What the Constitution Means to Me

The Greatest Manifestation of Patriotism

In his 1970 book, The Democratic Republic: An Introduction to American National Government, Martin Diamond observes the unique phenomenon of the term “Americanism.” “Other countries,” he writes, “have no single political doctrine, adherence to which is a kind of national obligation or heritage . . . . [T]o be an American has meant somehow to accept the fundamental credo; deviation from it causes one to be regarded as un-American (another expression which has no analogue elsewhere).” Yet Diamond is wrong about this one fact: the expressions we use in America do have analogs elsewhere. “Britishism,” “Canadianism,” and “Yugoslavism,” for example. The expressions “un-English,” “un-Canadian,” and “un-Australian” are used within their respective countries. But despite the “unexceptionalism” of America’s expressions, Diamond is right about the exceptionalism of what it means to be an American: to accept the fundamental credo “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness―That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, driving their just Power from the Consent of the Governed.”

Patriotism is often defined as “devoted love, support, and defense of one’s country; national loyalty.” However, American patriotism requires an exceptional definition to match the exceptional idea of what it means to be an American. Whereas a good American accepts the fundamental credo expressed in the Declaration of Independence, an American patriot is devoted to loving, supporting, and defending that fundamental credo. This is why, on June 30, 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told the residents of Independence, Missouri, and the nation, that “[American] patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it is also loyalty to America’s ideals.” These ideals were laid out in the Declaration and would be reached through the Constitution. The Declaration explains why governments are instituted, but it is the Constitution that answers the question of how governments ought to be instituted to fulfill the purpose outlined in the fundamental credo. For this reason, the U.S. Constitution is the greatest manifestation of American patriotism as it is not only loyal to America’s ideals, it is the stage on which those ideals may be realized.

Through the creation―or discovery―of how America’s government was to be structured, the Framers remained faithful to the ideals of the Declaration. In Federalist №10, James Madison explains how the new Federal Constitution will serve as a “Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” The issue with factions, Madison explains, is that their interest is “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison explains that there are only two ways to solve this problem: “the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.” The cause of factions, as Madison identifies, is liberty; therefore, Madison immediately rejects the first solution as being “worse than the disease” because of his loyalty to America’s ideal of defending liberty. This is a simple, yet important, example of Madison’s patriotism. It is important for Americans who accept the fundamental credo, and for the patriots who are loyal to it, to understand that political solutions should not violate the ideals for which the credo stands.

During the process of constitution-making, the Framers developed new American ideals: a commitment to compromise and a tolerance for competing ideas. These new ideals were necessary for the establishment of the Constitution that seems all too inevitable to us today. Let us take, for example, the compromise over slavery. Although slavery is inconsistent with the ideals of the fundamental credo, the awful practice was officially institutionalized in the Constitution’s “three fifths” clause. The same Constitution that sought to “establish Justice . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty” also, many will argue, secured the curse of slavery for generations to come. However, many forget that the Constitution, with all its greatness, would not exist without such a compromise. During one of the speeches of the distinguished Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, then-Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln remarked, “We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more; and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard.” Despite every reason for an abolitionist to abandon the Constitution (and there were many who did), Lincoln stood by it, and the compromise that made it possible, because he realized that the Constitution provided a great system of government and knew that such a system, being the greatest manifestation of patriotism, could be reconciled with the ideals to which that patriotism is loyal to.

Americans should look to the greatest manifestation of American patriotism for guidance; they should look to the Constitution. They should learn from the commitment that the Framers had towards the ideals of the fundamental credo and they should adopt a commitment to compromise and a tolerance for competing ideas which was necessary for the creation of the Constitution. They should not abandon the Constitution simply because it compromised on slavery; instead, they should view it the way that Lincoln did, by recognizing its greatness and reconciling it with the ideals of the fundamental credo. Finally, they should not attack the Constitution and its process based on their political frustrations. “American government was not established to satisfy our specific wants, but to sort out all our desires and demands and find some common good” (Lane & Oreskes, 2007, p. 11). Americans should understand and appreciate this central principle of the Constitution if they are to keep the republic that our Framers gave us. Or, in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Americans “should learn to love the gridlock. It’s there for a reason―so that the legislation that gets out will be good legislation.”

Reference

Lane, E., & Oreskes, M. (2007). The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country — and Why It Can Again. Bloomsbury.