Civic Nationalism Quotes

Democracy is not simply a license to indulge individual whims and proclivities. It is also holding oneself accountable to some reasonable degree for the conditions of peace and chaos that impact the lives of those who inhabit one’s beloved extended community.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

Allowing ourselves to become a nation of silent, secretive, timid citizens is likely to result in a system of democracy and justice that is neither very democratic nor very just.

Nationalism should not be confused with civic values, public spirit, social responsibility, or cultural pride.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, "We all do.

Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general—they are too committed to the myth of pure evil). Conservatives want schools to teach lessons that will create a positive and uniquely American identity, including a heavy dose of American history and civics, using English as the only national language. Liberals are justifiably wary of jingoism, nationalism, and the focus on books by “dead white males,” but I think everyone who cares about education should remember that the American motto of e pluribus, unum (from many, one) has two parts. The celebration of pluribus should be balanced by policies that strengthen the unum.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.

Yes, it is out of control. It is a loud and livid objection to the kinds of control that have long been in place in a nation built by white men who, when they angrily broke free of imperialist control themselves, promptly encoded protections of liberty and independence only for themselves, building their new nation on slavery and the oppression of women, on the legal and civic subjugation of that nation’s majority.

For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled [....] prevent[ing] precisely what should be his true fulfillment.

Tangier is more New York than New York. ... Then you must see how alike the two places are. The life revolves wholly about the making of money. Practically everyone is dishonest. In New York you have Wall Street, here you have the Bourse. ... In New York you have the slick financiers, here the money changers. In New York you have your racketeers. Here you have your smugglers. And you have every nationality and no civic pride.

The individual is seen as the ultimate. Consequently, we have witneed a decline of civic virtue at the expense of the common good. In addition, the loss of an objective standard for determining what is good and healthy for society has left us with nothing but a vague cultural desire to respect diversity and tolerate the perspectives and choices of others. Radical individualism is undermining the corporate solidarity that gave rise to our national success.

I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me ... Eventually a local warden came up to me and said , "Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons," with such an expression of civic determination that I pretense not to understand English. Instead, I listed my way through various "eh?" sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that since I was neither nationality, I wasn't worth the bother.

The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone, amounted to a repudiation non only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others in the post-independence leadership—though, emphatically, not all within this cohort—deeply believed that the combination of liberal democracy, civic nationalism, and socialist economics was essential to successfully building a modern Indian state.

India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.

Nations are not handed perfect, they are perfected by hand.

Our ability to love, serve, and act as salt and light in our communities is not dependent on various symbols of Christianity dominating the civic landscape.

War -- is a last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death! They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first -- just as the beast is the ape of god; to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God. Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator... Every nation-state tends towards the imperial -- that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.

To love this particular nation is to love the world. This paradox lies within all forms of liberal nationalism. A liberal nation is a nation to which anyone who affirms its civic ideals belongs.

As a representative institution, the U.S. Congress embodies the temper of its time. When the nation is polarized and civic commonality dwindles, Congress reflects that image back to the American people.

In the words of John Fonte, “The new, transformed civic morality of the progressive narrative . . . divides Americans between dominant or ‘oppressor’ groups—whites, males, native-born, Christians, heterosexuals—and victim or ‘oppressed’ groups—racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities; women; LGBT individuals, and ‘undocumented’ immigrants. Progressive politics doesn’t seek the national interest or the common good. Its purpose is to promote ‘marginalized’ or ‘oppressed’ groups against ‘dominant’ or ‘oppressor’ groups.”5 It is the old Marxist wine in new bottles, and the results are bound to be similar. Progressives

First, the past can inspire us. Second, the familiarity of the past helps us to see our common humanity with others who have lived before us. Third, the past gives us a better understanding of our civic identity.

The more we listen to the voices of others, voices unlike our own, the more we remain open to the transcendent forces that save us from idolatry. The more we listen to ourselves, the more we create God in our own image until God becomes a tawdry idol that looks and speaks like us. The power of the commandments is found not in the writings of theologians, although I read and admire some, but in the pathos of human life, including lives that are very unlike our own. All states and nations work to pervert religions into civic religions, ones where the goals of the state become the goals of the divine. This is increasingly true in the United States. But once we believe we understand the will of God and can act as agents of God we become dangerous, a menace to others and a menace to ourselves. We forget that we do not understand. We forget to listen.

The evils which were undermining the Republic bear so many striking resemblances to those which threaten the civic and national life of America to-day that the interest of the period is by no means merely historical.

All of these arenas of American life are facets of the same widely discussed phenomenon: the decline of what is termed “social capital.” As defined by political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, “… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’” It’s the trust, friendships, group affiliations, helping, and expectation of being helped built up by actively participating in and being a member of all sorts of groups, ranging from book clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, and parent-teacher associations to political organizations, professional societies, rotary clubs, town meetings, unions, veterans associations, and others.

Stop for a second to behold the miracle of engineering that these hand-held, networked computers represent—the typical CPU in a modern smartphone is ten times more powerful than the Cray-1 supercomputer installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976.

