The decline of patriotism has been a long observable trend in American cultural and political life for the past half a century. According to a June 2023 Gallup survey, only 39% of U.S. adults are “extremely proud” to be American, showing a sharp decline from a healthier, more vibrant era in America’s past. I contend that this is because America has lost its grasp on its identity. American history has re-examined its central figures like Jefferson and has found them burdened with very real sins, above all, that of slavery; great American heroes have been torn down from their pedestals, quite literally for the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, who had his statue in the Capitol replaced in 2019. If Plato compared the love of country to the love of one’s parents, then what greater love is there than to live one’s life in service to their country? Yet it seems here, too, Americans prove reluctant with fewer and fewer Americans willing to serve in the army. In 2023, the army missed its recruitment target by ten thousand. The crisis of patriotism is no mere side issue rather it is the pressing issue of public life. Old wedge issues that once divided the country like farm policy have been sidelined. All areas of policy, from national security as aforementioned, to taxation and healthcare, are now underlined by the central question of what America is, and how it ought to be loved. The path to patriotism’s renewal can only be found in the answer of that question, and the answer to that question can only be found by a careful investigation into history and an observation of the social landscape of most Americans' lives. The decline in patriotism has been sharp and shocking, but it was not an inevitable one. I shall explore how this has come to be, and how Americans have a way out.
No easy answers where blame can be put on “wokery”, or liberalism gone rampant, suffice precisely because American patriotism has survived previous liberal and left-wing turns. Grand liberal figures like Moniyhan and FDR were influential and even victorious, and yet theirs was not a legacy of an undermined, hollowed-out national pride. Wokery is a microcosm of the problem, not its cause. The old liberals and the old Conservatives were both united by an agreed-upon history of America. Theirs was a common conception of America - the answers to what America needed differed deeply, but the political differences did not indicate an inherent civilizational or constitutional split. That old unity with which every generation renewed the spirit of American patriotism was ruptured in the upheaval of the cultural revolution which occurred at the close of the Sixties. The new attitude which has eroded American patriotism is encapsulated in Jesse Jackson’s infamous chant of 1987 at Stanford, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”, and go it did with the “Western Civ” course being replaced by a Cultures, Ideas, & Values program instead. In the long arc of history, the 1987 incident is insignificant by itself; academic history is filled with instances of esoteric radicalism all the way down to the foundations of Oxford and Cambridge, but this incident is emblematic of a thorough process by which American history was recast as something evil, marked by original sin. The focus would now be placed upon historic injustices and a violent past rather than a genuine investigation of the past and the memory of it. The twin impacts of this were devastating. The previously described conceptual unity of American civilization was shattered; if Americans no longer shared a common narrative, they could no longer be patriotic. The removal of a common history that in some form justified America also removed the belief system that rationalised the emotive act of loving one’s own nation. Patriotism ceased to be a reasonable act, therefore eroding its respectability. It is no accident that patriotism rapidly declined amongst college graduates and the middle classes in America; the erosion of Western civilizational history as an academic subject properly taught and accepted meant the erosion of patriotism amongst the middle classes.
The crisis in the academy is not just a historical fact to be ruminated upon with a tragic sense of loss, but an ongoing reality that goes to the heart of how history is remembered. Scholars in the humanities like Chakrabarty and Conrad champion the fashionable fad of global history at the expense of the national and local, thereby distorting the important role history has in the forging of a people’s memory of themselves. Such a kind of history ignores the particularity of America’s foundation, a specificity which is necessary for the forging together of a political community. The particularity of America’s national foundation lies in a story based on Enlightenment ideas and the classical history of Rome and Greece in an Atlantic geopolitical contest between Great Britain and France. The unique story of America’s past is important to her patriotism precisely because America’s foundation is not narrow, but wide; not small, but expansive, broad enough to provide a common history for her citizens to partake in. The particularity of her history is the vessel for the universal values of the communal society that America has so successfully forged through its struggle with the world and itself. The loss of this has resulted in a republic that has found itself without a sense of its own historicity, robbing it of purpose and destiny. Only a recovery of the particularity of an America forged in unique historical circumstances will allow for the recovery of patriotic attitudes, because America will have recovered its story and the story of its ancestors. A nation cannot love itself if it has lost the memory of what it is and how it came to be.
