Too many American intellectuals today spend their time mocking popular expressions of American exceptionalism and other forms of patriotic thought without working to create and promote a richer vision of the country, a deeper and wiser patriotism that connects with the sentiments of ordinary Americans and raises them to a wider and more magnanimous plane. It is worth going back to read some of Daniel Webster’s great patriotic orations like the Second Reply to Haynes or the speech of March 7, 1850 to ask how in today’s circumstances we can articulate a vision of our union that can equally inspire its defense and its reform.
An early daguerreotype of Daniel Webster (Wikimedia)
A leadership class is responsible for, among other things, giving a voice to the feelings of the nation and doing so in a way that enables the nation to advance and to change. Most of the American establishment today is too ignorant of and too squeamish about the history and language of American patriotism to do that job. In the worst case, significant chunks of the elite have convinced themselves that patriotism is in itself a bad and a dangerous thing, and have set about to smother it under blankets of politically correct disdain.
This will not end well.
— Historian Walter Russell Mead in Establishment Blues | Via Meadia
Walter Russell Mead is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine, and is recognized as one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy. His most recent book, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), is a major study of 400 years of conflict between Anglophone powers and rivals ranging from absolute monarchies like Spain and France through Communist and Fascist enemies in the twentieth century to al-Qaeda today.
