One of the storylines coming out of our just-concluded convention in Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love and birthplace of the nation, is of a Democratic Party newly at ease with love of country, wrapped in the flag as tightly perhaps as The Hairpiece in the embrace of its bestie, ex-KGB strongman Vladimir Putin, in his trail widows and orphans, a murderer of journalists and dissidents, a man who would as soon burn Europe to ashes as shoot civilian airliners out of the ravaged skies of his undeclared wars.
Some might find this embrace of ours counterintuitive – the popular narrative after all has liberals and progressives burning draft cards, flags, bras and boy scout uniforms with equal abandon – but I’m not surprised. Not in the least.
Because it’s a poisonous lie that we liberals do not love this country of ours.
Here’s the deal: those words on the base of the Statue of Liberty, that bit about Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free are not by Phyllis Schlafly or even Ann Coulter, they’re by Emma Goldman Lazarus, a Jewish socialist lesbian labor activist.
The Pledge of Allegiance, in the non-Under-God-bastardized version that proclaims One Nation Indivisible? Penned by another socialist; the under God part was added later by Eisenhower’s executive fiat.
The greatest President the Republic ever saw? Others have their own candidates for the top spot, Washington, Lincoln, mine is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a patrician of course, but one who acted in, no, who lived noblesse oblige as it has been understood since time immemorial: duty to others, not as an afterthought nor an affectation for Instagram. Duty as something one does because one cannot honorably do otherwise.
Duty is one of those words we Americans have an ambiguous relationship with. It seems at first glance to exist in tension with that other prized ideal, liberty. It does not, quite the contrary; you can’t have one without the other.
For me, duty as an idea has always carried distinct connotations of Britishness, more accurately the flavour of the best of British; of what is owed to Crown and Country, not in the servile bowing and scraping of the Palace courtier, but in the freely given acknowledgement that there exist things of great gravity which precede and outweigh our ephemeral self, things great enough for you and me to live freely in their shelter. In the United Kingdom, they are the Crown in Parliament and the Realm, in America, the Constitution and the Republic it establishes, both supreme but always bound in that supremacy by law. A government bound by law however, bound by duty to law, is the keystone of a free society. We do not have absolute freedom or licence without constraint, you’re thinking of anarchy, we have ordered liberty.
This shared heritage is the bedrock of the vaunted special relationship between our two countries and key to understanding each singly and together; our many shared battlefields, our countless common dead in a way merely further tighten bonds that long precede them, that go deeper into the very soul of us as kith and kin. We breathe the same past as surely and as naturally as we breathe the same air, as the same blood flows red and thick through our veins and the same sun lights all our days.
We maintain the best of British in America; when the President calls, you heed the call, if he calls you to serve, you serve. If you swear on the flag, that oath binds you at the stake of your honour and your life, and of the two, it is honour that weighs heavier and lasts longer. So does the flag.
To be sure: we cannot follow the Sarah Palins of this world down the bloody moose trail marked my country right/damn right because America fuck yeah; love and devotion properly understood entail a measure of realism and nuance ill-suited to a reality TV show. They are things that grow in spite of all obstacles, in defiance of the pain that all past holds and whatever new agonies the future will inevitably reveal. Love inescapably carries with it the memory of loss and the certainty of grief to come.
This love, a love of one another and of this country that is ours, a love tempered by loss and yet still leavened by hope is what flowed like a mighty river out of that hall in Philadelphia. Maybe that’s what made it so powerful – beyond even the historic aspect of nominating a woman to supreme power – the resonance in those walls with the story of our country, a story that long precedes us and that will endure through ages to come when all of us alive today are dust. Today, and as long as we can into infinite tomorrows, we will sustain one another, all of us together as one from sea to shining sea.
One Nation Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All. This is who we are, our authentic self as liberals and Americans, and I submit the country is hungry for it.
That’s what true patriotism is: a love of the flawed, by the flawed, a love for each other that precedes us, that lasts for the time we are given, lasts beyond us to a future we cannot see but have cause to expect will unfold in confidence and hope. This is America, all will be well. What is wrong can be made right, if not by us today then by our children tomorrow. When the framers met in Philadelphia, they didn’t promise a perfect union; they promised “a more perfect union". That’s what we are called to do: to better the imperfect as best we can.
That is my patriotism, and I hope it is yours too. You’re welcome to share, you over there too, and you and you, because there’s enough to go around; love is infinite by definition. Love is not weakness or reckless abandon, love knows no color or creed, it is the strongest force in the universe. Today as every day, I choose love. And I choose to love America.
On the 13th of September 2001 a French newspaper, Le Monde, titled Nous Sommes Tous Americains, We Are All Americans.
The day before outside Buckingham Palace, the Royal Household cavalry played – by the personal command of Her Majesty The Queen – the American national anthem to soothe those of us who, trapped in London as skies were closed by terror, had gathered in our hundreds at the Palace gates.
That’s what at stake in this election and in the years to come. Not just who sits in the Oval Office or how we govern ourselves, but how the world will see us, and what kind of country we leave for those who come after. Our love for each other and that of the world for us, for America, for this flawed but inspiring place humanity calls home.
If this be patriotism, make the most of it. E Pluribus Unum.