Small acts of persuasion matter, because there is much less distance between people's beliefs than we often suppose. We easily confuse the distance between people's political positions with the intensity of their convictions about them. It is entirely possible for people to become sharply divided, even hostile, , over relatively minor disagreements. Americans have fought epic political battles over things like baking wedding cakes and kneeling during the national anthem. And we once fought a shooting war over a whiskey tax of ten cents per gallon. The ferocity of these battles has nothing to do with the actual distance between different positions, which, when compared to the entire range of opinions possible in the world, is almost negligible. None of this means that we can persuade our opponents easily. Persuading people to change their minds is excruciatingly difficult. It doesn't always work, and it rarely works the way we think it will. But it does work, and the fact that it works makes it possible for us to have a democracy.

Fellow-feeling. . .is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our national nor our local civic life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together for a common object. A very large share of the rancor of political and social strife arises either from sheer misunderstanding by one section, or by one class, of another, or else from the fact that the two sections, or two classes, are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view, while they are both entirely ignorant of their community of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and humanity.

We all have a stake in the truth. Society functions based on an assumption that people will abide by their word - that truth prevails over mendacity. For the most part, it does. If it didn't, relationships would have a short shelf life, commerce would cease, and trust between parents and children would be destroyed. All of us depend on honesty, because when truth is lacking we suffer, and society suffers. When Adolf Hitler lied to Neville Chamberlain, there was not peace in our time, and over fifty million people paid the price with their lives. When Richard Nixon lied to the nation, it destroyed the respect many had for the office of the president. When Enron executives lied to their employees, thousands of lives were ruined overnight. We count on our government and commercial institutions to be honest and truthful. We need and expect our friends and family to be truthful. Truth is essential for all relations be they personal, professional, or civic.

The two national powers that dominated the colonies, France and Britain, represented two different models of corruption. Britain was seen as a failed ideal. It was corrupted republic, a place where the premise of government was basically sound but civic virtue—that of the public and public officials—was degenerating. On the other hand, France was seen as more essentially corrupt, a nation in which there was no true polity, but instead exchanges of luxury for power; a nation populated by weak subjects and flattering courtiers. Britain was the greater tragedy, because it held the promise of integrity, whereas France was simply something of a civic cesspool.

We all know, he writes, “that laws without customs are not enough,” and that unlike other civic nations, Italians lack “great moral principles.” In Leopardi’s view, this resistance to collective thinking made Italians the most cynical of peoples, incapable of believing in the public good and unwilling to sacrifice their private concerns.

Like a new nation, Wikipedia inspires not only fanatic loyalty but also moral and civic dogmatism. Just as the U.S. uses its "Peace Corps" to rehabilitate imperial depredation with a bushy-tailed front group who teach ancient cultures how to take a dump, Wikipedia gives the radio-active bacteria mound of the Internet a fresh coat of paint.

Some authors have argued that a direct historical line can be drawn to Nazism from the French Revolution of 1789, the Jacobin 'Reign of Terror' in 1793-4, and the implicit idea of a popular dictatorship in Rousseau's theory of the 'General Will,' decided initially by the people but brooking no opposition once resolved upon. The French Revolution was indeed remarkable for its rehersal of many of the major ideologies that bestrode the historical stage of Europe in the following two centuries, from communism and anarchism to liberalism and conservatism. But National Socialism was not among them. The Nazis, indeed thought of themselves as undoing all the work of the French Revolution and rolling back the clock, in a political sense at least, much further to the early Middle Ages. Their concept of the people was racial rather than civic. All the ideologies to which the French Revolution had given birth were to be destroyed. The Nazi Revolution was to be the world-historical negation of its French predecessor, not its historical fufillment.

At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind.

For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of community; even mistrust of oneself and of one’s own destiny here assumed the character of profound self-certainty. In this country one acted—sometimes indeed to the extreme limits of passion and its consequences—differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninformed observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness in what they thought was the Austrian character. But that was wrong. It is always wrong to explain the phenomena of a country simply by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception: he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him. This interior space—which is, it must be admitted, difficult to describe—is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet both here and there it is the same, merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the middle of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination. In so far as this can at all become apparent to every eye, it had done so in Kakania, and in this Kakania was, without the world’s knowing it, the most progressive State of all; it was the State that was by now only just, as it were, acquiescing in its own existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all that had not happened, or at least had not yet irrevocably happened, as by the foam of the oceans from which mankind arose. Es ist passiert, ‘it just sort of happened’, people said there when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself. Yes, in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.

In reality, Kabila was no more than a petty tyrant propelled to prominence by accident. Secretive and paranoid, he had no political programme, no strategic vision and no experience of running a government. He refused to engage with established opposition groups or with civic organisations and banned political parties. Lacking a political organisation of his own, he surrounded himself with friends and family members and relied heavily for support and protection on Rwanda and Banyamulenge. Two key ministries were awarded to cousins; the new chief of staff of the army, James Kabarebe, was a Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up in Uganda; the deputy chief of staff and commander of land forces was his 26-year-old son, Joseph; the national police chief was a brother-in-law. Whereas Mobutu had packed his administration with supporters from his home province of Équateur, Kabila handed out key positions in government, the armed forces, security services and public companies to fellow Swahili-speaking Katangese, notably members of the Lubakat group of northern Katanga, his father’s tribe.

It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life that we should recognize this community of interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class's selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.

