The power and the glory: patriotism and music

“They embody the disrespectful loyalty of the old left that truly believed that a patriot was his country's worst critic.”

Over lockdown I’ve been listening to a lot of music, and pretty much all of that music was written before 1980. Being proudly unfashionable a lot of it has been protest music, and it has been deeply eye opening. One particular song I came across struck me particularly hard, written by the topical singer Phil Ochs is an out of character, almost patriotic song. Called the ‘power and the glory’ you could be forgiven for thinking that some of its lines came straight out of the ‘battle hymn of the republic’. ‘Her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom’ being a prime example.

The version I like the most was sung by Peter Seeger, a left wing social activist and folk singer. Seeger and Ochs’s song gives a glimpse into a part of the left long since withered; not just socialists, but first and foremost American socialists.

They embody the disrespectful loyalty of the old left that truly believed that a patriot was his country's worst critic.

All they did was driven by a strong and unwavering sense of morality and a distinctiveness that could come from nowhere else; they were representations of an aspect of their nation, the part that fought for the rights of all, the ones that sought to die to make men free.

Patriotism is a funny thing, and like all forms of love it is deeply irrational. It is as difficult to explain to you why I love my country as it is to explain why I love my mother. That is why its failings, it's sometimes bitter and even evil past, make no difference. Love does not see things that way, it does not weigh options or calculate this variable against that, it simply is and explaining that is possibly one of the hardest things you could do.