David Frum is confused by Todd Gitlin's patriotism:
Gitlin's book fails, second, because the patriotism he advocates is a patriotism without content and without qualities. In this again, he reminds me of Obama. The senator, remember, condemned the flag lapel pin as a substitute for "true patriotism." Not an indefensible point of view, in my opinion - provided that you actually mean something by the phrase "true patriotism." It becomes uncomfortably clear over Gitlin's few pages that his concept of a left-wing patriotism does not mean anything.
Gitlin's version of patriotism urges Americans to develop broader and more generous social programs to aid their fellow-citizens and to equalize their condition. But why call this "patriotism"? Why not "welfarism" or "collectivism" or "socialism"?
But if patriotism is about more than trying to make your country better, what exactly is it about? Frum doesn't quite explain, but consider this passage:
Indeed, the only energy you find in his writing comes when he lists the causes and motives that drove his sect away from patriotism. When he writes about that, suddenly enthusiasm grips him. If we were wrong, he wants to say, we were wrong for good cause, wrong for admirable motives, wrong because we were in some deeper sense right. In his telling, anti-Americanism may be a fault, yes, but only the sort of fault to which over-eager applicants confess in job interviews. "My faults? I just care too darn much!"
This then, is Frum's real problem. For Frum, it doesn't mater what America has actually done -- acknowledging America's faults makes you unpatriotic by definition. Unless you have a Panglossian view of America -- that it's the best possible country imaginable -- then you're not a patriot:
Gitlin tries to distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve. It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy.
But Frum's patriotism, helpful though it may be for beating up on people like Gitlin, is a sad, sallow little thing. How much can you love your brother if you don't try to help him with his destructive alcoholism? Why would Gitlin care so much if he was really unpatriotic? Is it really better to hand your brother a bottle of gin than to check him into rehab?
And really, Frum can't believe the line he's pushing. Surely he thinks there are many ways America could improve. Does that make him unpatriotic (even if he is from Canada)? I don't think so, but by his definition it does. Which should make it clear that, like the Right does with it's complaints about "activist judges," he's trying to make a political disagreement into a nonpartisan value that his opponent lacks. But just as conservatives really mean "liberal judges" when they say "activist judges" Frum means "policy ideas I disagree with" when he says "patriotism problem."
--Sam Boyd
