LAST Friday Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith published a piece in Politico entitled "The New Battle: What it means to be American." The gist of the piece is that conservatives and the Republican Party are moving away from culture-war issues and towards a struggle over the appropriate size and role of government. "Much of the right—including the noisy and influential tea party movement—sees greater and more immediate danger from this administration and Congress on issues related to the role of government and the very meaning of America than from the old 'social issues,'" they write.

I was going to move on and cite several of the conservative figures Messrs Martin and Smith interview, but actually, I think I'd better stop right there for a moment. Let's take a look at the elision in that sentence: the part where we move from "the role of government" to "the very meaning of America". What is the relationship of "the role of government" to "the very meaning of America"? There are certainly some functions that government assumes in other countries which are clearly un-American. For example, in some countries, the government enforces an official religion. In other countries, the government imprisons people and tortures them without trial. (Ahem. Let's not get into that for now.) But the left is at least as adamantly opposed to government playing these sorts of roles as anyone on the right is. So how does today's right see "the role of government" as a dividing line between the right and left, in a sense that affects "the very meaning of America"? Here's former Bush administration official Peter Wehner:

"What we're having here are debates about first principles," Wehner said. "A lot of people think [Obama is] trying to transform the country in a liberal direction in the way that Ronald Reagan did in a conservative direction. This is not the normal push and pull of politics. It gets down to the purpose and meaning of America." In the view of National Review editor Rich Lowry, that sense on the right of a fundamental shift has helped turn the role of government into a cultural issue, filling some of the emotional space formerly occupied by the traditional hot-button issues. Questions about the role of government "have a cultural charge because people feel the definition of the country is changing," Lowry said. Just as Christian conservatism in the 1970s and '80s grew as part of a backlash against what were seen as the cultural excesses of the ‘60s, the new right of today amounts to a rebellion against the perceived threat of this era—a slippage toward European-style social democracy.

Oh, okay. The phrase "European-style social democracy" isn't actually entirely clear; the United States is, in every meaningful sense, a European-style social democracy, albeit one with relatively low taxes, relatively parsimonious government entitlements, and relatively spectacular national parks. But you get the drift. The right, in Messrs Martin and Smith's telling, is arguing that the "purpose and meaning of America" are not compatible with the economic elements of Barack Obama's legislative agenda. That agenda, last time I looked, chiefly comprised universal health insurance, regulation of the financial sector, a carbon tax or carbon emissions limits, and an approach to shrinking future budget deficits that will fall more heavily on the rich and involve fewer cuts to existing social services and entitlements. Mr Wehner and Mr Lowry, like many tea-party demonstrators, think that this economic agenda is un-American.

Messrs Martin and Smith don't explicitly say this, but one gets the feeling, reading their article, that they think the transition to this battle over "what it means to be an American", in an economic sense, will calm some of the irrational frenzy of the old right-left culture wars over sexual identity, evolution, and so forth. If so, I would like to firmly disabuse them of that notion. Let's put it this way: I support the Affordable Care Act, known to the right as ObamaCare. I do not react well to being told that my position on this issue does not comport with "the purpose and meaning of America". I see not a shred of evidence for such a claim. In fact, I believe that my support for universal health insurance, like my support for universal education, is rooted in the greatest traditions of American history and political thought. No doubt Messrs Wehner and Lowry feel the same about their positions on universal health insurance. The difference is that I'm not going to accuse them of betraying "the purpose and meaning of America." I am not trying to turn a dispute over what government should do to improve America's social and economic fairness and well-being into a shouting match over who is or isn't a real American.

But that's what Messrs Martin and Smith say the right is trying to do. If so, then phooey to the right. That's not less acrimonious than the culture wars. It's worse. Here's a culture-war argument: you say America is a Christian nation; I say America is a nation where Muslims and anybody else has the right to worship two blocks from ground zero. Here's another culture-war argument: you say America's freedom is under attack and we can't afford to give terrorists constitutional protections against torture; I say those constitutional protections against torture are exactly the freedom we're trying to defend. Both of these are real arguments about the meaning of America, with roots in the country's founding documents and originating political events. If you want to accuse me of being un-American in an argument like that, I'll argue you're wrong, but I can see why the accusation is germane, and I may call you un-American in your turn. But to call someone un-American because of their position on relative levels of taxation or the government's role in regulating and guaranteeing health insurance is an attempt to enlist nativist fear and vindictive nationalism in the service of one's own economic agenda. It's an outrageous tactic, and it ought to be completely out of bounds.

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