IM-1776: Dark Age Patriotism

To recover our country from the realm of ideas

This week IM-1776 published my piece “Dark Age Patriotism”— an essay exploring the origins of our ideological regime and the long-lost patriotism of our revolutionary forebearers.

An excerpt:

To understand true patriotism, we need to recover our country from the realm of ideas and conceive of our homeland much as our fathers of the first founding did. To the Revolutionary generation, patriotism was a devotion and a responsibility to one’s people and place. Honoring these attachments required a strong sense of obligation and personal virtue, and it was expected of every man, no matter how lowly his station. Patriotism for the American colonists was to prioritize the particular over the universal, the real over the abstract, and to recognize one’s commitment to the living, the unborn, and the long dead. These Americans understood themselves to be beneficiaries of a political inheritance that had accumulated over centuries. They had a keen awareness of their collective past, the origins of their rights as Englishmen, and they commonly traced their habits, customs, and traditions back centuries to their Anglo-Saxon forebearers, who they believed to be a free people and the original authors of English liberty. Jealously guarding that liberty was considered a patriotic duty and it bordered on obsession. To the American colonist, his rights and liberty were not the product of an abstruse theory or some gnostic force; they were his birthright, and as such, they could be seized by the “grasping” and “tenacious” hand of tyrannical power.

I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to drop your questions or feedback in the comments section below.

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Always,

Lee