What has patriotism meant over time, and how has civil debate shaped it? We hosted a discussion of that question last week featuring philosopher Steven Smith of Yale University, who shared insight from his new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. He was joined by historians Allen Guelzo of Princeton University and Sophia Rosenfeld of the University of Pennsylvania. They explored some of the key episodes of patriotism and dissent throughout American history—from the Revolution through the Founding and the Civil War to today. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderated.
This panel was streamed live on October 13, 2021.
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This episode was produced by Jackie McDermott, Tanaya Tauber, John Guerra, and Lana Ulrich. It was engineered by David Stotz and Jackie McDermott.
PARTICIPANTS
Allen Guelzo is Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities and Director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton University. Guelzo is also a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and currently serves as a trustee of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. He is the author of numerous books on the Civil War and early 19th -century American history, the most recent of which is Robert E. Lee: A Life.
Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and the Mellon Foundation, as well as previously serving as the editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. Rosenfeld is the author of several books on intellectual history, the most recent of which is Democracy and Truth: A Short History.
Steven Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as the co-director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions. Smith has taught at Yale since 1984, and during that time has held serval positions, including Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science, Director of the Special Program in the Humanities, and Master of Branford College. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, the most recent of which is Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Steven Smith, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes
- Steven Smith, The Wall Street Journal, “The Two Enemies of Patriotism"
- Sophia Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth: A Short History
- Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History
- Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Independence Hall (1861)
- Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President
- Allen Guelzo, Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction
- Walter Scott, "Breathes there the man"
- Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address (1838)
- Marianne Anderson, "My Country Tis of Thee" at the Lincoln Memorial (1939)
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense
- Allen Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Tanaya Tauber: Welcome to Live at the National Constitution Center, the podcast sharing live constitutional conversations and debates hosted by the center in-person and online. I'm Tanaya Tauber, senior director of Town Hall programs. What is the American idea, patriotism and over time? Last week, Philosopher Steven Smith of Yale University shared insight from his new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. Joining Smith in this timely conversation were historians Allen Guelzo of Princeton University and Sophia Rosenfeld of the University of Pennsylvania.
They explored some of the key episodes of patriotism and descent throughout American history, from the revolution through the founding and the Civil War to today. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center moderated. This conversation was streamlined live on October 13th, 2021. Here's Jeff to get the conversation started.
[00:00:59] Jeffrey Rosen: Welcome to all of you. And Steven Smith, we'll begin with you. You argue in your new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, that patriotism, and the American idea, which you root in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is, being questioned today, both by the nationalist right and the multicultural left. And yet you argue that patriotism is worth embracing among citizens of all perspectives. Tell us what patriotism is and why you think it is worth embracing?
[00:01:34] Steven Smith: Thank you, Jeff. And thank you for that question. One of the ma- main arguments of my book, is that patriotism is principally a form of loyalty. Loyalty is a virtue, and I want to argue, it is the first virtue of social institutions. Without it, society, especially a democratic society, which depends upon a sense of, collective memory and a shared history, without that sense of loyalty or love of country, democracy, could, could really not, not exist and is coming frayed. One of the arguments I make in the book is that patriotism, in many ways, the, the debates we're having today are in many ways ancient ones. Patriotism has, in some sense, always been a contested virtue. anybody who reads, Sophocles' Antigone will see that the conflict between loyalty to country and loyalty to family is as old as, as Western civilization.
So the patriotism has always been contested. And the particular form of contestation that it faces today is as you quote, between the m- multiculturalists on the left, the nationalists on the right. I want to try, I would like to recenter that debate, focusing patriotism in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as the whole, you might say superstructure of commentary and ideas that has developed around those. We have always been a people of the book or at least of the books and of the text. And two, we are people of ideas. We are people of texts, and there's no more important reader of those texts than Abraham Lincoln. I delve into his conception of patriotism is rooted in ideas of, of human equality and equal human dignity for all people, a notion of inclusion.
he very much opposed the kind of, no nothing, as they were called. They called themselves nationalists of his own period. And he was also cautiously progressive as in, in, in, his idea of patriotism, in the sense that it was an idea yet to be achieved and to be constantly strived for and worked for. And those are some of the sort of core ideas that I've tried to put forward in my book.
[00:03:54] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for introducing the arguments so well. Sophia Rosenfeld, you, argue in your latest, book, that truth has been central, at the time of the American founding to the conception of democracy embraced by the f- founders. And in your earlier book that had short history of common sense, you talk about evolutions of concepts of truth from antiquity, which embraced a kind of vision of the human mind as a collection of faculties, where, where common sense is, is, is kind of a faculty in the mind. And, and, and you talk about how that, that was resurrected, but altered during the enlightenment by John Locke and the Scottish enlightenment folks who were, who were called the common sense school.
It's such an important and it- question. Can you give us a short history of c- of common sense and truth? Wh- what were Locke and the Scottish folks, arguing about? Wh- why did- why were they so determined to come up with a theory of how we know things, a theory of epistemology? And what were they reacting to-
[00:05:02] Sophia Rosenfeld: Yeah-
[00:05:02] Jeffrey Rosen: ... and what was their theory?
