POLITICS AND PATRIOTISM

This 30-year-old wartime episode has become the constant companion of McCain’s public life. “To be honest,” he says in a private moment, “I get uncomfortable when they keep talking about it. Not because I get flashbacks or nightmares. But I can’t tell you how many have performed greater acts. And after all these years it bores me. After all these years you’d rather talk about something else.”

But McCain plays his role, knowing that the story, endlessly retold, has its uses. His gripping campaign video plays it to the hilt, complete with North Vietnamese photos of McCain being dragged away by the Vietnamese mob, then lying half-dead in the POW camp. But the story has deeper uses as well. Because McCain isn’t just another politician running for president. He is also a traveling icon. He personifies heroism and patriotism. And through him, audiences are able to savor patriotic sentiments, which in this day and age, they don’t otherwise have many opportunities to express.

All politicians stand in front of American flags, but McCain more than most believes in stoking patriotic fervor, and in cultivating patriotism as an end in itself. He uses the word “patriot” more than just about any other living politician, even where it is almost out of place. “Patriot” is one of the two words he wants on his tombstone. (“Compassionate” is the other.) And he concludes most of his major speeches with a story of American heroism. Sometimes he tells about a group of Marines who were abandoned on the Mayaguez, and who fought on alone until they disappeared into the mists of history. Sometimes he finishes with the story of Roy Benavidez, a Green Beret who dropped in to rescue a twelve-man American patrol that had been surrounded inside Cambodia in 1968. Benavidez managed to drag several of the men to safety despite suffering seven serious gunshot wounds, twenty-eight shrapnel wounds, and bayonet wounds in both of his arms.

“I fell in love with my country while I was in prison,” McCain told an audience at a ceremony honoring Ronald Reagan last year. “I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges we enjoyed and usually took for granted. It wasn’t until I lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her.” Now on the campaign trail, the loss of patriotism is one of McCain’s constant themes. “The spirit of America is dissipating,” he warns. “People are not proud any more of their institutions. They are not eager for public service, or willing to work for a cause greater than themselves.”

It’s fascinating to watch McCain and the people who introduce him trying to articulate their patriotism, because for most of this century, patriotism has been the most tongue-tied of the sentiments. Patriotism has had what historian Michael Kammen calls a “spasmodic” history, but patriotic eloquence went into long-term decline after World War I. The volunteers in that war marched off to France to great rousing crescendos of patriotic bluster. The horror they discovered in the trenches and on the no-man’s-lands made all that high-flown talk seem false, or disgusting. The English poet Robert Graves recalled that after the war he could hardly bear the sound of patriotic rhetoric, and Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms that the stockyards-like slaughter of the war made it embarrassing to hear words like sacred, glorious, and sacrifice.

After the war, the new style was cooler and more taciturn. The new patriot was not silver-tongued and blustery, as Teddy Roosevelt had been; he was understated in the mode of Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper. By World War II, the verbose Romantics, like George S. Patton, seemed archaic in a world of Eisenhowers and Marshalls. By and large, the letters soldiers wrote home were not filled with the high idealism that marked the letters of soldiers in the Civil War.

And since then, America has struggled to rediscover a compelling patriotic language, though John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made attempts. These days, patriotism has been domesticated into a set of innocuous rituals, largely affixed to sporting events. We sing the national anthem before baseball games. We chant “U-S-A” every two years at the Olympics. On Memorial Day, towns across the country hold parades at which Little Leaguers march waving small flags. Patriotic instincts probably run as deep in America as they ever have, it’s just that public expressions of patriotism tend to be nebulous.

Moreover, the shapelessness of our patriotism seems symptomatic of a larger loss of definition throughout American culture. And many people, including McCain, seem to look to a new, crunchier patriotism as a way to heal our cultural woes.

