Patriotism’s true spirit still glows

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: July 3, 2008

Hubris nibbles at rituals and fervor, and misnomers arise in their place, producing a distortion. Witness the devolution of a concept, American patriotism, whose form has splintered from its original, representing a level of metamorphosis reminiscent of Kafka.
It is common to recall the Declaration of Independence as having sprung from colonial ire over taxation without representation. This is an accurate summation of the American Revolution’s antecedent, but an incomplete one. Great Britain’s taxing practices were an expression of an empire’s tyranny, which spawned rebellion. The declaration’s authors recognized taxation’s capacity as a tool of oppression and so endeavored to form a union steeled by founding principle against the creep of totalitarianism.
That particular aspect of the spirit of 1776 is one that should be considered the nucleus of a unique American patriotism, one that celebrates not alone affection for one’s country but appreciation of individual liberty shielded from threat of tyranny from within as well as without. Variations on the original theme pose hazards that sometimes elude both parties and the prevailing political ideologies conservatism and liberalism.
Patriotism is construed among some conservatives as mere nationalism. This has been particularly evinced during the Bush years amid government incursions into the private lives of American citizens in the name of fighting terror. Protecting citizenry from jihadists is of paramount importance and sometimes necessitates extraordinary measures. But the potential for abuse in the exercise of those powers should not be ignored. Even extraordinary measures ought to have limits.
Further, debating the merits of war or other government action is a stable, generally, of liberty and, specifically, of freedom of speech, which accords Americans the right to champion views sage or fallacious. That notion sometimes has been lost in the fog of rhetoric over Iraq. Taking a position on war, even a negative one, can be an expression rather than a rejection of a distinctly American patriotism.
But statism, the bent of liberals, is another thing patriotism is not. President Kennedy is revered among his kind for his call to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” a precursor to Camelot’s civil service push. In fact, Kennedy was correct only in the first of his two declaratives. The founding fathers envisioned a place where a people freed from government restraint could work cooperatively with one another in the free market in “pursuit of happiness.”
America, in other words, was not to be a place where people were born in servitude to it. Rather, it was to be a place where individual liberty provided the substance of opportunity’s hope. Patriotic devotion, in the American sense, is rightly formed along ideological rather than geographical bounds. It is driven by a belief in the America that we originally aspired to be, not blind faith in the state we have become. The former is a cause worthy of the sacrifice of life and limb; the latter makes its people mere subjects, precisely the condition from which the founding fathers sought refuge for themselves and the Revolution’s progeny.
The Fourth of July as a marker in the cultivation of individual liberty is what we celebrate today amid the waving of flags, flutter of bunting and crackling and burst of fireworks. Assaulted by modernism’s gusts, that spirit has flickered but has not been extinguished. For the good of Americans and mankind, we pray it glows brighter.