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These differences reflect a truism: patriotism has become more individualistic as U.S. society has grown more complex. The U.S. people, in their modern, more urban way of life, are better educated, more aware of the world and more sophisticated than their forebears. For the past decade, the young have grown up in an era of selfcriticism, and have learned to question American assumptions. They have also learned an idealism that often lacks realism—no tably an awareness that power and politics are inescapable facts of international life. Their definition of patriotism must be worked out in the context of a war that has none of the clear-cut aspects of Pearl Harbor, at a time when the country's internal problems are being examined with unprecedented intensity and emotion, and under a President who, despite all his efforts, has not been able to stir fervor in the hearts of his countrymen.
Out of all this comes the current pattern of dissent which disturbs _the President and many other Americans. For 185 years, perhaps no other country has given more legal protection to dissenters than the U.S. Every effort to repress dissent has, in the long run, brought an enlargement of the rights of free speech and press. Even in the most strained times, few intelligent Americans have attacked dissent as disloyalty. Given the U.S. proposition, no shade of opinion is unpatriotic—unless it advocates violence or overthrow of the Government. Unhappily, a few extreme dissenters tend toward that direction: that some assault the impregnable Pentagon is evidence of a sadly impotent search for meaning, of disbelief in the U.S. political process, of something gone wrong in the U.S. pursuit of happiness—or, perhaps, of the Administration's inability to give large segments of American youth a meaningful vision.
The hope is that there will be another change in feeling, that sterile extremism will go the way of McCarthyism, that Americans, young as well as old, will return to a Lincolnian patriotism that permits each man pride in his own country and strives for a world in which all men can pursue their own ideal of freedom.