America isn’t in a state of moral degradation and decay, as some of the Cassandras fear, but neither is it in a state that should make us content. If you drive around the country, looking into the cultural institutions of the middle class, you do not find widespread depravity or picturesque collapse reminiscent of the last days of Rome. Instead you see a nation that is good-hearted and bourgeois, and nobody should castigate the bourgeois virtues since they are responsible for most of the good things around us. But if there is a flaw, it is that American society may now be too bourgeois; it is tranquil to a fault. It is, as many social critics have noticed, characterized by a pervasive non-judgmentalism. Alan Wolfe calls this small-scale morality; Allan Bloom called it easygoing nihilism. Whatever its name, it is radically anti-contentious. Americans today are suspicious of vehemence, of people who radiate certitude. American culture recoils from those who try to “impose” their opinions or lifestyles. It is unfriendly to those who seem too passionately attached to higher ideals or who otherwise threaten to shake things up.

The public leaders who succeed tend to be soggy synthesizers. Winning politicians today weave together divergent ideas and march under oxymoronic banners: compassionate conservatism, practical idealism. They no longer aggressively push hard-edged creeds, as their counterparts did during the confrontational Reagan-Thatcher era. Instead they hold genteel and pluralistic “national conversations.” They empathize. They aim to show they can bring people together, not drive them apart. Even in the heat of the impeachment fight, neither party wanted to appear guilty of “partisanship,” redefined as a political sin.

The current mood of squishy tranquillity may be a sign of instinctive conservatism. A little status-quoloving calm may be an appropriate response to a decade as prosperous as this one. It’s not the end of civilization if Americans withdraw for a few years from politics and crusades and enjoy their sport-utility vehicles, their Jewel CDs, and their organic lawn care products.

On the other hand, nobody is going to identify this decade as a high-water mark of American idealism. As social critics from time immemorial have reminded us, affluence carries its corruptions. When a people turn toward the easy comforts of private life, they inadvertently lose connection with higher, more demanding principles and virtues. “What worries me most,” Tocqueville wrote about America, “is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.”

This seems to be what McCain and others are getting at when they speak of the enervation of the American spirit. The fear is that we have become a nation obsessed with risk avoidance and safety. We allow soft sentimentalism to replace demanding moral principles. We shrink our time horizon, becoming disconnected from our common past and less mindful of our future. We detach from public and political life and look on everything that does not immediately touch our own lives with an indifference that is laced with contempt. In short, in seeking to avoid the Scylla of overpoliticized turmoil, we may founder on the Charybdis of underpoliticized complacency.

McCain and others seem to sense that the way to combat some of these trends is to reattach people to the meaning of America, its highest ideals and transcendent glories. In other words, patriotism can serve as an antidote to the temptations of affluence. It can provide a counterpoint to enervation, inspiring people to live up to their principles. It can act as a counter-vailing force to excessive individualism, reminding people of their common bonds and reengaging Americans in national life. It can help inculcate virtue in the young. And it can protect against embourgeoisement, enlarging an otherwise pragmatic spirit that reduces life to the prosaic and mundane.

It’s natural that Americans should look instinctively to patriotism as an alternative to many of these worrying cultural and political trends. We have done so before. A century ago, just as now, many Americans felt that the national spirit was being dissipated by affluence and comfort. Then, just as now, there was a widespread sense that life had become miniaturized and that all the grand causes were gone. For us, it is the end of the Cold War that makes the current challenges seem small and unheroic. For Americans a hundred years ago, it was the closing of the frontier and the fading memory of America’s great, just conflict, the Civil War. As America emerged as a wealthy industrial nation toward the end of the 19th century, her citizens were settling into middle-class lives. Commuter suburbs were springing up. And people were beginning to wonder whether they were losing the hardy virtues of their ancestors, the yeoman farmers and the sturdy pioneers. To many, the age seemed overcivilized, extravagant, and too self-regarding.

So they were ready to listen when, at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous lecture on the closing of the frontier. Turner argued that it was the pioneer experience that defined Americanism: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and efficient Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe.” It was the act of settling a new land, and moving West to settle new territories, Turner continued, that bred all the distinctive qualities of the American character:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy which comes with freedom — these are the traits of the frontier.

