Although abstract logic and conceptual analysis are among philosophers’ primary tools, they must, as John Dewey emphasized, use these tools to “clarify the social and moral strife of their day.” In particular, surprising political events, like those currently unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic, can call for some serious rethinking. In my case, this has led me to reconsider my views about patriotism.
In 2012, halfway through Barack Obama’s presidency, I wrote a Fourth of July piece trying to explain my patriotic feelings for this country. My focus was an apparent contradiction in the idea of patriotism as a moral virtue. Patriotism seemed to require a commitment to the good of this particular country, even when its good was at odds with the greater good of everyone (“America First,” you might say). Love of a particular country appeared to conflict with the universal demands of ethics. I found a solution in the idea, expressed in our Declaration of Independence, that the American commitment to freedom was a commitment to the freedom of all people, not just of our citizens. My patriotism, I concluded, was a love of my country’s shared project of promoting freedom for all.
This ideal solves the logical problem of reconciling patriotism with ethics, but it looks bizarrely irrelevant against the current reality of American politics. The ideal implies that we are all somehow working for the same ultimate goal, which should provide a core respect for the views of our political opponents that will serve as a basis for cooperation and compromise in the name of our shared ideal. And, indeed, a ruling platitude of our day says we need to get beyond the politics of acrimony and division that obstructs decisive progress toward this guiding ideal. Viewed this way, the primary patriotic duty today would be to find some way to restore civil political discourse and a spirit of mutually respectful compromise.
But looking back at the last eight years and forward, with trepidation, at those coming, I’ve concluded that this desire for political civility is wishful thinking. In fact, our major political divisions rest on radically different conceptions of “freedom.”
In the broadest terms, those on the right cherish a nostalgic dream that hopes for a return to a golden past of traditional values and individual responsibility, whereas those on the left project a utopian future in which we reject our history of oppression and create new values of diversity and collective action. More specifically, some think freedom is essentially the right to seek wealth and happiness with minimal governmental restraint, whereas others say freedom requires governmental guarantees of basic economic security and full respect for the rights of marginalized groups.
At the extremes, some see our salvation only as a newborn Christian nation, whereas others call for a thoroughly secular post-capitalist society. Of course, there can be short-term tactical alliances that are mutually useful for opposing sides. But we deceive ourselves if we think there is some substantive shared political values that we are all seeking.
This point came home to me when I sought refuge from the trumperies of the recent election by reading “American Revolutions” by Alan Taylor, a masterful survey of the colonies’ break with British rule. I suppose I was hoping to find in our nation’s origin the shared ideals and high-minded political engagement so lacking in today’s politics.
But the history of the Revolution provided no such solace. Taylor’s narrative emphasized “the multiple and clashing visions pursued by the diverse American peoples of the continent,” contrary to traditional accounts of “a singular purpose and vision to the conflict and its legacy. The revolutionary upheavals spawned new contradictions and tensions rather than neat resolutions.”
In principle, the founders opposed all political parties on the grounds that, as George Washington put it, they are likely “to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” But from the very beginning bitter party divisions defined American politics.
Describing the clash between Jeffersonian Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists under the new Constitution, Taylor says: “Claiming exclusively to speak for the American people, each party cast rivals as insidious conspirators bent on destroying freedom and union. Referring to ‘the parties of Honest men and Rogues into which every country is divided,’ Jefferson insisted that ‘the Republicans are the nation.’ Federalists agreed with the polarity but reversed it.” Taylor concludes, “ Both parties believed that the fate of their republic hung in the balance.”
These revolutionary divisions set the tone for the subsequent history of the United States. The roughhouse of party conflict, not judicious civil debate, has been the norm. But our struggles for power were not only conflicts of self-interest but also of rival understandings of freedom. Should full freedom reside only in a governing elite of educated and property-owning men? Was slavery consistent with the “self-evident” rights of all human beings? Did the distinctive biological and social roles of women forbid an equal place with men?
We may think that we’ve decisively answered all these questions, but every answer has led to further questions about, for example, the role of wealth and privilege, the rights of minorities and the meaning of gender equity. And as America moved to a position of world leadership, these questions exploded into quarrels about what counted as liberation and what as colonization.
I would suggest that today our fundamental political conflict is over the place of the capitalist economic system in a democracy. The right sees capitalism as the paradigm of freedom: entrepreneurs creating the wealth that enriches both themselves and the nation. The left acknowledges an essential economic role for capitalism — at least for the time being — but also sees it as a fundamental danger to freedom, a constant push away from democracy and toward an oligarchy of the wealthy. Our task is to continue with vigor the arguments about freedom that our founders began.
The founders not only initiated our disputes about freedom. They also framed a Constitution designed to prevent our vigorous conflicts from leading to a tyranny that suppresses the political process. The idea was to have a variety of power sources — a president, two houses of Congress, the courts, the separate states, regular elections — each capable of taking the lead when necessary, but none so powerful that it could pre-empt the others. For the most part, these devices have proved effective. But recent events, here and elsewhere, revive the worry, expressed by Plato, that populist democracy can readily pave the way to dictatorship. Resisting this threat (and this temptation) is the first duty of today’s patriots.
The Bill of Rights, sometimes taken as a definitive statement of what freedom means, was in fact a hasty appendix to the Constitution and provided only a rough starting point subject to further amendment and continuous interpretive disputes. Instead of a vision of freedom, the founders gave us a framework for an indefinite continuation of their revolutionary struggle over what freedom should mean to Americans.
My proposal is that this endless, rancorous struggle for the soul of America is precisely what we should love about this country. Patriotism is not sharing with our fellow citizens some anemic idealization of what freedom means. It is a matter of engaging them — with everything short of physical violence, from compelling argument to deft political maneuvers — in the rough-and-tumble of political conflict over how we should understand freedom. This conflict remains our only way of working toward the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” our revolution sought. True patriotism now requires not reaching across the aisle; it demands mounting the political barricades.
Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” an anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
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Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His recent book, “Talking God: Philosophers on Belief,” is based on interviews published in The Stone.
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