Via Rod Dreher, I see there’s an especially choice quote from the Joe Klein column on Barack Obama’s “patriotism problem” that deserves some attention:

He talked about the Administration’s mendacity, its incompetence during Hurricane Katrina, its lack of transparency. But he never returned to the question of patriotism. He never said, “But hey, look, we’re Americans. This is the greatest country on earth [emphasis mine - JLS]. We’ll rise to the occasion.”

If the definition of patriotism as unconditional support for your nation’s warmongering didn’t convince you that there are problematic questions being begged in this discussion, then try directing your attention to this one. To start, what exactly does it mean for one country to be “greater” then another, let alone for a single country - especially one riddled with all of the sorts of tremendous problems that ours is - to be the “greatest” of them all? What could make such a thing true? How in world would we set ourselves to finding it out?

But the hollowness of this rhetoric, which is exposed by the fact that according to any reasonable measure you might deem to come up with, the US is decidedly not at the top of the pile, is of course not its chief defect: rather, the real danger in this sort of thinking is that it functions as a critical enabling condition for the kind of hegemonistic foreign policy that forces other countries to be “more like us” because, as we all know repeat mindlessly to ourselves, our way of being is the best way that there can be. It also makes it all but impossible for us to see the virtues of swimming against the tide, of questioning the American “way of life” (as if there were just one such thing), and of valuing ideological and cultural diversity at home and abroad.

There are, in fact, many aspects of what others would call Barack Obama’s “lack of patriotism” that rub me the wrong way: in particular, the kind of left-liberal “optimism” that Daniel Larison describes here, coupled with the standard rhetoric about the misery of the average American, leads me to suspect quite strongly that he’s just another do-gooding paternalist. But if his campaign were somehow to provide a check to our national habit of stubbornly chanting “We’re number one!” as our stadium crumbles and all the star free agents pack up for greener pastures, that would be a genuine good. It won’t, of course, but it would be nice if it did.

[ADDENDUM: As fascinating as I find this statistic, I'd be even more interested to see how many Americans, despite the widespread sense of our being "on the wrong track", still take - or are easily enough shamed into claiming in public that they take - their country to be the "greatest". I imagine this sentiment, too, characterizes a startlingly high percentage of the population.]

Filed under: patriotism, politics