But the 1890 census, Turner noted, informed Americans that the frontier had closed. The land all the way to the Pacific had been settled. So, Turner wondered, what would happen to the American spirit now that there was no more wilderness to conquer. What of “American energy . . . continually demanding a wider field of exercise”?

Others wondered the same thing. And so there arose a myriad of patriotic organizations designed to revive in the young the ideals of sacrifice exemplified in the Civil War and the vigorous spirit of the pioneers.

In the 1890s, the Women’s Relief Corps championed the celebration of Memorial Day, launched a campaign to introduce the flying of the flag over every schoolhouse, became a driving force behind the creation and the adoption of the Pledge of Allegiance, lobbied for flag-desecration laws and the national anthem, and distributed curriculum guides such as “Methods for Teaching Patriotism in the Public Schools” and “A Patriotic Primer for the Little Citizen.” Meanwhile, the WRC’s brother organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, sponsored pilgrimages to historic sights, donated flags to schools and other institutions, raised money for patriotic monuments, promoted patriotic rituals, and supplied schools with nationalistic textbooks. In 1900, the GAR helped New York State develop a 350-page Manual For Patriotism to be used in the public schools. In her recent history of this movement, To Die For, historian Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary describes a typical primer published in 1903. It taught the alphabet through the military conquests of the Spanish-American war, so B stood for Battles, F for flag, P for Philippines, R for Roosevelt, and Z for the zeal “that has carried us through / When fighting for justice / With Red, White and Blue.”

On Columbus Day in 1892, 100,000 American schools performed a ritual: A flag was brought to the front of each school, escorted by a color guard, and raised up the pole. Led by Civil War veterans, the assembled students shouted, “Three Cheers for Old Glory.” Then they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, which had been written the previous year by Francis Bellamy, raising their arms, palms up. They sang “America.” And then they listened to an oration, written by a committee headed by Bellamy and issued to schools across the country, which detailed the national narrative behind the rituals: the settling of the frontier, the growth of democracy, and the emergence of America as a great and wealthy power.

One of the people who worked most diligently to carry the pioneer ethos into the post-frontier age was Teddy Roosevelt. By the time Turner delivered his closing of the frontier lecture in 1893, Roosevelt had already published the first volumes of his history, The Winning of the West. He’d already tried his hand at ranching. He’d already talked over the ideas that led his friend Owen Wister a few years later to write the fabulously successful novel The Virginian, which largely created the western hero. And TR’s political career can be described as the pioneer spirit applied to public office. As a police commissioner, reformist governor, and president, he battled corruption in the manner of a frontier lawman. In the spirit of continent-crossing, he pushed for the Panama Canal. With his friend the conservationist Gifford Pinchot, he helped westerners develop the resources of their land, while also preserving the first national parks where Americans could go to be revived by wildness. And most important, his foreign policy was the pioneer spirit made manifest. One of the benefits of his foreign policy, he believed, was to confront 20th-century Americans with the sorts of challenges the wilderness had provided to earlier generations.

One hundred years ago this month, on April 10, 1899, Teddy Roosevelt went to the Hamilton Club in Chicago and delivered a speech called “The Strenuous Life.” His point was that just as a great individual must undertake ambitious tasks, so must a great nation. “A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world,” he declared.

Roosevelt urged an increase in military spending and called upon the United States to take a greater role in the Philippines. But his real concern was the moral health of the nation. Roosevelt accepted that America was to be an affluent, commercial nation, but he was horrified by the prospect that it would be only that. Throughout the speech there are jabs at those who think of nothing but making money. “We cannot sit huddled within our own border and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond,” he said. And Roosevelt held out China as an example of a nation that had fallen into decline because it had succumbed to the temptations of easy comfort. “We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism, heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk.”

