Patriotism: Its Moral Credentials

Abstract

When I was a young child we moved from New York City to a pleasant street in a modest suburb. At about the same time, the US entered the Second World War. Suddenly, patriotism was everywhere, and shed over our lives an atmosphere of warm sympathy, spontaneous cooperation and unaffected generosity. Then one morning I went out early and saw on the next street that something strange had happened at a neighbour’s home. The house belonged to a childless elderly couple who encouraged me and my friends to play at will on their carefully groomed lawn despite the meticulously tended garden that surrounded it. They offered us lemonade and biscuits, which our parents told us we might accept, and treated us with a kind of courtliness that made us feel very grown up. Today, incredibly, their garden was mangled and trampled; the rose-covered shelter where we drank our lemonade was pulled down and smashed; a lamp was shattered; the front door was boarded over. And words were painted across the front of the house in big untidy letters. They read: ‘America First! The Patriots!’