I think most on the Crunchy Con blog have overlooked Maggie Gallagher’s most important (for me) point: the American tradition defies being rooted to one place. As someone who’s been in the military all his adult life, this is truer for me than most. The great (maybe mythical) American tradition says that our ancestors left England (or other parts of Europe) to escape being trapped into the same place, occupation, and social class as their fathers. To be American means that I am judged on what I do, not on what my father did. If there are better opportunities for me in other places, I should go. The military forces this on all its members, for reasons more related to readiness than virtue. However, we learn that the place is not what matters, the family does; and one can find a community worth belonging to in any corner of America, given a willingness to look and meet new people. My wife, three girls, and I have lived in ten different places in my 17 years in the Army. In every one we’ve found a vibrant United Methodist congregation in the local civilian community, a support group in my unit, and a group of friends, civilian and military, that we enjoy spending time with and that share our values. What holds these groups together is not where we live, but what we believe. Tying that to a geographical area cheapens the ideal of America for me. ~”Jason” quoted at Crunchy Cons

This man, Jason, is making the best out of what I would regard as a bad situation (10 places in 17 years sounds absolutely dreadful to me, and I can only imagine what it sounds like to more settled people than I), but it seems to me that he has mistaken the “survival” mechanisms he has discovered to keep his family and faith intact for something superior to an actual traditional community that is all together its own “support group.”

Refugees also come together and form communities to support each other after being violently uprooted and driven from their homes, but they at least have the good sense to recognise that a DP camp is not superior to the old homeland. Furthermore, they don’t willingly make themselves refugees as so many Americans do in their desperate, I daresay slightly insane, need to get away from home when they are young.

We construct an entire ideology about our history (and thus falsify our own history) that tells us that we have always been refugees from some persecution or oppression (the flip side of the “nation of immigrants” nonsense) and that our virtue lies in not getting tied down or being settled. Of course, what real refugees from persecution would have wanted was to remain where they were, and when they could not do that they would want nothing more than to create a new, stable and enduring home for themselves. But even if some of the first Americans were refugees from persecution, we do not need to keep running away from our obligations to imitate them in perpetuity.

Of course, someone once said that the great enterprise of American conservatives is to try to get Americans settled down. Yes, conservatism has been an effort to stop Americans from acting like refugees in their own country. That involves adopting a radically different attitude towards place, ancestors, history and custom from the one Jason and probably tens if not hundreds of millions of other Americans espouse.

Note the last phrase he uses: “the ideal of America.” This is a pervasive attitude in our country that tells us that our country must have or be an ideal, it must “represent” something. Not like those tired, old European countries or the ancient “tribal” affinities of other continents. No, none of that. No sense of place–not in space, and not in society. No ties, no limitations, and also no belonging except what you can conjure up with your fellow refugees. To the extent that everyone carries his home with him, refugees can try to recapture something of what they have lost in a new place, but it will never be comparable and there will always be a yearning for what was lost. All the more reason not to center an entire way of life around constant flight and movement. This sort of ideal American exists as a permanent exile from his own country, living nowhere because he has lived everywhere.

Government and military service facilitate this, and it is not entirely an accident of administrative and manpower needs. Constantly rotating bureaucrats and servicemen around the country keeps attachments from forming to any given place and secures loyalty to the institutions in question. This might be the occasion to note the extreme deracinating effect of military life on people such that they can only any longer identify with common beliefs and have no sense of place, which makes these people perfect soldiers for a government that conceives of America in just the same sort of abstract way.