In a country where “Emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact,” Johnson warned, America “would have failed as a people and as a nation” if inequality was not addressed. The country could “gain the whole world and lose its own soul,” he said, paraphrasing the Book of Mark. Also Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the principles of the American founding “a promissory note” due, and urged the country to “stand up and live up to the true meaning of its creed”.
Will the Democrats Face an Interim Destruction?
This version of patriotism combines criticism of our country’s shortcomings with a commitment to change them. It adheres to the principles of liberty and equality because they are right, and also because they are ours, they are ours. It treats America’s worst aspects, not as enemies to be eliminated (as in our many domestic “wars” over this or that), but as we would approach a friend or relative who has lost our way. In this spirit, even the harshest reproach, the most relentless list of mistakes, is accompanied by a commitment to mend and heal, to build a more just and decent country. It also brings with it a practical belief: as long as change is possible, we owe it to each other to try.
This may sound like the soft tones of a more naive time. Don’t we now know more than previous generations about the brutality and complexity of history, the intensity of white supremacy in the early Republic, the constitutional compromises with slavery? Have we not outgrown complacent patriotism? But this is wrong and, really, shamefully parochial. We know no more about American injustice than King, or, for that matter, Johnson, the whiskered East Texas son who became a complex but effective civil rights champion. There was nothing complacent in their patriotism.
They insisted that every American should take some of the responsibility for their country’s crimes and shortcomings, whether they personally benefited or not. And for Johnson and King, everyone deserved to be proud of America’s progress toward justice. Patriotism was a practical task: valuing and preserving what is good, working to change the bad, and remembering that part of what is good in a country is that citizens dog change it. Patriotic efforts were no guarantee of success, but it was nevertheless an obligation—a duty akin to what the philosopher William James Eleven called “the moral equivalent of war.”
Today America faces threats to national well-being and even survival: climate change, racial inequality, oligarchy, the economic collapse of entire regions. But the enemy is not an invader: these slow crises turn us against each other. By venting our carbon, living in our economically and ideologically separate neighborhoods and regions, exchanging accusations of bigotry and bad faith, we are each other’s problems. In these circumstances it is difficult to find common wires. At some point, a Liberal gets tired of saying, “We’re better than this,” when we seem resolutely not to be.
But there’s something beyond both a final “We’re Better Than This” and your favorite update to Garrison’s “A Covenant With Death and A Covenant With Hell”. Progressive patriotism justifies risks and sacrifices to try to create a country that deserves it. Loyalty to the land, in this light, means the confidence that you and other citizens can still build better ways of living together.