Megan McArdleVerified account

So sing the anthem today. And read the Declaration of Independence. And celebrate your country, and every one of the 325 million people who calls the same place "Home".

We should constantly be reminding each other that we love our country, and our fellow citizens. Because if we don't do that, we will descend into vicious particularism. Sorry, "Will?" We have.

The problem with America isn't too much flag-waving and anthem singing; it's not enough of those things.

Similarly: you want a more assimilationist immigration culture? That's meaningless unless "American" is important, and importantly, includes people who are very different from you in appearance, culture, and history. You need to warmly include those folks in your patriotism.

And if you win that political fight, and you don't want ugly resistance from your fellow citizens, you're going to have to have some measure of comity. Which is again created by a sense that being an American is a special bond with other Americans, to whom we owe some goodwill.

Whatever you want out of America, you need that shared sense of identity. You want a bigger welfare state? You're going to be pitching it as a duty we owe to our fellow citizens--which is meaningless unless "fellow citizens" is a very important category of people to us.

Nation-building is really hard, as we discovered in Iraq. We've forgotten that the original nationalist project was just convincing people in places like Italy and Greece and Germany that they *were* a nation. It was incredibly difficult, and took decades.

Ritual draws us together, creates a shared space and sense of purpose. Symbolism gives us a focal point for our common identity. There's a reason that religious groups that focus on action in the world and neglect ritual and scripture tend to die young.

Question: But the flags, the anthems--it's all just empty! The real substance of patriotism is [insert whatever my favorite co-ideologist did to recently land in the news]. Answer: I get our point, but it's wrong. Ask an anthropologist how important ritual is.

America is strong enough to withstand an enumeration of her faults. But if that enumeration isn't given with love, it does not do much good. For the same reason that you will stand your wife telling you to lose a few pounds, but not an angry relative screaming it at reunion.

Question: Isn't this a call to whitewash our history? Answer: NO! We need to have a very clear accounting of the ways in which this country has departed from its founding ideals. But that accounting needs to include the credits as well as the debits.

Because if we aren't focusing on the things we all have in common, we are focusing on what we don't have in common. And that focus will tear us apart. Is tearing us apart.

And make no mistake: we need that sense of sacredness about the key moments in our history. We need to get misty-eyed about our founding documents. We need to have a sense of reverence for the flag, and the anthem, and all our other symbols.

That's why I tweeted the Declaration of Independence this morning. Yes, parts of it haven't aged well. But still, we are all Americans because those men pledged their "lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor" to give us a country.

We aren't an ethnostate. We're a creedal nation composed of many groups. We can't rely on culture and language and long centuries of shared history to do the heavy lifting of creating a shared sense of identity. We have to create it through ritual and reassertion of the creed.