I grew up in a conservative American climate. We were Republicans. We opposed tax increases. We were deeply suspicious of Democrats. We favored the U.S. Minding its Own Business. We favored the federal government doing the same, and having as little business as possible. We were against government programs that reduced personal accountability or autonomy. We opposed strong governmental regulation of free enterprise. We considered the Kennedys, communism, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Arts and modern entertainment to be deeply flawed and possibly evil. Especially the Kennedys.
Patriotism seemed, for a time in childhood, to be inseparable from nationalism (and perhaps tied to Republicanism, for that matter). Early on, however, I found that idea unsatisfactory. Why should I celebrate the piece of land I live in just because I happen to live there, but also expect other people in other lands to admit that my piece of land is the best piece of land, when they clearly have their own pieces of land? This was nothing more than an expanded version of ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. It was certainly not the lofty spiritual concept its adherents sometimes paint it as, and it never made sense to me. Nationalism is not patriotism.
Now, here I am in a post-9/11 world, with the Soviet Union gone, Democrats back in Congress, and both the specific role and general credibility of the Federal government in serious question (even more than during the Cold War, if that’s possible). The fiscal solvency of the 90s, attributable to Republican presidents and a Democrat congress, then co-opted by a Democrat president and Republican congress, has been completely erased by a Republican president and virtually rubber-stamped by a Republican congress. A shocking, rare, possibly un-preventable terrorist attack has been used as the justification for two foreign wars and a disturbing reduction in the civil liberties of American citizens. And noncitizens? Forget it. They have no rights. Presidential power has come to depend on exploitation of questionable constitutional loopholes and playing high-stakes chicken. It seems possible that energy, pharmaceutical, and military technology corporations now effectively own a greater percentage of our governing power than ever before.
The American media (overall) is definitely part of the problem, not the solution. The lofty ideal of non-partisanship is now a thin veneer covering clear agendas. Which is not, in itself so terrible. But the media either leads the charge or follows right along (depending on your point of view) in the national trend of demonizing the party of one’s neighbor’s choice, pandering to nationalist paranoia, and using patriotism for financial gain.
The political system seems polarized. For some conservatives, everything the right-wing establishment does is gospel and non-Americans are inferior, therefore deserving of whatever we do to them. Democrats are evil. For some liberals, patriotism is the same as fascism, the U.S. military is the source of all international conflict, and environmentalism and big government will save us. Republicans are evil. The national dialogue is cut in the middle. Liberals rarely hear serious, intelligent, sincere discussion of the conservative viewpoint, and vice-versa. The Big Parties, I think, like it that way. The media feed this problem like gas on a bonfire. Everyone seems to be convinced that the majority of the country holds their viewpoint and only idiots could possibly disagree.
So my country has problems. I’m aware of this. An essay this size can’t enumerate them all, of course. I just wanted to point out a few things. However, my country is not completely screwed up, and despite sometimes-overzealous historical revisionism and paradigm-shifting, my political genealogy is not peopled entirely by raping, murdering, bigoted bastards.
I’m deeply proud of what the Founding Fathers accomplished. I truly believe that, despite their personal flaws and mistakes (and the fact that they were clearly products of the 18th Century), they worked a miracle. They started the Great Experiment and they showed the world the potential of modern liberal democracy. They showed Proof of Concept by taking existing models the final steps toward true self-government. I truly believe that God guided this process. He is the author of the increased liberty and autonomy enjoyed by thirteen loosely-allied nation-states, and soon after by much of the world. God loves all his children, and He felt it was time to give them tools for determining their own destiny in stronger ways than ever before.
Unfortunately, I am faced with the reality that the actions of the American government since the Revolution — especially in the past few decades, both domestically and internationally — include various abuses of the power that was given to them. To us. This saddens me. Every time I hear a neo-conservative compare Bush to the Founding Fathers, it makes me a little bit sick. We are not the plucky upstarts who fought against overwhelming odds and gained our freedom through sacrifice, luck, clever politics, and divine intervention. They are dead. We are King George. We are Rome. Our greatest challenge is no longer to fight against oppressing powers, but to manage and administer our own power. I live in a nation where over half the politicians have come to use the values of Jesus of Nazareth as a stick for whipping the public into support, while often behaving in ways more characteristic of worshippers of less enlightened images of deity.
Nevertheless, America has done many amazing things in her time, and she still does some things right. For example, the U.S. is the largest single contributor to the United Nations’ budget, especially for humanitarian aid. Additionally, although governmental humanitarian aid represents a low percentage of gross annual income for Americans (compared to other countries), private individuals and organizations in the U.S. contribute a higher percentage of their income to international humanitarian aid than almost any other nation, and the raw dollar amounts of both official and private aid are greater than from any other country. Americans, despite international criticism, are relatively generous among nations.
Much of both official and private U.S. international aid in the last few decades has helped (and continues to help) promote and strengthen democracy. It is easy to think of spectacular instances of the United States’ heavy-handed clandestine or military interventions in non-democratic nations; it is more difficult to remember the many grant programs, donations to humanitarian rights organizations, etc. The latter far outweigh the former, both in number of instances and in dollars and man-hours.
Despite the unpopularity of this next fact, I think it is even true that some (though certainly not all) of the more scary things the U.S. has done have, in the end, benefitted millions. These are difficult issues to resolve, morally, because of the means-ends problem, but where would Panama be right now without U.S. intervention? South Korea? Where would the world be if the USSR had had no meaningful opposition to its seemingly inexorable expansion? Sure, it might have collapsed anyway, but what would be left?