The women of the Malesian Tales were however modelled after the lovely women of Singapore, the most urbane of the Malesian cities & the winners of the War of the Sexes.These lovely women,who belonged to a unique sub-species known as the "Singapore Girl", were spawn when the little City State imposed draconian measures in order to ensure its survival- measures covering population control, civic-consciousness, national hygiene & military preparedness- just as Sparta did during Milesian times. And thus, the Singapore girls,just as the girls of Sparta, were constantly in a state of military preparedness when it came to men.[INTRO]

And while the most desperate hours of the men within the Perimeter were passing, a second battle had been raging in their rear, back in the continental United States. When American soldiers went into action, it had become customary to provide them with a free issue of candy, cigarettes—and beer. In the places American troops fought, there were rarely any handy taverns or supermarkets. Reported to the home front, the “beer issue” rapidly became a national controversy. Temperance, church, and various civic groups bombarded the Pentagon and Congress with howls of protest against the corruption of American youth. One legislator, himself a man who took a brew now and then, tried a flanking attack against the complainers, saying on the floor of the House, “Water in Korea is more deadly than bullets!” But no one either polled the troops for their opinion or said openly that a man who was old enough to kill and be killed was also old enough to have a beer if he wanted it. Unable to shake the habit of acquiescence, the Army leaders bowed to the storm of public wrath. On 12 September the day the 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, lost half its strength securing Hill 314, Far East Command cut off its beer ration. The troops could still buy beer, but only when and if the PX caught up with them.

American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes that the nation owes its Black citizens three things: “the free right to vote, [the right] to enjoy civic rights, and [the right] to be educated.”11 Du Bois demands that “[n]egroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood … and that black boys need education as well as white boys.” Du Bois focuses on these three rights—voting rights, civic equality, and education—because he thinks of political participation as special among the liberties; education is important because only the educated citizen can participate well in civic life.

Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

In the nineteenth century wealthy families were typically settled, often for several generations, in a given locale. In a nation of wanderers their stability of residence provided a certain continuity. Old families were recognizable as such, especially in the older seaboard cities, only because, resisting the migratory habit, they put down roots. Their insistence on the sanctity of private property was qualified by the principle that property rights were neither absolute nor unconditional. Wealth was understood to carry civic obligations. Libraries, museums, parks, orchestras, universities, hospitals, and other civic amenities stood as so many monuments to upper-class munificence.

Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble.” Added a quotation: “The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks, which tell us how fortunate we are to have the ballot. The major nominees for president are not chosen by the ballot, but are picked for us by a quadrennial political convention which is half farce, half circus, most of whose delegates have not been instructed by popular vote. For months before the convention, the public has been conditioned by the mass media on who is who, so that it will not be temped to think beyond that list which the party regulars have approved.” Added a quotation: “I do not think civil disobedience is enough; it is a way of protest, but in itself it does not construct a new society. There are many other things that citizens should do to begin to build a new way of life in the midst of the old, to live the way human beings should live- enjoying the fruits of the earth, the warmth of nature and of one another-without hostility, without the artificial separation of religion, or race, or nationalism. Further, not all forms of civil disobedience are moral; not all are effective.” Added a quotation: “It is very hard, in the comfortable environment of middle-class America, to discard the notion that everything will be better if we don't have the disturbance of civil disobedience, if we confine ourselves to voting, writing letters to our congressmen, speaking our minds politely.....somehow we must transcend our own tight, air-conditioned chambers and begin to feel their plight, their needs. It may become evident that, despite out wealth, we can have no real peace until they do. We might then join them in battering at the complacency of those who guard a false "order," with that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars. While ever a state of feeling such as this shall universally or even very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom

For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres. But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.

Amantes Assemble Sonnet 91 Citizens are the alpha, citizens are the omega. Whatever good is possible, it comes from the citizens. Citizens are the creator, citizens are the ravager. Citizens make the autocrats, citizens can crush them. Citizens are the cause, citizens are the effect. There is no destiny, only determination of the citizens. Citizens are the worshipper, citizens are the worshipped. There is no religion, only humanity of the citizens. Citizens are the gospel, citizens are commandments. When citizens command with conscience, corruption falls. Citizens are the altar, citizens are the idol. When the citizens come down to the streets, dictators fall. Autocrats and dictators rule because the citizens allow it. Once the citizens wake up from hibernation, it's time for their last wish.

All nations are fictions created by stories and sumbols that endow certain lines on a map with an almost magical significance. But the magic requires that the stories and symbols of the nation surpass the stories and symbols of the tribes that constitute it. The easy stories - the ones about how our tribe is the best and the members of other tribes aren't really people - have disastrous effects when they emerge in a diverse democratic society. Such narratives fundamentally undermine the civic relationships that make democracy work. They transfer our civic allegiance from the messy, chaotic society that is trying to govern itself to the much more controllable subset of people who look, talk, or think like we do - creating nations within nations that work like corrosive acid on the political body.

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.

Another common adult misunderstanding is this: Parents and teachers think that the child should be taught the local geography first. From there they introduce her to ever larger units by graduated steps. The child is not, however, naturally disposed to learn by graduated steps. Her mind tends to leap from one spatial-temporal scale to another, such that, at seven or eight, she may well take a more lively interest in America than in Dane County, Wisconsin, in the dinosaur than in the dairy cow, in the Great Wall of China than in her hometown’s water tower. Socially and morally, too, she is more drawn to issues of good and evil, fairness and unfairness, categories that affect her life, than to adult priorities of class, ethnicity, and nationality.14 Unfortunately, adults have power, which they all too often use to steer the child to their own narrower concerns.

