The word patriot has seen a resurgence in recent decades, both in art (The Patriot, Patriots Day, Patriot Games) and in politics, PACs, and vigilante groups (The Patriot Act, Tea Party Patriots, Three Percent United Patriots). This odd division in how patriot is popularly used reflects the definition of the word itself; it turns out patriot has two branches of meanings, and has since it first entered our language.
In 1596, in the first written record in English, the word patriot is used to mean “fellow countryman.” In 1605, Ben Jonson uses it to mean “person who loyally supports his country.” The first means a person of the same place while the second means a person of the same opinions, and that split in meaning is as current as today’s news. Repatriation, for example, is returning someone to the country they came from, while a Patriot missile is designed to defend or advance political beliefs.
If there are two different definitions how, then, do you define patriot? How do you recognize one? Perhaps we should look to other sources to answer these questions.
The OED defines a patriot as “a person (claiming to be) ready to support or defend his or her country’s freedoms and rights.” By this definition, the French Resistance is neatly divided from the Vichy government; while the Vichy government may have seen themselves as protecting some freedoms for some of France, only the French Resistance was working for both France’s freedoms and rights, and for all of France.
So is this definition good enough? Does it work, for instance, in a country lacking both freedoms and rights to begin with? Stalin’s Soviet Union boasted neither easily identified freedoms nor rights, yet the old men who wore all their medals and sat out in the sun, drinking vodka, and playing accordions on Victory Day fought and bled for something real and called themselves patriots. They, it turns out, are covered by the American Heritage Dictionary as being the type of patriot who “loves, supports, and defends his country.” But, in this example, the country and the government are not synonymous.
So then, from these examples, we arrive at a more detailed split in definition: a patriot can be someone who fights for their country or for their form of government. The consequences of defining the split this way aren’t trivial.
For instance, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee determined that many people who’d fought for their country in WWII weren’t, in fact, patriots because they supported, or had supported in the past, a different form of economics or equality in the United States. Someone who had fought for his country on the battlefield and off, someone like Pete Seeger, who had been a patriot suddenly was not.
So what did the HUAC mean when it identified patriots? In Miriam-Websters we discover a patriot as one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests. By this definition, because current authority and interests don’t always align with the founding documents of a country, one can be a patriot and not value the documents of governance for their country. So the HUAC’s patriots didn’t have to care about the Constitution or Bill of Rights in order to love their country; they merely had to agree with the hunt for Communists in every walk of American life.
Where does this definition leave us now? Is this the definition of patriot we want now?
Currently “authority” in the United States resides less in a government based on constitutional democracy and more, according to a study by Gilens and Page, in a functioning oligarchy. “Interests” begs the question of whose interests; Russian interests have been widely cited as having influenced our most recent presidential election and subsequent executive branch actions. Our executive branch is currently filled with oligarchs who have demonstrably acted in the interests of Russia. Are they American patriots? Perhaps there is a special American twist on patriot that needs to be considered.
If patriot means fellow countryman then everyone in the country are patriots by definition. Yet our founding documents exclude more than include, and Africans and African-Americans were specifically targeted for not only denial of citizenship but for denial of basic humanity (being defined as 3/5ths of a human).
If patriot means “person who loyally supports his country” then what are we to make of the 35% of southerners in a 2015 HuffPost/YouGov poll who support flying the Confederate flag as a symbol of southern pride? The defeat of the Confederacy and the mythologizing of the South (see “Gone With The Wind”) has led many in the south — de facto citizens of the United States — to identify themselves as patriots because they believe in and support the Confederacy against the federal government of the United States.
In recent times, since Nixon and especially Reagan, African-Americans, minorities, women, and Democrats have consistently been branded with “unpatriotic.” But, given the definitions above, how can we, the majority of Americans, be unpatriotic?
Perhaps there is another definition of patriot that explains this, a definition that posits an ideal of what America should be (agrarian, Christian evangelical, clannish, patriarchal, white, unchanging — take your pick), what it should be but currently is not. This definition is unique for being undefined and undefinable, changing from group to group, person to person, and month to month. And it seems to be the definition most of those who call themselves patriots espouse.
Of course, those of us who take definitions literally are confused by this type of patriot. Advocating for the downfall of the United States is treason, yet many self-defined patriots are advocating for precisely that. Disenfranchising your fellow countrymen and countrywomen is undemocratic and unconstitutional, but self-styled patriots are working hard toward that end. How can they do this and call themselves patriots?
It is likely these Americans see themselves as patriots of another country, a country where everyone thinks and looks like themselves, a country that existed once, in fantasy or memory, but that they have lost. They have a shifting and undefined sense of how things should be, and that is what they fight for. And it is this sense of patriot that endangers the American experiment in representative democracy today.
Americans cannot let this undefined definition of patriotism stand. We cannot give over control of America to people who fundamentally don’t see the country for what it now is. We cannot cede the term patriot. If we embrace the broadest definition of patriot, loudly and clearly, if we recognize all our fellow country people as Americans — even the patriot fantasists — then we support and defend our country by clearly and unequivocally defining our country, our expectations of it, and our duty toward it. Words are ultimately defined by actions. Let us take action as patriots.