Making Patriots in an Unpatriotic Age Even as elites sneer at patriotism, small-town ceremonies and Walter Berns’s Making Patriots remind us that liberty cannot endure without love of country. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/06/making-patriots-in-an-unpatriotic-age/

Like many people in my neighborhood, I had an American flag ready to display when the nation’s big, beautiful birthday rolled around on Friday. I live in a small New England neighborhood where July 4 is a big deal. The 20-odd children who live here form an honor guard that parades briefly and lays a wreath at the foot of a tiny war monument. We raise the flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then a respected local addresses us after we sing the National Anthem. The ACLU hasn’t got wind of our activities yet, so we even engaged a friendly cleric to perform a benediction.

By contemporary standards, this exhibition of patriotic sentiment seems quaint. But I have always found the event moving and thought-provoking. It reminds me of how lucky I am to be an American, and it leads me to reflect on the extraordinary political genius that forged American liberty and made it, as Lincoln said in a fraught moment in 1862, “the last, best hope of earth.”

This year, preparing for the holiday festivities, I dusted off my copy of Making Patriots by the late political philosopher Walter Berns (1919–2015). I am glad I did. This brief, eloquent book is a beautiful tribute to patriotism, lately a much-besieged civic virtue (though Donald Trump is doing yeoman’s work to rescue it). Berns begins by noting that although Lincoln’s words are even more obviously true today than before, the patriotism that Lincoln commended (and which he knew was necessary to guarantee liberty) no longer enjoys widespread public support, at least among this country’s elites.