Patriotic Leadership

Especially since the events of September 11, 2001, political leaders in the United States—importantly including the president, recent presidential candidates, and congressional leaders—have regularly invoked patriotism (or loyalty, national pride, love of country) to motivate public support for (and to attempt to justify) various decisions and policies. Often these policies have involved quite substantial human and economic costs, so the moral weight being borne by the value of patriotism has been correspondingly considerable. The shared understanding that appears to lie behind these appeals to patriotism is that patriotism is either an obligation of citizenship or a virtue that citizens ought to possess (or at least display). As a consequence of this understanding, it is no longer politically feasible for a U.S. political leader to deny that he or she is a patriot, and political appeals to patriotism have come to have a rhetorical force that they have not possessed since “the last good war.”