The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (20 page)

Bear in mind that even if Jefferson had said it, it would be no less dumb.

Just curious: If a marine throws himself on a grenade while fighting for his country, would you feel confident that you’d keep your teeth if you said something along the lines of, “Wow. What a hero. A true patriot. He’s almost as patriotic as that college professor who, from the comfort of his air-conditioned office, called the Marines baby killers and war criminals.”

The protective coating of the phrase “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is clearly provided by the word “dissent.” It’s a word that often elevates buffoonery on its own. But when it’s tethered to patriotism it transmogrifies the lead of jackassery into the gold of stouthearted rebellion. Dissent in and of itself is nothing special. As anybody who has tried to get
something constructive done can attest, dissent for its own sake is often one of the highest forms of asininity. The reflexive contrarian who cares not what he is contradicting is quite simply the most useless of citizens and annoying of coworkers. The guy who says, “Frankly, I don’t care that the boat is taking on water. We shouldn’t start bailing out until we’ve fully discussed our leadership structure” is a dissenter, and he is an ass for it.

“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers,” observed Carl Sagan. “But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” Most lone dissenters are alone not because they are dissenters but because they are loons. Yes, we revere some exceptions, but we revere them because they were
exceptional—and because they were right
. Unfortunately, we live in a country where we increasingly lavish attention on people solely because they break from the emaciated and gasping corpse we call orthodoxy these days. Jack Kevorkian is treated like a Thomas More figure by HBO, when the reality is he was simply a ghoul who really enjoyed getting attention by killing desperate people.

In short, the merit of any dissent is dependent upon what the dissenter is dissenting
from
—and
why
. (Just as the merit of any consensus is wholly dependent upon what people are collectively consenting to.)

Even more so, the
patriotism
of dissent depends entirely on what the dissenter is dissenting
from
—and
why
. As John O’Sullivan once noted, tongue firmly in cheek, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Treason is the highest form of dissent. Therefore treason is the highest form of patriotism.” QED.

The American Communists who infiltrated American institutions and, on Stalin’s orders, opposed American entry into World War II were not patriotic for doing so. And when Hitler betrayed his “partner in peace” and invaded Russia, those same American Communists did not become patriotic overnight by suddenly supporting the war either. Alternatively, the progressive historian Charles Beard opposed U.S. entry into World War II, just as the Communists did, and he was just as wrong on the merits of the question. But his motives were for the most part decent and patriotic. In other words, dissent
can
be patriotic but merely dissenting doesn’t make you patriotic. Some of the chanting Occupy Wall Street protesters out there recycling their urine and filming gay porn movies in tents might
also be interested in helping America, but many are simply motivated by an apish desire to join the crowd or a nihilistic yearning to take a sledgehammer to the foundation of a country they just happened to be born in.

The whole subject of assessing—or questioning—the patriotism of people leaves liberals particularly queasy, which, after all, partly explains why the phrase “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is so appealing. It’s a heads I win, tails you lose proposition, because it offers a free pass to say the most terrible things about your country and claim to be a patriot in the process. Dissenter: “I hate America.” Normal Person: “Why are you so unpatriotic?” Dissenter: “How dare you question my patriotism!?”

This is the logic of the wife beater who insists that his spouse left him with no choice but to abuse her. In a rhetorical way it’s even worse, because the one who questions the love a man has for the wife he beats is never cast as the villain. But question a fellow American’s love of country, and all of a sudden you’re the bad guy.

You can understand why this seems so odd to normal Americans. Imagine there’s someone who believes it might do America “a ton of good to have our butts kicked” (in the words of left-wing novelist Tom Robbins). Or this person might believe that the world would benefit from “a million Mogadishus” and that “the only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military” (in the words of then Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova). Or this person might believe that America is “just downright mean,” brimming with people with “broken souls” and hasn’t done anything worthy of eliciting pride in her lifetime (Michelle Obama). Or he might believe that because of
“
Ameri-KKKs” racism at home and cruelty abroad we shouldn’t say “God bless America” so much as “God-damn America!” (Reverend Jeremiah Wright).

Now according to a large number of people, if you were to say that such a person was driving around with something less than a full tank of patriotism, that would make you a McCarthyite, a demagogue, maybe even a fascist.

To understand why this is absurd, just replace “America” in the above quotes with just about any remotely similar noun. “The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat
the New York Yankees
!”
Cleveland
is “down
right mean!” “It’s not God bless my
K-car,
but God-damn my
KKK-car
!” And so on. In any of these instances a reasonable person might “question” a given individual’s love for the Yankees, Cleveland, or K-cars. But no reasonable person can ever—ever!—question the patriotism of anyone else without being the worst kind of villain. Indeed, when listening to the Left it sometimes sounds as if it’s reasonable to question whether or not Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were guilty of giving atomic secrets to the Soviets, but don’t you dare question their patriotism!

Even more confusing is the stance of mainstream liberals when it comes to patriotism. Many respected intellectuals will dismiss or forgive the ravings of the hard left on the grounds that dissent is patriotic even as they concede that the actual content of the dissent may be unpatriotic. But ultimately, anti-Americanism doesn’t much interest them. What drives them crazy, however, is what they consider to be unwarranted
pro
-Americanism, or what is commonly referred to as “American exceptionalism.” My longtime debating opponent Peter Beinart writes that calling America the greatest country in the world is a “lunatic notion.”
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Michael Kinsley, meanwhile, was so flabbergasted by the stupidity of voters who opposed Obama that he saw fit to pen yet another essay on how America is not the greatest country ever for
Politico
; it was titled “U.S. Is Not Greatest Country Ever.”
⁵

Subtle.

