As he did in his disquisition on race, in today's patriotism speech Obama gives Americans a fairly detailed history lesson ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. When it comes to more recent history, pundits have long admired Obama for his ability to rise above the Boomer culture wars, and today he broached the topic himself, saying, "What is striking about today’s patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s -- in arguments that go back forty years or more. ... Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views -- these caricatures of left and right."
But the most powerful part of Obama's speech is not his litany of patriotic childhood memories, nor his exhortations that to live up to its greatest ideals, the United States must pursue more progressive public policies. Those are to be expected. Rather, Obama is able to describe one of the most central struggles of liberalism: the tension between loving one's country and holding it to ever-higher standards of decency:
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: it's ongoing racial strife; the perversion of our political system laid bare during the Watergate hearings; the wrenching poverty of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia. 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. I came to understand that our revolution was waged for the sake of that belief – that we could be governed by laws, not men; that we could be equal in the eyes of those laws; that we could be free to say what we want and assemble with whomever we want and worship as we please; that we could have the right to pursue our individual dreams but the obligation to help our fellow citizens pursue theirs.For a young man of mixed race, without firm anchor in any particular community, without even a father's steadying hand, it is this essential American idea – that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will – that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans.
--Dana Goldstein
