Excerpts: “At the core of our identity are two conflicting narratives–by which I do not mean stories or histories but the basic beliefs, cognitive values, affective dispositions, and prescriptions for action that constitute our shared way of life. These two competing accounts are the bifocal lenses through which we understand ourselves. I will call the the narrative of return and narrative of progress” (p. 19).
“The earlier optimistic narratives of progress, from the Civil War to the New Deal and Great Society to the election of Barack Obama, described America on an upward trajectory toward greater justice and inclusion. While progressives once believed that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,’ today’s new age progressives view the prospect of piecemeal political reform as hopelessly naive. The optimistic narrative of progress has been replaced by counter-narratives of victimization and irredeemability that have producted racism, climate catastrophe, and an impending fascism foreshadowed by the election of Donald Trump” (p. 29).
“Nationalism may begin as a simple and uncontroversial demand to have one’s culture or way of life be strong and respected, but it almost inevitably turns into an ideology of resentment that feeds on anger and grievance. Even though nationalism is oftened confused with patriotism, the two are quite different. There is nothing inherently exclusionary or triumphalist about patriotism. It expressed a human need to belong, for service, and for love of one’s own” (p. 107).
“No period of history has done more to establish the idea of world citizenship than the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an attempt to bring the heavenly city down to earth, to establish in the here-and-now a new world order brought about by international trade and perpetual peace” (p. 124).
“Neither of the two dispositions described earlier–the nationalist or the cosmopolitan–captures the specificity of patriotism or its sense of piety, duty , love, and reverence. If the nationalist’s distinction between friend and enemy tends to reduce politics to war, Kantian cosmopolitanism tends to confuse politics with morality” (p. 128).
“Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are in fact doppelgangers, mirror images of one another that tend to magnify each other’s worst aspects. Nationalism fosters a fierce insularity that denies universal values of any sort. Cosmopolitanism uproots people from the local arrangements that most find worthy of reverence, and give life meaning and wholeness” (p. 141).
“What distinguishes American patriotism from that of Germany or Japan is that America is a creedal nation based on an idea. It is not sufficient in America to express loyalty to a tradition or to the ‘fatherland.’ One must be loyal to the set of ideas on which our traditions are based” (p. 143-144).
“In the modern world, constitutionalism is largely a legacy of the Anglo-American tradition–what Churchill called the ‘English-speaking peoples’–and the places that have been touched by it. Starting with early declarations such as the Magna Carta, the writ of habeas corpus, and the Toleration Act, and continuing to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, a consensus has slowly developed regarding the fundamentals of constitutional government, which remains an endangered species among political forms” (p. 147).
“As both Montesquieu and the Federalist authors argued, the people may be able to judge or select their representatives, but it is the representatives’ job to refine, enlarge, and enlighten the citizenry” (p. 148).
“A core part of Lincoln’s patriotism is that it is devotion to an idea or to what we stand for as a people. This aspirational quality of patriotism is connected to an idea of individual self-development and perfection. For Lincoln, only the full development and exercise of our human faculties make citizens capable of self-government” (p. 152).
“The kind of equality that Tocqueville cared most about was neither equality of opportunity (favored today by Republicans) nor equality of result (favored by Democrats), but a recognition of common human dignity. Ours is a regime that values the equal moral dignity of every human being, however humble, and this should be something of inestimable value for every American” (p. 191).
“Politics is the business of balancing and adjudicating between competing interests so that none gets so powerful that it can oppress the others” (p. 193).
“American patriotism at its best does not rely on indoctrination but on teaching and supporting the virtues of civility, respect for law, respect for others, responsibility, honor, courage, loyalty, and leadership–all virtues worth having and keeping” (p. 203).
Smith, Steven B. (2021). Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. New Haven: Yale University Press.