[00:05:03] Sophia Rosenfeld: Yeah, it's, I mean, in some ways, it links back quite directly with questions of patriotism, once ideas of truth get caught up with problems of politics. But in a nutshell, I'd say that if we think back to the era of the enlightenment, sort of Locke onwards, the great question that animated the enlightenment was really, how can we know things in an accurate way? How can we really get a sense of the world? And that began from a critique in a sense, that much of what we thought we knew was really mythology, was mistaken, was just inherited principles. But the question emerges in full form for almost every great thinker of the 17th and 18th century. How can we know anything accurately?
And I don't think it's an accident that that same moment and what you might call epistemology or the history of how you know things soon coincided with a moment in politics that envisioned a politics on a very different foundation, not a politics of sort of hidden behind the scenes, dissimulation, but a politics that would make truth front and center. And the question emerged, where would that truth come from? And the odd and unusual in a sense answer that I think the founding generation came up with, is that it would be established collectively. It would come out of, that there would be no one organization that, or no one method or no one place from which truth emanated, but rather, that truth would be a kind of social product. We'd put our heads together and come to some kind of low-level consensus about what the world was like. And we tend to call that common sense still.
[00:06:42] Jeffrey Rosen: Fascinating. and so, relevant to our current debates, as we'll see in a moment. Allen Guelz- Guelzo, your pathbreaking books on Lincoln describe the ways that Lincoln both embraced the ideals of the De- Declaration. "I've never had an idea politically that did not come from the Declaration." He said. But also transmuted and transformed them. What are the ideals of the Declaration through Lincoln's eyes? And, and to what degree did they constitute, in your view, the American idea?
[00:07:13] Allen Guelzo: Jeffrey, for Lincoln, what stands at the core of political life itself are natural rights. this is the great discovery of the enlightenment, that human beings possess, hardwired into themselves as human beings, certain rights that, that a natural law has to create, it should be there. And Jefferson articulates some of those when he talked about rights, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. These come simply by virtue of the fact that we're human beings, created in, in, the image of our creator. And that's what's in the Declaration, Lincoln subscribes to that entirely. and possessing those natural rights, that's what makes ordinary people able to govern themselves.
it's what means that people do not need aristocrats. They do not need Kings. they do not need a hierarchy to construct their lives for them. The purpose of government is not to invent those rights, the purpose of government is to secure those rights because those rights exist prior to government itself. Those natural rights and believing those natural rights were what made him an opponent of slavery. Because in Lincoln's days, slavery was of course a legal institution, yet he was convinced to the core of his being that it was not right. Well, in that case, what made it wrong? Well, because it was a violation of natural rights, in this case, the right to life, the right to Liberty, the right to the fundamental idea of governing oneself.
Patriotism was for him what you said when you were justifying those rights and the kind of government that emerges from it. When he was delivering a eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852, he said that Clay loved his country. First of all, because it was his country, that came naturally, but, and here Lincoln takes a step beyond that, because his country had shown that free individuals were capable of prospering. They were capable of governing themselves. That democracy, based on natural rights, was not just a suicide bat that was eventually gonna fall apart under pressure. That kind of patriotism for him transcended ethnicity or any other kinds of loyalties.
In July of 1858, he talked about how half the people living in the United States at that point had come from some other place and they didn't have a direct connection to the American revolution. Nevertheless, when they read in the Declaration that all men were created equal, Lincoln said they believed that they were bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of those old men who wrote the Declaration. And of course, as you quoted his comments in Philadelphia, in 1861, he said that he never had an idea politically that did not arise from the Declaration of Independence. And he understood the Civil War as an assault on the Declaration, as assault, an assault on those natural rights and the capacity of people to govern themselves. His patriotism in that sense was very much a patriotism of a rational and enlightenment of sort.
[00:10:29] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for that. Steven, I think it's... I'd like to ask you whether you agree with Allen's distillation of the basic principles of the Declaration as glossed by Lincoln, and whether you would root in Lincoln's vision, the values of patriotism that you identify at the end of your book, including equality, the rule of law, limited government, pluralism and respect for diversity, culture and the arts, economic development and opportunity invention and discovery and individualism?
[00:11:04] Steven Smith: I very much agree. I would... One thing when it comes to Lincoln, I would just say, you don't disagree with Allen Guelzo. I, I certainly agree with it. I, I would add a couple of other dimensions to it because I think while Lincoln's commitment to the rights of free human beings, of free men and women are central to his idea of the American polity and of the American Republic. he was also deeply aware, and I hope Allen will agree with this too, that patriotism is, it is a patriotism o- of ideas and of rights, but one of... And this is one of the arguments I make in my book. Our patriotism is also an ethos. It's a rooted in a common way of life. That is to say a collective history, a collective memory.
