ALL AMERICAN PATRIOTISM

Review

SECTION ONE Rachel Campos-Duffy, co-host of 'Fox & Friends Weekend,' assembles this book as an act of deliberate transmission: she wants American songs, stories, and photographs to pass from one generation to the next before the particular texture of that inheritance fades. The thesis is not argued but performed. Rather than making a case for patriotism, Campos-Duffy gathers its artifacts — the lyrics people sang at kitchen tables, the images that fixed certain national moments in memory, the stories that explain why someone would risk something for a country. The audience is families, and especially parents who sense that civic identity is now contested and fragile, and who want something concrete to hand their children. This is a book to read aloud and to look at together, not to annotate. Its argument lives in accumulation: that love of country is learned the way love of anything is learned, through repeated, particular encounters with the thing itself. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The anthology form itself rests on an implicit anthropology of the body-soul composite. Songs are not merely informational; they work on the person through rhythm, melody, and breath. By centering music and photography alongside narrative, Campos-Duffy treats patriotic formation as something that happens to the whole person, not only to the reasoning intellect. This is consonant with the CCMMP's insistence, following Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, that the person is not a mind that happens to inhabit a body but a unified being who receives meaning through sensory as well as rational channels. - **Fallen**: The book's primary weakness from an anthropological standpoint is also its most honest diagnostic data. A purely celebratory anthology cannot hold the fallen dimension of national life — the broken promises, the structural injustices, the ways concupiscence works itself out in collective behavior as well as individual choice. Aquinas's account of gratitude as a strict virtue, one that requires accurate perception of what was genuinely given, implies that sentimental gratitude — gratitude that cannot name what was also taken or withheld — is a deformed version of the real thing. The book does not obviously supply that corrective. - **Redeemed**: Where the book does point toward something reparative, it is in its insistence that civic love is a practice, not an opinion. The act of singing together, of gathering around photographs, of telling stories that require a listener — these are exercises in the kind of ordered attention that virtue formation depends on. In Thomistic terms, repeated acts shape the appetite; the book proposes that repeating these particular acts shapes civic appetite toward the common good. - **Prudence (memory)**: The integral virtue of memory, in Aquinas's account, is not mere recall but the disposition to draw on past experience as a reliable guide for present choice. An anthology that preserves songs and stories is doing memory-work in exactly this sense: it keeps the past available as a resource for practical wisdom, rather than allowing it to dissolve into sentiment or be replaced by abstraction. - **Justice (gratitude)**: Gratitude, as a potential part of justice, renders to benefactors an acknowledgment proportionate to the gift received. Campos-Duffy's curatorial project can be read as training this capacity in readers — not by argument but by placing specific gifts (a song, a sacrifice, a photograph of a particular moment) before them and inviting a response. SECTION THREE Rothbard's[^1] *Conceived in Liberty* sits in deliberate contrast to this book: where Campos-Duffy gathers the emotional and aesthetic residue of American identity, Rothbard subjects the founding period to a rigorous libertarian-historical analysis that is largely unsentimental about state power and deeply skeptical of the nationalist consolidation that produced the Constitution. The two projects are not enemies but they are genuinely in tension — Rothbard's account of the Sons of Liberty and the Stamp Act crisis, for instance, reads the same founding energy that Campos-Duffy celebrates as fundamentally anti-statist and decentralizing, a reading that complicates any warm patriotism that identifies love of country with support for federal institutions. A reader serious about civic formation would benefit from both: the anthology to feel the inheritance, the history to examine what that inheritance actually cost and whom it served. ## References 1. Rothbard, Murray (n.d.). *Conceived in Liberty I-IV*. Table of contents, Parts IV-V. — 'Sam Adams Rallies Boston... Government Replaced by the Sons of Liberty... The Stamp Act Congress'

✓ Strengths

• ✓Gathers songs, stories, and photographs as a unified act of cultural memory, training readers in gratitude for particular goods rather than abstract patriotism.
• ✓The anthology format implicitly affirms that civic belonging is carried through embodied, sensory experience — music heard, images seen, stories told — which aligns with a body-soul unity account of how persons receive and transmit tradition.
• ✓By naming specific moments and figures in American history, the book invites the reader to understand gratitude as a response to particular gifts, not a generalized sentiment.
• ✓The curatorial labor itself models domestic prudence: Campos-Duffy situates national identity within family transmission, treating the home as the primary school of civic love.
• ✓The inclusion of song — a form of communal prayer in many traditions — acknowledges the liturgical dimension of patriotism, the way a people rehearses shared identity through repeated public performance.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Patriotism presented through celebratory anthology risks eliding the fallen dimension of national history; without honest reckoning with failure and injustice, gratitude can shade into sentimentality rather than the virtue Aquinas describes as rendering what is truly owed.
• ⚠The Fox News publishing context may predispose the framing toward a partisan rather than genuinely civic account of American identity, narrowing the audience the book could otherwise accompany.
• ⚠Photographs and songs carry emotional weight that can bypass the rational appetite; without interpretive framing, the book may produce affective nationalism rather than the prudent civic love the tradition commends.