The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response. And in today’s world, that means recognizing that it’s impossible to have a well-informed citizenry without having a well-connected citizenry. While education remains important, it is now connection that is the key. A well-connected citizenry is made up of men and women who discuss and debate ideas and issues among themselves and who constantly test the validity of the information and impressions they receive from one another—as well as the ones they receive from their government. No citizenry can be well informed without a constant flow of honest information about contemporary events and without a full opportunity to participate in a discussion of the choices that the society must make. Moreover, if citizens feel deprived of a meaningful opportunity to participate in the national conversation, they can scarcely be blamed for developing a lack of interest in the process. And sure enough, numerous surveys and studies have documented the erosion of public knowledge of basic facts about our democracy. For example, from the data compiled by the National Election Studies on one recent election, only 15 percent of respondents could recall the name of even one of the candidates in the election in their district. Less than 4 percent could name two candidates. When there are so few competitive races, it’s hard to blame them. Two professors, James Snyder and David Stromberg, found that knowledge of candidates increased in media markets where the local newspaper covered the congressional representative more. Very few respondents claimed to learn anything at all about their congressional elections from television news.

Until Americans can overcome this idealization of law, until they begin to see that law is, like other institutions and actions, to be measured against moral principles, against human needs, we will remain a static society in a world of change, a society deaf to the rising cries for justice- and therefore,a society in serious trouble.” “The realities of american politics, it turns out, are different than as described in old civic textbooks, which tell us how fortunate we are to have the ballot. The major nominees for president are not chosen by the ballot, but are picked for us by a quadrennial political convention which is half farce, half circus, most of whose delegates have not been instructed by popular vote. For months before the convention, the public has been conditioned by the mass media on who is who, so that it will not be temped to think beyond that list which the party regulars have approved.” “I do not think civil disobedience is enough; it is a way of protest, but in itself it does not construct a new society. There are many other things that citizens should do to begin to build a new way of life in the midst of the old, to live the way human beings should live- enjoying the fruits of the earth, the warmth of nature and of one another-without hostility, without the artificial separation of religion, or race, or nationalism. Further, not all forms of civil disobedience are moral; not all are effective.” “It is very hard, in the comfortable environment of middle-class America, to discard the notion that everything will be better if we don't have the disturbance of civil disobedience, if we confine ourselves to voting, writing letters to our congressmen, speaking our minds politely.....somehow we must transcend our own tight, air-conditioned chambers and begin to feel their plight, their needs. It may become evident that, despite out wealth, we can have no real peace until they do. We might then join them in battering at the complacency of those who guard a false "order," with that healthy commotion that has always attended the growth of justice.

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity. It is extraordinarily naive for a Christian to rule out categorically the possibility of any conflict between their national identity and their baptismal identity. But it’s precisely this kind of naiveté that is on display every time a church flies an American flag above the so-called Christian flag. Or perhaps it’s a bit of unintended truth-telling. Flags are powerful symbols that have the capacity to evoke strong emotions—think of the passion connected with protests involving flag burning. In the world of symbol, flags are among the most revered signs. So when a church flies the American flag above the Christian flag, what is the message being communicated? How can it be anything other than that all allegiances—including allegiance to Christ—must be subordinate to a supreme national allegiance? This is what Caiaphas admitted when he confessed to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”[8] When the American flag is placed in supremacy over all other flags—including a flag intended to represent Christian faith—aren’t we saying our faith is subordinate to our patriotism? Is there any other interpretation? And if you’re inclined to argue that I’m making too much out of the mere arrangement of flags on a church lawn, try reversing them and see what happens! For the “America First” Christian it would create too much cognitive dissonance to actually admit that their loyalty to Christ is penultimate, trumped by their primary allegiance to America, but there are plenty of moments when the truth seeps out.

Considering these precursors, a debate has arisen about which country spawned the earliest fascist movement. France is a frequent candidate. Russia has been proposed. Hardly anyone puts Germany first. It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans in 1867 by the Radical Reconstructionists, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in the eyes of the Klan’s founders, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. By adopting a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as by their techniques of intimidation and their conviction that violence was justified in the cause of their group’s destiny,88 the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It should not be surprising, after all, that the most precocious democracies—the United States and France—should have generated precocious backlashes against democracy.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

The individual citizen had no chance to voice his protest or his opinion, not even his fear. He could only leave the country - and so people did. Those who used 'I' instead of 'we' in their language had to escape. It was this fatal difference in grammar that divided them from the rest of their compatriots. As a consequence of this 'us', no civic society developed. The little there was, in the form of small, isolated, and marginalised groups, was soon swallowed up by the national homogenisation that did not permit any differences, any individualism. As under communism, individualism was punished - individuals speaking out against the war, or against nationalism, were singled out as 'traitors'. How does a person who is a product of a totalitarian society learn responsibility, individuality, initiative? by saying 'no'. But this begins with saying 'I', thinking 'I' and doing 'I' - in public as well as in private. Individuality, the first-person singular, always existed under communism, it was just exiled from public and political life and exercised in private. Thus the terrible hypocrisy with which we learned to live in order to survive is having its backlash now: it is very difficult to connect the private and public 'I'; to start believing that an individual opinion, initiative, or vote could make a difference. There is still too big a danger that the citizen will withdraw into an anonymous, safe 'us'.