This is something that Lincoln emphasizes very strongly in his first great speech, the Lyceum Address, as it's, as it's usually called, where he says, the great enemy, of, of free, of free government today, does not come from abroad, but it comes from a loss of collective memory. the silent artillery of time, he says. One of, I think his most beautiful and captivating expressions, the silent artillery of time, it is corroding our collective memory. And I think that sense of memory, which is so important to any polity, is what we, is the problem that we see today. it is part of forgetfulness of where we came from, but it's also a fracturing of that, memory.
It's kind of being, being car- carved up into so many different and competing rival narratives, rival, rival approaches, that we've lost any sense of what a kind of common purpose and collective memory is. And I, I would add to what Allen, I would add to that dimension of Lincolnian patriotism. I, I call it in the book, enlightened patriotism. I would add that dim- dimension to what the importance of, of rights and the kind of, I would say legal or, a philosophic foundation of American patriotism.
[00:13:24] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for that. Sophia, I- I'd love your thoughts on, on the ideals of America as being embodied in the Declaration. Do you, do you agree with Steven and Allen on that? which is an important question. And then tell us about how you think that the search for truth embodied in the original First Amendment is also part of the American idea? And you said that, at least initially, it was thought there were two possible sources of truth in a modern democracy, one, the wisdom of the crowd, and then the second, the, the, the judgment of, of elites.
[00:14:02] Sophia Rosenfeld: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's a fascinating question. just what American ideals are. And there are... I would, I would agree with S- Steven that there, there are many. Rights is one of them, but not the only one that matters in that sense. I do, and I, and I would agree to that we do need some kind of common narrative to hold us together. My question though is less, where do we find that? Then are we so diverse in the ways we live today? Are we so unequal in educational attainments, in economic terms, in so many different ways that it might be more difficult than ever to find that common ground? So I don't... I'm less worried that we don't know where to look for it. Then do we have the capacity to mean the same things by the same terms, when we lived in somewhat siloed existence, as these days? We have very few really common experiences in life as Americans.
We don't all go to the same schools. We don't all live in the same kinds of places. heterogeneity is a, is a marvelous thing. The pluralism of America is wonderful, but a certain amount of inequality that is, to a certain degree makes it hard to find that common ground. if I were to think of myself as a patriot, which I guess I am in a certain sense, I would have to agree with Steve that the place one would want to find that is in this, in a set of principles, of Constitution and others, less than, I'm... The ethos, I understand. I think we do need a common memory. I'm a bit more nervous when we start talking about it in terms of things like, language or accent or things that immediately seem to me potentially exclusionary in certain ways.
But I'm mainly in full agreement that some kind of commitment to the basic ideals on which this country founded, I love very much Steven's idea, that these are aspirational positions. These aren't things that already exist, they are things we're aiming for, greater equality, greater Liberty, greater fraternity for that matter, are ideals that could potentially bind us together across our differences. I would like to believe that is true. as to the First Amendment, there's another principle that I think one can embrace as part of what makes America distinctive. It's not the only place with the free speech tradition, but of course the First Amendment is an unusual free speech tradition.
And in so far as it allows for dissent and allows for the possibility of pluralism, I think it can certainly be a part of what might make somebody convinced that, that something abstraction, that is the United States of America, is something to which one could have a serious amount of loyalty.
[00:17:09] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for that. I'm gonna pause to say, I think it's significant that the three of you, with some important nuances of, of difference have essentially agreed that there are certain American ideals rooted in the Declaration, to which we can aspire, people of different perspectives, can and, and should, continue to aspire. And, and now is the time, Allen from m- me to ask you to amplify on a point Sophia just made. She, she said that the whole thing originally depended on some kind of set of common means for evaluating the truth. Before we jump to the president, I wanna ask you about Lincoln's Day.
Steve notes that at the time of the founding, when John Jay said that American national identity, had created, one connected country, one united people where people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, it was an overstatement even then at the time of the founding 'cause the, the founders were more diverse than, than Jay was suggesting. What about Lincoln? To what degree did Lincoln's vision of the Declaration at the time when he became committed to the eradication of, the system of chattel slavery depend on a homogeneous people of, of common mores, manners and means of discussing the truth or, or not?
[00:18:31] Allen Guelzo: I think, to a certain degree, Lincoln was indifferent to questions about mores and manners. He believed that allegiance to a set of ideas was what you used as the paramount judge of patriotism. And this is why I say that his notion of patriotism is, is a very rational one. I think you can distinguish, well, let's say two basic families of patriotism. There is a patriotism which is a passion. This is the kind of patriotism that begins with tribal patriotism, then develops into kind of communal patriotism. And in the 18th century, you find this in the form of throne and altar patriotism and, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, you get the blood and soil version of this.
