American Principle, Memory, and Home

The thing we call “America” has never lacked for arguments over its self-definition. One could produce a shelf of books about them. But one of the most important discussions, one that has been going on for most of my adult life, is the debate between creed and culture — between, on the one hand, an understanding of America chiefly as the embodiment of universal principles, and on the other hand, an understanding of America chiefly as a very particular place, a homeland made up of a particular people with a particular history, and institutions that are not easily transferrable to peoples who do not share that culture and that history.

For most of the years since the Second World War, the debate has tended to favor the former position, the universalistic position. This has been especially true among the college-educated, who have been taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that American patriotism is a dangerous and narrowing sentiment, a source of chauvinism, arrogance, and war, an opiate of the great unwashed — a sentiment to be regarded by refined people with condescending suspicion at best, and outright hostility and condemnation when necessary. Global citizenship, whatever that grandiose term may mean, has long been regarded as a more worthy object of pedagogical attention. If one dared to speak favorably of patriotism at all, it was always paired with a domesticating modifier, a dutiful semantic chaperone that made sure that patriotic sentiment stayed within appropriate bounds. It had to be informed patriotism, or reflective patriotism, not the hairy and untamed autochthonic beast roaming the land by itself.

The belief that America is best understood as an idea rather than a specific place, however, allowed for a moderate form of liberal patriotism — a highly intellectualized perspective that could be maintained separately from the realities of one’s love for an actually existing America. The late philosopher Richard Rorty articulated this idea in a memorable and influential way in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. The title succinctly conveyed its argument: that “America” is an ongoing ideal not yet fully realized — that “the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln’s hopes.” Rorty highlighted authors and works, from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and the philosophical writings of John Dewey, which had served as guiding signs pointing the way forward. But it was the idea itself that deserved our loyalty.

The book was warmly received by those who saw in it an effort to reclaim the mantle of patriotism for the Left, in accents reminiscent of the glory days of the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this hope did not bear up under scrutiny. Rorty had the considerable virtue of being a clear writer, a virtue that made it hard to hide the thrust of what he was saying.

You “cannot urge national political renewal based on descriptions of fact,” he declared. “You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.”

The last two sentences are especially startling. Particularly fascinating is the fact that they come from a leading advocate of pragmatism, a philosophy that, whatever else it means, is committed to an emphasis upon the actual, the immediate, the concrete, the particular, as opposed to the ideal or imaginary or fantastical. One would have thought that a pragmatist would be less of an idealist, would have more respect for the sheer stubborn reality of the way things are, of the world into which you wake up every morning.

There is a big difference between saying, as Abraham Lincoln did in his 1838 Lyceum Address, that the great achievements of our founders are fragile, and ever in need of support and bolstering, and saying that our country does not exist yet, because it does not yet correspond with the dreams of enlightened intellectuals. This is the language of “unfinished nation” taken to its extreme.

“Achieving” our country is the sort of ungrammatical phrase that always should be a tip off that an intellectual heist is taking place. We do not use the word “achieve” in the way Rorty has tried to use it. One accomplishes a task; one does not “accomplish” a country. One lives in it. Unless, that is, one is a pragmatist who urges us to live in a dream country, rather than the one that actually sustains us.

A more serious way of making this point is to say that we cannot live in the world provisionally. Otherwise, we will reach the end of our lives without ever having begun them. A better pragmatist, William James, understood this fully. We must make choices, ultimate choices, very particular choices, merely to live. We are not born into a vacuum, or on probation from reality. We have specific fathers, mothers, families, neighborhoods, and contexts in which our duties and obligations are shaped. Our duties are to them, not to the fathers, mothers, and others that we would have preferred to have, had we been able to create the universe in a manner more after our own hearts. We cannot withhold ourselves from these many connections, including our country, until it meets our highest standards of purity. We do not have it in our power to reinvent the world first, and then and only then begin to live in it. The past has a reality, has inescapable sway, has authority over us. And we cannot be nurtured by that past until we acknowledge its reality.

A primal love of one’s actual country, like the primal and inexplicable love of Being itself, constitutes an enormous emotional and spiritual resource, to be drawn upon in all the endeavors of one’s life by those fortunate enough to have it. Such love is not synonymous with complacency. Nor is it synonymous with any particular ideological commitment or political identification. But it is incompatible with the idea of America as an open-ended experiment, an entity yet to be achieved, in which all options are open, all traditions are subject to dissolution, all claims are revocable, and whose Constitution is an amorphous living document that means what our judges and law professors tell us it means today, when they are not creating new things out of whole cloth. If everything is open to change, then nothing finally matters but the narcissistic self, the one still point left in a turning world. But this is a recipe for disaster, for lives stunted by the false excitement of a provisionality that is, at best, nothing more than an extended adolescence.

My point is that the idea cannot be an end in itself; the very concept disintegrates at the first analytical touch. It cannot be redefined and repurposed to a program of pristine detachment and endless critique, in the name of the highest and most universal ideals. The idea of America, like all great experiments, means nothing unless it is undertaken for the sake of what is not experimental. It cannot refuse a primal attachment to the actual existing political entity in which one lives and moves and marries and raises children, and for whose sake one’s forebears strove and fought and sacrificed.

