“Just” Loyalty To A Place On The Map
There is something amusing about the fact that Obama gave his address on patriotism the same day that this argument came out, since whatever truth there is about Obama’s alleged foreign policy “particularism” he reminded everyone today that he is not interested in any other kind of particularism:
That is why, for me, patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is also loyalty to America’s ideals – ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion [bold mine-DL].
Presumably, by “anyone” he means anyone in or from America, but that might be all together too geographically limited.
There are two ways universalists set up the distinction between what they think patriotism is and more common definitions that they reject. The first way is to say, “not that, but rather this,” which is the formulation preferred by George Bush and Joe Lieberman. As Michael related in his story on Lieberman:
His love of country is “rooted not in arbitrary attachment to our country’s land or its borders, but in a recognition that the values that were present at the creation of America and animate it still—the values of freedom and justice and opportunity—are not just our own national values; they are universal and eternal values, which are right and true not only for us in our own time, but for all people in every time [bold mine-DL].”
As I have already remarked to Michael, the attachment to “values” is far more arbitrary than attachment to “our country’s land or its borders.” There is something much flimsier and more malleable in attachment to “values” that makes reaffirming that attachment a constant refrain of universalists. The “arbitary” attachment to one’s land does not usually require so much articulation and constant reinforcement, because it essentially a far more visceral and natural attachment.
The second way is to say, ”not just this, but that.” That is how Obama has laid things out in his speech. So his patriotism is similar to James’ civic or constitutional patriotism (except that for James the relevant question is, “Are you a citizen?” and not “What do you believe?”). This is predictable enough for a politician, but there is something about such propositional patriotism that I find rather too dismissive of the “place on the map” and certain kinds of people. Of course, the “place on the map” isn’t your home, it isn’t the place itself, but a representation of that place through an act of abstraction and imagination of one’s land as part of this or that polity. Propositional patriotism is marginally better than the other “values”-driven patriotism, which defines itself by how unlike attachment to the country it is, but it still maintains the fiction that to be attached to the land and to certain ideals is clearly superior.
Why do American universalists maintain this fiction? It is to make an Americanist and exceptionalist point–your average, run-of-the-mill patriot in other countries whose patriotism is “just” loyalty to his place and people is somehow espousing a weaker or poorer form of patriotism. But it seems to me that a patriotism that is too tied up in “ideals,” like the “values”-driven patriotism, is more susceptible to the virus of ideology and exactly the destructive flinging of charges of disloyalty and lack of patriotism based on one’s political views that Obama deplores.
It also leads one to make rather bizarre arguments such as this:
I believe it is this loyalty that allows a country teeming with different races and ethnicities, religions and customs, to come together as one. It is the application of these ideals that separate us from Zimbabwe, where the opposition party and their supporters have been silently hunted, tortured or killed; or Burma, where tens of thousands continue to struggle for basic food and shelter in the wake of a monstrous storm because a military junta fears opening up the country to outsiders; or Iraq, where despite the heroic efforts of our military, and the courage of many ordinary Iraqis, even limited cooperation between various factions remains far too elusive.
Pretty clearly, a whole lot of things separate us from Zimbabwe, Burma and Iraq, and the reasons for tyranny or chaos in these places are many. Besides, it is rather disquieting to think of our patriotism entailing loyalty to certain political ideals, even when we may agree that these ideals are desirable. We may all find liberty to be a very desirable and worthy ideal, but besides the problem that we know how easily things done in the name of liberty can actually be detrimental to its substance there is also something, well, quite illiberal about making attachment to political propositions the basis or a substantial part of patriotic loyalty.
This is at the heart of “credal” or “propositional” nationalism, and reveals the land-plus-ideals patriotism to be a species of the same, and yet it bizarrely sits side by side with a claim about Americans entering our “fourth century as a nation.” While it is debatable whether you can refer back that far to only one nation, to speak of a nation that dates back four centuries is to make nonsense out of tying it to a creed or a set of ideals or political propositions, especially when most of the latter had not yet been fully formulated when the first colonies were established.