In his sermons, as in the book he published in 2005, The Myth of a Christian Nation, Boyd challenged the idea that America had been, or ever could be, a “Christian nation.” Taking his text from the Gospels, he reminded evangelicals that Christ’s kingdom was “not of this world,” and worldly kingdoms were the domain of fallen man. Evangelicals, he wrote, speak of “taking America back to God,” but the Constitution said nothing about a Christian nation, and America never remotely looked like the domain of God, certainly not in the days of slavery or of Jim Crow, and not today. A nation may have noble ideals and be committed to just principles, but of necessity it wields the “power over” of the sword, as opposed to the “power under” of the cross—which is that of Jesus’ self-sacrificial love. To identify the Kingdom of God with that of any version of the kingdom of the world is, he wrote, to engage in idolatry. The myth of a Christian nation, he continued, has led to the misconception that the American civil religion is real Christianity. Evangelicals, he wrote, spend our time striving to keep prayer in the public schools, “In God we trust” on our coins, and the Ten Commandments in public places. Might it not be, he asked, that the effort to defend prayer before civic functions reinforces the notion that prayer is a perfunctory social activity? And what if we spent all that energy serving each other with Christ-like love? We could, he wrote, feed the hungry, house the homeless, bridge the “ungodly racial gap,” and side with others whose rights are routinely trampled.

He continues: "Happily the Greek nation, more than any other, abounds in literary masterpieces. Nearly all of the Greek writings contain an abundance of practical wisdom and virtue. Their worth is so great that even the most advanced European nations do not hesitate to introduce them into their schools. The Germans do this, although their habits and customs are so different from ours. They especially admire Homer's works. These books, above all others, afford pleasure to the young, and the reason for it is clearly set forth by the eminent educator Herbart: "'The little boy is grieved when told that he is little. Nor does he enjoy the stories of little children. This is because his imagination reaches out and beyond his environments. I find the stories from Homer to be more suitable reading for young children than the mass of juvenile books, because they contain grand truths.' "Therefore these stories are held in as high esteem by the German children as by the Greek. In no other works do children find the grand and noble traits in human life so faithfully and charmingly depicted as in Homer. Here all the domestic, civic, and religious virtues of the people are marvellously brought to light and the national feeling is exalted. The Homeric poetry, and especially the 'Odyssey,' is adapted to very young children, not only because it satisfies so well the needs which lead to mental development, but also for another reason. As with the people of olden times bravery was considered the greatest virtue, so with boys of this age and all ages. No other ethical idea has such predominance as that of prowess. Strength of body and a firm will characterize those whom boys choose as their leaders. Hence the pleasure they derive from the accounts of celebrated heroes of yore whose bravery, courage, and prudence they admire.

Of course, not everyone agreed with Professor Glaude’s assessment. Joel C. Gregory, a white professor of preaching at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and coauthor of What We Love about the Black Church,8 took issue with Glaude’s pronouncement of the Black Church’s death. Gregory, a self-described veteran of preaching in “more than two hundred African-American congregations, conferences, and conventions in more than twenty states each year,” found himself at a loss for an explanation of Glaude’s statements. Gregory offered six signs of vitality in the African-American church, including: thriving preaching, vitality in worship, continuing concern for social justice, active community service, high regard for education, and efforts at empowerment. Gregory contends that these signs of life can be found in African-American congregations in every historically black denomination and in varying regions across the country. He writes: Where is the obituary? I do not know any organization in America today that has the vitality of the black church. Lodges are dying, civic clubs are filled with octogenarians, volunteer organizations are languishing, and even the academy has to prove the worth of a degree. The government is divided, the schoolroom has become a war zone, mainline denominations are staggering, and evangelical megachurch juggernauts show signs of lagging. Above all this entropy stands one institution that is more vital than ever: the praising, preaching, and empowering black church.9 The back-and-forth between those pronouncing death and those highlighting life reveals the difficulty of defining “the Black Church.” In fact, we must admit that speaking of “the Black Church” remains a quixotic quest. “The Black Church” really exists as multiple black churches across denominational, theological, and regional lines. To some extent, we can define the Black Church by referring to the historically black denominations—National Baptist, Progressive Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal (AME), African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), Church of God in Christ (COGIC), and so on. But increasingly we must recognize that one part of “the Black Church” exists as predominantly black congregations belonging to majority white denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention or even African-American members of predominantly white churches. Still, other quarters of “the Black Church” belong to nondenominational affinity groups like the many congregations involved in Word of Faith and “prosperity gospel” networks sponsored by leaders like Creflo A. Dollar Jr. and T. D. Jakes. Clearly “the Black Church” is not one thing. Black churches come in as many flavors as any other ethnic communion. Indeed, many African-Americans have experiences with many parts of the varied Black Church world.

Our political system today does not engage the best minds in our country to help us get the answers and deploy the resources we need to move into the future. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence in the same way that markets have unleashed our collective productivity. “We the people” must reclaim and revitalize the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated—but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities—especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power—has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. The freedoms embodied in our First Amendment represented the hard-won wisdom of the eighteenth century: that individuals must be able to fully participate in challenging, questioning, and thereby breathing human values constantly into the prevailing ideologies of their time and sharing with others the wisdom of their own experience.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

Our nation and the world are faced with a great crisis. This is a time for each and every one of us to commit ourselves to the highest level of personal and civic service and sacrifice. To win the war against the Coronavirus, we must exhibit the highest level of self-leadership possible. This current crisis requires from each of us new faith in Divinity and humanity, and it requires a new patriotism grounded in self-discipline, compassion, and undying respect for our own life and the lives of others. By honoring this pledge, together we can return stability to our lives and the world.