In short, TR saw foreign policy activism and patriotism as remedies for cultural threats he perceived at home. He wanted an America that would be perpetually striving and industrious. And he and the millions of other Americans who worked for this cause created the three things you need for a patriotic revival. They created a national narrative, recounting the emergence of a people: the story of westward expansion. They created a public philosophy, a creed that explained Americans to themselves and organized their thinking about the future: the public philosophy of what might be called muscular progressivism. And they created a patriotic sentiment, an emotional style and a set of rituals that people could use to express and pass down their love of country: all the flag waving and pledging and speechifying.

And it seemed to work. At the beginning of the century, America practically burst with energy and nearly exploded with self-confidence. Corporate empires were built, industries established. Cities leapt skyward. The public buildings completed during that era bowl you over with their strutting exuberance. America emerged as a world power.

But World War I wasn’t all that put an end to that patriotic ethos and the public philosophy that undergirded it. They had another more serious flaw, which has made them impossible to revive: They were racialist. They were self-consciously racialist (which gives them a candor startling today), based on pseudo-Darwinian ideas about the superior races’ obligation to uplift the lesser ones. In The Winning of the West, Roosevelt traces the “perfectly continuous history” of the Anglo-Saxon race from King Alfred through George Washington and up to the cowboys. Then he goes on to explain why the superior races must conquer the inferior:

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, through it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori — in each case the victor, horrible through many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. . . . It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

We no longer divide races into superior and savage. We no longer teach the westward expansion as one long triumph for progress and civilization. And yet the pioneer ethos, and Teddy Roosevelt’s attitudes toward foreign lands, were built on these theories. If we are going to encourage a new 21st-century patriotism and preserve the vigorous virtues that the pioneer ideologists rightly celebrated, we can’t just re-brew the elixir that worked in the past. We will need another national narrative, and another public philosophy to guide us.

Already one attempt to replace the pioneer ethos has emerged, but it has failed. In 1993, Nathan Glazer published an essay in the Public Interest entitled “American Epic: Then and Now.” He argued that the tale of westward expansion dominated the American mind up until at least the 1930s. But now, he continued, the dominant creed is multiculturalism. The pioneer epic, Glazer wrote, was about free land, free institutions, and free men — Columbus, Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark. The multicultural epic “celebrates quite different voyages: the middle passage, the Trail of Tears, the immigrant ship, the underground railway, the tenement trail from slum to suburb.”

Anybody who has children in school knows how thoroughly the multicultural narrative has replaced the pioneer narrative. Nowadays, Harriet Tubman is better known among school kids than almost any Founding Father. Anybody who follows politics is aware of how thoroughly the multicultural public philosophy has triumphed. Now when candidates say they want a staff that represents America, they don’t mean a staff that represents distinctly American values. They mean a staff that “looks like America,” with requisite tokens from each of the multicultural groups, all bringing their own distinct vantage points to the table. A group that “looks like America” is diverse, not unified.

Multiculturalism holds that America is special because it is a nation of nations. It’s a microcosm of the world. Championing diversity and celebrating difference are held up as our vocation. But multiculturalism, it is now clear, fails as an effective public philosophy. Whatever you may think of its merits as a creed, it indisputably has failed to achieve what a public philosophy is supposed to achieve. It doesn’t lift most people out of themselves and involve them in public life.

To be sure, many people deeply identify with heroic tales of oppressed minorities. Their lives are given meaning by these struggles. And the vast majority of Americans would never dream of being anti-multicultural. They watch with a sense of vague approval as their children compose their Sacagawea book reports. They go to Disney movies like Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and sing along with the multicultural pieties. But all this stuff doesn’t move them very much either. Multiculturalism doesn’t remind most people of our common bonds or renew pride in country. It’s simply unrealistic to expect a nation to embrace an ethos that prominently features guilt and self-flagellation. So it’s no surprise that faith in public institutions has plummeted as the multicultural ethos has achieved hegemonic control over the schools and public discussion. If multiculturalism is the only public narrative on offer, then most people will cease to identify with public narratives and withdraw from public life.

The public philosophy based on the pioneer experience is obsolete. And the multicultural ethos is too parochial and divisive. What sort of public philosophy might reenergize American public life and guide us through the next decades?

