What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism

by Dan Rather

The true foundations for those buildings are not brick and stone, but our Constitution, our rule of law, our traditions, our work ethic, our empathy, our pragmatism, and our basic decency. As I have seen over the years, when we cultivate these instincts, we soar. When we sow seeds of division, hatred, and small-mindedness, we falter.

America at its best is a wonderful, diverse, and spirited chorus. When we sing together, our message is amplified and it can shake the heavens.

We are bound together by our destiny, and we must work to ensure that there are calm and steady hands at the controls of our government.

rolling wreck,

see my love of country imbued with a responsibility to bear witness to its faults.

But more than land, we are bound together by a grand experiment in government, the rule of law, and common bonds of citizenship.

We all are allowed to celebrate the Fourth of July as citizens, even though few of us have predecessors who were on this continent in 1776.

And we should neither forget nor be paralyzed by our prior national sins.

George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address,

warned future

generations “to guard against the impostures of prete...

It is important not to confuse “patriotism” with “nationalism.” As I define it, nationalism is a monologue in which you place your country in a position of moral and cultural supremacy over others. Patriotism, while deeply personal, is a dialogue with your fellow citizens, and a larger world, about not only what you love about your country but also how it can be improved.

Unchecked nationalism leads to conflict and war. Unbridled patriotism can lead to the betterment of society. Patriotism is rooted in humility. Nationalism is rooted in arrogance.

In the name of protecting ourselves, we limited our civil liberties (the Patriot Act), undermined our moral traditions (torture), and ultimately launched a bloody and costly foreign misadventure (Iraq).

Patriotism—active, constructive patriotism—takes work. It takes knowledge, engagement with those who are different from you, and fairness in law and opportunity. It takes coming together for good causes. This is one of the things I cherish most about the United States: We are a nation not only of dreamers, but also of fixers. We have

looked at our land and people, and said, time and time again, “This is not good enough; we can be better.”

Our nation will not survive as we know it without an engaged and committed population.

“We the people,” all of us, are living together in perhaps the greatest social and governmental experiment ever conceived.

Patriotism would require standing up to what I had seen, not standing alongside it in silence.

They had grown up in a system they never questioned and never really understood.

there are states seeking to limit access to the ballot box, even if they make claims to the contrary.

many of the gains we’ve seen are being curtailed under specious claims of voter fraud.

The real danger to the sanctity of

the vote lies in suppression.

To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can’t convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters.

Many who are most vocal in championing a free, open, and dynamic economy are the same political factions that suppress these principles when it comes to

the currency o...

Dissent is most controversial during wartime because it is cast as unpatriotic and dangerous to the national cause. But that is precisely the time when a democracy should be asking itself difficult and uncomfortable questions.

The role of dissent is to force all of us to question our dogmas and biases. It is to stretch the spectrum of discourse.

Orwell understood that a government that is beyond the reach of accountability has little incentive to tell the truth. Indeed, its power may arise from the obliteration of objective facts. In the world of 1984, contradictory statements lose all sense of context and we are left with preposterous slogans: “War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.” And yet Orwell asks us, if there is no one with the power to call out a lie as a lie, does it end up ceasing to be a lie?

But as a public official in the United States, you agree to subject yourself and your actions to scrutiny.

a young Roger Ailes, who would advise future Republican presidents and then monetize the demonization of a supposedly “biased” press by creating Fox News.

I have no doubt that many conservatives believe that the press is biased, but I believe the political leaders and activists who assiduously stoke these fears are doing so cynically. They

These days, I fear that the pull of our inborn patriotism combined with a fear of being labeled un-American clouds that role, with real and potentially corrosive effect.

Iraq was a bloody and costly conflict that was poorly planned and poorly executed, not so much in the initial military campaign but in the rationale for invasion in the first place and then the management of occupation.

The term “WMD” was a brilliant marketing campaign by the Bush administration to conflate the Armageddon scenario of a nuclear weapon (although most experts believed Iraq didn’t have anywhere

near the capability) with the specter of chemical weapons, which, while horrific, are much more limited in scope.

This wasn’t simply a vague case of “fake news.” It was subtle propaganda, with just enough of an air of plausibility to lull a nation into a war of choice. And yet the press continued to use the term “WMD” up to and after the war. Meanwhile, the links of Iraq to al-Qaeda, which we now know were nonexistent, involved so much nuanced explanation of people and groups w...

And the press didn’t do enough to try to explain ...

Much of what we now know about what happened in Iraq is because of great journalism. But the policy decisions had already been made and the damage had already been done.

The war destabilized a region that was already unstable.

In the intervening years, we have seen Iran rise in power, Syria descend into a horrific civil war, and ISIS an...

The Iraq War cost roughly forty-five hundred American lives, with thousands more severely injured, not to mention those lives lost by our ...

Estimates put the financial cost to the United States at around $2 trillion. It is a troubling lesson about the dangers of unintended consequences. And the press played a part in turning a blind eye to the go...

In wartime, the American people tend to give an administration a lot of latitude in waging the fight, and for good reason. Wars are difficult affairs,...

It is not the role of the press to suggest military strategy or to actively undercut the commander in chief. Our job is merely to ask questions, and if the answers are unsatisfactory, it is our responsibility to follow up with more questions. However, in times of strong patriotic fervor, asking a question can be spun as unpatriotic. And the Bush administration, along with its allies in the conservative press, were not hesitant to hang a “bias” s...

Were we really going to say that the administration was playing games with reports from the intelligence community? After all, it was plausible that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction; he had used chemical weapons in the past. Were we really going to ask too many questions about the tenuous links between Iraq and the terrorists who struck on 9/11? Wasn’t Hussein a mass murderer and an avowed enemy of the United Stat...

Whether on television or online, there is no shortage of analysis. But analysis is only as good as the information that supports it.

What has gotten far less attention but has perhaps been the greatest loss to our democracy is the decimation that has come to local newspapers.

It is as if public meetings are happening behind closed doors. And with no coverage, no one is keeping the people who work for us—on those school boards or city councils—accountable.