I took this oath at least twice, when I enlisted in the military at 17, and a few years later when I became an officer, and I meant it each time despite being a descendant of America’s slave class:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” To me, anything or anybody that prevents the nation from spreading basic democratic principles, e.g. “Self Evident Truths,” to all citizens is an “enemy.”
Sam Johnson said: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But he meant a pretended patriotism which so many have made a cloak of self-interest.
Expressions of Patriotism do not absolve a citizen of the responsibility to know where the nation falls short in fulfilling its obligations to the citizens and, even more importantly, to work to resolve gaps between words and deeds. Do not say: America! Love it or leave it! Instead, say: Love it and let’s fix it.
Legitimate protest of government policies and actions is a cherished right, indeed an obligation, in our democracy. However, more than twenty years ago, Peter Drucker said that America does not have one integrating force that pulls individual organizations in society and community into coalition; and, and I have seen the evidence. He went on to say, for example, that the traditional political parties, once the best feature we could have developed for American progress, can no longer integrate divergent groups and divergent points of view into a common pursuit of power for the progress of our nation. Rather, they have become battlefields between groups, each of them fighting for absolute victory and not content with anything but total surrender of the enemy. “What we have,” Peter said, “is ineffectiveness, indeed, paralysis. We do not have even the beginnings of the theory or the institutions needed for effective leadership in the current milieu. Yet effective leadership has never been needed more….”
The notion of inevitable American perpetuity is not patriotism. It is dangerously arrogant because it permits people, even leaders at the highest levels as we have seen, to say and do awful things as they conclude, perhaps, that America will prevail no matter what. History belies that conclusion about democracies. The America that has devolved now, as Charles Murray said, “… is not an America that can remain America. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.”