There is no shortage of people stepping forward to suggest one. Gary Bauer, among others, is attempting to articulate a public philosophy that melds patriotic sentiment with biblical morality. Pat Buchanan is trying to create an American version of blood-and-soil populism. Michael Lind has a nationalist public philosophy that links Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson — a sort of Great Society nationalism for the 21st century. Michael Joyce and William Schambra of the Bradley foundation are working on a public philosophy based on local communities and civil society.

But it’s interesting to turn back to John McCain, because he is a centrist figure in American politics and because, of the leaders who seem to have thought most about patriotism and the national identity, he is a relatively centrist figure in American politics, in tune with mainstream culture.

Like most people in America, McCain has learned the etiquette of the multicultural creed, and he is sympathetic to many of its goals. He loudly calls upon the Republican party to be the party of inclusiveness and boasts of his sensitivity to Hispanic concerns. He supports some bilingual education programs and urges his party to move beyond affirmative action debates. But, also like most people, McCain is clearly dissatisfied with the multicultural vision. America is a diverse country, but it cannot be just that. It is united by something more than its diversity, and when McCain talks about his patriotism, he is groping to articulate what that is.

Right now his sentiments are vague. He talks about the military. “I have never had a prouder moment in my life than after Desert Storm,” he says. And he tells stories of military heroism, like the one about Roy Benavidez in Cambodia. But personal courage is not the same as patriotism, because it doesn’t indicate what cause the hero serves. So McCain gropes, struggling to articulate a solid goal in the midst of slippery swamps.

“I believe we are an unfinished nation,” McCain often tells his audiences, as if he were trying to recapture the spirit of the pioneer with frontiers left to conquer. He swells with pride as he describes the accomplishments of the high-tech industries, sensing that there is something quintessentially American in the energy, risk-taking, and mobility of the Silicon Valley work force. He also talks about America’s role as the sole superpower, sensing that America’s creed must somehow explain and celebrate its dominant position in the world. But if you compare McCain’s approach to politics with, say, TR’s conscious effort to preserve the pioneer spirit, it remains indistinct. TR had westward expansion, but McCain has no central narrative to organize his thinking, and no public philosophy to explain America’s purpose.

McCain, of course, is a politician, not a public philosopher (TR fancied himself both). McCain’s job is to promote policies. And in this he is more specific. In fact, if you look at his policies, you can begin to imagine a national narrative and a public philosophy that might be erected around them.

All politicians have to translate the virtues they possess into an agenda that requires those virtues. The main task of a politician who relies more than most on nationalist sentiments is to explain why the nationalist virtues — courage, steadfastness, honor, pride — are necessary to solve domestic problems. And as a result, politicians who make patriotism a hallmark of their careers tend to fasten on the word “reform.” They hold up some vision of an American ideal which they argue has been betrayed by corrupt and parasitic interests. They then insist that it will take a courageous warrior to beat back those interests and ram through reform. Like others before him, McCain adopts this approach. “I want to reform. I’ve been a reformer all my life,” he says, before rattling off his reform credentials in campaign finance, defense spending, and the tax code.

But these days McCain is most famous for his foreign policy views, especially his response to the war over Kosovo. Aside from his apparently millions of appearances on the talk shows, McCain has delivered two major foreign policy addresses of late — one in Kansas just before the Kosovo adventure got started, and one at a think tank in Washington on April 13.

Taken together, they have a clear message: America’s moral destiny is wrapped up in its status as a superpower. If America ceases to assert itself as the democratic superpower, promoting self-government around the world, it will cease to be the America we love. McCain is unabashed about the great legacy our parents’ and grandparents’ generations left us. “The United States is the indispensable nation because we have proven to be the greatest force for good in human history,” he declared in Kansas. “We enter the new century a peerless mature power. . . . Given that our experiences this century will inform our leadership in the next century, we should prove to be an even abler champion for mankind.”