But it's still a passion, not an act of reason. this is what Sir Walter Scott talked about, this, this famous poem, he writes about breeds, they're the man with soul so dead who never to himself has said, "This is my own, my native land." And that's all about who, you know, the ma- the man's heart had an arrow within him burned. this is a patriotism of passion that draws heavily on symbols and punishes departure as treason. It lives within hierarchy and it is hostile to inequality and glorifies fraternity. Some of the things that Sophia was talking about. patriotism though in a different family is more a matter of obligation and loyalty. This is the loyalty that Steven was talking about, where you define patriotism as an obligation, as, as a debt owed to fellow citizens or to the etiology of one's community.
Americans have always distanced themselves from throne or alter kinds of patriotism. We don't have a throne, we don't have an alter. What we have is a creed, and it's that creed that identifies us as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as groups. We think of ourselves as individuals and we're disinclined to yield to communal or tribal forms of patriotism. We're not really fundamentally all that bothered by, by inequality. We put up with it for a long time and we tend to be foreign to fraternity. We don't like to be pressed into the mold, that others lay out for us. Now, the upside of that is, we're less likely to be carried away by patriotism as passion. The downside is that we're very likely to regard self-interest as more compelling than patriotism.
And that will lead us sometimes to think first about profits, and that's what gives us Benedict Arnold. Or loyalty to rival etiologies, that's what gives us the Rosenbergs. And I think this weakness is to a large degree today exacerbated by, by globalization. Because globalization seems to make patriotism look local and antique. And what I think we're experiencing is simply the long arc of American individualism and self-seeking. it allows us to discard patriotism as though it was unworthy and therefore we often have trouble dealing with violations of it. But our democracy really is built on a patriotism of reason. And there is something to be said for the protection afforded by at least some measure of the patriotism of reason. And that I think is what Lincoln was seeking to speak to in the crisis of the American Civil War.
[00:22:17] Jeffrey Rosen: Many. Thanks for that. S- Steven, Allen has just distinguished what he calls the patriotism of reason that he attributes to Lincoln and the founders, from the patriotism of, of throne and altar of hierarchy, of blood, of, of tribal allegiance, and that of fraternity and globalism, and international allegiance. I think in your book, you, make similar distinctions and say that the tribalism of national loyalty is being embraced today by the rights of the tribal, the, the, the allegiance to multiculturalism and, and globalism and, and, the statelessness, by the multicultural left. And therefore that the patriotism of, of reason is, is under siege. do we have that writer or how, how would you describe the current debate between the right and the left today about patriotism?
[00:23:10] Steven Smith: I think that's broadly right, correct as I read it or as I view it. what we have today is a situation where, and I say patriotism has in many ways always been contested. but on the right, we see it's certainly embraced, but patriotism has become weaponized. it's become a tool for distinguishing who's in and who's out, who's the American, who's, who's an enemy of the people. and again, I would argue, this is not patriotism. I mean, you could maybe it's patriotism on steroids in some way, but that's not as patriotism as I think, we have been discussing it.
It is a form of nationalist self-assertion and a division of the world into, into the sort of hostile camps of friend and enemy, which in fact is a distinction that cuts all the way down into our domestic politics. on the left, of course, patriotism is under attack. it's seen, I mean, to put it, to say it was seen as antique is- would be a polite way of putting it. the left tends to see patriotism as a sort of a form of xenophobia, probably a form of racism, perhaps even a form of white supremacy. both of these are so dehumanizing, dehumanizing of fellow citizens, dehumanizing of one another, de- dehumanizing of the possibility of the kind of civic discourse and concern for truth that Sophia, discuss so eloquently.
So patriotism has to be in a first instance, distinguished and recaptured from these extremes. And I would encourage people to, if you're a person of, I would say, the center right, I think you need to push back against the people on your side of the aisle. If you're on the center left, I think you need to be pushing back against them because only by reclaiming a kind of decent center, one that unites, I think, the people on both sides of the spectrum and the moderate sides of both sides of the spectrdo we have a possibility for reclaiming patriotism?
And if I could just add one more point to that, the only way, or I shouldn't say the only, but one important way of reclaiming that, is through education, is through the way people are taught, how we're taught in the schools, how we're taught in the universities, in the colleges, the kind of courses that we offer. This, this will determine, what the next gen- how the next generation comes to understand patriotism, or in fact may not understand patriotism, depending on how they, how they are, how they are taught. We're not, we're not born patriots, it's not encoded in our DNA in some form, it has to be taught. And if it's not, not taught properly, or if it's not taught with a kind of decent respect, I think we're in for very, very serious trouble.
[00:26:18] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for those powerful thoughts. And of course, programs like this are part of the National Constitution Center's effort to answer your call for an enlightened civic education that can inspire citizens of different perspectives and learners of all ages to, fully participate in the republic of reason by cultivating their faculties of reason and studying history in a non-partisan way. Sophia, we have some questions already, in the Q&A box about whether the democratization of media has a positive development in the search for truth, or whether the gatekeeper model of journalism gives the average citizen a better means of finding the truth? And then, that was from, a friend, Jonathan.