Again, imagine a man who relishes going out of the way to point out how his wife isn’t all that special. You might think that guy isn’t wholly committed to her. And if a woman said, “My daughter’s fine, but she’s really no better than any other kid,” you might think she’s lacking in the maternal-love department. This illustrates a truth about how love works. At some basic level, if you love something, you must find it preferable to something else, perhaps everything else. Your reasons can be subjective, or simply impossible to identify or quantify. Love, true love, is a mystery. Indeed, I put it to you that men who marry women solely because they meet a checklist (blond hair: check! Green Bay Packers fan: check!) aren’t really in love. They may grow to love their spouse, but that happens only when they come to appreciate what makes her different from a mere manifestation of categorical bullet points.

This doesn’t mean love of wife or country requires deceit or unthinking agreement. “‘My
country, right or wrong,’” Chesterton famously observed in
The Defendant
, “is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” And while the quote is not taken too violently out of context, it does leave out the part where Chesterton says that any decent man would share his unfortunate mother’s troubles for the rest of his life. Why? Because he loves his mother. Similarly, the patriot who believes his country is wrong is right to say so. But that does not mean that saying your country is wrong automatically makes you a patriot—or right.

I am not saying that all liberals do not love America. What I am saying is that they are hopelessly confused about how to think about and, therefore, express their love of her.

We could, but should not, leave it there. Because confusion does not exhaust the problems liberals have with patriotism. Chesterton may have said “my country right or wrong is something no patriot would say.” But Orwell got closer to the truth of true patriotism when he said, “My country right or left.” This is the formulation today’s liberals have a much more difficult time grappling with.

When America elects a left-wing president, the tendency for conservatives is to like the government less and the country more. This is because liberal presidents tend to want to change America while conservative presidents tend to talk about the need to change the government. And when America elects conservative presidents, the Left tends to express its love for government more (and lament how it is being discredited by conservatives) and its fondness for America less. Every four years the stars in the firmament of liberalism start talking about how they might need to leave the country if the Republican is elected. They almost never do, alas, but the fact that they talk that way is indicative of their obsession with politics above everything else.

For all the whining about how Republicans use patriotism as a wedge against their opponents, the reality is more complicated. Liberals are uncomfortable with the topic of patriotism because their core philosophical impulses are to make America a different country than it is. This is not an evil impulse, and it can certainly manifest itself in patriotic ways. More importantly, it can manifest itself in humane and decent ways. But at the most basic level love is about acceptance. If you are constantly trying to change
the person you claim to love into someone he or she is not, there comes a point when it’s reasonable to ask whether you really, truly, deeply love the person for who he or she is. Barack Obama campaigned promising to “fundamentally transform” America.
⁶
We would not think a husband who promises to “fundamentally transform” his wife has a healthy love for her.

By the same token, it is simply untrue, as a historical matter, that liberals don’t resort to what we call McCarthyite tactics. Throughout the twentieth century progressives cast the bulk of their program as an effort to impose “100 percent Americanism” from coast to coast. For a time their greatest bogeyman was the “hyphenated American”—i.e., German-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American,” declared Teddy Roosevelt. “The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” Naturally, the Wilson administration was the worst. “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

“When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace,” Clarence Darrow explained while working as a propagandist for the Wilson administration, “I know he is working for Germany.” In a speech at Madison Square Garden he said, “[A]ny man who refuses to back the president in this crisis is worse than a traitor.”
⁷
FDR and his surrogates routinely suggested that opponents of the New Deal were unpatriotic “malefactors of great wealth” and the like.

The very idea that liberals have always stood foursquare against anything that smacks of McCarthyism is simply a self-serving myth (indeed, McCarthy himself began his career as a Democrat and rose in Wisconsin state politics as a progressive Republican). The Left has always made allowances for McCarthyite tactics when it is one of their enemies getting grilled. The House Un-American Activities Committee, after all, was founded by a progressive Democrat, Samuel Dickstein, to investigate German sympathizers. During the barely remembered Brown scare of the 1940s everyone from real Nazi supporters—the German American Bund, for example—to misguided isolationists was targeted and harassed. Much like Wilson, FDR believed that any domestic dissent was treachery and insisted that his department of justice persecute his opponents. At
the height of the madness Walter Winchell read the names of isolationists on the radio, calling them “Americans we can do without.”
⁸
American Communists in this period readily named names and compiled lists of alleged German sympathizers. After the war, when Harry Truman ran for president in his own right, he won the election only after insisting that his opponent was a stooge frontman for a Hitlerite plot. In 1964, liberals peddled the idea that there was some vague connection between Barry Goldwater and the Nazis. CBS’s Daniel Schorr even reported that Goldwater’s planned vacation in Europe was actually a clandestine effort to link up with Nazi elements in “Hitler’s stamping grounds.” During the war in Kosovo, former
New York Times
columnist and dean of left-wing civil libertarians Anthony Lewis dubbed Republicans in Congress the “disloyal opposition” for their dissent from Clinton’s effort (dissent that makes the recent Democratic stance toward the Iraq war seem like cheerleading).

But that’s ancient history, right? Well, look at what happened the moment Barack Obama was elected. Suddenly dissent stopped being the highest form of patriotism. In the summer of 2009, then speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and then majority leader Steny Hoyer insisted that the town hall protests against the Affordable Care Act were “un-American.” Indeed, the moment a populist, grassroots movement—aka the Tea Partiers—sprang up against Barack Obama, dissent suddenly transformed from the highest form of patriotism to the lowest form of racism. “Let’s be very honest about what this is about,” noted self-trained political scientist and Oscar-robbed star of
Mystery Men
and
Wet Hot American Summer
Janeane Garofalo to a nodding Keith Olbermann. “This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. There is no way around that.”
⁹