Such obvious truths have been for decades contested by some of our country's most privileged beneficiaries, and the patriotism that expresses our country's goodness disparaged and mocked.
In its place a fashionable oikophobia-the hatred of one's country, principles, virtues, history, and the fellow citizens who still believe in our civic ideals and their goodness-preens morally and embraces the impossible utopias that such oikophobes promote.
Patriotism, the beating heart of our "Unum" that binds the "Pluribus," is besieged at a time when we face dangerous developments like enormous debt, open borders, and assaults on our Constitutional order and Bill of Rights at home, and abroad totalitarian rivals "Filled with passionate intensity" to supplant our global power, and diminish our freedom.
It's telling that the most famous work of literature to come out of the war is Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," which calls patriotism "The old lie." But other writers also rejected patriotism.
One of many cultural markers of this disdain for patriotism is the despicable statement made by novelist E.M. Forster, a member of the Bloomsbury group of countercultural writers, critics, and intellectuals that arose before World War I. Forster's and the "Bloomsberries'" anti-patriotic sensibility is obvious in his famous statement, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope that I should have the guts to betray my country." And he said this in 1939, when Great Britain was beginning the struggle against a monstrous totalitarian enemy that was stopped only because millions of men gave their lives to protect the freedom of juvenile narcissists like Forster.
Finally, this brief history of anti-patriotism, and the long record of its infiltration of the West mean that restoring patriotism and oikophilia will take a monumental effort, or perhaps a mind-concentrating catastrophe.
The worst slaughter on our soil in our history, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, inspired only a brief outpouring of patriotism and affection for our country.
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