Steven Johnston is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Encountering Tragedy: Rousseau and the Project of Democratic Order.

The Truth about Patriotism

By STEVEN JOHNSTON

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4089-8

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………ix1 “Without External Picturesqueness,” Or, Why I Am Not a Patriot…………………………………..12 This Patriotism Which Is Not One……………………………………………………………..213 Iconic Drama I: The Mortal Logic of Enmity…………………………………………………….644 Iconic Drama II: The Socratic Way of Death…………………………………………………….895 The American Memorial/Monument Complex I: The Architecture of Democratic Monuments…………………1156 The American Memorial/Monument Complex II: Political Not Patriotic……………………………….1387 Patriotism and Death: Wounded Patriotic Attachments…………………………………………….1618 Bruce Springsteen and the Tragedy of the American Dream…………………………………………198Notes……………………………………………………………………………………….233Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………269Index……………………………………………………………………………………….279

Chapter One

Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text … it is not a way of saying that everyone else is wrong … rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure.-MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Archaeology of Knowledge

Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal … The pleasure of hating … makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.-WILLIAM HAZLITT, “On the Pleasure of Hating”

Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are the soul of any patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance.-WILLIAM JAMES, “The Moral Equivalent of War”

How does it happen that the state will do a host of things that the individual would never countenance? … Through the interposition of the virtues of obedience, of duty, patriotism, and loyalty. -FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power

“Without External Picturesqueness,” Or, Why I Am Not a Patriot

These are patriotic times. United States troops make war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Possibilities of apocalyptic violence from named but invisible enemies haunt the home front. Lifetimes of fear and insecurity await coming generations. Add structural economic fragility, planet-wide pandemics, a rise of “natural” disasters, and global environmental meltdown to the mix and America faces impressive challenges. This is the very stuff of patriotism: epic problems call for virtuoso performances.

Nevertheless, I would like to make the case against patriotism.

In 1973 John Schaar, writing in the face of Vietnam and Watergate, deemed patriotism the sine qua non of democratic politics. Much could be said on the fate of Schaar’s plea for patriotism. Regardless, thirty-four years later I would like to revisit Schaar’s claim on behalf of democratic politics. Like Schaar I have little hope of success. Like Schaar I sense thoughtlessness afoot. Like Schaar I think that citizens won’t need the argument and that noncitizens will be prone to reject it. Like Schaar I will carry on nonetheless, for patriotism’s dangers are endless and the case for democratic politics is one that always needs to be made. Though events of 2001 confirmed these truths, they did not invent them.

To exemplify the themes that preoccupy the book, I offer two distinct versions of politics. The first, patriotic, has two constitutive elements-a willful enmity and a logic of sacrifice-that compromise or even destroy what they claim to privilege; the second, democratic, aspires to a magnanimous, hastened agonism that serves as a spur to others and requires a direct, participatory version of civic engagement disinclined to cheer itself.

PATRIOTISM OF HATE

For a politics of enmity, consider first the conduct of presidential politics in 2004. Democratic opposition to George Bush’s bid for election centered on his conquest of Iraq. John Kerry charged Bush with gross incompetence, dishonesty, and malfeasance. Having failed to prepare for occupation, America found itself fighting Bush’s war a second time-and losing. Moreover, the Iraq invasion turned out to be gratuitous. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship posed no threat to the United States; moreover, it had no involvement with the attacks of late summer 2001-despite what the administration, against the evidence, repeated ad nauseam. Bush’s Iraq obsession diverted attention from critical military operations in Afghanistan, which enabled Osama bin Laden to escape and al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself in more dangerous form.

Bush responded to criticism of his Iraq war in predictable fashion. He changed the subject and rendered suspect the very idea of criticism. Bush insisted time and again that the commander in chief had to be resolute, stay the course. No other posture would be thinkable for the president. To challenge the war’s rationale, to question its execution, would send the wrong message to American troops fighting and dying on behalf of the country. Such slander would reach not only American soldiers but, more importantly, the “terrorists.” To treat with disrespect, dishearten, and thereby undermine the military would embolden and empower the evildoers. As if summoning the American spirit of calumny (read: sedition), Bush effectively equated criticism with aiding and abetting the enemy, fratricide. Bush, moreover, identified himself with American troops to the point of convergence. Trying to account for failure while refusing to admit its possibility, Bush quipped: “We thought we’d whip more of them going in.” The implications of Bush’s mantras were unmistakable: to challenge the president amounts to unpatriotic, arguably treasonous, behavior. If Bush’s silencing strategy succeeded, it would place him beyond reproach. Patriotism can be the first as well as the last refuge of the scoundrel.

