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Can Patriotism Survive the '90s?
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21901 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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7 / 1993 |
1,563 Words |
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Woody West
Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times. |
The decade of the nineties is a perplexing time, one in which respect for tradition and the value of its instruction contend with a disdain for our past and a denial that it has much to teach that is applicable in a brave new era. This represents both a logical extension of a pattern of national self-denigration that festered particularly in the 1960s and a complacency that seems to accept the folk tenet that God watches over drunks and Americans, absolving us of the responsibility to vigilantly and intelligently preserve American liberties.
In a stunningly short period, we have gone from Ronald Reagan, whose passion for this nation and its ideals communicated itself as utterly genuine, to Bill Clinton, who as a young man whined and zigged and zagged when summoned to his nation's service, yet now implicitly portrays that episode as a higher patriotism. We have moved from a day, not that antique, when the words "Thy mandates make heroes assemble" were sung as expressions of a self-evident truth, to the derisive "Amerika," in the idiom of the 1960s counterculture and its inheritors and imitators today.
To be sure, there are always those who resent the intellectual and emotional claims of citizenship, who consider such obligations a sham. They contend, for example, that patriotism is purely circumstantial--forgetting that while being born here rather than there may be accidental, it cannot erase the fact that you were born here, and that a lot ineluctably follows from that.
Nevertheless, in recent decades it is frequently the conceit of those who reject the significance of nativity (or adoption of place) to label themselves "citizens of the world." This implies that any adherence less than global is ignoble or insufficiently sensitive to our common humanity.
It may be, in some epoch to come, that national boundaries and affection for a particular place will have been subsumed by a broader allegiance. It may be, in that distant day, that the concept of patriotism will be so archaic that it becomes an exotic subspecialty for historians. Perhaps.
Until then, however, patriotism--the first cousin of nationalism--will remain very much with us. Indeed, the tender hopes of "global patriots" for a politically predominant United Nations aside, patriotism is likely to continue to animate a good deal of our world. This is not encouraging for those for whom nationalism is an abomination and patriotism low on their list of admired qualities.
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