Scott Richert on Patriotism

Race, Nationalism, and Patriotism, Part III: Patriotism

Historically in English, both patria and natio have come together in patriotism, the love of a particular people in a particular place. Again, this is analogous to the human society of the family, which, throughout history, has not simply been defined genetically or culturally but with reference to the physical location of the family. Our modern, mobile American society throws us off here, because we think nothing of moving from state to state several times in our lives, nor do we particularly find it odd to sell our childhood home after we inherit it (assuming our parents haven’t sold it long ago). Our sense of belonging to a particular place--not only being a part of a particular place, but that place being a part of us--is extremely attenuated.

But the modern American experience is not normative--not only historically, but even today, among European-derived peoples. Europeans in Europe are much more rooted, and that close association with the land of their fathers--the patria terra, to return to the Latin--has a cultural (and, indeed, even a genetic) significance that has largely been lost here in the United States.

It’s no surprise, then, that patriotism, in modern American usage, has diverged from its historical definition and largely come to mean abstract adherence to some set of American “ideals"--for instance, the “proposition nation” or “credal nation” idea of the neocons, or the Jaffa-ite version of the “noble lie” of the Straussians. After all, how can patriotism retain its traditional meaning for people whose connection to the land on which they currently reside is at best momentary and accidental? It makes little sense to develop an attachment to a place (and the people who reside therein) when we’re only “passing through,” looking forward to our next move, “onward and upward,” as we chase the “American dream.”

The result, in the United States, has been the separation of those two terms that should be inextricably linked--natio and patria--and the destruction of patriotism, as traditionally understood. But because natio and patria are linked, when our relationship to the latter is attenuated, the former becomes more abstract--an ideological construct, rather than a lived reality.

The answer is not to throw up our hands and declare ourselves “rootless cosmopolitans,” as some who have actually begun to see the problem have done, nor to think that an abstract nationalism (either the “proposition nation” or some defining away of our differences until “American” means nothing more than “of the white race, residing within the borders of the current United States") will solve our problem. Instead, we need to return to life as our ancestors lived it, and as most Europeans today still do: in one place, among our people, through many generations.