Sklar Collintubo, jumps in and ask whether social media served a good way for people to connect themselves through words and experiences? Your, your book on truth, of course, talks powerfully about the ways that social media has made the search for common truth more difficult as, the most, is filter bubbles and echo chambers. And algorithmic radicalization has, made it hard for citizens to converge around a common understanding of the truth. Tell us about the developments, technological and otherwise that are challenging what, Steven just, called the republic of reason?
[00:27:37] Sophia Rosenfeld: Right. Well, S- Steven makes an important point that I do want to echo first about and, and really agree on the importance of civic education and what you're doing, and the Constitution Center among other examples as really vital. And I don't think that has to mean that criticism of the United States is off the table. In fact, good civic education is all about not just cherishing the past, but forms of improvement. Imagining new ways to deal with new kinds of problems and old problems alike. And I would consider the problem of truth right now to be a problem that's both perennial and has a new form in our moment, precisely for the reasons, Jeff, that you just pointed out, which is that we, most of our ideas are coming to us in new forms, as I sit here and talk to everybody on Zoom. Right.
They, we are all sort of mediated in new ways. I think, in the early days of the internet, there was a kind of utopianism that suggested suddenly everybody will have all the facts at their fingertips, truth will be, we'll all be referenced librarians, truth will just flourish. And in fact, you know, the oppressive governments will fall, a kind of liberation will emerge out of the technology. And what we've seen is of course, quite the opposite. Technologies are, are good and bad in different ways, but along with all the new access, we have the truth, we have enormous access to untruth. We have access for every liberatory idea, we have emancipatory idea. We have access to hate and, dangerous ideas.
And in some ways, we haven't quite caught up. We haven't really figured out what to do with this huge unvetted space. We haven't figured out how much power private companies should have in controlling the space or whether it should be some kind of public good. We haven't figured out, whether we're better off being exposed to narrow streams of information or this kind of vast unfettered, unvetted, smorgasbord of ideas that is the internet today. So I think we are, in a position in which we really haven't figured out how to let anything like a consensual truth reemerged in the context of our new electronic existences. And I think it's one of the great challenges of our times. And I don't see it as incompatible with patriotism or civic education. I see it as something that might actually work well hand-in-hand.
[00:30:27] Jeffrey Rosen: It is indeed one of the great challenges of our times. It's part of the Constitution. Center's mission of civic education, is to try to bring together wonderful scholars like you to think about it. And we have a guardrails of democracy initiative that will commission, peek scholars of different perspectives to identify both the challenges to these, institutions of reason that we're talking about and also possible solution. Allen, before we jump into the solutions, which of course is the hardest part of this extraordinarily challenging problem, what light can history shine on? Why the republic of reason is under assault? Now, Sophia has identified social media, which is obviously a very important factor.
has, has this v- vision of the republic of reason and citizens converging around common truth through civic education, been under assault, you know, going back to the 19th century? And, and what does that history tell us about what some of the other causes today are?
[00:31:30] Allen Guelzo: I think one reason why the republic of reason sometimes seems to be on the town is that reason and passion are two quantities where the advantages, or at least the way it always seems to be on the side of passion. When we talk about a republic built around natural rights, on an appeal to natural rights, an appeal to reason, that's very lofty, but in the minds of many people, it can also seem like very thin and unexciting rule. Whereas, if you can whip up people's loyalties to a particular individual, to a particular party, to a particular ethnicity, to a particular religion, that seems to have a whole lot more electricity and color to it. And that often carries the day. And Steven, I think put his finger on that when he talked about Lincoln's warnings in that first grade speech that he gives in 1838, the so-called Lyceum Address.
There, Lincoln says that the generation of the American revolution is passing away. By 1838, of course, obviously it was. That silent artillery of time, which by the way, is a phrase I have a strong suspicion, he borrows from Samuel Johnson. There's a very similar phrase like that in one of Samuel Johnson's essays. And of course, Samuel Johnson is the one who's famous on the subject of patriotism for saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. [laughs]. Now, I don't, I don't know if there's a bright line that connects all that, but it's an interesting footnote. Patriotism seen as the republic of reason, because sometimes just seem very dull, whereas patriotism as the blood and soil, the throne and altar, the f- the personal fealty, the tribal loyalty, that can seem extremely powerful.
And you know what is a- an interesting moment to illustrate this is when we talk about our national anthem. our national anthem is, when you come right down to it, a song about a flag. And is that not a peculiar thing to take us as a national anthem? So I've, I've, I've had friends, especially musical friends in, in moving in musical circles, who said "Well, we should get rid of, of the national anthem and replace it with something like America the Beautiful. Because in America the Beautiful, what are we talking about? Purple mountains, majesty. Isn't that great? Isn't that wonderful? And my response is to say, yeah, that is great, that is wonderful, but I can find purple mountains majesties in a lot of places on this planet.
If I had to choose, I'd be more inclined to take us in the direction of My Country, 'Tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty of thee I sing, because it's the liberty, that is the really extraordinary thing about, about American life, about American ideals. It's the thing that I think is at the real core of, of an American patriotism. And, yes, we do deal with this when we're teaching history. Because in the one sense, when we're teaching history, we're doing what other people do. We're teaching basic facts, as we're teaching basic facts about grammar or basic facts about chemistry. But especially in teaching history, I'm always having to think about, "What kind of citizens am I forming?" Because that's what history does.
