Unpatriotic voters elect unpatriotic leaders: Column Should the electorate have to pass a patriotism test?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

Last week, Rudy Giuliani mused about whether President Obama loves America, musings that produced immediate media backlash as beyond the pale. Some thought this was proof of Republican racism. (Never mind that Obama had accused President Bush of being "unpatriotic" back in 2008). Others gloated that Giuliani had "trolled" the media into spending five days debating Obama's patriotism.

My own take: Of course Obama loves America. After all, you always hurt the one you love.

But, seriously, why do we care? That is, why do we spend time looking at presidents — and others — based on irrational emotional attachments that are hard to assess, rather than looking at things like credentials that are easy to assess, and arguably more directly related to the job, than things like patriotism, or loyalty, or honesty? Why can't we just be rational about these things?

Maybe because, as Robert Frank suggested in an underappreciated book some years ago, Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role Of The Emotions, we don't want to be totally rational about things because, ironically, it's not rational to be too rational.

Imagine that you're thinking of getting married. Would you want a spouse who sticks with you for purely rational reasons, or one who forms an irrational attachment — let's call it "love" — that doesn't depend on rational factors?

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Most people would say the latter. A purely rational attachment is nice, but if things change — say, if you become sick, or unattractive, or broke — a rationally attached person might rationally choose to leave. A person who loves you, on the other hand, might stick around anyway, because being parted from you, even if some of your charms have vanished, would cause emotional pain, while helping you feels good.

Likewise, you'd like to hire an honest employee, one who will feel guilty about stealing from you. A rational employee won't steal if there's a danger of being caught, but an honest one won't steal even when he can get away with it, because if he does he will feel guilty, while if he resists temptation he will feel virtuous.

A person who is perfectly rational about costs and benefits, with no irrational constraints like loyalty or honesty (or patriotism), is a person who will lie, cheat and steal whenever he or she can get away with it. A sociopath, basically.

Since we can't keep an eye on everyone we deal with all of the time, we look for other traits, boiling down, essentially, to a conscience, that will ensure that they are more likely to act properly even when nobody's watching. And if that's important in a spouse or employee, it's also pretty important in people, like political leaders, who do a lot of things out of the public eye, and who are subjected to a much greater variety of temptations.

Thus, we want our political leaders to be patriotic, in the hopes that, whatever they are involved in, they will put the interests of the country ahead of their personal interests. Outward signs of patriotism are nice, but of course anyone can put a flag pin on a lapel, or place hand over heart during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Instead, just as we might trust a potential spouse or employee more if we knew that he or she had resisted temptation in the past, traditionally we look for signs that would-be leaders have sacrificed something for their patriotism, say by serving in the military, or otherwise putting themselves at risk for the country. We also look at their associations, behavior and general demeanor to see if they look like people who would feel guilty if they did something bad for the country, and virtuous if they did something good.

So that's why people care about patriotism in a president. Perhaps we need to pay closer attention to these questions where presidents are concerned, but perhaps we should go a step farther: In a country like ours, where voters reign supreme, it seems as if concern about the patriotism of rulers ought to also apply to voters.

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in his famous novel Starship Troopers, envisioned a society where voters, too, had to demonstrate their patriotism before being allowed to vote. In his fictional society, the right to vote came only after some kind of dangerous public service — in the military, as a volunteer in dangerous medical experiments, or in other ways that demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice personally for the common good. The thought was that such voters would be more careful, and less selfish, in their voting.

So when the five-day wonder of questioning Barack Obama's patriotism is over, perhaps we should address another question: How patriotic is the electorate? And how long can we survive as a nation if the answer is "not very"? And we should proceed from there.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School : How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.



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