6 Responses to ““Just” Loyalty To A Place On The Map”
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I’m curious how you apply this principle to religion. Does devotion to Christ mean devotion to the lands and people of ancient Israel, or to the political entity known aa “Christendom”, or to the principles of conduct that Jesus taught?
Daniel,
I’m not sure why you left out the opening sentences to the paragraph you quoted, but in reading the transcript of Obama’s speech I found the sense of his writing much more understandable with them included:
“That is why, for me, patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is also loyalty to America’s ideals – ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion.”
The notion that patriotism is more than identification with land and certain groups of people is hardly a new idea, at least in America. The entire project of settling America and forming a federal government here requires that we identify with certain ideals that keep us together, because without those ideals we would not be a country at all, we would have split into many separate nations and Confederacies long ago – as we almost did. We are all immigrants here, a lot of us from not too long ago. Patriotism in this country is not the same as it is in the Old World, it is founded on abstract ideals as much, and even more so, than anything else, because that is what keeps us together, and has even helped create the sense of a United States, rather than a collection of disparate loyalties who patriotism is confined to the group or place of our birth.
You could certainly say that this has led to a peculiar strain of idealistic patriotism in our country which is different than that found in many older parts of the world. But it’s not something unique to Obama, it’s a characteristically American phenomena. It’s also something that can lead us into idealistic ventures in the world that other countries might not embark upon, which I think is what concerns you the most. But it doesn’t have to either. It merely requires us to be suspicious of those who try to manipulate our idealistic patriotism into serving the interests of those who wish to involve us in unnecessary foreign wars, such as Vietnam and Iraq, while recognizing that it serves us well in fighting necessary foreign wars, such as WWII and the Cold War.
What you are ignoring is that there really is a basis for American exceptionalism and American idealism. We really aren’t altogether like any other country in the world due to our unique origins and heritage. You might wish things were different, but that makes you an idealist all your own, just of a different stripe. This is how America is, and it isn’t going to change any time soon. I would think a conservative would recognize this and work with it, rather than try to deny it or disparage those who embrace it.
I didn’t leave out the opening sentences to the paragraph I quoted. I omitted previous paragraphs, but I quoted the passage in question in full. I didn’t say that the definition was new; I am saying it is questionable and there are reasons to object to it. I identify Obama’s move as one made by Americanists. I don’t assume that it is something that he is inventing. Every country is ultimately unlike every other country. Every nation-state founded in a colonial revolution is in some respects like the U.S., and in many ways it isn’t. I don’t deny that we have a unique history, but I deny the implication that our unique history makes us so significantly different from all other peoples on the face of the earth, which is what American exceptionalism tries to claim. Arguing with flawed visions of patriotism is part of how I am trying to “work with” what we have.
I got my quote from Sullivan’s site, in which the sentences I quoted were a part of the same paragraph as yours:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/the-patriotism.html#more
Maybe your source differs in formating.
I would severely disagree that every nation-state is founded in a colonial revolution akin to the U.S., or that it is composed of immigrants as ours is, or is similar in nature to the US. We have only to look at a country like Iraq, which is composed of several different groups with differing identies and loyalties, and hence a differing sense of what constitutes patriotism, and see that these divisions are precisely what makes American-style democracy so difficult and even impossible to impose, either from within or without. I thought this was one of the primary arguments against the entire American attempt to impose it’s values upon Iraq and the middle east – that these places have a very different political culture than our own, and are not motivated by the same political ideals as we are. You are actually suggesting that Bush was right, that all these countries out there are actually just like the US, rather than different, in which case it shouldn’t be so hard to turn them into democracies like ours. I simply don’t think you have thought this through, and seen that the notion that America is “exceptional” isn’t to say superior or deserving of hegemon status, but an acknowledgment of the realities of history.
[...] I think there are effective critiques of Obama’s understanding of patriotism, but Jonah Goldberg’s isn’t one of them. Who is a patriot in his view? He tells us: We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is. [...]
[...] This, though, is really only the flip-side of what Barack Obama believes when he claims that “patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is also loyalty to America’s ideals–ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion.” Those who oppose credal nationalism but who argue (against the record of history) that it is the only possible American national identity do as much as Obama to empower the federal state that imposed this abstraction on us. [...]