What is a patriot? Who can claim to be a patriot? These questions came to mind when a friend said, on Facebook, “There [are] a great number of self-proclaimed patriots on my friends list that…” yada yada yada. I’m sure you get the gist.
To define it, Merriam-Webster says a patriot is “one who loves and supports his or her country.”
Oxford says that a patriot is “a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies or detractors:”
dictionary.com has two definitions, the first says a patriot is “a person who loves, supports, and defends their country and its interests with devotion.” The other definition is a patriot is “a person who values individual rights, especially one who attempts to defend those rights against presumed interference by the federal government.”
I could delve into the etymology of the word, but it is more important for this conversation to understand how Americans experience patriotism.
The first sense of patriotism comes from our founding. In which the American colonists called themselves patriots, even though they were fighting against their government and against their king.
Before our revolution, Merriam-Webster says the term was used as a pejorative, signifying that “patriots” were anything but patriotic.
As the American Revolution took off, the revolutionaries took the pejorative form of patriot as a badge of honor, and it is that badge of honor that we use today for our founding fathers. We respect that group for willing to give up their lives for the freedoms they fought for, against a government that was not listening.
Now that we are nearly 250 years past our Declaration Of Independence, patriotism is harder to define, and harder to nail down, which begs the question who is the real patriot?
There is the Fourth Of July patriotism. Yay America, Yay our military. Yay, we are the greatest nation of the planet. This is the patriotism that is taught in elementary school. This is our nationalism. This is our founding mythology. This is what pulls us together in times of need, like Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
There is the governmental patriotism. This is the belief that our government is great, and if you don’t love and support the government than you are not a patriot. (Many of these people hate Trump for he is attempting to change the Executive Branch, and people hate change.)
There is the idealized patriotism. This is the belief in the founding of your country, and is tied to the pejorative, the badge of honor. They are patriotic for the idealized philosophy of our founding. This can be seen in people who, with all their heart, believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Assembly, the Right to Bare Arms, the Separation of Powers, and all that the founding fathers gave us.
All of these are valid forms of patriotism. And beyond that they are all needed for our country and nation to flourish.
We need the Fourth of July Patriotism to bind us together as a people. We are, unlike most countries in the world, a mix of different religions, races, and ideologies, which come with all the baggage that that brings. We need a belief that holds us, and binds us together.
We need governmental patriotism to ensure that we as a people flourish. We need people to believe in a strong government to ensure that our founding system and rights are upheld.
We need idealized patriotism in order to keep our system doing what the constitution was designed for. With every human endeavor things have a tendency to veer off course, and it is the idealized patriots that ensure things don’t get too far off course.
At the end of it all, what we need now is more of the Fourth of July Patriotism to run through our veins. We are divided to such a extent that it is hard for some to see the humanity of the other, and we start throwing slurs back and forth. Please remember, we are a people with a shared history, and a shared basic goal, to have a better country. What that means varies per person, but please remember we all want a better country.