Because sustaining civic feeling is so difficult, democracies are subject to entropy. When the bond of citizenship is badly cast or has been allowed to weaken, there is a natural tendency for subpolitical attachments to become paramount in people's minds. We see this in every failed American effort to export democracy abroad. And we are also seeing it in Eastern Europe today, a particularly tragic development. Within a few years after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, democratic institutions were established there. But not a sense of shared citizenship, which is the work of generations. Democracies without democrats do not last. They decay, into oligarchy, theocracy, ethnic nationalism, tribalism, authoritarian one-party rule, or some combination of these.

As Christians, our primary objective is to profess the gospel of Jesus Christ to all nations (Matthew 28:16-20). No other task should be allowed to interfere with or obscure that purpose. If the Great Commission becomes secondary, or if Christianity is understood primarily as a means of accomplishing social or political goals, then we’ve handed to Caesar what belongs to God (Matthew 22:21).

I’ve got news for you,” Frank said. “What you see as just extraneous bits of jingoism are secretly the purpose of the entire event. The game exists to be a ritual in the nation’s civic

Patriotism at its best, inspired by a history of shared sacrifice in a shared country, was not racist or exclusionary; it was democratic, civic-minded, and inclusive, devoid of the hatred that so often arises out of communities based on race or ethnicity.

The immigration debate in America today is not really about immigration. Nor is it about national security, the economy or the vagaries of our outdated asylum system. Like much else in our civic life, the immigration debate is mostly a proxy for domestic policies and the culture wars. It just happens to a particularly potent proxy because it tends to elicit strong feelings about the American dream, ethnic identity, class and nationhood. That is to say, immigration is an issue that’s ripe for exploitation and cooption by both the Left and the Right. Each side can easily condemn the other without ever getting down to debating actual US policy on its merits. This is one reason why we still have an immigration system that dates from 1965. Book Review: “They’re not sending their best.” Claremont Review of Books, volume 20, no.3 (summer, 2020). P.45

One thing that the global justice movement taught us is that politics is, indeed, ultimately about value; but also, that those creating vast bureaucratic systems will almost never admit what their values really are. This was as true of the Carnegies as it is today. Normally, they will—like the robber barons of the turn of the last century—insist that they are acting in the name of efficiency, or “rationality.” But in fact this language always turns out to be intentionally vague, even nonsensical. The term “rationality” is an excellent case in point here. A “rational” person is someone who is able to make basic logical connections and assess reality in a non-delusional fashion. In other words, someone who isn’t crazy. Anyone who claims to base their politics on rationality—and this is true on the left as well as on the right—is claiming that anyone who disagrees with them might as well be insane, which is about as arrogant a position as one could possibly take. Or else, they’re using “rationality” as a synonym for “technical efficiency,” and thus focusing on how they are going about something because they do not wish to talk about what it is they are ultimately going about. Neoclassical economics is notorious for making this kind of move. When an economist attempts to prove that it is “irrational” to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say “irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, or the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.” There is absolutely no reason why one could not rationally calculate the best way to further one’s political ideals through voting. But according to the economists’ assumptions, anyone who takes this course might as well be out of their minds.

Starrett (1996) argued that, because we inhabit a global community, our civic responsibilities transcend the borders of nation-states.

But they can hardly have missed the part of Olmsted’s document that teaches a stirring civics lesson: “It is the main duty of government, if it is not the sole duty of government, to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals is liable to interpose to that pursuit.”1 As Olmsted sees it, Yosemite has the potential to close out the era in which the prize manifestations of nature’s beauty have been reserved for the wealthy.

In Uberwald the dwarfs and trolls haven’t settled their old grievances, there are large areas controlled by feudal vampire or werewolf clans, and there are also tracts with much higher than normal background magic. It is a chaotic place, indeed, and you’d hardly think you were in the Century of the Fruitbat. It is to be hoped that things will improve, however, and Uberwald will, happily, be joining the community of nations.” Vimes and Vetinari exchanged looks. Sometimes Carrot sounded like a civics essay written by a stunned choirboy.

This national energy policy of the last four decades is, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic. And it is worse today than ever.

Like his father, Andrew became actively involved in the civic affairs of his community. At the time, farm bureaus were forming throughout the country—cooperative organizations devoted to promoting the practical and economic interests of local farmers.10 When a national farm bureau was founded in 1919, Kehoe “volunteered to head [its] drive for membership.” Two years later, in April 1921, he was elected to the board of directors of its Bath Township unit. He did not retain that position for long. Just seven months later, he abruptly quit the organization.11 From that point on, he directed his energies toward an issue that had come to dominate the politics of his adopted hometown, one that would eventually obsess him to the point of madness.

