkers. Aristotle observed that one could be both a good man and a good citizen, but a good man had universal qualities elevating him above the regime-specific qualities of a good citizen. And Aristotle said that a bad regime made it impossible to be a good citizen. There were no good Nazi citizens. Modern Enlightenment liberalism decries patriotism as a constricting and false understanding of how human beings should live together. Smith takes on two complementary critiques of patriotism made by leading academic thinkers in this tradition, Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb.
Nussbaum builds on a Stoic philosophical conception of cosmopolitan citizenship, relying extensively on the Greek thinker Diogenes, along with Alexander the Great and the Roman philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius. She argues that our local connections and ties can matter, but that we should really think and act in terms of our shared humanity. Patriotism, for Nussbaum, is ultimately childish and involves “finding in an idealized image of a nation a surrogate parent who will do one’s thinking for one.” As Smith notes, “Nussbaum’s advice is simple: grow up.” We are citizens of the world, more or less.
Smith describes Nussbaum’s world citizenship as an oxymoron, a technical impossibility. It is a gauzy sentiment, believed by virtually no one except for certain global-minded elites and fuzzy-headed intellectuals. Nussbaum’s examples of Alexander and Marcus Aurelius, who expressed admiration for universalism, are instructive, Smith thinks. These men operated within the realm of empires; their imaginations were inspired by outsized political orders that had gobbled up lesser entities. Yet they too were not and could not be citizens of a global humanist empire. Smith’s advice to Nussbaum: Get serious, please.
Kateb argues that patriotism backs us into a black-and-white world of friends and enemies by requiring an unconditional obedience that marginalizes dissenters. He is unable to find any benefit in national loyalty, however humane. Kateb’s arguments ignore the many healthy examples of patriotism that are not premised on domination of others but on belief in and respect for the goodness of one’s country. Smith makes a basic distinction: “There is surely a difference between men and women who go to war in the service of preserving democracy, and those who do so to spread tyranny.” That patriotism could be corrupted or disordered doesn’t make it wrong or prove that we should abolish it. However, might patriotism be an illusion?
Hannah Arendt raised this question with her response to Gershom Scholem’s criticisms of her coverage in The New Yorker of the trial in Israel of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Arendt lambasted the Israeli tribunal that prosecuted Eichmann, questioning its very legitimacy. According to Scholem, Arendt, writing only a couple of decades after the Holocaust, did not display a proper love for the Jewish people, her people. She replied that “she could not love an abstraction like a people, only individual persons.” Arendt acted absurdly, Smith concludes. When we say we love our people, we know we are not claiming them as our close friends or family; we mean that we possess gratitude for our countrymen and for who we are as a people. What Arendt needed, Smith says, is the Yiddish term “mishpocheh,” which means “family” but is not limited to blood relations. It includes those we do not even directly know, “but we know them when we see them.” They are our fellow citizens, neighbors with whom we share a legacy, including a political one. As a result, these people aren’t strangers, and we extend to them a certain trust. Humorously illustrating this point, Smith recalls the old slogan “You have a friend at Chase Manhattan,” to which the Bank of Israel slyly responded: “Here you have mishpocheh.”
Political loyalty has come under direct strain in recent times and from different directions, decreasing the ability for vast cross sections of the citizenry to maintain loyalty to a common set of constitutional principles, memories, history, and heroes as the focal point of citizenship. Smith identifies two forms of, shall we say, political heresy that build on worthy aspects of politics but ultimately deny human flourishing.
Smith describes Donald Trump’s right-wing nationalism as one heresy plaguing American patriotism. From the left, there are two developments: a globalist mindset that regards the nation and its standards as passé and beneath the coming borderless humanitarian future, and a multicultural ideology that replaces American citizenship with a set of tribal ethnic, racial, and group identities whose claims against a racist and sexist past must be vindicated. All three are “dehumanizing,” Smith says. He does not consider in this critique that many who supported Trump did so for the very same patriotic motivations that the author defines in the book. Their approval of Trump issued from a strong perception that both globalism and multiculturalism were undermining American patriotism. Most Trump voters were not compelled by the kind of ideological nationalism that Smith attributes to them.