While George Bush maintained his presidential composure, David Brooks expressed and perfected patriotism’s counterpart. Just days before the election, Brooks delivered an indignant broadside on behalf of the Bush campaign. John Kerry, he insinuated, had not established his patriotic credentials. What led Brooks to this assessment? Kerry’s lack of what Brooks deemed the proper visceral response to September 11 and Osama bin Laden. Like Bush, Brooks did not hesitate to speak on behalf of the American people. Responding to bin Laden’s pre-election videotape, Brooks wrote, “What we saw last night was revolting. I suspect that more than anything else, he reminded everyone of the moral indignation we all felt on and after Sept. 11.” Brooks then took the occasion to convert bin Laden’s narcissism into a new presidential criterion. The sermon continued with a declaration: “One of the crucial issues of this election is, Which candidate fundamentally gets the evil represented by this man? Which of these two guys understands it deep in his gut-not just in his brain or in his policy statements, but who feels it so deep in his soul that it consumes him?” Here Brooks enunciated an affective loyalty test. You are what you feel. You must feel what we all feel. You must show it. And you must show it in a way that we can recognize and affirm. Bush passed his test; he responded to bin Laden by insisting that America would not be intimidated. Kerry failed; he dared criticize (“attack”) Bush for losing an opportunity to capture bin Laden. Drawing on the authority of the American people, Brooks made an astonishing claim: “Many are not sure that [Kerry] gets the fundamental moral confrontation. Many people are not sure he feels it, or feels anything.” Brooks concluded by professing one of patriotism’s tenets, “We are revealed by what we hate.”

Let us take Brooks at his word. After November’s election Kerry’s status notably altered. Once Bush had been “returned” to the presidency, Brooks, in a follow-up piece, identified Bush’s new enemy: the CIA. With Democrats reduced, for the time being, to mere opponents, the CIA drew Brooks’s wrath because it first questioned and then resisted Bush’s Iraq war policies; worse, it did so during a campaign season. It sabotaged Bush through anonymous leaks and stealth publications. It even voiced disdain for him at meetings. Since Brooks couldn’t countenance the idea that the CIA had an obligation to the truth and an obligation to challenge Bush’s repeated falsehoods, distortions, and misstatements about Iraq as he tried to fix responsibility for war failures on the agency, he believed that it must be called to account for having “violated all standards of honorable public service.” Brooks also couldn’t abide the idea that the CIA’s principal allegiance was to the American republic. Just the opposite: “This is about more than intelligence. It’s about Bush’s second term.” CIA employees, accordingly, do not work for America; they serve instead “on the president’s payroll.” What should be done with the “mutineers”? Brooks fantasizes mass slaughter and individual execution. He won’t call directly for death, but projects lethal possibilities onto a distant past that knew how to deal with disloyalty. In Brooks’s nostalgic daydream, Langley would be laid waste, with heads displayed on “spikes.” Absence of punishment, after all, amounts to appeasement; then “everything is permitted.” From presidents to pundits, patriotism speaks its truths to the enemies it creates and permits itself wide latitude rhetorically, politically, and militarily when it comes to the country’s defense. Not only does hate reveal identity; its performance constitutes identity.

I now turn to a topic closely allied with the politics of hate: patriotism’s logic of sacrifice. In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche theorizes the relationship between a political order and its creators. Once upon a time, peoples believed that their well-being depended on the accomplishments, the sacrifices, of ancestors, which amounted to a gift that kept reiterating itself, generation after generation. Founders thus lived on in highly productive fashion. As a result, peoples felt a profound sense of indebtedness to forebears, and what was owed demanded payment: hence the advent of public rituals, tributes, ceremonies, and monuments to express not just gratitude but also love for the order bequeathed.

Frederick Douglass confirms Nietzsche’s analysis of a founding’s patriotic productivity, the very Frederick Douglass who, speaking before the American Anti-slavery Society in New York in 1847, declared: “I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country.” Douglass cannot be taken at his word, however. Consider his account of the Fourth of July, then America’s sacrosanct patriotic holiday. Speaking to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-slavery Society in 1852, Douglass retells the inspirational tale of American freedom. It is an inspiring story partly because no one thought it would ever be told. Independence seemed doomed from the start, a romantic notion at best, a suicidal undertaking at worst. And yet seven decades later, here are Douglass and the members of the society celebrating the country’s day of days. America’s fathers were patriots, heroes, warriors; they privileged the common good over self-interest. They were animated by principle, not profit. Freedom is their legacy-to some. Yet restrictions cannot derail the celebration.

