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. The songbook for our democracy is infused with our history, the joy of our glories and the pain of our failures. Its music and lyrics can and must be taught to those who will come after us.

patriotism is not a cudgel. It is not an arms race. It also means confronting honestly what is wrong or sinful with our nation and government. I see my love of country imbued with a responsibility to bear witness to its faults.

George Washington, in his famous Farewell Address, warned future generations “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

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.

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.”

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

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.

Should they quit in defiance, or try to stay and do the best they could? Cobb knew that if he pushed too far, he and his reporters would likely be fired and replaced by those not afraid to toe the company line. It is that age-old dilemma: Do you stay and try to change the church from within, or leave the church? Cobb and the others decided to stay and push back in subtle ways.

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.

We have a long history in the United States of marginalized voices eventually convincing majorities through the strength of their ideas. Our democratic machinery provides fertile soil where seeds of change can grow. Few knew that better than King.

I find it difficult to understand why he assumed that he single-handedly had enough wisdom to decide to release highly sensitive government secrets, but you cannot deny the effect he had. American policy has changed profoundly. I do not know how history will judge Snowden, but it is a good reminder of how dissent can look up close and in real time. It is messy. It is controversial. But it often is consequential.

Edward Snowden

Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower famously paid homage to this history in a 1954 speech during the height of the Red Scare: “Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels—men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

“The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas . . . ,” Holmes wrote in his dissent. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. . . . I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes on the FREE MARKET OF IDEAS... Justice's dissent regarding dissent

At first glance, it might seem as if the press is a destabilizing force: It can undermine the credibility of our elected officials and ultimately our confidence in government. It can drive down stock prices and embolden our nation’s critics and enemies. It can uncover inconvenient truths and stir divisions within our society. But our Founders understood that long-term accountability is more important than short-term stability.

George Washington complained that the press treated him unfairly, and I imagine every president since then has felt similarly at some point in his tenure in office. But as a public official in the United States, you agree to subject yourself and your actions to scrutiny. And for most of my early life and career, I had a sense that politicians, especially those at the national level, understood this compact. Even as they tried to hide things or shift attention away from scandal, they knew they could not afford to disengage from the press.

I do not think the bias attack against the American press holds up to scrutiny. Reporters by their nature tend to be suspicious, especially of accrued power, and that usually extends to party politics.

I believe the political leaders and activists who assiduously stoke these fears are doing so cynically. They see press attacks as a way to rally their base and distract voters from the weaknesses of their own candidates, without having to answer specific allegations.

But tolerance alone is not sufficient; it allows us to accept others without engaging with them, to feel smug and self-satisfied without challenging the boundaries within which too many of us live. A society worthy of our ideals would be a much more inclusive one, a more integrated one. It would be a place where we continually strive to create a better whole out of our many separate parts.

You couldn’t ignore that there were women or African Americans in society, but you certainly could ignore the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, who most often were closeted. That such people would one day be open members of society, living with pride and having children and legal marriages? It is impossible for me to adequately convey how utterly alien those notions would have seemed.

And then one day I was sitting in my office at CBS News when a longtime close colleague came in and shut the door, saying that he needed to talk to me. As soon as he sat down, he blurted out, “I’m gay.” I saw in his eyes an anxiety I hadn’t ever seen during our years of working together, even on the most dangerous or difficult assignments. In that moment I understood the courage it must have taken him to tell me this, and the energy he must have had to expend over the many years we had known each other to keep this central part of his life hidden.

The more we are around people with a variety of life experiences, the more we can understand and value the needs and worth of our fellow citizens. But our own life experiences can also shape our views.

Our own history has shown that we are stronger as a mosaic than a melting pot. Our nation is bound together more by ideals than by blood or land, and inclusion is in our cultural DNA. We should feel proud that we are not all the same, and that we can share our differences under the common umbrella of humanity.

It is perhaps not surprising that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan looked at a nation so traumatized and felt they could defeat us. Of course, history turned out differently. The same generation that had been driven to such depths in the 1930s rose up to push back the forces of totalitarianism in a two-ocean global war in the 1940s. Perhaps those authoritarians, who felt no empathy for their own people or those they conquered, underestimated the strength of our empathy. Empathy builds community. Communities strengthen a country and its resolve and will to fight back. We were never as unified in national purpose as we were in those days. What had weakened us had also made us stronger.

One of the best foreign policy efforts in American history was to help rebuild Europe and Japan. Our enemies became our friends through an acknowledgment of the common bonds of humanity. The postwar world order was built on that foundation.

Empathy makes for wise foreign and domestic policy.

Fundamentally, science is about a method of understanding our world through observation, experimentation, and analysis. It’s about allowing facts to win out over prejudice, no matter how deeply entrenched. We are seeing these values under attack—from climate-change denial to the questioning of our own government’s statistics when they prove to be politically inconvenient.

So it would be a mistake to think that the antiscience currents we face today are entirely new. Back in 1980, the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

But perhaps the biggest mistake the press makes is falling into false equivalence. Not every scientific issue has two sides, or certainly two equal sides. And yet science “debates” are far too often reported in just such a manner. A particularly damaging example of this phenomenon can be seen in irresponsible concerns over vaccine safety.

Science is much more than the accumulation of facts; it is about the willingness to reevaluate our assumptions in the face of data to better see, understand, and improve our world.

Science, like the arts, is about the most creative applications of the human mind.