I bemoan Americans’ lack of participation in our political process. We have had low voter turnout for many years, and I include myself in this statistic. However, I celebrate the fact that, with almost every move Bush has made (as with Clinton, Reagan, etc.), there have been pickets, protests, sit-ins, marches, speeches, rallies, petitions, and lobbies. At least some Americans still care passionately about what happens in this nation and abroad. There is still controversy and differing opinion. The heart of the process is still beating, even if the viruses are rampant and make us wheeze and cough.
Up until now, this essay — or rant — has almost the cliché flavor of wailing about the state of the country now that Big Mean Republicans are in charge. The problem with that is that I don’t object to everything the Republicans have done (even Bush), and some of my objections, when they exist, are hard for me to defend. I have difficulty believing that reducing taxes for the ultra-rich is fundamentally unfair, when the result still makes them give a greater percentage of their income (and a ridiculously high raw dollar amount) to the government than any of the rest of us. Clearly there are multiple alternative views of fairness. I don’t think that keeping a strong military is such a bad idea, even if I have serious doubts about the culture fostered by military life and the uses to which different administrations put our armies. The fact is that we live in a dangerous world, and I think it’s naive to think that reducing our ability to protect ourselves or our allies is going to make the world a safer place. Even our (at times transparently self-serving) interventions in other nations are hard to fully condemn, when you really look at them as something other than a stick to beat your political opponents with. The Balkans, Central America, and the current favorite, Iraq, are much more complex issues than they are often presented.
Let’s not forget the precedents for U.S. interventionism, World Wars I and II. Although we were only involved in WWI for a couple of years, I believe the consensus is that American troops made a positive difference, and I have never heard anyone seriously suggest that American involvement in WWII was not a major factory in the eventual Allied victory. Those wars don’t give us the right to do whatever we want, without regard for morality; but they demonstrate that America’s foreign policy will be judged by outcomes more than by the sensibility of the decisions at the time they were made.
Except by the French. Sometimes you help England save someone’s butt and they never forgive you. Oh well.
I think it’s clear that Iraq is not currently a Fun Situation. I think it’s also clear that certain Commanders-in-Chief ignored some of the smartest people way back when it might have made a difference. I think it is also clear, if you seriously consider it, that the current situation suffers from information filtering and distortion, and is much more complex than either side would have us believe in their attempts to use it as political fodder. It is easy to play “what if,” now that things have been done. It is more difficult to do it rationally, suppressing the urge to use counterfactuals to smack down the other guy. It is even more difficult still to talk about what should have been done, instead, or what to do now.
The fact is that the U.S. is big and powerful (for now). I am a firm believer in the idea that power equals responsibility. We will, and should be, some version of police entity to the world. Many criticisms of U.S. foreign policy recognize this. Why didn’t we intervene in Rwanda? Why weren’t we more persistent in Somalia? Why are we not intervening in Palestine, on behalf of Palestinians? We are big, we have lots of money, and we have powerful armies. This means we have a moral responsibility to help the rest of the world when we can, which needs to include pulling our heads out of the sand and learning about other nations and cultures, even when we’re not forced to. That way, we can intervene intelligently.
We have an even greater responsibility to stem the tide of corruption that constantly threatens to engulf our own political process.
We will be criticized for every move we make, no matter what, and that is not a bad thing. When someone has this much power, they need lots and lots of feedback, including the negative kind. We need to be constantly reminded that our actions have consequences, and that our power, rather than exempting us from our responsibility, amplifies it. We have the resources to make needed and lasting changes in domestic poverty reduction, domestic healthcare, domestic crime management, foreign poverty reduction, environmental practices, social justice, and many more areas. We need to do these things now, while we still have the ability to do them. And we need to listen to the critics, both at home and abroad.
And sometimes we need to listen and then act anyway. The critics are sometimes protecting their own interests or their own egos, and their criticisms can be just as biased and unhelpful as the opinions, policies and actions for which they condemn the U.S. There is no valid way to live according to someone else’s internal moral compass. We have to use our own, and live with the consequences. I think we have willfully ignored that compass in several important recent actions, but the criticisms themselves are not the evidence of this. Criticism is important politically and socially, but it cannot be the deciding factor in the most important decisions. Wrong is wrong, whether someone complains or not. By the same token, right is right, even if the entire world rails against it.
Even the worst American sins, of omission and commission, domestic and international, are evidence of the great freedom of action and self-government that exists in our country, coupled with the resources — the power — we have currently been blessed with. Freedom and power can never be unidirectional. If you have the ability to help, then you also have the potential to hurt. They both grow or atrophy in lockstep with each other. This potential does not justify those sins, but it helps explain them. The challenge, of course, is to use one’s powers for good, not evil. Any superhero knows this. It’s the thing that separates them from the supervillains.
My country is great, not because of any one good thing that any one administration has done (although there have been some amazing things done), and not in ignorance of the bad things, but because of the freedom and potential that exist within its system of government, including the possibility of modifying that system as needed. I am a patriot, not because I think the U.S. is somehow a more moral, or more beautiful, or better nation than any other. I am a patriot because I love my country for the good it has done, and the potential for good it still has. I am a patriot because I hope that the U.S. will work against the forces of corruption, exploitation and apathy, both in the government and in the citizenry, both at home and abroad, and truly protect the freedoms that the Founding Fathers literally held sacred. I am a patriot because I hope that the U.S. will follow the relevant examples in the rest of the world when necessary, and remain in (or rejoin, depending on your perspective) the ranks of those nations who provide positive examples of government to others. I am a patriot because I hope for a day, certainly far in the future, when all governments will provide critical personal freedoms to their citizens, deal with other nations in a just and humanitarian manner, and be supported by actively moral populations.
I am a patriot because I believe God, through my fortuitous citizenship in the U.S.A., has given me many valuable gifts. These gifts are not exclusive to Americans, and they do not make me a better person than someone who does not have them. They just make me happy, and I want everyone on earth to have access to those same gifts.
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