RUDY GIULIANI, a former mayor of New York City and failed presidential candidate, has caused a little stir by questioning Barack Obama's love of country. "I do not believe—and I know this is a horrible thing to say—but I do not believe that the president loves America," he said on Wednesday, at a private dinner to promote the presidential prospects of Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin. "He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country." The reaction to Mr Giuliani's comments have been swift and decisive. Pundits from the left have been quick to suggest that Mr Giuliani is making an elliptical comment about Mr Obama's race, alien paternity and/or Indonesian school days. Amy Davidson of the New Yorker asks, "[W]as Giuliani just suggesting to the audience that there was something different about Obama? And what might that be?" Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post speculates that Mr Giuliani is channeling the ideas of Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative polemicist who insists that Mr Obama, animated by his Kenyan father's anti-colonial politics, sees America as a malign neocolonial power. The gist of these comments is that it's simply outrageous to call Mr Obama's love of country into question—of course he loves his country!—and that Mr Giuiliani's urge to do so can only reflect some kind discomfort with Mr Obama's skin-tone and pedigree, or at least a demagogic willingness to exploit the racism and xenophobia latent in the dark conservative heart.

The reaction from the right is, predictably enough, rather different. Kevin Williamson of the National Review questions whether Mr Obama even likes America. Mr Williamson mentions Michelle Obama's admission that she was never "really proud" of her country until her husband was elected president, as well as Mr Obama's long-time association with Jeremiah Wright, a Chicago pastor best known for a rousing sermon noting the moral outrage of America's history of slavery, racial apartheid, brutality toward natives, and so on. Given the centrality of white supremacy, sexism and oligarchic capitalism in America's history, at least according to leftists, "there is very little that a man with Barack Obama’s views and proclivities should love about the country," writes Mr Williamson, "beyond the fact that its people are so vulnerable to insipid sentimentality that they twice elected him president."

One might observe in response that progressives, in addition to acknowledging the injustice and venality inherent in the American experience, tell a story of progress in the struggle against these evils. The hopeful narrative of the progressive realisation of America's founding ideals supplies left-leaning Americans with ample basis for patriotic affection. That said, Mr Williamson's tendentious comments seem to contain more insight about Mr Giuliani's controversial remarks than do the knee-jerk liberal accusations of race-baiting.

Mr Williamson's column usefully emphasises the fact that, for many conservatives, to love America is to insist on the sanitisation of historical fact. We see this attitude at work in the Oklahoma state legislator's recent proposal to nix Advanced Placement American history courses on the grounds that such courses, by teaching some actual history, tend to cast the country's past in a rather unflattering light. But plenty of facts about America just aren't very flattering. A few miles from my house one can find battlefields where men killed and died for the right to keep other men as slaves, as well as the place where many thousands of dispossessed captive Cherokee were forced to begin a genocidal march to Oklahoma. And that's just Chattanooga!

Now, Mr Obama's political worldview is pretty much what one would expect from a moderately left-leaning African-American law professor. This means that the president is indeed keenly aware of, among other blots on the national record, America's exceptionally savage history of slavery and white supremacy, and its ongoing legacy. This sort of awareness inevitably—and justifiably—complicates a relationship to one's country. Many of us have been ill-treated or abused in one way or another by our parents. We love them anyway, because they are ours, but we don't forget the abuse, and it tempers the quality of our devotion. Love of country is not so different.

The ardent and unclouded quality of love that Mr Giuliani and Mr Williamson find missing in Mr Obama is largely the privilege of those oblivious of and immune to America's history of injustice and abuse. Those least aware of historical oppression, those furthest from its living reality, will find it easiest to express their love of country in a hearty and uncomplicated way. The demand that American presidents emanate this sort of blithe nationalism therefore does have a racist and probably sexist upshot, even if there is no bigotry behind it.

Mr Obama's politically compulsory declarations of America's exceptionalism have always struck me as rote, a little less than heartfelt, even a bit grudging. Mr Giuliani, I think, has come away with a similar impression, as have many millions of conservatives. The difference is that where Mr Giuliani sees a half-hearted allegiance to the fatherland, some of us see instead evidence of education, intelligence, emotional complexity and a basic moral decency—evidence of a man not actually in the grip of myths about his country. A politician capable of projecting an earnest, simple, unstinting love of a spotless and superior America is either a treacherous rabble-rouser or so out of touch that he is not qualified to govern. So Barack Obama doesn't love America like a conservative. So what? His realism and restraint are among his greatest strengths.

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