And Lincoln recognized that very clearly in the Lyceum Address. And he recognizes that the people of the American revolutionary era are no longer there to provide that personal formation, that personal indication, that personal testimony. So what has to come in its place? Well, Lincoln's response is, obedience to the law. To the con- to the contrary of passion, he is afraid of mob action. He condemns mob action and the irrationality of mobs. What he says is, obedience to the laws. And he will add, "Hail fall of fury, hail rise of reason. Reason is now the only thing which can guide us." And he's saying that in 1838, and in many ways, he's saying the same thing 20 years later in his, first grade, speeches in the series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas.
So I ask myself when I'm teaching history, "What kind of citizens am I forming? Are they good at criticizing failure? I certainly hope so." And that is good to a point, but not if what you do is find yourself paralyzing oneself and others politically. On the other hand, you also want to ask, "Is what I am teaching sufficient to make some of these students one day be willing to storm Omaha Beach?" And that's good too. That's good too, to a point, but again, not if it's going in fact to incite mob violence and anarchy. So always I'm asking myself, "What am I doing? What kind of citizens of my forming as I teach?" And I'm trying to walk between those, those two guardrails. And I think it is between those two guardrails that we're on the path of reason, the path of reason that we capture in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution and really in Abraham Lincoln.
[00:37:08] Jeffrey Rosen: thank you so much for invoking My Country, 'Tis of Thee. I thought and hear now, Marian Anderson on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial after she'd been barred from Constitution Hall singing those glorious words and, urge friends who were listening to, listening to that memorial performance. Steven, Allen just drew the distinction, which was drawn by Lincoln and Madison and Jefferson and Cicero and Aristotle between reason and passion. And the founders did think that we, the people, we as individual citizens had a duty to master our powers of reasons to overcome our unreasonable or irrational passions or emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear, so that we could achieve self-mastery and devote ourselves to the common good.
It's a very tall order. It requires a lot of reading and studying and thinking. W.E Du Bois said so movingly, "I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension." Is it too much to ask citizens to read that deeply, to achieve that kind of self-mastery? At a time when all of us, no matter how, privileged we are, struggle every day to read deeply rather than surf and browse, it almost seems like an unattainable ideal. Do you think it's still possible?
[00:38:40] Steven Smith: in a word, no, it's not possible. And why, why would it be? I mean, one doesn't need to be a learned classist or philosopher to be a patriot. and I would want to, I certainly am not suggesting that one has to have a, first class, liberal arts degree in order to understand what patriotism means. This is one of the reasons, and I'm gonna push back a little bit on some of the things that have been said. We, we are a republic of reason, I grant, grant you that. But Lincoln was not, or at least, my reading of patriotism is not just a patriotism of, of reason. I, I, I use the distinction in the book between the patriotism of logos, Greek word for reason, of speech, and a patriotism of ethos, patriotism of character and habit.
Lincoln was a rationalist, he- and he was a man of the enlightenment as we've heard, but he was also, had a foot in, in the other, column, the other enlightenment, the Scottish enlightenment. He understood the, the importance of habits and common sentiments, and certain kinds of common manners, that also ground, ground reason and that make reason, real, in a way, make these ideas real there. Yes, if we just had to in- intellectually intuit or understand them, that would be, extremely thin rule. they have to be rooted in again, our common- our common practices and common habits. he was very much not just a student of Locke and the natural rights tradition, but o- of Hume and Burke, in his emphasis upon, these kinds of common sentiments.
That's not to go to say that he, he was very much, as we were talking about, a kind of enemy of the kind of passionate, hatreds that, they'd be deviled his time, a- as, as well- as well as ours. He thought that that was an enemy of, of rationality of any kind, and truth-seeking of any kind. But you- you need, you need both. You need in a sense, both reason and habit, reason and, and ethos or character, to, to sustain a kind of, make, make a viable, a viable patriotism. It has to be rooted, whether those sentiments are rooted, and I know, So- Sophie pushed against this a little bit earlier in our common language and a common exper- in, in certain kinds of common experiences.
in common, again, common, o- other kinds of, of nonpolitical factors, cuisines, musics, things that bind people together, it's a- you know, it's a form of life, is part of a way of life. A common ethos. These are equally necessary to the great ideals, the great aspirational ideals that we read about in the Declaration and that, that Lincoln and others, of course, extremely eloquently, defended. So that's sort of where, I wanted to take this discussion of patriotism, in my book.
[00:41:57] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for that defense of common sense and common habits. Sophia, you wrote the book on the history of common sense and talked about the ways that the common sense philosopher believed that all human beings share an inherent moral sense or common sense that can, guide our exercise of reason and that they believe that the development of, of habits, of industries, self-reliance, self-discipline were necessary to achieve the common benevolence on which republics, dependent. Were they wrong? You, you, you know, better than anyone 'cause you, you, you, you wrote the book on them. Were they incorrect in, in, this exaltation of the common sense and common habits?
