Yesterday the United States passed its 250th anniversary. Since I probably will not be around for the 300th one, this is my last opportunity to discuss the question of what makes the nation special within an anniversary-context.
Many years ago, someone asked me if I was, as the song lyric goes, "proud to be an American." I recollect that at the time I was probably infected with some of the Liberal guilt-complex, so thinking about "The Indians" and "The Slaves" made outright pride difficult. Yet even then, I think I was aware that the nations that preceded America-- both in the Old Worlds of Asia and Europe, and in the pre-Columbian tribes of the "New World"-- had bloodied their hands so deeply in unjustifiable suffering that by comparison American hands barely have more than red stains on their fingernails.
The culture of guilt-- which only APPEARS to be the polar opposite of pride-- has resulted in many recent clickbait articles on the subject of the 250th anniversary. The general gist of the articles seems to be "Conservatives are proud to be Americans, Liberals are not." A recent speech by New York Mayor Mandami takes a more cunning strategy, seeking to redefine American pride in terms of fighting entrenched power.
The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel — the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.
The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.
The problem with this simplistic "fight the power" ethic is that it says nothing about what it means if this nation, or any nation, acquires power, or any particular reason to use power in the manner Liberals approve of. For instance, if many Liberals think that the nation should have "open borders" while Conservatives disagree, then Mandami's logic is that the only possible reason for opposing Liberal permissiveness must be that old devil Racism.
That's why I stated that guilt only appeared to be the polar opposite of pride. Mandami doesn't feel the weight of the collective guilt he seeks to foist upon his listeners; he's given himself exculpation by pretending to be one of The Elect. He doesn't want to be proud of the whole America, which like all other tribes and nations includes both dark sins, often undertaken for survival, and examples of far-sighted illumination. He's proud only of being an American Liberal, and any sins he commits are justified by the battle against entrenched interests. The idea that some Liberal causes become entrenched interests-- and that they would thus engender resentment and opposition-- would never occur to Mandami, though such opposition entirely fits with his cant that "nothing is fixed into place."
Today, though I'm still wary of the misuses of both patriotism and anti-patriotism, I'd say that no tribe or nation without the basic pride of self-survival: the pride that says, "We deserve to exist." Proverbs says that "pride goeth before destruction," but I believe the writer opposed the sort of pride in which individuals set themselves against the good of the people, which is symbolized as the will of God. Anti-patriots like Mandami don't ever care about the overall good of the people, and while a super-patriot like Trump may not care about people as such, he *may* be more likely to act in the interest of the nation as a whole.
In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote, "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." This is the self-assertiveness of all natural living things, even in creatures incapable of justifying their existences. When White settlers bought Black slaves from Muslim slave-dealers and used these slaves to carve a nation out of the wilderness, I can cavil as well as anyone that the decision was morally wrong. But I didn't live with the difficulties of frontier life, and I don't know absolutely that those slaveholders weren't partly justified in desiring to control a work force that couldn't pick up and leave when it pleased. My current answer to that long-ago question is that I am proud of the concatenation of wills, good and bad, that it took to make this country, and that I am also proud that the USA has done more than good than bad than most if not all of their predecessors.
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