RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like many people in my neighborhood, I had an American flag ready to display when the nation’s big, beautiful birthday rolled around on Friday. I live in a small New England neighborhood where July 4 is a big deal. The 20-odd children who live here form an honor guard that parades briefly and lays a wreath at the foot of a tiny war monument. We raise the flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then a respected local addresses us after we sing the National Anthem. The ACLU hasn’t got wind of our activities yet, so we even engaged a friendly cleric to perform a benediction.

By contemporary standards, this exhibition of patriotic sentiment seems quaint. But I have always found the event moving and thought-provoking. It reminds me of how lucky I am to be an American, and it leads me to reflect on the extraordinary political genius that forged American liberty and made it, as Lincoln said in a fraught moment in 1862, “the last, best hope of earth.”

This year, preparing for the holiday festivities, I dusted off my copy of Making Patriots by the late political philosopher Walter Berns (1919–2015). I am glad I did. This brief, eloquent book is a beautiful tribute to patriotism, lately a much-besieged civic virtue (though Donald Trump is doing yeoman’s work to rescue it). Berns begins by noting that although Lincoln’s words are even more obviously true today than before, the patriotism that Lincoln commended (and which he knew was necessary to guarantee liberty) no longer enjoys widespread public support, at least among this country’s elites.

Lincoln is the hero of Making Patriots, in part because the patriotism he espoused has been threatened by a culture increasingly bent on unmaking patriots. Of course, some version of the annual ceremony in my neighborhood was enacted across the U.S., with special fervor wherever the MAGA dispensation holds sway. But there are many other forces in our society that conspire to ridicule or otherwise undermine patriotic sentiment.

For many educated people today, mention of the word “patriotism” instantly brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s misunderstood observation that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It is misunderstood because, as Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell explained when reporting the phrase, Johnson did not mean to disparage “a real and generous love of our country” but only that “pretended patriotism” that is a “cloak for self-interest.”

Making Patriots is an antidote to the poison of casual anti-patriotism. It reminds us that liberty without patriotism cannot long survive. This is not to say that Berns recommends unthinking allegiance to flag and country. He points out that when Stephen Decatur made his famous toast to “our country, right or wrong” in 1816, he “could be accused of being un-American” because he was substituting unthinking chauvinism for reasoned commitment.

A large part of Making Patriots is devoted to explaining the exceptional nature of the American idea. Every schoolboy is—or used to be—regaled with stories about the amazing bravery of the ancient Spartans, whose mothers told their sons to return from battle either with their shields or on them. But American patriotism has always been markedly different from the Spartan variety and even from the patriotism displayed in ancient Athens, a commercial, democratic polity in many ways more congenial to modern tastes.

What makes America different is that the foundation of its patriotism is not place but principle. The word “fatherland,” Berns notes, does not occur in our patriotic vocabulary because our allegiance is not first of all to our native land (the word “nation” comes from the Latin nasci, “to be born”) but to the ideas of freedom that animate it. America really is that paradoxical thing, a “nation” of settlers from other lands. The principles of liberty and popular sovereignty, articulated in such documents as The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, gave rise to what Berns observes was “an altogether new” understanding of what it means to be a patriot. The novus ordo seclorum—“a new order of the ages”—inscribed on our currency commemorates this permanent novelty.

The fact that American patriotism has its foundation primarily in an idea of freedom whose home lies with the will of the people means that we must depend heavily on our educational institutions to inculcate it. Noah Webster spoke for many when he said that “every child in America should be acquainted with his own country,” not only with its history and geography but also with its principles and its “illustrious heroes and statesmen.”

Webster’s high mandate, however, was steadily eroded over the course of the 20th century. America’s Founders insisted on a separation of church and state, but they also, Berns observes, “intended to promote religious belief even as they strove to discourage religious fanaticism.” Over the course of decades, legislatures and, especially, the courts conspired in one decision after another to undermine the moral and civic education that nurtures patriotic citizens. For example, in 1991, the state of Florida enacted a statute requiring public schools to teach that no “culture is intrinsically superior or inferior to another.” As Berns argues, this was tantamount to telling immigrants from Cuba or Haiti that they might just as well have stayed home.

The purpose of civics courses in the past was to instill respect for the principles that formed America. The question now, Berns notes, is whether the private realm can take up the slack. We are all the beneficiaries of patriotism. Whether we are continuing the necessary task of making patriots is the challenge this profound book invites us to ponder.