For most of our veterans, it should go without saying that military discipline and experience give them a moral authority. It is a recognition—once universal—that is too often forgotten in an age when patriotism itself seems suspect to many. On this day when we honor our veterans, it’s good to recollect both the debt of [...]
Roman death masks—called “imagines”—were actually wax models impressed directly on the face during life, and they bore a remarkable likeness to the person. Displayed during the funerals of the elite, they served as a link between the present and the past and were meant to inspire attendees to patriotic virtue. The recent defacement of statues [...]
In 1900, Jean Sibelius revised his patriotic tone-poem, “Finlandia,” and its popularity grew in leaps and bounds. Suddenly the world knew about Sibelius, “Finlandia,” and Finnish national pride. Jean Sibelius Jean Sibelius’ tone-poem, Finlandia, wasn’t supposed to be the program headliner that Saturday night at the San Francisco Symphony. The main draw was the Sibelius Violin [...]
Love of one’s country stands better when it finds its office within a higher love. Lewis disaggregates ‘love’ into loves In his book The Four Loves, published in 1960, three years before he died in 1963, the Irish/Englishman C.S. Lewis says that, although goodness itself cannot turn bad, things that we associate with goodness and [...]
With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as [...]
Ridley Scott’s TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle came to Amazon in November, and bluntly put, it’s a horrifying ten hours. The premise says it all: What if the Allies had lost World War II? We see America divided between a Nazi regime in the east and a Japanese empire [...]
The greatness of the American myth is that it is mostly real. Enough of the faux-conservatives, these woke rightists, judging America as not worth saving and smearing our heroes as tyrants or war criminals. On December 3, 2024, James Lindsay, rightish provocateur, revealed that he had “very lightly edited” “several thousand words straight out of” [...]
Why is the true Fourth such a powerful image of liberty? Because the things that most deepen us and rouse us are dangerous. An appetite for the real good means being willing to face danger, and the whole point of the liberty we celebrate is that we learn to handle danger, to face it responsibly, [...]
The spirit of good nationalism is inseparable from the spirit of humility. It loves its neighbours. A good nationalist loves the good nationalists in other nations because they love their country as he loves his. A good nationalist knows that bad nationalism is merely imperialism wearing a patriotic mask. Nationalism has a bad name and [...]
The ideals upon which America was founded are now forgotten by many. Yet these same ideals are buried in these songs of patriotism and faith. By singing these songs, we instill the truths contained in their words in our hearts. We learn once again to have faith in God, to gather and build community within [...]
Particularly in dangerous times, the true patriot has a duty to resist the call to blind nationalist obedience so that he may serve his nation’s true interests, and help it to live up to its duty to obey a law higher than itself. Perhaps the most famous quotation from the great Tory lexicographer Samuel Johnson [...]
Patriotism—the love of place, countrymen, and local traditions—lasted for millennia, until replaced by nationalism, which we believe is a natural outgrowth of tribal life, instead of an invention of Western Europe. I sat through elementary school not knowing that to guarantee new generations of virtuous and patriotic citizens, the French Revolution established the first comprehensive [...]
Thanks to feverish cosmopolitanism and globalism, many Americans have grown up rootless and hyper-mobile, so they have little in the way of local "patria" with which to connect. The American patriot increasingly looks like the Atlantean or Trojan patriot, forced to carry within himself whatever residual sense of home and connection to place and people [...]
Christians can respect George Orwell even if we cannot fully claim him. But “woke” progressives have no logical choice but to repudiate the secular liberal icon altogether for his skepticism toward egalitarianism, globalism, and political correctness. However he may feel about it, no honest and perceptive person will deny that the Overton window of acceptable [...]