Well-behaved students were chosen weekly for the privilege of carrying the American, Christian, and Alaskan flags into morning assembly, and warned against letting the American flag touch the ground.
Read: The original kings of esports. A sense of national dread loomed over my early life. The books I read, the news I watched, the conversations that happened around me deepened that wariness into distrust, forming a permanent disconnect between me and America. I was 23 when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman.
I was 24 when George Zimmerman was acquitted. I was 25 when Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, and I turned 26 days before the state decided that he would not be indicted. As the deaths of Martin and Brown followed me into young adulthood, my new rage broke apart any notion of a cohesive national identity.
The patriot identity limits our ability as citizens to collectively revolutionize the American infrastructure. It is a national identity that observes the flaws of the system and, instead of considering abolition to address the root of the problems, aims simply to reshape or reform.
The distance between me and the country made it difficult to figure out how to ground myself. I would clearly never be a patriot. It took years for me to understand that Blackness is a thing that self-defines. I would need to learn to define myself. For two years, I indicted the United States on the page and in weekly critiques during my M.
In one critique, my professor suggested that for all my rage and desire for institutional destruction, she suspected that I cared about this country quite a lot. I was incredulous.
Caring would make me a patriot, and no word felt emptier or more distant. I feared coming off as a bitter Black woman whose motivation for interrogating her placement in and relationship to this country was to prove how unspectacular it is. Others worship more than one god. Pledge defenders argue that the case now before the Supreme Court is an effort to strip religion from public life.
Believers know — or ought to know — that as long as a faith is kept alive in the hearts and minds of its followers and is spread through voluntary channels, it will not only survive but often prosper. Promotion of religion belongs to houses of worship, not government. The Supreme Court already has ruled, in , that public school students cannot be forced to recite the Pledge since some religious groups object to swearing allegiance to anything other than God.
Like prayer in school, it would become a matter left to the home and church, not the public school system. But now the second example. In the process, my son will be late for school and miss an exam he has worked hard to prepare for.
Does anyone think that this harm would justify me in turning my back on the drowning boy? These considerations apply not only to individual agents, but also to governments. There are situations in which one country can prevent a great evil in another, and do so at modest cost to itself. In such circumstances, the good that can be done for distant strangers outweighs the burden of doing it. In this vein, Bill Clinton has said that his failure to intervene against the genocide in Rwanda was the biggest mistake of his presidency.
While it is hard some would say impossible to reduce this balance to rules, there is at least a shared framework—based on the urgency and importance of conflicting interests—to guide our reflections. As a rule of thumb, we can presume that because human beings tend too much toward partiality, we should be careful to give non-partial claims their due.
Sensing the danger of proving too much, the critics of patriotism draw back from the root-and-branch rejection of partiality. Instead, they try to drive a wedge between patriotism and other forms of attachment. George Kateb does not offer a generalized critique of partial attachments. Individuals are worthy of special attachments in a way that countries are not.
That is why he works so hard to drive a wedge between love of parents and love of country. One can love these things reasonably, and many do. I disagree. To be sure, a country is not a person, but it begs the question to say that love is properly directed only to persons. It abuses neither speech nor sense to say that I love my house and for that reason would feel sorrow and deprivation if disaster forced me to leave it.
I have had such an experience. Consider immigrants who arrive legally in the U. Their lives in their new country often are arduous, but they at least enjoy the protection of the laws, the opportunity to advance economically, and the right to participate in choosing their elected officials.
Is it unreasonable for them to experience gratitude, affection, and the desire to perform reciprocal service for the country that has given them refuge? But here again, his conclusion does not follow from his premise. Surely we can love people who are not responsible for our existence: parents love their children, husbands their wives. Besides, refugees may literally owe their continuing existence to countries that offer them sanctuary from violence. Is it less reasonable and proper to love the institutions that save our life than the individuals who give us life?
As another philosopher, Eamonn Callan, has suggested, if patriotism is love of country, then the general features of love are likely to illuminate this instance of it. To do that would be to surrender both intellectual and moral integrity. But to say that parental love risks crossing the line in these ways is not to say that parents are required to turn their backs on criminals who happen to be their children, or to cease all efforts to reform them.
Nor is it to fault parents who have wrenchingly concluded that they must cut these ties. There is one more objection to my conception of reasonable patriotism: it is irrational to choose a life that puts you at heightened risk of dying for your country. The objector may say that there is nothing worth dying for, a proposition I reject. Must a political community be morally unblemished to be worth killing or dying for? The United States was a deeply flawed nation when it went to war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The servicemen on the Normandy beaches harbored none of the dulce et decorum est illusions that led young Englishmen to welcome the outbreak of the first world war; the GIs fought against pure evil in the name of a partial good.
They were neither wrong nor deceived to do so, or so I believe. Is everything done in response an expression of delusion? Not at all: some reactions are necessary and justified; others are excessive and illegitimate. I favored retaliation against the Taliban, which asked some Americans to kill and die for their country. Most Americans agreed, and I think we were right. Attacking those who did not attack us was—and is—another matter altogether. As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.
Lurking behind the critique of patriotism is the longing for an unattainable moral purity in politics. I take my stand with Max Weber, with the ethic of responsibility that embraces the necessary moral costs of maintaining our collective existence—all the more so when our government rests on the consent of the governed. It is only within decent political communities that citizens can hope to practice the ordinary morality we rightly cherish.
Report Produced by Governance Studies. Viewed as a leading, independent voice in the domestic policymaking sphere, the Governance Studies program at Brookings is dedicated to analyzing policy issues, political institutions and processes, and contemporary governance challenges.
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