Time Essay: The Return of Patriotism

The new American patriotism probably started with the Bicentennial.

After Viet Nam and Watergate, 1976 turned into a vast star-spangled ceremony of self-forgiveness. Later came certain movies (Midnight Express and The Deer Hunter, for example) that were fascinating in their allegory: each portrayed American youth abroad, wholesome and handsome and lovable, yet in the grips of foreigners as evil as reptiles. This winter, Americans have been inclined to think that reality (whether in Tehran or Bogota) has confirmed the allegory. U.S. citizens are held hostage far from home; the dangerous and primitive outer world does not play by the rules, it seems. The Soviet Union rolls over Afghanistan with no more moral hesitation than an exterminator spraying pesticide.

A complicated impulse has stirred in Americans’ thinking about their country and its place in the world. Patriotism has reappeared, along with its scruffy little half brothers, xenophobia and chauvinism. In an odd but exactly appropriate way, the new sentiment was crystallized most purely in Americans’ jubilation over the U.S. hockey team’s performance in the Olympics—the Huckleberry Finn American underdogs whipping the Soviet superteam and then going on for the gold medal.

It was just a hockey game, of course; it had no bearing on American foreign policy or prestige or power in the world. And yet it was such a dramatically and symbolically delicious moment that Americans erupted briefly in spontaneous, childlike gladness. The very innocence of the conquest made it sweetly uncomplicated and morally unimpeachable. The nation indulged in small orgies of flag waving and anthem singing. At a Stop & Shop supermarket in Cambridge, Mass., the p.a. system suddenly blurted that the U.S. hockey team had beaten the Soviets. The store erupted as bags of cookies, paper towels and anything else handy were tossed into the air with pandemonious cheering. One psychiatrist reported his patients’ telling him how, for days, tears shot to their eyes when they thought of those American boys.

It would be a mistake to exaggerate the significance of the joyful outburst; in a tough winter for American morale, the Olympic hockey was a lovely diversion. Still, the moment was connected in some deeper ways to the emergence of a new patriotic impulse in America. It seems to many that the villains have moved overseas again; fewer Americans are transfixed by any evil within. They have the patriotism of outraged innocence (contaminated somewhat by association with the Shah and by the tales of SAVAK tortures). Americans, for so long vaguely depressed by endless quarrels among themselves, now find they are in an unexpected kinship of common interest and travail.

Patriotism has often had a terrible reputation. Samuel Johnson called it “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Tolstoy thundered: “There never has been a combined act of violence by one set of people upon another set of people that has not been perpetrated in the name of patriotism.” Patriotism is both indispensable and extremely dangerous, involving always the hazards of the self being ceded to the larger purposes of the fatherland. Hitler had a sinister little instinct for patriotic sentiment. Patriotism, or a debased form of it, raucous with jingo and the bully’s knuckles, has led the U.S. astray from time to time; citizens hounded German Americans during World War I, for example. They did idiotic and ominous things—fulminating that Einstein’s theory of relativity had Bolshevist origins, and acclaiming the neonativist persecution of immigrants with socialist ideas.

Patriotism has most often gone wrong when people have confused loyalty to the republic with loyalty to one government or another. Political leaders almost invariably seek to legitimize themselves by the d’etat, c ‘est moi “strategy that makes their own interests inseparable from the well-being of the country itself; disloyalty to one becomes disloyalty to the other. Thus the Nixon Administration had it that its critics were unpatriotic. J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI to try to destroy the lives of “unpatriotic” Americans like Martin Luther King Jr.

The unpredictabilities of the world have supplied Jimmy Carter with a kind of spontaneous American sense of national community. He has not hesitated to exploit the mood in his campaign for reelection. That is perhaps human and inevitable, but also dangerous. The politician who exploits patriotism for political gain, even if he is President, risks discrediting both himself and, more sadly, a love of country that has only recently begun recovering the self-confidence to show itself in public again.

At its truest, American patriotism has a sort of abstraction about it that makes it uniquely difficult and valuable: it is a devotion not to a specific physical place, gene pool, cuisine or cultural tradition, but to a political and social vision, a promise and the idea of freedom—an idea not much honored elsewhere in the world or in history. At its worst, American patriotism degenerates into a coarse form of national self-congratulation.

Patriotism should have higher ambitions. Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni sees the current stirrings as a fitful groping toward some kind of national unity. The most significant symptom he detects is the jump in the proportions of voters casting ballots in the primaries this year. Because of Iran and Afghanistan, says Etzioni, “we have what I call a hinge effect. All projections up to that point have to be redone. We largely put behind us the Viet Nam complex. This is the turning point in political apathy. We had a decade and a half of retreat from institutions, identity, directions and commitment. There was a tremendous yearning there, and there still is.”

Americans have a friskily self-destructive habit of turning even their best impulses into junk and kitsch; a Beverly Hills hair salon lately had eight models in tank tops and khaki trousers parading around the shop carrying flags and sporting new “military” hair styles. The entrepreneur turns militarism into a profitable fad. Love of country, by such associations, comes to seem vaguely sick and stupid.

It should be possible to love one’s country intelligently, without being either a schlockmeister or an incipient Nazi. (Anyone incapable of distinguishing between the Third Reich and the U.S. is a moral imbecile.) Patriotism seems so easy to discredit that it dies of contempt a few hours after budding. But the real problem is deeper. Americans who would be patriots must try to learn what it is that they have in common, what it is in the republic that is worth cherishing and preserving. Until they know that, their patriotism will have no more content than a bright, loud afternoon parade. — Lance Morrow