Our nation was born in a spirit of fierce debate. Our Founding Fathers had sharp political differences, but they were almost all deep readers, writers, and thinkers. When they set about to create a modern republic, they went into their libraries and pulled out the works of philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. They consulted the Greeks, the Romans, the philosophers of Europe, and the Bible. They revered the power of the written word and how it enabled a nation free from the whims of a king.

Although the United States had just rescued Europe from the conflagration of fascism, we still had a profound inferiority complex when it came to assessing our own cultural value. Every city wanted a museum of fine arts (collections of mostly European paintings and sculptures) and a symphony conducted by a European maestro.

I appreciated that art shouldn’t be about impressing others; whether you are an individual or a nation, art is about engaging in a candid dialogue with yourself.

We now understand that the great American story is not confined to history books or political speeches. It is sung, and danced, and dramatized, and turned into verse. It is painted, and sculpted, and written, and filmed. Artists may not swear an oath to serve in government or the military, but they swear an oath to freedom of expression that is no less worthy of recognition, especially in a democracy such as ours.

“The harm of a censorship system is not just that it impoverishes intellectual life,” Ai wrote in a column for the New York Times in 2017. “It also fundamentally distorts the rational order in which the natural and spiritual worlds are understood. The censorship system relies on robbing a person of the self-perception that one needs in order to maintain an independent existence. It cuts off one’s access to independence and happiness.”

In art, you can find voices that channel your own life story better than you could ever express it yourself. And you can also find voices that introduce you to worlds you would never have otherwise visited.

Taking in Lawrence’s paintings and the song “Strange Fruit,” I was struck by the power of art to move me. As a young reporter, I had witnessed the lethal results of institutionalized racism firsthand, and standing there in the bright galleries of the MoMA, I was transported back across time and distance. I wasn’t just thinking. I was feeling.

Art is an attempt to capture the truths of the world as you see it in a medium you can share with others. It is about lending your voice, your perspective to local, national, and global conversations. And that is why, in the United States in particular, our definition of what is art and who is an artist must be as varied as our citizenry.

The photograph has a name: Earthrise. The image was captured by astronaut William Anders of Apollo 8 on the first manned mission to orbit the lunar sphere, and the photograph can be seen as a mirror image for every vision humans had ever experienced up to that point. From before the dawn of history, our ancestors looked up in the night sky and saw a brilliant moon, often in shadow. But in that moment on Apollo 8, three men from our planet looked back and saw all the rest of us on a small disk with oceans, clouds, and continents.

From that distance, people are invisible, and so are cities, countries, and national boundaries. All that separates us ethnically, culturally, politically, and spiritually is absent from the image. What we see is one fragile planet making its way across the vastness of space.

United States ambassador Adlai Stevenson in a speech he gave to the United Nations in 1965. “We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.” With the Earthrise photograph, suddenly Spaceship Earth was no longer a metaphor. It was there for all of us to see.

Over the years, I have been to many military cemeteries, and I am always overcome with waves of emotion. This is especially true of the cemeteries that are filled, not with the tombs of long-lived veterans who earned a military burial for their service, but with the graves of the young who perished in battle. For me the most striking hallowed ground is the Normandy American Cemetery in France. I defy anyone to walk through its more than 170 acres of green grass and white crosses and stars and not feel deeply moved. All told, 9,387 American servicemen are buried there, with uniform grave markers, regardless of the rank they held in life. Death strikes us all with the same finality.

Another striking cemetery can be found halfway around the globe, in a volcanic crater in the hills above Honolulu. Nicknamed Punchbowl, it is a tribute to the sacrifice in our Pacific and Asian wars, not only World War II, but also Korea and Vietnam. Above the bustle of Waikiki, it is a place for meditation on the cost of service with the “courts of the missing”—walls of 28,808 names etched in marble of those who went missing in action or were lost and buried at sea. As an inscription at the cemetery reminds us: “In these gardens are recorded the names of Americans who gave their lives in the service of their country and whose earthly resting place is known only to God.” “Known only to God” is a phrase that epitomizes a level of service beyond our full comprehension. In war, most deaths are lonely, and leave loneliness behind.

And that is how it was during World War II: There was a sense of service that permeated all of society, even down to young boys like me. I remember the rationing of food and materials. The idea that we all had to go without, that we were all asked to sacrifice in even small ways, created a sense of togetherness. It was everyone’s war, and everyone was encouraged to participate.

“There is a healthy disrespect among veterans who served on the front lines for people who walk around telling war stories,” Moulton told the Globe. There were “many others who did heroic things and received no awards at all.” How many politicians could you imagine approaching their accomplishments with this level of humility, especially among our current leaders? That is the benefit of service: It tends to humanize you.

We either choose to be part of a community that stretches beyond ourselves, our material needs, and our creature comforts, or we do not. In our society, it is possible for the selfish and self-centered to live at the expense of the rest of the population.

If we were building the Capitol today, would we make it so bold and beautiful? Its stateliness embodied the audacity of a nation. In its chambers were passed laws of sweeping import. More recently, it has been largely a house of small-mindedness, as politicians have maintained power by essentially promising to take government out of the business of big ideas.

For most of my lifetime, this has been a two-way conversation between government and society at large. We expected ourselves and those we elected to office to dream big and experiment, without fear of the failures that are invariably part of tackling tough challenges.