Tocqueville did not doubt American patriotism. He thought it conspicuous and avid. Where patriotic sentiments touch the soldier, they might be mistaken for honor. Tocqueville understood two types of patriotism: patriotisme instinctif and patriotisme rèflèchi. Both work upon the soldier. For Tocqueville, instinctive patriotism is an immediate and natural feeling toward the place of one’s birth. It is a feeling of affection. “This instinctive love is mingled with the taste for ancient customs, with respect for ancestors, and the memory of the past; those who experience it cherish their country as one loves the paternal home.” Of relevance is the fact that instinctive patriotism allows for personification. “Some peoples have been found who have, in some way, personified the country and have caught sight of it in the prince. So they have transferred to him a part of the sentiments that compose patriotism; they have boasted about his triumphs and have been proud of his power.” This has been the fate of the American soldier—not for all, indeed hardly for any of his history, but it does, importantly, help to explain realities of the present. Andrew Bacevich notes: “More than America’s matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation’s arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.” That this personification is not in concert with the actual distribution of honor in America is of no relevance to the instinctive patriotism which animates it. For instinctive patriotism is not mediated by rational thought. “It is itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, it believes; it feels; it acts.” Reflective patriotism emerges in America through democratic practices. Through participation in political life citizens come to see that their individual interests are bound up with those of the state. They also come to view the works of the state as the products of their own hands, for they are made democratically. In these ways democracy leads to a patriotic elision of
sentiments. It was not, necessarily, that they felt these sentiments more deeply than other peoples, but rather that they extended them to a greater range of objects. For this equality was responsible. It is easier to sympathize, Tocqueville noted, with those like one’s self (semblables). Democracy produces similarity. Therefore the democratic citizen will be quick to sympathy. “So there is no misery that he cannot easily imagine and whose extent is not revealed to him by a secret instinct. Whether it concerns strangers or enemies, imagination immediately puts him in their place. It mingles something personal in his pity, and makes him suffer as the body of his fellow man is torn apart.” The democratic penchant toward pity must be explained, in part, by the readiness with which democratic citizens come to depictions of suffering. Democracies prefer the real to the ideal. Their instinct is for the useful, not the beautiful. If Americans are the most prosaic of peoples it is because the aim of poetry is not to represent the true but to embellish it. Aristocracy produced “beautiful illusions” about human nature. Achilles was a creation of aristocratic poetry. Democratic poetry, however, takes as its subject “humanity itself.” No longer will poetry “live by legends,” which, it must be said, elevated, and palliated, violence in the aristocratic consciousness. Democratic poetry subsists on “human destinies.” It will depict, then, in democratic centuries, not only “unprecedented prosperity,” but also “incomprehensible miseries.” This combination of prosperity and misery was nowhere better captured than in the American postwar literature of the 1920s. Most incisive for the soldier was Hemingway’s portrayal of the wounded veteran Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. American doughboys may well have thought themselves on an adventure, as David Kennedy has pointed out, but the war nonetheless constituted the last gasp of “the medieval romantic tale.” Consequently, World War