Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a
patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races
and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition
or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea.
We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles,
and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among
ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the
core of American identity, the soul of the body politic.
They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable among and to the other nations.
"Patriotism is unwelcome in many quarters of the land today, and unknown in
many others. There is virtually no thoughtful discussion of the subject, for the
word has settled, in most people's minds, deep into a brackish pond of sentiment
where thought cannot reach. Politicians and members of patriotic associations
praise it, of course, but official and professional patriotism too often sounds like nationalism,
patriotism's bloody brother. On the other hand, patriotism has a bad name among many thoughtful people,
who see it as a horror at worst, a vestigial passion largely confined to the thoughtless at best: as
enlightenment advances, patriotism recedes. The intellectuals are virtually required to repudiate it as a
condition of class membership. The radical and dropout young loathe it.
Most troublesome of all, for one who would make the argument I intend to make, is the
face that both the groups that hate and those that glorify patriotism largely agree
that it and nationalism are the same thing. I hope to show that they are different things--related, but separable.