But it is only fair to insist that the Rortyan image of abstract liberal patriotism is not the only form that America-as-idea has taken. It is much more deeply rooted than that. Evidence for this can be found at the very beginnings of the history of the United States: for example, in Alexander Hamilton’s bold contention in Federalist 1 that the American nation was destined to be a test case for all humankind, deciding whether it is possible for good governments to be constituted by “reflection and choice,” rather than relying on “accident and force.” Such a mission, he added, being universalistic in character, should conjoin “the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism” in the hearts of those hoping for the success of the American experiment. He meant “philanthropy” in the amplest sense of the word: the love of humankind. The particular mission of America, in his view, was part of the universal quest of the West, and of all humanity.

This strong sense of aspirational universalism is a key part of American national self-consciousness. We would no longer be ourselves if we were to abandon it. But it has its limits, and its fallacies, and pitfalls, of which we ought to be equally aware, particularly in the wake of some imprudent judgments we have made in the past three decades of post–Cold War American foreign policy. Vice President J.D. Vance caused unwarranted and overblown consternation in certain quarters when he stated that “America is not just an idea.”. It is hard to see why those words elicited such strong reactions. He did not deny the force of the idea, rightly understood. He denied its sufficiency as an account of what makes America what it is, and why its people love it. Creed can never substitute for culture, for the conditions that sustain its life and give it momentum.

There can be no doubt that a certain idea of America forms a key element in the makeup of American national self-consciousness. But it is far from being the only element. There is also an entirely different, and altogether necessary, set of considerations in play. As the French historian Ernest Renan insisted in his 1882 lecture “What is a Nation?” a nation should be understood as “a soul, a spiritual principle,” constituted not only by present-day consent but also by the dynamic residuum of the past, “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” which form in the citizen “the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.” These shared memories, and the passing along of them, form the core of a national consciousness.

A nation is not only an idea, in this view. It is, as Renan argues,

[T]he culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more — these are the essential conditions for being a people.…A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.

Performing great deeds together, remembering travails borne together…. These mark something different from an “idea.”  They mark a very particular force, a sense of belonging and membership, of an embrace of the past in all its human complexity, regardless of whether it aligns with Rorty’s standards of achievement. Our nation’s particular triumphs, sacrifices, and sufferings — and our memories of those things — draw and hold us together, precisely because they are the sacrifices and sufferings, not of all humanity, but of us alone. Pace Rorty, the Gettysburg Address is not only about the abstract principles of democracy. What makes it such a moving speech is the way Lincoln grounded it in a reverent tribute to the honored dead, whose deeds have consecrated the very ground, and from whose sacrifice and suffering the rest of us are to take our bearings henceforth. In the loom of Lincoln’s masterful rhetoric, creed and culture are woven together seamlessly.

This non-creedal aspect of American patriotism is not always well articulated, particularly in academic settings. One will have better luck searching for it in popular culture, songs and stories, where one can find the more primal aspects of American patriotism expressed with directness and vividness. Indeed, Richard Rorty would have done well to pay more attention to the music of the Popular Front, which gave birth to powerful songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” or Yip Harburg’s haunting ballad “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” These two songs appealed to the patriotic heart while decrying the inequities of the status quo.

But the power and reach of such songs could not compare with that of the canonical American patriotic songs, in which the sense of “home” and particularity are ever-present. “The Star-Spangled Banner” speaks not of the universal rights of man, nor the soaring words of the Declaration of Independence, but of the American flag, and it recounts a very particular story, the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, recalling a moment of national perseverance in time of war and hardship. “America the Beautiful” mingles wondrous invocations of the American land with reverent memories of military and religious heroes of the past, as well as calls to lives of virtue and brotherhood. And there is little else but images of land and echoes of Heimat in Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America ”— “Land that I love!” and “My home sweet home!”— which has enjoyed a surge of popularity in the years since 9/11.

That the composer of this last song, one of the formative geniuses of American popular music, was born in Tsarist Russia with the name Israel Berilin is, of course, both utterly amazing and entirely appropriate. Even immigrants who shared neither descent, nor language, nor culture, nor religion, could find a way to participate in the sense of America, not merely as an idea, but as a home, as a place where they could be “born again.” In many cases, they could articulate the meaning of their American home more winningly than could the native-born. Their experience serves to illustrate the immense distance between the actual form taken by American patriotism and the provincial or “blood and soil” nationalisms to which it is so often inaccurately and ungenerously compared.

It is no small irony that Woody Guthrie composed the America-centric “This Land is Your Land” because he was tired of hearing Kate Smith singing Berlin’s song, “God Bless America” on the radio in the late 1930s. But which song was the more provincial? The song of the middle-class Oklahoma boy, or the tribute of a stetl-born Russian-Jewish immigrant whose family had been chased out of Russia by a pogrom?

However, the point should be clear: the debate between America defined as an idea and America defined as a home should not be based on the false premise that it is possible to be entirely one or the other. Instead, there is a vital and living tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals, which so often form the propulsive force behind our aspirations and reforms, and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture, and the land. Yes, there are, and always will be, differences in emphasis. Fine. Let the debate between them continue! Let the debate keep its distinctives alive. But that fact remains that both have a place here, and neither will flourish here without the presence of the other.

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