I am convinced the reason a majority of young Americans regard patriotism as unimportant is that they see so little evidence of healthy patriotism among the adults running the country.
To those who have been observing the way Americans increasingly express anger toward their opponents and contempt for our shared institutions, it came as no surprise when a recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll revealed that the share of Americans who say patriotism is very important to them dropped from 70% in 1998 to 38% today.
Why would we expect anything else when leading Republicans condemned NFL players’ protests for protesting the national anthem but remained silent after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building?
Why would we expect anything else when leading Democrats condemned Donald Trump for deliberately endangering national security but defended Hilary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents as a trivial lapse in judgment?
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A sizable majority in both parties have consistently expressed, both in words and in actions, a love of party that supersedes love of country. That is not patriotism. It is narcissism.
For the narcissist, others are worthy of respect only insofar as they share the same values.
Patriotism requires more of us. It requires that we put aside private allegiances and reach out to those who share a larger identity. It means putting our separate, parochial interests in the service of a greater good. Such words ring hollow to those who are convinced that a greater good is legitimate only when it conforms to their own interests.
But what does a “greater good” really mean? After all, people of both parties insist they actually are pursuing a greater good. It’s the other party, they say, that is ruining the country.
This is the challenge of trying to maintain a national identity within a pluralistic society. People have very different values from one another, and their values inform what they envision as a greater good for all.
Is it a greater good to build more public transportation or more roads and parking spaces? Is it a greater good to ensure protections for the unborn or to make abortions available on demand? Is it a greater good to provide free health care and education for all or to have low taxes and personal responsibility? Is it a greater good to protect people from the consequences of their decisions or to give them freedom to make mistakes?
The number of large issues about which Americans care, and the even greater number of specific laws and policies affecting those issues, ensures that we will never come to widespread agreement about many of the goals we seek for our nation. The best we can do is come to agreement about the means by which we pursue those goals. That requires agreeing to abide by a shared set of principles and norms, even when doing so does not get us the results we believe to be important.
That is a hard sell. It is especially hard today when so many of our citizens are short-term consequentialists, focused on immediate results and ready to believe nearly any action that obtains those results is justified. This is a recipe for moral failure.
To be patriotic means loving a country that falls short of my ideals. But it means more than that. It means loving the people to whom I am bound in society, not because I agree with them, but because our lives our mutually dependent. To be patriotic means celebrating that I am a human being, which is to say, a social animal.
Aristotle put it this way: “Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”
Society precedes the individual because it is only in society that we learn the virtues and character traits that allow us to flourish. It is in society that we learn patience, courage, generosity, justice and love.
Patriotism is not just thinking (or saying) that America is great. Patriotism is acting in ways that actually make all of us better. It is attending meetings of local government. It is paying attention to what is happening on my street. It is helping out neighbors when they need a hand. It is playing by the rules, winning with dignity and losing with graciousness.
Patriotism is not just a value. It is not just something one believes in one’s head. Patriotism is a virtue. It is a character trait exhibited by the way one acts in the world.
If we had more examples of adults acting virtuously, in ways that demonstrate love and respect, even for those who are hard to love, we would have more young people seeing how important it is.
Kyte is director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and co-host of "The Ethical Life" podcast.