I contend a further point, that patriotism is not solely dependent on ideas alone. Thus what I have sketched above would be an incomplete picture were I not to examine the great crisis of voluntary associations in America as sketched by Robert Putnam in his seminal work “Bowling Alone”. America is not simply an idea that exists in the imagination; it is embodied in the bonds that bring its citizenry together - the churches, clubs, synagogues, neighbourhoods, and cultural groups in which its people invest their time and effort to build something greater than themselves. All of those have long been in decline with falling memberships. Masonic halls are empty, and church groups have thinned crowds. If Americans have ceased to be patriotic, it is partially because they no longer have reasons to believe they ought to be, as evidenced by their daily lives. How can Americans love their nation if their nation has ceased to have an impactful presence in their lives? What Putnam showed in “Bowling Alone” is that the America that the average person saw and interacted with had become smaller and thinner. For most Americans, their country is an ideal and dream, but it is also the reality on the ground. America for the working man or the business worker is their family and social circle of friends, or their town, their church or football team. If the average American is going to start loving their country again, it will only be so when the institutions that previously justified that love and held it in place are restored to vigorous and vibrant life. The task for the patriot is to restore the community that creates a stake in the nation for the individual.
Perhaps the counterargument to this is that the internet shall solve all of our patriotic woes. After all, is it not a great connector? If America should have a patriotism crisis because its people are more alone and atomized, surely the internet can serve as a kind of connective medicine. This, to me, seems insufficient. Humans are corporeal beings, and the nation in which they live is a physical reality defined by physical borders and physical institutions in which people must live together. A firm corporeal sense of America’s geography, both as a United States, and acknowledging local tradition, will help restore a patriotic attitude as this would finally be a restoration of what in the past 30 years has been lost, namely the community. To expound a little further, the bad ideas that have undermined American patriotism in the academy would not have been so successful had they not been taken up rhetorically by America’s leadership class. I do not accuse America’s public servants of being unpatriotic. Every act of service they do should be enough to exculpate such tawdry accusations. Nevertheless, there was an observable rhetorical turn by America’s great liberals in the 1970s. Speeches like Mario Cuomo’s “A Tale of Two Cities” were rhetorically brilliant (Mr. President, you ought to know that this nation is more “A Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”) but they put forward a vision of America that rejected its essential goodness. Such rhetoric was ultimately dangerous for America’s inherent patriotic spirit, precisely because it seemed to signal to the country that its own leaders had lost faith in the national and in the ideal. A decline in rhetoric seemed to signal a lost faith, a lost belief in a necessary ideal that uplifted the spirit. America’s leaders must once again put forward a positive vision of their country.
What, then, is the task which lies ahead?
The prescription for our current crisis was aptly given by Dr Starkey in a lecture he gave to Cambridge’s Conservative Association invoking the Restoration of 1660 - namely that today’s task is to reverse a revolution. Buckley, in his great wisdom, observed that the task Americans were called to during the height of the Cold War was to “stand athwart history yelling stop”, but today, we must go further and maturely reflect upon the fact that yelling stop also means building anew and going back to past precedent, having learned the lessons of today’s failures. Americans must rediscover the institutions that they have allowed to wither and endeavour to build new institutions to replace them. The question that America must contend with before it can begin to heal itself and regain its lost patriotism is what its history is for. An honest reflection by American society both requires it to acknowledge the wrongs that were done and remember them, and calls for the celebration of those rare heroes that rise above. Proper love of one’s nation cannot be restored if history is reduced to a dilettante plaything of politics where the search for the truth is tossed aside. It cannot be a game of “gotcha” or the dry-as-dust recitation of popular anecdotes, both the good and the bad. Once the American academy begins to do history once more, once history is taught with proper care to remember and commemorate the past, only then will the American people regain the needed intellectual scaffolding that justifies the love of the nation.
I wish to turn to Chaucer, the man who practically invented the language America speaks, for he has some wisdom on the matter of today’s discussion writing in the Parliament Of Fowls:
“For out of old fields, as men say,
Comes all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Comes all this new science that men hear.”
So is today the task of the Conservative to plough old fields for new knowledge and renew what has declined, restore what was lost. A proper love of America as a nation, itself founded upon an ideal to strive toward and firmly believe in, will only come with a rediscovery of its history - the good and the difficult. Americans will once again grow to call themselves patriots, as past generations did, once they recover the bonds of community that gave them a stake in their society and provided a genuine unity. The loss of patriotism is reversible. It will be hard, but reflecting on the America of the past and gazing with much love at the wonderful nation it still is today, I believe it is a momentous task worth undertaking.
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