ON PATRIOTISM

Abstract

2 3 R O N P A T R I O T I S M D O N A L D K A G A N In October 2001, without dissent, Congress requested that the president designate September 11 ‘‘Patriot Day,’’ a national day of remembrance of the attacks by international terrorists on two American cities that killed thousands of innocent civilians. When they had recovered from their shock after the attacks, most Americans reacted in two ways: They clearly and powerfully supported their government’s determination to use military force to prevent future attacks by capturing or killing the perpetrators and tearing out their organizations root and branch. And, to this end, they supported the removal of the leaders of states that supported, abetted, or gave refuge to terrorists unless those leaders abandoned such practices. Most Americans also expressed a new sense of unity and an explicit love for their country that had not been seen for a long time. Not every country deserves the devotion and patriotic support of its citizens. Dictatorships of whatever kind have no right to these commitments, for they rule over unfree, often unwilling, people as if over slaves; they lack moral legitimacy. But citizens of free countries like the United States can vote in elections with real choices for lawmakers and leaders, and those who don’t approve of 2 4 K A G A N Y their country’s laws and way of life have the right and opportunity to change them by legal process. Failing in such an attempt, they are free to leave the country with all their property. By staying they are tacitly accepting the laws of the country and the principles on which those laws are based. They are free to doubt them and even to denounce them, but they are morally bound to observe them. For Americans, as for citizens of any free country, there really is a social contract like those imagined by the political philosophers, and that contract provides legitimacy. People who tacitly accept that contract have the moral obligation to defend and support the country they have chosen as their own – that is, to be patriotic. It seems to me, moreover, that Americans have especially good reasons for belief in and devotion to their country. America has been a beacon of liberty to the world since its creation, and was especially so in the twentieth century. The September 11 attacks produced a wave of vilification against America from ‘‘intellectuals ’’ at home and abroad, but it is worth remembering what Americans did in the twentieth century. They helped save Europe from German domination in two world wars. After World War II they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They stood against and helped defeat the Soviet Communist government, which along with Nazi Germany and Maoist China, was among the most brutal regimes in history. They stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while Europeans stood by and watched, and they drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and ultimately from his seat of power as he prepared to resume his goal of dominating the Middle East. ‘‘People should think,’’ the late David Halberstam said from New York following the attacks, ‘‘what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past sixty years. Probably, I think, a bit like hell.’’ In my view it doesn’t take an American chauvinist to suggest that there is some virtue in a country that has helped save the world from Wilhelmian Germany’s right-wing imperialism, Hitler’s Nazi regime , Japan’s militaristic domination, and Stalin’s totalitarianism. Yet voices here and abroad from the world of ‘‘intellectual’’ orthodoxy continue to condemn and blame the United States, as they did throughout the Cold War. These dissenters’ ideas have a wide currency and reflect a se- O N P A T R I O T I S M 2 5 R rious flaw in American education that should especially concern those of us who take some part in it. The encouragement of patriotism is no longer a part of our public educational system, and the cost of that omission is now making...