Patriotism Begins With Localism | The American Conservative

Patriotism Begins With Localism | The American Conservative

Ian Marcus Corbin writes:

"It is perhaps easier to say what America isn't, and to love her for that. Recent immigrants will tell you that things are easier here: less regulation, more opportunity, more efficient bureaucracy, less snobbery. And this is all true. While class distinctions are pretty much as real here as anywhere in the 'old world'--a high school dropout would have a hard time making friends on a Beacon Hill roof deck--they are also more porous than elsewhere. All a poor Irish kid needs to do is get himself admitted to Boston College or Harvard or Boston University and learn to pronounce his R's, and he's welcome to don a pair of boat shoes and clamber up onto the roof. And that's not nothing. The hungry and ostracized have a hell of a better shot escaping their station here than they do in Venezuela, Russia, or even France. This is America at its best: wide open and hospitable, playing host to transplants from abroad. This is our particular national genius....

"I believe we should shamelessly embrace our cultural balkanization, or to put it more gently, our cultural federalism. It is nowhere written that a person ought to feel equally at home in every nook and cranny of the state she calls home. If there is a deep sense of patriotism available to us Americans, it will have to be based in local soil."