Adams drew from the War of 1812 the disconcerting conclusion that occasional wars are indispensable for the inculcation of civic virtue and hence long-term health of republican government. Adams to Rush, "Wars at times are as necessary for the preservation and perfection, the prosperity, Liberty, happiness, Virtue, & independence of Nations as Gales of wind to the Saluburity of the Atmosphere, or the agitations of the Ocean to prevent its stagnation and putrefaction." There is a definite echo here of Jefferson's famous claim that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," as well well as Adam's own hope during the Revolution that "the Furnace of Affliction" would help to purify the nation, ridding it of its softness and selfishness." Adams, "We all regret or affect to regret War...There never was a Republick; no nor any other People, under whatever Government, that could maintain their Independence, much less grow and propser, without it." ... "What horrid Creatures we Men are," he mused, " that we cannont be virtuous without murdering one another." Chapter 9, page 139-140

High-quality national surveys of high school seniors confirm that kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes.

The source of loyalty for European identity is ‘constitutional patriotism’. Its solidarity is founded on civic rights, rather than common origin and history

Though a constitution was not yet reality at the time, we can say that there were these post-national elements like civic rights and duties which enabled for the first time the emergence of the Swiss identity and nation approximately five centuries after this community was first created in the 13th century.

Gates’s fetish for reducing population is a family pedigree. His father, Bill Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer and civic leader in Seattle with a lifelong obsession for “population control.” Gates Sr. sat on the national board of Planned Parenthood, a neo-progressive organization founded in 1916 by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger to promote birth control and sterilization and to purge “human waste”58 and “create a race of thoroughbreds.

Liberty cannot be locked up in a cage, whether that cage is a party platform, a national constitution, a bill of rights, or a campaign slogan. Liberty exists, or does not exist, in the hearts of the people. If the people are free, then civic freedom for the people becomes a possibility.

I chose to take the weight of the world on my shoulders, but you don't necessarily have to. If you can't take the weight of the world on your shoulders, take the weight of your nation - if you can't take the weight of your nation, take the weight of your city - if you can't take the weight of your city, take the weight of your neighborhood. Start small but start somewhere - take responsibility for the issues of your immediate vicinity if not the whole world, and the world will change, slowly but surely.

The decrees and canons of the greatest Church Council of the Middle Ages must be read as the sign of a quickened conscience in Christendom, not as proof of general depravity. A Nation or smaller civic community that passes enactments for the checking of avarice or the prohibition of other evil-doing is not sunk in vice. Far from it. It is alive to the disease that troubles its peace, aware that unchecked the disease may spread to the ruin of the whole society, and is resolved that corruption must be got rid of for the sake of the health of the whole.

Finally, there is the group of mainly humanist intellectuals who constitute a movement known as Afropessimism.63 Reacting against the Pollyannaish postracial rhetoric at the turn of the century, they insist not just on the persistence of racism in America, but on the fact that race remains the critical divide in the nation, the living lineaments of slavery whose “afterlife” continues to define black Americans as socially dead, permanently excluded from the taken-for-granted civic culture and social life of white-defined America.

In actual fact the deep racial divides in our nation present one of the greatest opportunities for the American church. Racism is in the church, but it is not unique to the church. It’s the gospel that is unique to the church—the truth that the divine power of Almighty God reaches even across the deepest of cultural divides (Romans 1:16).

the librarians and booksellers who sustain the creative, intellectual and civic life of our nation.

Let me say at once that I am no advocate for a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all other countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land. Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of national honor as a gentleman of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nations neither inflect nor suffer wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealing with other nations, any more than he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.

Justice begins with a just civilian, not a politician.

Honor He Wrote Sonnet 56 It's the citizens’ duty to make a nation nonpartisan, Government is meant to serve as powerless figurehead. All my hopes lie in the hands of accountable citizens, A good politician acts a citizen, not political dunderhead. So no more procrastination with the curation of society, No more playing hooky in the school of life and sanity. Be the politician that you seek in the sewers of state, Not by law but by an indefatigable accountability. Democracy means rule of the people, not sleep of people, Yet that's what it means to people 'n politicians alike. But shhh, nobody is supposed to admit any of it in public, For discretion is the better part of a society of sleeping mice. Let sleeping slime sleep, if you are human, take charge now. Dream with your eyes open and keep your democracy vow.

Far more than Polish nationalism, however, Zionism has been and continues to be a global project with multiple goals. These goals are as disparate as enduring peace and security for the state of Israel, the advent of the messiah, strengthening Jewish ethnic consciousness and warding off assimilation in the diaspora, and the transformation of Jews into authentic, harmonious, and productive beings imbued with military prowess and civic virtue. Not only do these goals remain unattained despite the achievement of Jewish statehood, there is also no foreseeable point at which they could be attained. Zionism remains, therefore, a permanent revolution and as salient in the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the nineteenth. Greater than the sum of Israeli or diaspora Jewish institutional structures, Zionism is part of the emotional substrate of Jews throughout the world.

But the episode was illustrative nonetheless of a nasty and menacing trend that was coursing through the state’s politics. It was a trend fueled by root causes national in scope and years in the making: an increasingly polarized electorate, the erosion of trust in civic institutions, the advent of social media with its cordoned-off silos filled with hate and conspiracy theories.

As the state spreads it tentacles into every corner of life in the name of regulation, rationalization or economic development, people who wanted their way of life to continue would have no choice but to engage the political system, no matter how much they had wanted to mind their own business. The Catch-22 was that an attempt at such engagement could be deemed as the government as political interference deserving of a tough response. Thus, civic groups had to find ways to protect their interests without being seen as challenging the government's dominance; to act politically while seeming apolitical.

