CASE DISMISSED:

Give Us Back Our Damn Flag: The leftist case for patriotism (Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks, 7/02/04, LA Weekly)

[T]hroughout the nation’s history, many American radicals and progressive reformers proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America stood for basic democratic values — economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right-wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

Nevertheless, progressives are faced with the tough question of what exactly it means to be patriotic in an increasingly global economy and interdependent world.

Danny Postel put this a great deal more honestly, even if accidentally, this week when he pondered how the Left had ended up on the side of the totalitarian clerics in Iran instead of the side of America and the democracy movement:

We’re better at making sense of situations in which the U.S. [...] is the foe and building our solidarity with other people around that. That was the case in Guatemala—as it was in Indochina, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and East Timor.

Looking at the cast of characters with whom he proudly declares solidarity--Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Salvador Allende, Daniel Ortega, etc.--may even be more damning than the simple acknowledgement of anti-Americanism.

At any rate, whoever Mr. Dreier and the hopefully pseudonymous Dick Flax are, Michael Walzer, one of the most thoughtful men of the Left, several years ago presented a quite devastating case against the idea that the Left can even be decent, nevermind patriotic:

The radical failure of the left's response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

A politics that proceeds from "festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate" isn't very damn likely to include much love of country, is it?

MORE:
Loony Left impugns its own patriotism (Jan Golab, July 03, 2004, LA Daily News)

Today's anti-war crowd becomes indignant when they are called unpatriotic. But whose fault is it they get tarred with that brush? Too many among them have adopted the rhetoric of the lunatic left -- America is "the real enemy" -- and coronated Michael Moore as their hero.

Whole lies, half-truths, false presumptions, ignored facts, faulty logic, snide innuendo, unflattering handpicked film footage, all deliberately packaged to denigrate the president and the war effort, do not amount to an act of patriotism. (Yes, I saw the film.) It also violates the basic American value of truth and fairness. No newspaper or magazine today would publish such a shameful hatchet job about anyone. (I know, as I've been a magazine journalist for 30 years.)

Saddam Hussein, the greatest tyrant of our time (2 million dead, and counting -- unmentioned in Moore's film) doesn't need to produce propaganda anymore, because he's outsourced the job to the American left. Indeed, Hezbollah has offered to help promote "Fahrenheit 9/11" in the Middle East. Most recently, Moore has compared the insurgents who are cutting off American heads in Iraq to the Minutemen in the American Revolution -- the real patriots. "Their numbers will grow and they will win," he says.

How's that for encouraging the enemy?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 4, 2004 7:14 PM