You’d think all Americans would want their country to remain the world’s sole superpower. After all, the game theorists teach us that nations always seek to maximize their power. But in fact, if you look around the op-ed pages, you discover that many are ambivalent. Many liberals believe that multilateral power is more ethical than American power. Many on the right believe that a superpower America means a Leviathan state that will trample on communities. Realists don’t like mixing morality and foreign policy, whereas isolationists see foreign policy as a one-way ratchet that can corrupt a nation’s values but never improves them. Then there are the people on the right and left who don’t believe American culture or the American leadership class is strong enough to sustain an ambitious foreign policy. And finally, there are those who believe that the global marketplace and the Internet make talk of America’s global destiny obsolete.

None of these people is any less patriotic than John McCain. They just have different versions of what America means and draw different policy implications. When McCain holds up America’s superpower status as a key to America’s identity in the next century, he is starting to fashion a distinct and controversial public philosophy. At the level of policy, McCain is more assertive in places like Kosovo than those who are ambivalent about America’s supremacy. He is willing to commit more resources than they are to preserving America’s superpower credibility. And he is willing to use American power more aggressively in defense of American values. For example, McCain said in his speech last week, “I think the United States should inaugurate a 21st-century policy interpretation of the Reagan Doctrine. Call it rogue-state rollback, in which we politically and materially support indigenous forces within and outside of rogue states to overthrow regimes that threaten our interests and values.”

This approach to foreign policy hints at a coherent view of America’s past and future, which, if developed, could organize America’s faith in itself. It starts with the fact that America is no longer a nation crossing the prairies or freeing the slaves. Instead, the narrative that explains America today is the story of the country’s rise to pre-eminence in the 20th century. It is the story of Eisenhower and Marshall and MacArthur and Truman and Kennedy and Reagan. After all, America’s progress in this century is no less heroic than its progress in the 18th and 19th centuries. But unlike the tales of the Founders and the pioneers, the 20th-century narrative hasn’t yet coalesced in the public imagination to form a new American epic.

Nonetheless, the American heroes of the century now ending do exemplify certain ideas that apply to the next one. They made maintaining America’s global supremacy their priority, knowing that if the country were to slip into the ranks of middling powers, it would be a catastrophe, not only for American confidence and values, but also for the world, since no other nation is equally fit for world leadership. Furthermore, these heroes were institution builders. They built the structures that kept the peace and protected freedom through the Cold War, and they helped restore or introduce democratic institutions in places like Japan and Germany, treating defeated enemies with magnanimity and vision.

In particular, America’s best 20th-century leaders thought institutionally. And today many of America’s institutions need reform. The most effective part of John McCain’s stump speech is the “Are you proud?” passage. He runs down a list of institutions and asks: Are you proud of the state of the presidency? Are you proud of the campaign finance system? Are you proud of the tax code? Are you proud of a budget process that rewards special interests? These questions answer themselves and suggest an agenda for domestic reform that is the counterpart to America’s role in the world.

But there is something else the heroes of the American Century exemplify: citizenship. They dedicated large parts of their lives to public service, believing it the most honorable of professions. They believed, too, that public service requires certain virtues, like duty, loyalty, honesty, discretion, and self-sacrifice — virtues that can always use reinforcement in Washington and across the land. Citizenship implies a set of habits and obligations that counteracts the decentralizing tendencies of American life, the impulses to autonomy and self-expression. And the duties of citizenship join people across class, race, and region to involve them in the political fate of the nation — in the task of self-government.

This is where, at the beginning of the 21st century as at our Founding over two hundred years ago, politics and patriotism come together: in self-government. They come together in the individual’s self-government that makes possible self-sacrifice and virtue; they come together in the civic self-government that underlies healthy social institutions; and they come together in the political self-government that is America’s achievement and model for the world. It wasn’t until John McCain lost America for a while, he says, that he realized how much he loved her. Perhaps it’s only after we’ve forgotten the meaning of our patriotic pride for a while that we’re now ready to realize how central to us is, in the words of James Madison, “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”