Get Out of My House
While doing research for The Reactionary Mind, I made an incredible discovery: I love my country.
I was raised by two Navy veterans. Mom was an E.R. nurse; Dad was a corrections officer. They raised me to love God, family, and the U.S. of A. Really, they couldn’t have done a better job. But after I was medically disqualified from serving in the Navy—I’d always dreamed of going to Annapolis—I started to drift, until I fell down the rabbit hole of right-wing politics. First I converted to Anglicanism and became a royalist. Then I converted to Catholicism and became an integralist of sorts.
Like so many Millennials on both the Left and the Right, I had no time for the United States. In fact, that’s the one thing my generation can agree on: the American Experiment has failed.
From the very first, our country was fatally wounded by some original sin. (For the Left, it’s slavery. For the Right, it’s revolution.) The freedoms enshrined by the Constitution are false freedoms. (For the Left, it’s the freedom to discriminate. For the Right, it’s the freedom to sin.) The Founding Fathers are eighteenth-century Whigs whose legacy is now quaint at best. There’s nothing left to do with their liberal republic but smash it to pieces, clear away the rubble, and build a new regime in its place.
Tocqueville was clearly talking about us radical youffs when he said,
Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
But after Regnery approached me about writing the book and I plunged feet-first into Medieval history, my thinking started to change.
The way G. K. Chesterton praised the simple, rugged peasant reminded me an awful lot of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer. Geoffroi de Charny’s Book of Chivalry bears a striking resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt’s doctrine of the Strenuous Life. I felt more affinity for John Winthrop’s “model of Christian charity” than for the decadent kings of Renaissance Europe.
That may seem like a bit of a stretch. For what it’s worth, I’ve started to notice other people making it, too, from Hilaire Belloc to Mark Twain. (Speaking of Twain, isn’t he an awful lot like Chaucer? Have you ever seen them in the same room together?)
That’s really not even half the story, though. Falling in love with a country is like falling in love with a woman. You can name all the things you find so attractive—her eyes, her smile, the way she snorts a little when she laughs—but, as soon as you say it out loud, it sounds so inadequate. You wish you’d said nothing at all.
“Don’t eff the ineffable,” as Roger Scruton once said.
If I’d been a little more humble, I would’ve known that a true Christian is always a true patriot. Charles Péguy, the great Catholic poet who was killed in World War I, put it best:
How right the ancients were, dear friends, to have celebrated, feasted, and commemorated the foundation of a city; to have realized that the city was a being, a living being, and that its foundation was no ordinary action, but a religious action; something out of the ordinary and solemn, worthy of solemnization…
For the Christian, patriotism is a natural extension Fifth Commandment. It widens our familial bonds to encompass the whole “tribe”: our parish, our city, our nation. They’re bonds of loyalty, bonds of love. Those folks might not be blood, but they’re kin.
And, at the risk of effing the ineffable, that’s really what patriotism feels like, isn’t it? You love your country for the same reason you love your childhood home. Because it’s your place. You love your countrymen for the same reason you love your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles and cousins. Because they’re your people.
Scruton said this is the basis of all real conservatism. He called it oikophilia: the love of home, of people and places and things that are familiar to us. The Greeks called it storge, which C. S. Lewis widened to encompass all our homely affections. He said that storge “lives with humble, un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine.…”
I’d be a hypocrite to fault anyone who doesn’t feel this familiar love for our country, or this familial love for our countrymen. But the number of Americans who apparently feel no real love for America is tragic—and not a little unnerving.
For instance, I can’t believe how many conservatives still struggle to condemn the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. No, not the Capitol Hill “insurrection”; there’s no such thing. But what happened that day was not only a crime: it was a sin against nature.
Of course, not all of my comrades see it that way. Sarcastic references to the “temple of our democracy” abound. It’s just a building, they say. Well, yes. But life happens in “just buildings.” If someone burned down the house you grew up in, you’d be heartbroken. Sure you would. Even if you don’t own it anymore, it would still hurt like hell.
Given that we’d spent all of 2020 cursing Black Lives Matter for vandalizing statues of Lincoln and Jefferson, I thought we knew all this already. Apparently not. Apparently we need to remind ourselves of what Tocqueville said: Those who hold our country’s symbols in contempt hold us in contempt as well.
Our buildings and statues, our flags and songs and all the other regalia—these things are more valuable than politics. At least, they should be. But if the party line is worth more to us than our homeland, our national family, then we’re no better than Antifa. We’re just thugs with too many opinions.
Russell Kirk called John Stuart Mill a “defecated intellect,” a brain in a vat, a purely theoretical being. That’s exactly what conservatives are not supposed to be. We’re supposed to understand that society, like its members, is incarnational. We don’t just believe in ideas. We believe in people, places, things.
Maybe this is all too abstract. (That would be ironic.) I’ve tried, and maybe failed, to make this point here before. I just don’t get it. Seriously, how can anyone attack the U.S. Capitol and call himself a nationalist? What can be less nationalistic? Burning the flag, maybe. But that’s a pretty low bar.
For the record, I’m under no illusion that Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney care about Our Democracy™. I do, though, and so should you—if not for the love of democracy, than for the fear of the despots Tocqueville warned us about.
For whatever it’s worth, I believe there was fraud in the 2020 election. By all means, criticize the government! I’ll join you. But being a patriot means that your criticism of the government is motivated by love for the governed. An abstract theory about what the State “ought” to do isn’t enough. That’s how we get a Robespierre, a Hitler, or a Stalin.
Teddy gave a pretty good definition of patriotism when he said, “I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children.”
The folks rioted last January 6, and those who defend them now, are skinning the land. They’re leaving our children a country with more hatred, bitterness, and fear. They’re poor creatures. And I sincerely wish they could love America the way she deserves to be loved—not only for the country’s sake, but for their own.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying my book The Reactionary Mind. Peace and the Good!