And then I'll, 'cause we're, where we are in the program, I'll ask you about some of your reforms to the problems of disinformation that you so powerfully identify in your book, including the... You, you ask, "Could, empirically-minded, plain-speaking, fact-checking journalists, bulked-up suffrage court and educational systems, the traditional street demonstrations, and the development of a new kind of First Amendment jurisprudence that paid more attention to maintaining facticity and reversing silencing techniques, be enough to revitalize the democratic take on truth?" There's a lot in there, but we'd love your thoughts.
[00:43:22] Sophia Rosenfeld: Okay. That's, that's a lot, love this. I just want to say one thing first in, in response to Allen's point though, about the importance of history in forming citizens. And I agree with that entirely. But I do want to say that I think that also studying non-US history is often a very good way to make citizens. That citizens in a sense, don't need to be steeped only in a national tradition, but need to sort of be able to de naturalize the world they're in to see how- to see difference, to see possibility, which then allows a kind of patriotism that appeals to me, which is one that involves the possibility of reform, involves the possibility of thinking a new. You know, this is what a family looks like to us, what the families look like elsewhere. Let's think about what a family might look like in the future.
So I'm, I'm interested in the ways, and this is really a segue into the topic of common sense. Citizenship, I think comes from a lot of, experiencing the world a lot of different ways, and common sense can work in two different planes. Sometimes it works simply to reinforce what is already, by which, I mean, it keeps us the status quo, the status quo. But common sense is often historically worked the other way as it did for Tom Payne in 1776, which is to underline what, what kinds of truisms don't correspond to our sort of instinctive sense of the world? He said, "You know, it's, it's kind of strange, but think of a island ruling a continent for instance." And when he put it in- put it in those terms, he, in a sense reversed the logic of his moment.
And common sense has this, this two-sidedness that I think is historically very interesting and important in that it can be a force for conservatism and it can be a force for reform and change, and it can be wielded a variety of different ways. And, Steven is right that some kind of common ethos, of course, is essential to maintain... Nobody's attached just to the law and the abstract, there has to be some kind of ethos. But I think that ethos has to be fairly thin rather than robust in order to not be exclusionary, is really my only point there. In terms of what we can do to change our culture, that's of course the- what the $64,000 question about how to move beyond this moment when we seem to have lost any kind of common investment in a shared truth of any sort.
And while I do support all sorts of efforts to keep truth on the table, from fact checking to supporting all kinds of institutions involved in disseminating truth, I do worry that it's, those kind of epistemic reforms, will themselves not be sufficient in this moment in so far as we've gotten to a point of such divisiveness and such so little common experience, so little shared experience with each other, so little shared even memory, that it's hard to imagine that we can come to the table and find even baseline truths that we're likely to arrive at. And I hate to be so pessimistic, but I, I do feel at this moment that for all the value of things like fact-checking, they're not going to quickly reverse the situation that we're in.
[00:46:58] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you very much for that, for the candor of it and the, acknowledgement of the complexity of the challenge. Allen, I, I guess this is my question to you about solutions, the question of whether, the courts should revisit our traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, which prohibits any kind of regulation of speech, unless it's intended to- unlikely to cause imminent violence, is one we'll be talking a lo- a lot about. at the NCC in the coming years, we're gonna have a great podcast on the topic, tomorrow.
and I, I know that's not your focus, but to the degree that some are blaming the unregulated First Amendment which prohibits government from regulating the platforms or, or requiring fact-checking and, and so forth. is that a debate you, you have a view on and, and what can history tell us about, you know, whether the, the libertarians First Amendment is a friend of the republic of reason or not?
[00:48:06] Allen Guelzo: Let me frame it this way. what the founders were always fundamentally concerned about were great concentrations of power. That was what worried them. They understood that there were two, two forces. So does this... I'm starting to sound like a physicist. But there are these two, [laughs], there are these two forces in the universe, in the political universe, and one is liberty and one is power. You can't just have one without the other. You just can't have liberty because if you've just got liberty, it becomes anarchy. You need a certain amount of power. Someone has, someone has to, to, to program the traffic lights. But power tends to be hungry and it tends to encroach on Liberty and eventually eat up Liberty. What the founders understood was that you have to structure system, which will valorize liberty, but it's going to use just enough power to keep the forces of anarchy and, and violence at bay.
What they really feared was the force of power, the acquisition of power. We see huge concentrations. and this is, I think is especially true in terms of social media. We see huge concentrations of power, not only financial power, but, but concentrations of political power, of, of movements of politics and, and major corporations working so hand in glove, that they really are operating in each other's favor and doing each other's business. We have seen moments similar to this in the past where we, I, I think it's safe to say, we've never seen anything quite like the phenomena that we've seen today. And what drives much of my anxiety about natural liberties and natural rights is how much those concentrations of power operate against it, and operate as suppressor.