Smith also articulates the inescapable need for loyalty, rightly understood. Loyalty, he argues, “is a foundational virtue that undergirds all forms of social relations.” But this definitely does not mean that any loyalty will do or that there can’t be pathological forms. The problem is that solidarity within any political order requires it.
In opposition to the notion that loyalty leads inexorably to irrational behavior and litmus tests, Smith discusses Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), which teaches us that loyalty matters only if there is an ability to exit a particular political system. In a free society, loyalty combined with the ability to exit helps to discipline overweening governments. By investing us in the political order through the bonds of love and memory, loyalty leads us to reform and improve that order precisely because it is ours. Smith might have added that it’s loyalty that keeps us calm when our party and ideas lose an election or two. We abide by the results because of a loyalty to the Constitution and the historical nation that stands above our momentary defeat and guarantees the loser the future opportunity to shape politics and elections.
We can explore American patriotism in particular by reasking the question first asked in 1782 by a French immigrant, Hector Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, in his Letters from an American Farmer: “What is the American, this new man?” Surely an American patriotism would be constituted by the kind of life one makes in this country and how laws and culture uphold it. Crèvecoeur’s essay reflected on free labor, material gain, and choice of religion, among other elements of an emerging American way of life. Smith calls Crèvecoeur’s letter the beginning of America’s creedal patriotism, the idea that one can choose to become an American by taking on the country’s way of life. American patriotism is appropriable by newcomers.
Smith further links the creedal nation to the Declaration and the Constitution, with equality, liberty, individual rights, and limited government as key elements. But Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is the deep, foundational teaching of America as creedal, Smith observes. Tocqueville outlined America’s creed in our social and political culture and entrepreneurial spirit. And the creed is now under assault. But is the creed enough?
Tocqueville’s notion of patriotism underscores that American liberty is a precious inheritance that must be upheld. But he also articulates that patriotism here and elsewhere is about habits, dispositions, ways of life, and love for the nation itself. We must be loyal to the law that exists in this land, this territory, and to the political-cultural memory contained within these borders. Smith might agree with this, but it means that creedal patriotism isn’t a sufficient or comprehensive understanding of patriotism — our loyalty is to a political entity whose meaning cannot be protean or infinitely elastic. There must be, as Smith terms it, an “ethos” arising from our history that shapes our political home and elicits our devotion. And that ethos, as Tocqueville knew, can also be providentially given.
The conservative comes by patriotism honestly and can articulate it without much reflection. Love of country, its symbols, ideas, battles, and heroes and heroines, is something we conservatives just know and understand. We live it in our hips and shoulders. Thus our confusion and, at times, anger at the latest provocations from many members of the progressive Left and their globalist or anywhere-and-nowhere allies. For them, patriotism and national loyalty are a style crime at best and a matter of grave immorality at worst. In many countries in the West, including the United States, matters have now progressed to the point where the love of country is dismissed outright on the ground that our history is a long record of abuses and injustices that cry out for vast redress. Patriotism is replaced by a nihilist project of repudiation as our highest activity.
Should such movements continue to grow in power, our national celebration days, a common national history and education, and devotion to and faith in our country and its foundational law will become deeply problematic. Such is the aim of the 1619 Project, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the mind-control strategy of anti-racist pedagogy. Smith describes these deleterious movements but pulls his punches somewhat in outlining their true intent. How can we love a country built on slavery, where structural racism causes and explains all differences among races in education, wealth, and career attainments? Who would seek its common good rather than a racialized socialist makeover?
A different problem confronts us with conspiratorial conservatism and its belief that our national situation is so dire that extreme measures and campaigns are called for to save the country. I speak of a certain type of conservatism that sees only friends and enemies. This is the element of the Right that still wants to follow Trump, and not necessarily to seek political victory but to inflict pain and insults on opponents.
We find ourselves seemingly at the dawn of various illiberalisms, one of whose qualities is the inability to understand and cherish a humane national loyalty and how its civic goods uphold a free and dignified life for citizens with different religious, political, and ethnic loyalties and attributes. Before the “widening gyre” delivers us to a “blood-dimmed tide,” we might seek a sober knowledge of why patriotism is something we are predisposed to and how it can order our affections properly. Smith’s book is invaluable in this regard. We can then label the illiberal enthusiasms that masquerade as justice for what they really are: ideological fronts that would impose a dogmatic reconstruction of political, economic, and social reality.
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