While Douglass addresses the society’s members as fellow citizens, he refuses to claim joint political ownership of America with them. This is not his country, nor is it his holiday. These are yours, he tells them. Yet Douglass’s oration places him within patriotism’s ambit as he understands it. More than mere celebration, patriotism involves, nay requires, serious criticism. No country is served by the bland recapitulation of congratulatory self-images. Hard truths need to be told. Accordingly, Douglass recovers July 4 by narrating it for the slave to his fellow citizens. The very fact of July 4 celebrations exacerbates the evils of slavery and makes the day, as well as its ideals, an unparalleled obscenity for blacks. No occasion brings America’s crimes into perspective like the Fourth. It is a day of pretense, hypocrisy, ridicule, vanity, impiety, self-satisfaction, bombast, fraud, and deceit. “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.” The cries from chains grinding human beings bloody, he informs his audience, overwhelm the tumult of joyous celebration. It’s not just that slaves can hear the “jubilee shouts.” It’s that America cannot “hear the mournful wail of millions!” Douglass deploys every linguistic resource at his disposal to focus the public mind: “I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America!”

Douglass’s masterly performance places his audience in an uncomfortable position. Having reminded people of what they already know, they now have to justify what was once unassailable, namely their patriotism, their love of country. Slavery’s history is America’s history. The country’s constitution presupposed and affirmed slavery. There is no America without slavery. As such, love of country seems impossible in front of Douglass. How can they love the country now that they see it, at this moment, as he sees it? He won’t draw the conclusion they must draw for themselves. It’s as if he is forcing them to do it by refusing to do so himself.

Still, Douglass takes comfort and finds hope in America’s youth. Among nations it is but an infant. Despite a wayward life of seventy-six years, time remains for America to correct its ways. Thus while the patriot’s gaze is sickened, the patriot’s heart is gladdened. Douglass is to America in the mid-nineteenth century what the revolutionaries were to the colonies in the late eighteenth century. He will rouse the country from a life of prosperity and ease. One problem-the country epitomizes self-regard: “the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.” Surely, Douglass believes, if America can work itself into a frenzy of historic proportions over a minuscule tea tax, it can summon the outrage needed to fell slavery, an ill that fouls every aspect of American life.

Douglass ultimately takes refuge in the Constitution. It can vindicate the founders-not the reverse. As if by magic, it can undo, in retrospect, undeniable founding crimes. America, from birth, has possessed the political means to right its perpetual defects. Douglass embraces this argument once he has been mysteriously freed from a politics rooted in an understanding of “the pro-slavery character of the Constitution.”

Douglass’s critical engagement with America embodies Schaar’s account of “patriotic radicalism.” According to Schaar, to wage successfully a serious oppositional politics, you must persuade fellow citizens that you share “a country with them” and that you care for the “common things,” though you may also violently disagree in certain respects. Schaar’s account of a self-styled patriotic politics suggests that Douglass loves America despite his protestations to the contrary. He cares with such passion that he cannot let go of his critical engagement with America. Douglass’s military service-recruitment-during the Civil War ups the ante of his commitment. Deeds match rhetoric. Douglass almost seems to be making an installment on Founding debt even though he, by rights, should be a recipient of payment. Regardless, Douglass’s wartime efforts ultimately reveal a fatal flaw in his critical patriotism. Previously without country, Douglass now senses one within reach. The Civil War represents a political opportunity not to be missed, and Douglass’s contribution places him within America’s wartime patriotic tradition. He wants “colored men” to be included one day in the great patriotic narrative that will frame the war. The struggle between North and South names an epic battle of right versus wrong. Patriots rush to defend Liberty against its southern traitors and join the ranks of America’s heroes. Neutrality disrespects morality. You are either with the government or against it. Patriotism’s call must be answered, and this chapter in American history must not be absent colored contribution. Douglass does not fear Jefferson Davis’s criminal war policies as much as he desires patriotism’s approving retrospective judgment. To fall within patriotism’s embrace means dying for your country, history notwithstanding, even if it’s not your country. This in turn presupposes an America defined by its potential rather than by what Douglass calls its dead past.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from The Truth about Patriotismby STEVEN JOHNSTON Copyright © 2007 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission.
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