I remember the comment of Frederick Douglas in 1860. Douglas once said, as he was speaking in Boston, when, when the opportunity came to say this, he said, "If freedom of speech had been permitted in the slave south, slavery wouldn't have lasted more than a few minutes." [laughs]. And, and, and because the First Amendment, freedom of speech, freedom of expression that way, is a great corrosive of power. It undermines power, it questions power. Now today, I hear many people sometimes very angry, sometimes trying to be sweetly reasonable, saying, "Well, we need to curtail much of what we call freedom of speech. We need to curtail many of the things that occur under the First Amendment."
And that sends little, red alarm lights going off in my mind. Because once again, I hear the old blandishments of power. And power, I understand, as the founders understood it to be, the enemy of liberty. So I, I will take my chances with, with freedom of speech. I will take my, my chances with the First Amendment, knowing that in the end, what I'm siding with is liberty. And I'd rather side with liberty and take my chances there than side with power, because the chances that on the, on the side of power, have been shown in the last century, at least, to be lethal to human flourishing. But that's a political statement of my own.
[00:51:36] Jeffrey Rosen: well, thank- thank you for it. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll call it a constitutional statement, so, so that, squirreled in line with the NCC's mission, as indeed it is because it's a, it's a claim about the nature of the way that, founders, from Lincoln to, the president have understood the balance between, free speech and power. we, need to wrap up, we're three minutes away, I think, with your indulgence. I'm gonna give Steven the last word because, we were here convened, by him to mark the publication of his new book. I'm gonna thank our great questioners, including agreeing with, our friend who says that it would be confusing to use My Country 'Tis of Thee because no one would know who won at the Olympics.
It's true. It is the tunes, God save the king. But the- but, it's, the, the lyrics are as beautiful as, as Allen says. And, also an important, observation from, another one of our friends who asks whether the founders thought that what was crucial in balancing reason and passion was wisdom. with all that in mind, Steven, and just really about two minutes to close us off, your final thoughts. And if, if you had just a sentence, a lo- give me a long one, as long as the second sentence of the Declaration. But basically a, a long sentence to sum up the essential principles of the American creed that you think deserves the allegiance of citizens of different perspective, what would it be?
[00:53:13] Steven Smith: Well, we've talked about a lot... Thank you very much, and thank you everybody. We've talked about a lot of them. I think a commitment to equality is central in this, in, in our national creed. a commitment to Liberty, a kind of reasonable diversity, essentially important. Let me also just say, my book is not a work of public policy. I can't really prescribe, you know, policies of how to, how to get from here to there. But one thing I do want to endorse, if anybody is listening to this, who has any influence on it, I, I think it's very important to- I think it would be a very important thing to introduce some program of national service.
that doesn't mean military service, it could take many, many different kinds of service. I see this every year at my university and I assume that every other student's... Young people want to do something, they want to help. and it's much easy- and, and the university, makes it much easier for them to get an- to get an interview at a Wall Street firm, and it does to help them do something for national service. we don't know each other anymore in this country, we're divided by all kinds of things that have been, described before, education, class, culture, you name it. we don't know each other, giving people a chance to serve would be a chance for them to mingle, to meet one another, to lower the temperature of our public discourse.
not to get people to agree. We'll never agree. That's, that's fine. That's not important that we do. It is important that we come, we, we come to respect each other in a way that we don't at the moment. And I can... To me, the, the program for a kind of national service would be one way, and I think an important one, of trying to overcome these problems and maybe restore a more decent kind of patriotism in our country.
[00:55:15] Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you so much for that inspiring, call for, national service. the Constitution Center has no, view on, that matter, but I do at the end of all these shows, exalt our listeners, first ex- exalt you in the sense of thanking you for taking an hour out of your evenings to learn and grow together with these brilliant scholars, and also to exhort you to continue to read, cultivate your faculties of reason by reading the great books of our panelists today. Allen Guelzo's got so many wonderful recent books, Reconstruction, A Concise History, a very short production. Robert E. Lee, A New History of the Civil War.
And of course, please read the great works of our, scholars, Sophia Rosenfeld's Democracy and Truth, A Short History and Common Sense, A Political History, as well as the book that convened us today, Steven Smith's, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. For shedding so much light, Steven Smith, Sophia Rosenfeld, and Allen Guelzo, thank you for a wonderful discussion and thanks so much friends.
[00:56:33] Tanaya Tauber: This episode was produced by John Guerra, Lana Ulrich, Jackie McDermott, and me, Tanaya Tauber. It was engineered by the National Constitution Center's AV team. Our fall season of debates and panels is well underway. If you miss any of our recent programs, you can catch up via this podcast or watch the video in our media library at constitutioncenter.org/constitution. We also have several exciting programs still to come this fall. Check out the full lineup and register to join us virtually at constitutioncenter.org/debate. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Live at the National Constitution Center on Apple Podcasts, or follow us on Spotify, and join us back here next week. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Tanaya Tauber.
