On love of country
It seems hard to love the United States these days. Political despair, long a companion to some of us, has begun to curdle into something worse: contempt. Why should we work to sustain a republic whose political system has given us the choice between a criminal swindler and a listless octogenarian? Caring about the polity seems to mean accepting that you are a dupe. Resentment follows quickly on such thoughts.
One can see this resentment among Americans of widely varying political sensibilities. In that regard, the present moment differs from periods of more one-sided anomie that I can recall, though the country’s crack-up over the Vietnam War might offer a point of comparison. Then, as now, part of what we are divided about is what, if anything, makes this country great.
Those on the left tend to think the US has never been great, while those on the right tend to locate its greatness in a hazily imagined and heavily fictionalized past. The left is more realistic in pointing to the continued baleful influence of the country’s hegemonic foreign policy, while the right correctly sees social and family cohesion as goods that the nation has too quickly abandoned.
Both sides, however, tend to devalue the significant social and economic progress the country has in fact made over the past few decades as well as the extraordinary cultural and scientific achievements that still make the US the envy of the world. For these and other reasons—including simple attachment—I think this country is great and worthy of not only admiration but love.
What I want to argue here is that such love can co-exist with a healthy measure of bitter disappointment—but not with contempt. So, for this reason—among other good reasons (e.g. that it will make us miserable if we carry on living here!)—we ought to eschew such contempt.
I’ve written before about my relationship, as an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, to the idea of America. I explained there that my love of this country is in large measure a love of particulars, of particular places and people, though I am also sympathetic to (a certain conception of) its animating ideals and principles. But if we set all of our admiration on such ideals and principles, their inevitable abrogation will leave us disheartened.
I also argued in that piece that love of country is most centrally grounded in one’s love of one’s countrymen: those we know standing in for the innumerably many we do not. Of course, if all the countrymen we know are in our hometown or hail from our home state, our fondness for them may be more parochial, not yet capable of giving rise to a real love of country. How, then, can our love reasonably extend beyond the limits of our immediate knowledge?
My answer to this question is that, in the absence of experience—and, in all but the smallest nations let alone in one of its vastest, most of us will fall well short of the necessary experience—we need imagination. What I want to explore in the rest of this essay is how such imagination can be something other than fantasy, the conjuration of an imagined community—in Benedict Anderson’s evocative phrase—where no real community, or communion, exists.
I write on the eve of a holiday we are marking this year, albeit somewhat jocularly: Bastille Day, the 14th of July. Of the ideals codified in the revolutionary motto—liberty, equality, and fraternity—we tend to hear a good deal more about the first two in our own culture, especially among left- and right-liberals who emphasize respect for individual autonomy as the foundation of modern liberal democracy. No nation, liberal-democratic or otherwise, however, can survive without a felt sense of fraternité, which I will here refer to under its more-familiar guise of ‘solidarity’.
Solidarity, more than liberty and equality, is self-evidently an achievement, something we must work to foster and maintain. (Liberty and equality are, in reality, like this, too.) In living up to this value, then, we are given a task. That task, simply put, involves going outside our natural affinities to embrace a common social purpose with others.
One place you do hear about solidarity is in labor unions, where union members must trust their fellow workers, whom they may not even know, and face up to the risks of taking on their employer, in order to secure better working conditions and pay for all. Often, in a union, you work toward goals that are not for your own direct benefit, as I learned in my first season as a union organizer, when I was asked to work on a campaign to improve childcare allowances for graduate student parents at my university. I chafed at the role at first, not seeing what I had to contribute as an unmarried childless 25-year-old nor really understanding why we were pouring so much energy into the campaign, but, in doing the work and especially in talking to student parents, I quickly came to see the value—for everyone—of a university that is committed to the welfare of its workers in this way.
In political life more broadly, solidarity helps us advance the common good when our natural sentiments might tend inward, whether out of selfishness or mere insularity. In identifying others as our comrades, in caring for their welfare, and in living in hope of cooperation with them, we exercise a distinctly practical form of imagination. This practical imagination is not a naïve construction of a shared identity where none really exists. Nor does it depend on the affinities that supposedly derive from a shared heritage or ethnos. Rather, the practical imagination we need treats our fellow citizens as already bound up with us as sharers in the tasks of political life, as those to whom our political actions are answerable.
This political relationship—of citizen to citizen—is not one of intimacy. Aristotle rightly classes political friendship—his evocative name for the idea I am discussing—with business partnerships, as relations grounded in utility or benefit. But love does not require intimacy or even deep familiarity, as those of us with sprawling families can attest. Often, we love unbidden. Love of country is like this, too: choice, even where it is a possibility, is less important than a sense of affinity that is primordial and largely sustained by the recognition of others, though we sustain this love through our ongoing choices all the same.
I have been speaking of love of country and its roots in solidarity and its nourishment by political imagination in order to make a case for patriotism in the face of disappointment.
We have, as Americans, much to be disappointed about, even beyond the present political crisis. In part, we ought to be disappointed in ourselves, for allowing political disagreement to bring us to the precipice of civil strife. I continue to think, as a matter of sincere conviction, that most of my countrymen are decent people who would wish me well and want to find common cause with me. I have, over the past ten years, lived and felt too little in accordance with that conviction.
But we are also rightly disappointed in the members of our political class for their fecklessness and venality, in the corporate plutocrats who wish to control us even more openly than they do, and in the leaders of a wide range of social institutions for squandering public trust.
The political hope that we as a citizen body need in order to overcome these disappointments and to steer our political lives toward civic flourishing seems to me to depend on love of country. And this dependence is not only instrumental—as if this love were something to keep ourselves going when we would rather opt out in anger—but also intrinsic, insofar as that love guides us toward mutual understanding instead of recrimination.
Like many Americans, we celebrated this Fourth of July with gusto, watching the fireworks over the Hudson River with a group of friends after a lively picnic whose libations led to a half-ironic reading of portions of The Declaration of Independence—just as the UK Parliamentary Election exit poll was released—as well as to the entirely sincere singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. I confess that the fireworks were stirring in their vibrant grandeur, but more moving still was the joyful attention they inspired. We all looked up in wonder, then looked at one another.
Thank you for writing such a pivotal article about what American culture is truly suffering from, lack of solidarity. Independence and equality are not truly achieved without one's love for their neighbor. During another dangerous time of great polarization within the United States, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, "Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling."