A Deficiency of Patriotism?

I made the mistake of turning on the radio and listening to a talk radio program yesterday while driving home. One of the right-wing radio personalities was expressing consternation at the lack of patriotism in today's youth. A recent poll showed a significant majority of Americans would not volunteer for the military if the US entered a new war. Military recruitment rates are already low, and the obvious problems according to these pundits are apathy, cowardice, and hatred for America.

Another article referencing the first linked above adds more commentary on the failings of today's population.

For starters, young Americans have been steeped in a culture that denigrates patriotism and fixates on the failures of our past. For decades, colleges have promoted the narrative that American and Western values are synonymous with racism, colonialism and oppression -- and it's bearing some particularly nasty fruit. For example, we have recently seen some on the American left justify terrorism and accuse the U.S. of "genocide" for supporting Israel against Hamas. The long, messy war in Afghanistan only added to this pessimistic view of America's role in the world. Add to that the undeniable fact that today's generation of Americans is weaker and more coddled than any generation before, leading ever more digital lives. Would they be able to withstand the rigors taken on by the "Greatest Generation"?

Anyone who opposes this fantasy is woke, unpatriotic, and selfish by default. How dare the young demand a modicum of self-ownership? Don't they know true virtue is found in obedience to Mars and Mammon?

I might be picking on the right, but that doesn't mean I embrace the left. Nonetheless, there is an element of truth to American foreign and domestic policy being influenced by racism, colonialism, and oppression. Denying the facts is bad history, not patriotism. It is not justification of terrorism to seek an explanation for why people choose such drastic action, sometimes out of mindless hate, but often out of desperation due to unjust and destructive policies perpetrated by the US and its allies. Again, denying the facts is bad history, not patriotism. Obesity is a real problem throughout America, but that is a matter for another time. Condemnation of people who refuse to be pawns for the political class in their wars, however, is absurd.

There is nothing cowardly or unpatriotic about questioning US intervention today in Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, or anywhere else either. After more than two decades of pointless waste and destruction in the "Global War on Terror," the American people are tired. Truth is the first casualty in war. We have now had time to learn the truth behind propaganda for the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and more. The wealth transfer from the working class to financial and industrial war profiteers is undeniable, and those same political plunderers are the ones who want to exploit "patriotism" again so the poor and young bleed, break, and die to bolster the corporate bottom line or enrich the old and wealthy.

The Founding Fathers are often cited by American conservatives as paragons of patriotic virtue. They were hardly a homogeneous whole, but they were largely in agreement on one key point: the path to progress and prosperity is through peace. George Washington's Farewell Address offers one well-known example of this sentiment.

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it - It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.
[...]
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

If opposition to military adventurism and foreign intervention is cowardice, George Washington was first among cowards. The lust for power and bloodshed is antithetical to the philosophy of liberty, and reveals the dark motivations behind public policy. Don't fall for the rhetoric of warmongers. If the people are unwilling to enlist, question the merits of the war, not the virtue of the people.

Suggested reading:

• We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now, edited by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods Jr.
• War is a Racket, by United States Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler
• The War Prayer, by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
• AntiWar.com