James C. Harrington: Many of us have flawed idea of ‘patriotism’

By James C. Harrington

July 4 — the grand midsummer holiday with picnics, parades and fireworks — would be a good time to pause and consider what we mean by “patriotism.” Politicians these days fling the word about wildly and loosely.

We see “patriotism” coded, for instance, to mean America nationalism — we’re better than everyone else and we need to show them. Or, in another context, it has a xenophobic contour: Keep Muslims or other immigrants out of the country or “why can’t they be like us?” Sometimes “national security” is part and parcel of “patriotism.” And considerable “patriotic” rhetoric these days masks a long-simmering anti-intellectual streak in America — facts be damned, as it were.

Mexican children talk through a border fence to University of the Incarnate
Word students visiting New Mexico on a “Social Justice and Service Trip"
to the El Paso area. Photo by Sr. Martha Ann Kirk   

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott played a game like this when, as attorney general, he filed suit against the president’s plan to relax immigration enforcement to the extent it would not break up the families of law-abiding, gainfully employed immigrants. Abbott found a judge to his liking who ruled in his favor. When a divided U.S. Supreme Court let the ruling stand, Abbott and his successor, Attorney General Ken Paxton, crowed about their success, even though their legal maneuvering, paid for by our tax money, subjected 743,000 Texas immigrants to immediate deportation, breaking up their families.

None of this is true patriotism. True patriotism is building our country, unifying its diverse people behind the common goal of achieving our “unalienable” rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and recognizing that the purpose of government is “to secure these rights,” as the Declaration of Independence frames it.

Patriotism is about forming community, not dividing it or excluding segments of our society. The Declaration is a communitarian statement of principles; it is not just about individuals. It is a vision that the last line of the Declaration emphasizes: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

The authors of the Declaration, we know, had a narrow view of who had unalienable rights — essentially white male freeholders and landowners. Subsequent generations steadily and painstakingly extended the Declaration’s promises to everyone.

Too many people have been murdered over the years, or brutally clubbed and beaten, fighting for these rights, for us to sit back and let false patriotism tear at our democratic fabric. We owe it to those who have suffered and died, and to our grandchildren, to make democracy what it should be.

We have an uncanny way of “flattening” the Fourth of July — that is, limiting it to something festive rather than looking at the challenges the Fourth presents for us to be better Americans and to accomplish the goals for which we have declared ourselves. As a country, we are veering away from our community goals of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for everyone. We’re becoming ever more individualistic, even selfish.

There is an appalling maldistribution of wealth in our society. For a country where a sizeable number of people claim a Judeo-Christian ethic, we’re remarkably short on feeding the hungry, caring for the elderly, healing the sick, paying just wages, narrowing inequality between rich and poor, welcoming immigrants and pounding swords into plowshares. And we have buried civil dialogue in a grave of acrimonious political discourse, often shouting about who is more patriotic than the other.

This Independence Day, let’s celebrate but also examine ourselves as a nation and recommit ourselves to our ideals. That is true patriotism.

James C. Harrington, a human rights lawyer in Austin, is founder and director emeritus of the Texas Civil Rights Project.