The media have indeed informed the public about threats to our air, water and food. Ever since 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, more and more information has been made available. And the public has responded. About fifteen years ago, public interest in the environment reached its height. In 1988, George Bush Senior promised that, if elected, he would be an environmental president. In the same year, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was re-elected, and to indicate his ecological concern he moved the minister of the environment into the inner Cabinet. Newly created environment departments around the world were poised to cut back on fossil-fuel use, monitor the effects of acid rain and other pollutants, clean up toxic wastes, and protect plant and animal species. Information about our troubled environment had reached a large number of people, and that information, as expected, led to civic and political action. In 1992, it all reached its apex as the largest-ever gathering of heads of state in human history met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “Sustainable development” was the rallying cry, and politicians and business leaders promised to take a new path. Henceforth, they said, the environment would be weighed in every political, social and economic decision. Yet only two weeks after all the fine statements of purpose and government commitments were signed in Rio, the Group of Seven industrialized nations met in Munich and not a word was mentioned about the environment. The main topic was the global economy. The environment, it was said, had fallen off the list of public concerns, and environmentalism had been relegated to the status of a transitory fad.

Every high school civics class sings praise to the system of checks and balances within the American governmental structure—each branch holding power to check the others so that no one branch can wield too much—but there is little discussion of the need for checks and balances of external power centers. The awesome power of the corporate sector, which was nonexistent at the founding of the nation but today carries resources and influence that totally eclipse the voice of ordinary people, needs counterbalancing. This notion is not socialist, nor is it an offense to freedom; it is simply a pragmatic, commonsense response to obvious realities.

the “secession” of the rich in which they “disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot.

Mike Lofgren, a Republican who spent thirty years observing how wealthy interests gamed the policy-making apparatus in Washington, where he was a staff member on the Senate Budget Committee, decried what he called the “secession” of the rich in which they “disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot.

It is perhaps the most important civic duty of every citizen to inform themselves about the issues of the day and cast educated votes for people who truly represent their views.

the Religious Zionists have shown that they would prefer civil war in Israel to peace with the Palestinians. That is because these Jews define their national identity in terms not of civic loyalty to the state but of religious obligation to the land.

I served our country in its military for a total of 40 years 6 months and 7 days. At a time when we have fake news and people have accepted that lies are as valid as the truth all I can say is that my DD-214 shows that I served and retired from the United States Naval Reserve, before joining the United States Army in its Military Intelligence Corps, and served as such until retiring in 1987. I personally don’t know of anyone else that actually served in two branches of our military and retired from each, and although I frequently receive thanks for my service it is appreciated but not necessary. What is however necessary, is that we as citizens give a long hard look at where we are going as a nation. Yes, our infrastructure needs repair and our people need good jobs. We certainly want to feel secure but we definitely don’t need one man to fix our Constitution, which by the way is not broken! We do not need a crude iron fist to run our country! What we do need is a clear understanding of where we are going and what our country stands for…. “The pursuit of happiness” for “We the People!” Our government is based on a system of checks and balances, not the blind following of an autocrat. That’s been tried before and failed each time. Let’s not go down that “Rabbit hole!” Stand up and protect our democracy and cherish our freedom! What we have is priceless! Don’t let anyone take that away from us…. “Stand up for what is right!

Jimmy likely wrote all three editorials, and one, titled “Who Is for Law and Order?” carried his byline. He argued that the spectacle, seen in other recent conflicts and then repeated most dramatically in the Little Rock crisis, of white people defying police as well as state and federal troops raised the question, “If white people defy the Constitution, who then are the law-abiding citizens of the U.S. and who is for democracy?” Inherent in his answer was a reshaping of the relations between blacks and whites. On one hand this meant the loss of white people’s claim to civic and moral authority. “The Little Rock crisis has put an end to the era of the white man’s burden to preserve democracy,” he asserted. “The white man’s burden now is to prove that he believes in democracy and that he can follow the example of the colored people in upholding law and order.” As for black Americans, their newfound racial assertion struck a blow to the edifice upon which their subordination had long rested. “For years untold colored people have been forced to maneuver in all directions trying to avoid a head-on collision,” Jimmy wrote. “They have allowed white people to name them ‘Negroes’ by which the whites mean a thing and not a person. They have stayed out of the public parks, restaurants, hotels and golf courses, walked on the cinder path when meeting whites on the sidewalk, gone to separate schools, worked on the worst jobs under the worst conditions, smiled and acted unhurt when abused in public places.” But the recent tide of black protest revealed that African Americans were making “an about face.” Black people, he wrote, were not only pressing for their rights but were also beginning to “denounce” the people and practices that had denied them those rights. 80 Jimmy’s analysis of Little Rock differed from other commentaries, which tended to emphasize it as an advance in the struggle for integration, highlight the moral questions it raised, or discuss it as a crisis of authority played out through conflict among the local, state, and national governments. Instead, Jimmy said Little Rock represented a rather sudden transformation now taking place among black people. The importance of Little Rock for him was in revealing how black people were seeing themselves differently and thus making this “about face,” no longer accepting the southern way of life and even rejecting the standards by which white people had organized society and elevated themselves. This analysis, and all of the editorials on Little Rock more generally, continued the focus and tone of Jimmy’s previous writings in the paper, but they also reflected the greater attention that Correspondence was soon to give to the escalating civil rights movement.