Light On Dark Water

Patriotism and the American Creed

Last week I mentioned patriotism as one of three things (the
others being religion and love of family) to which a person of
conservative temperament naturally inclines. Thinking about the
different senses which many people may give to the word
“patriotism,” I thought I ought to say a bit more
about it, especially as I had recently run across what was to me
a surprising, and to my mind erroneous, definition of it.

On reflection I think this definition is probably shared by a
lot of people, and if that’s true it might explain some
misunderstandings. It came from a moderately well-known
conservative writer whom I won’t name, because I
haven’t been able to find the remarks again (I think they
were made in passing, where the main topic was something else)
and I don’t want to take the chance of misrepresenting
him.

At any rate, if I understood him correctly, his view is that
allegiance to the governing principles of a nation is the primary
component of patriotism. He seemed to be saying that one could be
an American patriot anywhere in the world by professing American
principles. This was not just surprising but startling to me. It
really shouldn’t have been—didn’t Chesterton
say many years ago that America is a nation founded on a creed,
and having the soul of a church? Still, patriotism is
not the name I give to that creed.

If I were to leave my wife and live with another woman, I
don’t think anyone would consider me a good husband because
I continued to speak of my wife in the most admiring terms. I
could not claim devotion to the abstract principle of my wife as
the equivalent of living with her. Similarly, if I were to move
to New Zealand—move there simply because I thought it would
be a better place to live, not because of some external
necessity—I might still fervently profess American political
principles: representative government, the rule of law, ordered
liberty. But I wouldn’t call myself an American
patriot.

My own sense of the word “patriotism” is that it
refers primarily, and almost exclusively, to love of one’s
native country, with “country” being a somewhat loose
term, not necessarily the same as “nation,” but
definitely referring to a place. I have a fair amount of
patriotic emotion for the United States, but more for the South
as a region, more still for Alabama, more still for extreme
northern and extreme southern Alabama, most of all for the
obscure crossroads in the Tennessee Valley where I grew up and
the small town on Mobile Bay where I now live. I have a deep
affection for these places not because I believe them to be
objectively superior to all others but because they are my
home.

I wonder if my kind of patriotism even has a place at the
political table anymore. Both the right and the left seem to
equate the word with a sort of ideological
Americanism—it’s just that the former is for it and
the latter against it. If I stop for a moment and try to think of
an American conservative who is identified with a particular
place or region, I can’t come up with any. The left
professes a sort of theoretical admiration for what is local and
unhomogenized, but doesn’t think very highly of the actual
incarnations of this abstraction, as is testified by the fury and
contempt directed after the last election toward most of the
people who actually constitute the so-called “Red
States.” Wendell Berry is an obvious example of a
contemporary commenter on political affairs who is deeply rooted
in a specific place, but views such as his are not much in
evidence in our political life at large, and neither the right
nor the left quite knows what to do with him. To tell the truth,
I sometimes wonder whether more than a few Americans even have
a home, properly speaking, anymore.