What is American Patriotism? Thoughts on the Fourth of July

Commitment to the Founding Idea 

On this fourth of July, I attended a concert of patriotic music at Lawrence University in Appleton where I live. I and the rest of the audience sang the familiar, patriotic songs, and I thought about what it means to be a patriotic American. For me, it begins with a recognition that the United States is my home. I was born and grew up here. I have spent almost all of my life here. My parents were born here, and so were my children. This is my home.

However, the United States is not just a place. It is also an idea – the idea that all people are created equal. We all deserve equal economic opportunities, and we all should be equal before the law. My country was founded on that idea, and for me, a commitment to it is an essential part of American patriotism. I believe that I cannot really be a patriotic American without such a commitment. Moreover, a patriot must recognize that our country has never fully lived up to the idea of equality.  It has not been a reality but an aspiration. We have struggled to make our idea a reality. Over the centuries, we have come closer, but a patriotic American must recognize that there is still much to do.

The Founding Fathers Thought About Equality

The fight against economic inequality occupied a large place in the minds of our founding fathers because they knew that extreme economic inequality was incompatible with democracy. A society of extreme inequality tends to become an oligarchy because the wealthy upper class is able to use its wealth to control the society’s politics. The lower classes then see that they are shut out of the political system, and they lose faith in democracy. They fall prey to demagogues who promise to “be their voice” and to fix a rigged system. Democracy cannot survive in a society with extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth and income.

The founding fathers were born in a society in which most of the wealth was held by a class of hereditary, titled landowners, and in founding their new country, they made sure that it would have no place for a titled nobility. They thought that would be enough to prevent the emergence of extreme inequality because they lived in an agrarian society with a seemingly limitless supply of land and in a time when the inexpensive tools needed for farming were within the reach of most people.

The Struggle Goes on With New Tools

The methods that served the founding fathers in the fight for equality are not sufficient for us today. We live in an industrial and commercial society that has created new ways for hereditary wealth to be accumulated and new barriers to equality. We do not have a titled nobility, but we do have oligarchs, and they present the same danger to democracy as the titled nobility presented in the eighteenth century. 

As patriotic Americans, we must continue the fight against extreme inequality in order to preserve our democracy. Our weapons in this fight will be different from those used by our eighteenth-century ancestors because our world is different from theirs. Just as we cannot defend our country today with eighteenth-century muskets and swords, so we cannot defend our democracy with eighteenth-century policies. We will have to use weapons like a wealth tax or a system of free post-secondary education in order to counteract the tendency for wealth and income to become ever more concentrated. These are things that our founding fathers would not have thought of doing, but they would have understood completely our reasons for doing them. We have not always thought of such policies as patriotic duties, but that is what they are. Our country is an idea as well as a place, and commitment to the idea is an essential element of American patriotism.

As patriotic Americans, we must continue fight against inequality and oligarchy. We will not be the first modern Americans to understand that patriotism demands that we not shrink from the fight. In the early twentieth century, Wisconsin's progressives saw the need to fight against the power of oligarchy The architects of the New Deal saw the need, too. 

On this fourth of July, let us renew our commitment the idea that our country represents. Let us renew our patriotism.