Slick Barry Obama won’t question anybody else’s patriotism. The impression he wants to leave is that he is high-minded, even if his surrogates are not. What he does in substance is craft a concept of patriotism so nebulous and abstract that no one not being directly paid off by an enemy government can be labeled “unpatriotic”.
If, as Barry intones, all those who believe themselves to be working to perfect America, who are “loyal to America’s ideals”, are American patriots, then the ranks of the patriotic must embrace many surprising figures: Benedict Arnold, Banastre Tarleton and Robert Rogers thought it best for America to remain under the British Crown; Jefferson Davis, for it to split in two; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, for it to play second fiddle to Stalin. In our own day, Americans have joined the Taliban and al-Qa’eda in their zeal to improve their country through the imposition of worldwide shariah. Patriots all! Who is so base as to doubt them?
Having no windows into men’s hearts, we cannot know that those listed did not “love their country”. Their subjective feelings are not, however, any of our business, and a definition of “patriotism” built around feelings is of no practical or political interest.
The reason for regarding patriotism as a virtue is not because it is an especially fine and lofty emotion but because government can function more effectively and less oppressively if a solid majority of the population is patriotic. C. S. Lewis concludes an excursus on love of country with this utilitarian observation:
Patriotism, then, has many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step – has already begun to step – into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least prepare for their defense. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for “their country” they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. [The Four Loves, p. 47 (1960)
Those who are patriots by Senator’s Obama’s standards do in fact judge their country’s every action “in a purely ethical light”. Practical patriots, by contrast, are not disqualified from examining ethical considerations, but, if their opinions do not prevail in the government’s counsels, they do what they can to carry out its policies vis-à-vis the rest of the world nonetheless. Practical patriotism enables those in charge of forming and executing national policy to weigh the nation’s interests prudently. It also improves the likelihood of success. Nothing is more heartening to one’s enemies than the impression that a fifth column exists within your own borders to stultify your leaders’ military, economic and diplomatic initiatives. There’s little doubt that al-Qa’eda and other mufsidun draw hope from the conviction that America’s massive resources will not, in the end, be deployed against them.
But what about Nazi Germany? Should a “practical patriot” have helped Hitler overrun Europe?
The reductio ad Hitlerum has become the standard objection to “unthinking” patriotism, yet Hitler is no more an argument against patriotism than Dr. Mengele is against medicine. Few governments display Hitlerian pathologies, and the United States is distinctly not one of them. Toward the exceptions – of which the Ba’athist regime in Iraq was, let me note, a conspicuous instance – resistance is justified. Elsewhere, it is possible to strive for desirable reforms without undermining all that the unreformed authorities try to accomplish.
What is missing from Senator Obama’s version of patriotism is the recognition that a country worth loving is worth our aid and comfort even when we are sure that it is in the wrong on a particular question. While he offered tepid dispraise of Moveon’s infamous “General Betray Us” ad, he has yet to rebuke, much less repudiate, cities and colleges that hamper military recruiters, or bureaucrats who take it upon themselves to publicize military secrets, or the many members of his own party who look forward to trying American officials for “war crimes” (a notion that somebody in the Obama campaign shares or shared), or even the Democratic Congressman who pretty much called on al-Qa’eda to assassinate Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. If, as candidate Obama asseverates, “America is the greatest country on earth”, is there any reason not to question their patriotism?
Addendum: On the lighter side it wouldn’t be an Obama oration without elementary errors of historical and numerical fact. PowerLine takes note:
Then there’s this:
I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, I listened to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
I would have thought that pretty much everyone – certainly every Presidential speechwriter, and every Harvard Law School graduate! – knows that these are not the “first lines” of the Declaration, which begins, “When in the course of human events....” What, exactly, accounts for the fact that Obama is not a laughingstock?
Finally, this:
As we begin our fourth century as a nation, it is easy to take the extraordinary nature of America for granted.
“Fourth century?” The United States of America came into being in 1789. We have just recently begun our third century. I suppose Obama would say that the 21st century is America’s fourth, just as Minnie Minoso played major league baseball in five decades. As always with Obama’s howlers, you should ask yourself: would the press have bought it if it came from Dan Quayle?
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