Caring for Our Fellow Citizens, Just Like Hamilton Did
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How can we truly become, as the late Amitai Etzioni put it, a "community of communities?" Or, put differently, how can we reclaim a kind of patriotism that engenders feelings of togetherness and societal cohesion? In an essay for the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs , Walter Russell Mead extols the virtues of a Hamiltonian-inspired patriotism. "Then, as now," Mead writes, "Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another... And just as individual Americans have duties and ties to their family members that they do not have to the public at large, they have obligations to their fellow citizens that do not extend to all humankind." Conservatism today, in contrast to the kind of small-c conservatism embraced by Hamilton, is too often conflated with a obligation-free libertarianism. While the former puts emphasis on responsibility and duty, the latter jettisons all of that in favor of maximum autonomy and un-ordered liberty. A country of