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True American Patriot Is Made, Not Born
The Chicago Sun Times, July 25, 2000
By John O'Sullivan
A history professor I know likes to arouse his students from their usual torpor by quoting the following description of the American Revolution: "A war between the English and the Germans -- which the English won." In this quotation "the Germans" refers, of course, to the use of Hessian troops by King George III. But the professor's larger purpose is to remind his students that the American Revolution began less as a war between two distinct peoples -- the Americans and the British -- than as a political dispute within one English nation divided by geography.
What divided this nation into two warring polities was not a series of accidental disputes over taxation but the fact that the colonists were overwhelmingly on the Whig, nonconformist and radical end of the Eighteenth-century political spectrum whereas the London parliament was dominated by a conservative alliance of Anglicans, Tories and King's men. Americans sought independence because in a united Anglo-America they would always be governed by their political opponents.
But in the Mel Gibson blockbuster, "The Patriot," the Germans strike back. That at least is the view of the film critic Jonathan Foreman, writing in both Salon and the London Daily Telegraph, who argues that the film portrays the American Revolution in Teutonic terms as a people's war in which political ideas are replaced by pre-political ethnic loyalties. What this requires is that the British be transformed into brutal foreign intruders who commit a war crime -- burning women and children inside a church -- that in actual history was committed by the Nazis in wartime France.
The end result, laments Foreman, is that the distinctive American brand of patriotism -- namely a principled commitment to liberty, equality, democracy and the liberal ideas of 1776 -- is transmogrified into a crude Germanic ethnic nationalism of blood and soil. One may have reservations about the details of Foreman's thesis. But the theoretical distinction he makes between two kinds of patriotism is an important one. But there is a third kind of patriotism that fits America better than either, and in his latest book, My Love Affair With America (Free Press, $ 25), Norman Podhoretz illustrates it with a sure precision.
At the very start of his sunnily optimistic celebration of American progress -- accurately subtitled "The cautionary tale of a cheerful conservative" -- Podhoretz says that his own love of America comes close to Bertrand Russell's account of his love of England as "very nearly the strongest emotion I possess." That degree of passion surely distinguishes it sharply from a philosophical commitment to even the most admirable political ideas.
Nor is Podhoretz's patriotism a matter of simple ethnic loyalty. Much of his argument is devoted to praising America as a nation that has generously made room within its liberal nationalism for self-conscious ethnic groups, notably for his own ethnic group, the Jews.
If, however, an American is made as much as born, how does that happen? The American identity is a cultural one; we become Americans by living in America, learning its language, imbibing its history, taking part in its celebrations, singing its songs, sharing its hopes and coming to feel that we have a right to share in its destiny.
In his autobiographical reflections on being an American, Podhoretz starts with the sentence: "It all began with language." Podhoretz was not the first member of his immigrant family to master the English language, but he was the first to make it work for him as a writer, an editor, a critic, and now a celebrant. No immigrant can really be part of the national community unless he learns the language of the country.
Then, because he came to political consciousness in the early 1940s, he saw what America had achieved in history by first defeating Nazism and then resisting communism. Patriotism is easier to sustain if, like the French and the British, you can look back on a splendid record of national achievement.
And, finally, by mixing with other Americans from very different backgrounds in the Army, he saw that the ordinary American was both free and decent. The secret of America is not that it adopted a liberal constitution. Every Latin American state has done as much. It is that Americans were free men living free lives to whom therefore the ideas of 1776 appeared in the guise of simple common sense.
In 1776 they became politically free because culturally they already felt free. And they therefore made it possible for their grandchildren to be born free. Not enough Americans today say thank you. In 239 pages Podhoretz does so eloquently.