Patriotism and the Bitter Cup

It is not a question whether we shall be a multitude of people. No, that has been conspicuously decided already; but whether we shall be the new nation, the guide and lawgiver of all nations, as having clearly chosen and firmly held the simplest and best rule of political society.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Fortune of the Republic, 1878

January 20, 2021.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are sworn in as forty-sixth president and forty-ninth vice president of the United States. It is the dawn of a new administration—one charged with rising from a storm of social and political upheaval such that we have not seen in our nation in perhaps over two centuries.

Since our founding—from the establishment of a band of self-regulating colonies in the seventeenth century to the formal birth of the United States in 1776 and after—ours has been a nation of multitudes. This truth as a cornerstone of our republic is exemplified in our nation’s original motto: E Pluribus Unum.

Of many, one.

We are not a homogenous nation—neither by color, creed, religion, nor any other physical or cultural fabric that, for other nations both now and in antiquity, have served to bind people and political institutions together in commonality. Toward that end, we are and have always been a nation defined by our differences. This unique quality has been a great source of strength from which we have derived an amalgam of ideas, philosophies, creations, and inventions. It saw us transform from a band of rebel colonies, hamstringed to the strongest empire in history ruling us tyrannically from across the Atlantic Ocean, to the leader—indeed the definer—of the “free world.” But our great and varied differences can at once be our strength and our Achilles heel.

As Americans, we draw on a spirit of independence, this fury within all of us to rise up against whatever we perceive as tyranny or oppression. It is entrenched within our American identity from all the stories we keep sacred in our nation’s history: Rising against a foreign oppressor and carving our own way as young nation of rugged pioneers. Casting aside the shackles of human slavery. Leaving to our dark past the suppression and oppression of women. For all our faults, America has a rich history of overturning age-old injustices, of blazing a path for the entire world toward a level of freedom and human rights unprecedented for any other civilization before.

Dissent, indeed “rebellion” in its many forms, is to the American mind a patriotic thing. Americans are not shy to state what their rights are, to tell those they see in authority when they feel their rights are being trampled, and to give stark warning to any and all they deem threatening to those rights. To speak out is to be a patriot. To fight is to be a patriot.

The social and political upheaval that we have recently witnessed to such an unprecedented degree across our nation, up to the steps of the very Capitol, was foreseen or at least forewarned by our founders. In the famous Federalist Papers—the essays written by our founders defining the constitution they wrote, and considered the guiding framework for interpreting it—James Madison writes:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.

– James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787

Our founders recognized these very human inclinations and their potential for prevalence in a democratic society. And yet, as Madison further explains, these passions—this extremely oppositional quality that is in our nature as human beings and especially as Americans with our infinitely varied roots and a deeply-embedded spirit of independence—are what make our system work. In our democratic republic, competing factions become a healthy part of the democratic process, and this dynamic safeguards us “against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest.”

But when does this “healthy factionism” turn into something far more dangerous?

Many believe that our nation has gotten to such a point, that we have fallen into sectarianism and that our cherished republic is, in a real way, under threat. The irony is that many adherents to both political spectrums of today—the “left” the “right”—feel this way about the other equally and for differing reasons. But, in that there is real commonality: the bitter demonization and deep distrust of the other side and all its bad actors and agents.

In war, soldiers become conditioned to disassociate from an enemy that they must hunt, fight, and kill. For those who have been there, we know exactly what that’s like. We know full well both the value and the danger in that life. How it becomes a necessary but unfortunate evil toward accomplishing the ugliest endeavor mankind can carry out. Yet today, we can see the same dehumanizing phenomenon being played out increasingly across our society and government, through our cities, streets, and institutions—by both sides of a viciously divided political spectrum.

We see ideologically motivated calls for and actions of violence; threats and attempts of armed rebellion against state and federal governments and authorities; rage-fueled destruction in cities; desecration of our nation’s symbols and institutions; and intent and action toward suppression and eradication of all those who hold opposing beliefs.

There is a line. And it is upon its crossing it that we become no longer patriots—but delve into the throes of extremism.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in his glacial stand for black civil rights that still were not fully realized nearly one hundred years after the end of the Civil War. He reminded the nation, “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

Though patriotism can unite us, it can also, just as easily, become a guarded chalice that each of us covetously clutches. One that we blindly fill up with darkness and hatred, brace as a shield to rationalize our divisions, and ravenously drink from to quench our thirst for hostility against those we cast as our enemies.

We can dissent and disagree—passionately and even vehemently. And we will. But we can make a choice to not cross that line, to recognize that our disagreements are the natural outplay of the intentioned processes of this great democratic republic of which we are a part. We can make a choice that, despite any of our differences and the ardent dissent and debate that we understand will take place between us and among us, we shall remain still neighbors, friends, brothers and sisters…united as Americans.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

– President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. On the eve of the Civil War