Yglesias Picks Up Shovel, Digs
by Armed Liberal at July 6, 2008 7:25 AM
In a more thoughtful followup (not hard!) to his earlier paean to Mother England, Yglesias goes on to say one sensible thing about patriotism:
American liberals and American conservatives are both Americans so our American patriotism is very similar. We just have different ideas about politics.
He then drives directly off the rails.
Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there's something arbitrary about it -- we're just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don't see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren't.
All of which is to say the liberal doesn't, as a political matter, confuse the emotions of patriotism with a description of objective reality or anticipate that the citizens of Iraq or Russia or China or wherever will drop their own patriotisms and come to see things our way. Patriotism is a sentiment about your particular country but it's also a sentiment that's much more widespread than any particular country, and if you can't understand the full implications of that then you're going to go badly wrong.
No Matthew, you marvelous Harvard-trained Atlantic columnist you, you're describing something far closer to nationalism, not any kind of patriotism I would recognize - or that Schaar, Wolin, or a host of others I could name would recognize. They actually are different things, you know.
And here's a clue, which you spent several hundred thousand dollars to miss but which was available to you for two-fifty in library late charges.
There actually is something unique and well worth celebrating in American patriotism. First because we were among the first to throw off the yoke of hereditary privilege and substitute the rule of the governed. Second - and most important - because we are not a patrimony defined by land or by blood - not an accident of geography or a nation bound by a common heritage but instead a people animated by a set of ideas. That Yglesias thinks those ideas are worth as much as the ideas motivating - say, China's polity, or Iraq's - speaks volumes about what he sees when he looks around him.
And volumes about what I see when I look at him. I see someone who thinks love of country is not dissimilar to love of the Celtics. Why would anyone die for the Celtics? Why would anyone owe anything to the Celtics?
