When row upon row of neighborhood homes continued to display the nation’s flag in the weeks after 9/11, it seemed confirmation enough that the proud public spiritedness of the World War II years had reemerged from the attics of a younger generation’s hearts. Also a WWII veteran, the late constitutional scholar Walter Berns was asked to comment on this sentiment so vividly demonstrated—the sentiment of patriotism. The precise question his interlocutor wanted to know, was whether the (truly impressive) flag-waving in 2001 didn’t in fact prove that in America at least, patriotism, or even patriots, requires war to be fostered.
Patriotism is the love for one’s patria, one’s country or fatherland. But fatherland is not a word that’s found in the American lexicon: to be American does not require either pure bloodlines or ties to the soil. Furthermore, while America’s own birth certificate invokes the pursuit of peace and prosperity for a people, the insistence within the Declaration of Independence on each individual’s natural and inalienable rights arguably works to deemphasize the public and the communal by the very staunchness of its defense of the private sphere. Rights with us are primary; duties, even the greatest civic duties, are taken to be secondary and thus run some risk of being neglected outright. Failure to participate in public life through voting, for instance, carries no legal penalty. Thus even the sense of having duties needs cultivated. Something as shocking and grand as war appears necessary to draw such disparate individuals out of their private lives and into the civic sphere.
Berns disagreed. He did believe, however, that an active remembrance of past wars is vital to forge not just patriots, but to maintain a healthy republic. Left to itself, the past alone can be deceptive—for those who mistake their memories for rights especially, but for those with an unfelt ignorance of their history most especially of all. To echo President Lincoln, memories of even great deeds and great people grow cold as they grow old. Remembrance must be an activity, therefore, one that must be brought to bear on present challenges. And a nation, like a person, must deserve its past as much as its future. How it does this is through a conscious participation in the present, in the core activity of patriotism, the activity of citizenship.
Citizenship as a crucial activity at home and how it translates onto the world stage is the subject through which Pete Hegseth approaches the question of the future of the American Republic in his newly-released book, In the Arena: Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One speech Can Reinvigorate America. While it’s impossible to know whether the 21st century will be a second “American century”, Hegseth argues that the answer to whether the American Republic will be healthy and vibrant, not to mention evidence greatness, can be gauged more readily by looking at how individual Americans are engaging in the civic life of their communities and the nation.
The life of republics at all times is closely bound to its citizens; as citizens and not subjects, the inhabitants of a republic directly nourish the state through governing and being governed in turn. Founded on the proposition of equality and self-rule, the American Republic is particularly reliant on the spiritedness of its citizens to maintain its reserved mode of government and its moderate character. The pursuit of individual freedom, impartial justice, and equal opportunity doesn’t simply animate the American form of citizenship, writes Hegseth; this is “the pursuit of [our] republic.”
If the future of the republic relies on its citizens, what does it mean to be a good citizen? In today’s political discourse, the substance of this question is largely ignored, however much some of its particular terms are quoted with abandon. Hegseth notes that to the extent that the notion of citizenship is invoked, it’s to a devolved notion of a “transactional relationship where expansive rights and generous benefits are afforded to citizens in exchange for superficial and easily avoidable duties to the American experiment in self-government.” A more robust understanding of citizenship is needed, one that puts into context an individual’s civic duties. Hegseth finds such a definition in an energetic speech Teddy Roosevelt delivered in 1910 at the Sorbonne in Paris, fresh from a post-presidential African safari.
That speech, “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivers the sentiment and the terminology for the book, particularly for its title. Citizenship is a sweaty and a bloody endeavor, something that happens “in the arena.” Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, who holds two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge, is quick to point out the obvious ramifications for military service of this definition, of doing one’s duty “in those great occasional crises which call for heroic virtues.” But he avoids the easy caricature of hawkish saber-rattler by rescuing TR from his own frequent mischaracterization as Crazy Cousin Teddy “Roosevelt” Brewster, forever bent on the impossible glory of charging the San Juan bedroom stairs. Hegseth recalls TR’s acknowledgement in that same speech, that the call for heroic virtues is occasional; what is constant is the execution of civic duty through “the ordinary, every-day affairs of life.”
What’s constant in citizenship is the need for the “homely virtues” that “stand at the bottom of character,” upon which is built the ability to muster and sustain heroic virtues in times of crisis. In the abstract, this means cultivating qualities “which make for efficiency, and…those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good.” More concretely, this includes “holding one’s own,”—the will and the power to work, “to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children,” in addition to cultivating good character. Upon this rock of active citizenship at home can be built “the good patriot,” how the American citizen and nation behave in the international arena.
In the Arena isn’t a treatise of political theory, nor is it an unqualified hymn of praise to the 26th President of the United States. The author’s admiration for TR’s assured, manly, and spirited defense of active citizenship does carry the narrative forward energetically however, as he describes in semi-autobiographical but accessible fashion how TR’s speech challenged him to volunteer for military service, and afterwards to inform American legislators and the public about the actual possibilities, realities, and differing challenges facing American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the months leading up to “The Surge.”
Patriotism isn’t simply flag-waving; it is the deeper civic activities which the flag-waving is a testament to, whose value we are reminded of when our country is attacked and our way of life threatened. But to know when our way of life is threatened, we first have to know the principles upon which that life is built. To be reminded of the privilege as well as of the rights of being citizens in a democratic republic, we need to have had first a civic education that has encouraged us to invest in the health and longevity of the American regime. While perhaps not uncovering startling new, In the Arena is a welcome and needed reminder, that good citizens are spirited, well-informed citizens, and that such spirited citizens make for a robust and healthy nation.
