Defining patriotism

In the span of four days last week, we had the opportunity to contemplate two starkly different definitions of patriotism.

Last Tuesday, the death of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the towering civil rights leader and presidential candidate, brought to mind his definition of patriotism: loyalty to the highest ideals of the nation.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s sweeping and inconsistent tariffs. Two of the judges that he nominated to the court joined that majority. Trump erupted in a fit of rage. He called the Republicans on the court who voted against him “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” The three judges who dissented and supported Trump, he said, had showed “strength, wisdom, and love of our Country.”

Got that? Jesse Jackson’s definition of patriotism did not put loyalty to the current occupant of the White House above loyalty to the highest ideals of the nation. But Trump made it clear that any act that opposes even his weirdest whim is, by his definition, unpatriotic.

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century British poet-essayist-lexicographer, famously defined the p-word this way: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” That comment was aimed at what Johnson considered the abuse of that word by an English politician named John Wilkes—not a critique of love of country in general. But Trump certainly fits any reasonable definition of “scoundrel,” and he clearly is hiding behind patriotism in calling judges “very unpatriotic” for trying to limit his ability to act unilaterally, without the approval of Congress.

The words patriotic, patriotism, and patriot will be everywhere this year, as the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rolls around in July. In his waking moments, Trump is certain to use those words—and often abuse them. The rest of us should be willing to look more deeply into those words and decide what the meaning should be for each of us.

As for me, I have come to think of patriotism as an idolatrous, red-white-and-blue, modern-day version of the golden calf that the Israelites manufactured, when they became impatient for the return of Moses from the mountain where he was to receive the Ten Commandments:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

—Exodus 32:1-4

No nation is worthy of worship. In fact, the prophet Isaiah makes clear that the creator of the universe does not exactly hold any nation in esteem. “Before him all the nations are as nought, as nothing and void he accounts them.” Isaiah 40:17. Yet we reflexively accept a near-idolatrous attitude toward the flag, the anthem (a British drinking song with lyrics by a slave-holder), and the nation they represent.

This nation has expressed some high ideals, but has fallen sadly and stubbornly short of achieving them. The soaring language of the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” came from a man, Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves and impregnated one. When it came time to devise a means of governing the new nation, the slave states did not want direct election of the president, because enslaved people made up a large percentage of their population, and they were not allowed to vote. That would give states where African-Americans were allowed to vote an advantage in a national popular vote to choose the president. Instead, the founders gave us the Electoral College, a bizarre contraption that gave the slave states a real advantage. Those states came up with a wicked formula that made each enslaved person equal to three-fifths of a human being, and they insisted that those enslaved people be counted towards congressional representation. The number of representatives a state had in Congress determined how many electoral votes it had in the Electoral College. So slavery shaped the way we chose our presidents.

Twice in the twenty-first century, this system has given us presidents who lost the national popular vote but won the Electoral College: George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. In the aftermath of those elections, Bush gave us the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and Trump has given us, among many other nasty policies, the cruel mass deportation of immigrants, an ongoing list of war crimes at sea, drastic deregulation that will damage our environment, and the nonsensical tariffs that the Supreme Court has now rejected.

Somehow, Trump has persuaded himself—and tried to persuade the nation—that tariffs will force other countries to pour billions of dollars into our national treasury. The truth, of course, is that tariffs are a tax, and the people who pay that tax are American citizens—like Amy Tedesco, whose Long Island business has been badly affected, Newsday reports. She sells prom dresses, mostly made in China, and the tariffs have raised the prices from an average of $400 to $600 or $700. People have turned to buying prom dresses online and settling for dresses of lower quality. But for Trump, judges who voted to overturn these tariffs are “very unpatriotic.”

In pursuit of his own version of patriotism, Trump has been trying to erase the memory of the nation’s original sin. In his first presidential term, Trump created a 1776 Commission to support “patriotic education.” Trump explained: “We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

At the very end of his first term, the commission issued its report, on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. It dismissed as destructive to “our civic unity and social fabric” any claims that the founding generation was hypocritical for saying that all men are created equal, but supporting the enslavement of human beings. The report argued that slave-owners like George Washington and James Madison actually “set the stage for abolition.”

In his second term, Trump has continued his ongoing whitewashing of national history. Just two months after his inauguration last year, for example, he signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It began like this:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

On a visit to Glacier National Park last year, Judy and I saw at an information desk a notice that cited Trump’s executive order and told visitors:

Glacier National Park belongs to the American people, and the National Park Service wants your feedback. Please let us know if you have identified (1) any areas that need repair; (2) any services that need improvement; or (3) any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”

Despite its obvious intent to suppress the elements of the nation’s history, like slavery, that don’t appeal to Trump, that notice did get two words right: grandeur and abundance. This country is blessed with abundance of scenic grandeur. When someone asks about love of country, I don’t think of the Electoral College, of a Congress that has failed to rein in Trump’s excesses, or a Supreme Court that has mostly bowed to his wishes, until the tariff decision. I think of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and other glorious national parks.

But Trump wants us to think of a country that has never done wrong, a country where the evils of its original sin have been unfairly exaggerated. In a social media post, Trump once attacked the Smithsonian Institution in this broadside: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” Sorry, Donald, but slavery really was very, very bad.

In an op-ed last September in the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kevin Sack commented on what Trump is trying to do. Sack is the author of Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, where a white supremacist murdered the pastor and eight others in 2015. His summary of Trump’s agenda:

The intent seems clear. Mr. Trump aims to sand down—if not altogether erase—some of the more inglorious episodes of American history, particularly those involving racial and ethnic subjugation, to feed the ravenous maw of white grievance that fuels so much of today’s political discourse. This, of course, is antihistorical in every sense, a betrayal of the discipline’s most fundamental purpose: to learn from the past. If we ever aspire again to become one nation, the entirety of our past, including the enslavement of an estimated 10 million people, must be acknowledged as our shared history.

The rest of us must not let Trump’s fictional version of American history prevail. Our nation has a lot to confess: slavery and multiple regime changes that we have enabled in other nations, to name just two of our sins. We can’t let his cynical invocation of the p-word make us forget what we need to fix.