It's Time for a Radically Different View of Patriotism

By Ira Chernus, AlterNet. Posted June 20, 2008.

"If the 2008 election is to be a debate about the true meaning of patriotism, then bring it on." That's the clarion challenge from bellwether liberal columnist E.J. Dionne: "Obama cannot simply cede the terrain of patriotism to McCain." Right on, E.J. "And progressives should not assume that patriotism is somehow a bad thing." Right again.

But whose patriotism should Barack Obama proclaim? Dionne's suggestion is (Are you sitting down?) … Theodore Roosevelt. Well, that's just "bully." But hey, I thought John McCain owns the rights to TR symbolism in this year's campaign. He got there first, with his "Man in the Arena" video, featuring Teddy on the campaign trail and then cutting to McCain waving to the crowds -- a TR for our time.

Of course everyone can make their own TR, just as everyone can make their own brand of patriotism. Let's take a look at this year's models, liberal and conservative, and see if we can tell the difference.

The McCain-TR pairing seems like a natural. Both made their reputations as war heroes, risking death in service to their country. Roosevelt went on to show his patriotism by presiding over a brutal occupation in the Philippines and sending the Great White Fleet around the world to let everyone know that the United States did "carry a big stick." When the Great War broke out, he scorned President Woodrow Wilson for being too weak to use U.S. force against Germany.

In the McCain video, Germany also figures large. TR's brief appearance is sandwiched between sound bites of Winston Churchill rallying his people to stand tough against the Nazis: "We shall never surrender. Never give in." Then cut to McCain, rallying his people: "We're Americans, and we'll never surrender. They will." Who are "They"? McCain doesn't tell us.

But it doesn't really matter. McCain projects that his TR-style patriotism is not about advancing specific national interests against specific enemies. It's about an abstract emotion: the pride of being so rough and tough, with such a big stick and such resolute will, that we will never surrender to anyone. He would have you believe it's about a clear-cut choice between the rugged Westerner who has proven his toughness in war and the inexperienced Harvard grad whose strength of will has never been tested.

E.J. Dionne wants that Harvard grad to keep on pushing his own version of patriotism, quoting rather different sound bites from Teddy Roosevelt. Real patriots reject "gross materialism," TR said. If "the big business man" wants to be patriotic, he can't just pile up profits. He must benefit "the public which he serves" -- something that tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans seem to have forgotten, as Obama often reminds us.

But McCain has not forgotten. In his video, TR's words are not about war but about service to country here at home. He pledges to the American people that he will put all his strength "at your disposal." ''Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in,'' Teddy proclaims, in a clip filmed during his 1912 campaign for president, the same campaign that produced the famous line: ''We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.'' The sacred battle he fought that year was not against foreign enemies. It was against corporate selfishness, and for progressive domestic policies.

Selfless service, not macho belligerence, is the central theme of McCain's patriotism. "I owe America more than she has ever owed me," he says plaintively, as the video shows the young naval officer in North Vietnamese chains.

Well, it turns out that selfless service is the central theme of liberal patriotism, too. "True patriots believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness; freedom from sacrifice is cowardice," E. J. Dionne quotes from a liberal manifesto he's touting, The True Patriot.

He might have done better quoting Todd Gitlin, who makes the point more sophisticatedly in The Intellectuals and the Flag. The Left has abandoned patriotism, Gitlin laments, not only because love of country has been so abused in our age of American empire, but because in principle it conflicts with individual freedom. "Patriotism decrees that we are not free. We are obliged" -- obliged to subscribe to our nation's ideals, to take responsibility for making sure all our fellow citizens benefit from those ideals, to pursue that goal by engaging with all Americans, whether we like them or not, in the political arena, where pragmatic compromise is a patriotic necessity.

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Ira Chernus is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.

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