Why Did The Fathers of the American Revolution Hate America?

So I’m listening to this Peter Beinart/Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads exchange on patriotism and, round about minute 8:00 Goldberg grumbles about the rhetoric of progress and ‘parliament of man’ and all that. Then:

Barack Obama talks about making America better by remaking it, by reinventing it. The aesthetics of his campaign are about a revolution. Well, it seems to me that if you believe this country needs a revolution, if you believe that it needs to be remade, then your love for it isn’t that profound.

Has the man never celebrated the 4th of July? What does he think the fireworks are supposed to represent? His mom told him it’s just a pretty light show (she didn’t want her young son to think revolution is a good thing) and he never thought to ask again when he grew up?

Why did the founding fathers hate America?

I agree with Yglesias that there isn’t that much difference between conservative and liberal patriotism. The difference is that conservatives think (probably rightly) that they can get rhetorical mileage, saying things about patriotism they themselves obviously can’t believe.

Let me rather boringly underscore the point. Ages ago, back in May, I was going to write a post about this. The occasion then was David Frum and Ramesh Ponnuru criticizing Todd Gitlin on patriotism. Ponnuru:

Either Gitlin is saying that he loves that part of the country’s past and present that is compatible with his own liberal political philosophy, or he is saying that the America he loves is an America that neither currently exists nor lives only in his imagination but is instead in a continual process of becoming. Neither attitude strikes me as what most people would call patriotism. It’s not a love of the country as it exists, with liberal, conservative, and apolitical components. I have no reason to doubt that Gitlin feels that love, but his theoretical apparatus may not give him the terms in which to express it.

I wonder what theoretical apparatus Ponnuru would employ if called upon to express his patriotism? Obviously he doesn’t love everything about the actually existing U.S. But if that’s not how he distinguishes himself from Gitlin, then how?

Frum: “There is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism – it is a wish fantasy. And it is this wish fantasy, this shrinking from realities, this attempt to let phrases do the work of real ideas, that is the ultimate failure not just of a single book, but of the whole new approach to patriotism.”

So it is absurd to think the American Revolutionaries were patriots, or that the spirit of the American Revolution is an appropriate object of patriotic attachment? Abraham Lincoln was indulging a wish fantasy, expressing no patriotic sentiment, when he appealed to the ‘better angels of our nature’ (as opposed to the ‘actual, warts-and-all angels of our natures’)? Seems like a sorry sort of patriotism that forbids you to accentuate the positive about your own country, on pain of failure. (Sigh.) Maybe it’s a Canadian thing.

Getting back to bloggingheads, at one point Goldberg describes some editorial backchat at NR, during which Ponnuru apparently made the standard ‘can’t love of my country be like love of my mother?’ point. Which is actually pretty much the right thing to say. All the other stuff – the stuff about loving America because it is objectively exceptional in certain ways – is not really it. If you love America because it is objectively the best at doing certain things that’s fine but not patriotism. That’s like loving your football team only so long as its winning, which is sort of the opposite of team loyalty. As I was saying: who thinks that loving your mother means loving everything about her to the point of being opposed to your mom improving herself or getting her act together or overcoming her problems? If your mom has problems – maybe really serious problems – and your brothers or sisters are trying to help, do you stand athwart the train of helping mom crying ‘stop!’ On the grounds that you love her too much to bear to see her become better, hence un-mom-like? Suppose your mom is a drug-addicted schizophrenic, living on the streets. Is a condition of still loving your mom that you find a way to love the fact of her drug-addiction and mental problems and lack of housing?

But seriously. The point, again, is not that Frum or Ponnuru or Goldberg could believe for a second that it is unpatriotic to desire change – even radical change – for your country. No, that’s too crazy. They are only interested in blaming liberals for not believing it. Bah.

OK, a post on this subject deserves at least some positive thoughts that exhibit a modicum of seriousness. The varieties of patriotic experience:

1) Talking smack about the British on the 4th of July. This is recreational patriotism and is essentially meaningless but highly enjoyable. This is sports-team patriotism.

2) Patriotism as an essentially military virtue. Soldiers are the paradigm patriots and you expect certain character traits of soldiers. We tend to label those traits ‘patriotic’. However, for reasons too obvious to rehease, those of us who are opposed to military dictatorship don’t really expect this model to generalize to all aspects of politics and free life.

3) ‘My country, right or wrong’. Either this is it, or nothing is. The only question is: what’s the right way to understand this, what’s the wrong way? The wrong way I have illustrated sufficiently. The right way is Carl Schurz: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Wikipedia has some good quotes from Schurz (I honestly don’t know much about him). But they are so relentlessly sensible I fear Republicans will fail to find any rhetorical use for them, hence will persist in saying nothing about patriotism that they themselves could possibly believe.