Fundamentally Wrong
Posted on July 1st, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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I think there are effective critiques of Obama’s understanding of patriotism, but Jonah Goldberg’s isn’t one of them. Who is a patriot in his view? He tells us:
We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is.
According to Goldberg, Obama doesn’t believe this. In support of this claim, he mostly refers to the ridiculous moments of excessive rhetoric in the campaign and the embarrassing worship of the man that many of his supporters practice, none of which really proves his case. Is Obama too full of himself, and is his campaign a cavalcade of delusional personality cultists? Yes. Does that make them insufficiently patriotic? That’s not obvious. It is unfortunate for Goldberg that his column came out the day after Obama gave his patriotism speech, since the speech completely devastates Goldberg’s thesis. Among other things, Obama said:
I believe those who attack America’s flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.
And again:
As we begin our fourth century as a nation, it is easy to take the extraordinary nature of America for granted.
And again:
As I got older, that gut instinct – that America is the greatest country on earth – would survive my growing awareness of our nation’s imperfections….Not only because, in my mind, the joys of American life and culture, its vitality, its variety and its freedom, always outweighed its imperfections, but because I learned that what makes America great has never been its perfection but the belief that it can be made better.
So, in other words, Obama does believe that America is fundamentally good and great, but can be made better. I find both the exceptionalist and the meliorist aspects of this view to be misguided and troubling, but if the standard that Goldberg wants to set is a belief in the “fundamental goodness” of America he cannot very well claim that Obama does not meet that standard.
Filed under: politics
I’m sure you’re aware of this, but there’s no use in arguing against people like Goldberg. They are certain that only Republicans and conservatives and Joe Lieberman can possibly believe in American goodness. A liberal black man cannot possibly be trusted to believe in these things, it’s obviously a ruse. It clearly doesn’t matter what Obama says, he’s just not part of the club. As a ceritified delusional personality cultist and third-degree Obama flack, I can personally attest to this. We are just pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, including our own.
Yes, I’m familiar with the futility of it from past arguments, but it serves as a useful example of how the mainstream conservative criticism of Obama is typically at best founded on one or two anecdotes to the exclusion of everything else the man has ever said or done. It seems to me that a powerful case can be made against him based on what he has actually said and done without having to concoct theories about him.
In case you missed it, I was defending Obama’s “membership” in “the club.”
Well, thanks for defending Obama’s membership cred, even if it’s not really a compliment by your standards, but I’ll accept whatever I can get. I’m sure good arguments can be made on policy grounds against Obama, but the meme that is being used to organize all criticism is that he’s an “outsider”, not to be trusted, not a member of the club, and therefore it’s simply useless to argue otherwise. I’m not even sure this works electorally in this cycle, since many people seem not to be trusting the club members these days. So maybe Obama is better off being perceived as something of an outsider.
Gee–If one has to believe in the fundamental goodness of America to be certified as a patriot, where does that leave us old-fashioned Calvinists who don’t believe that *anything* human is fundamentally good? One fondly hopes and fervently prays [to allude to one of your favorite bogeymen] that the nation will live up to its high calling [although as people like Sacvan Berkovitch have pointed out, we rewrite the covenants even as we invoke them], but fundamentally the allegiance is one of obligation to a community, whether inherited or chosen. It should never set up the nation as an idol.
Well, you’ve hit on a major problem of Americanism and “credal” nationhood. I have fewer objections to this phrase, since I believe all things remain fundamentally good because they were created good, but have been corrupted in the Fall. Even so, the phrase does uncritically invest earthly things with more virtue than they may possess.