Patriotism, like religious faith, isn't rational. It comes more from the gut than the brain. You can be mad as hell at something your country is doing — ashamed, even, at its shortcomings — and still feel a welling up when you hear somebody singing "God Bless America."
In a way, that bumper-sticker phrase from the 1960s nailed it: "My country, right or wrong." Except that the slogan was mostly touted by people who didn't like dissent from the what our government was doing.
In fact, real patriotism demands accommodation of our vast differences. American democracy is fueled by disagreement: Losers and winners are equally entitled to express and hold their conflicting beliefs. You've got to love a country that really delivers on that promise.
So it's hard not to view the rise of hyperpartisanship as an unpatriotic development. It's not enough nowadays to argue passionately over issues. Now the path to victory usually includes character assassination and vows not to have anything to do with the other side. Instead of viewing issues pragmatically, and resolving conflicts with a solution that works best for the most people, politicians and thought leaders now pitch arguments as moral conflicts and demand dogmatic allegiance.
The demonizing of opponents has happened before in American history, with tragic results. Just over a century and a half ago, it cost the lives of one out of every four American men between ages 20 and 40.
Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://blog.timesunion.com/editors.
The American Civil War, in the view of David Goldfield, a University of North Carolina historian, was less a triumph of freedom than a terrible failure of policy. It could have been averted, he argued in a 2011 book. Rather than a war that cost 620,000 American lives — a share of the nation's population that today would translate into 10 million American deaths — slavery could have been abolished and the economy remade through the political process.
After all, a lot of countries got rid of slavery without resorting to war. If you want to view it in purely economic terms, the $6.2 billion cost of the war could have instead been diverted into payouts to slaveowners and reparation payments for the South's 4 million newly-freed slaves, plus 40 acres of land for each. Here's where Goldfield's thesis gets really controversial: What pushed the nation into war, he argues, was largely the infusion of religion into the political realm. That led to the casting of the disagreements among the states as a moral battle.
Moderates like Stephen Douglas were pushed aside by the rise of radicals espousing moral certitude. Compromise was depicted as capitulation. First in the North, and then in the South, leading voices came to the insistence that God was on their side. Since fighting was the mid-19th century solution to many threats — Indians and Mexicans, notably — war became inevitable.
Now, of course, you might say, nothing of the sort could occur again. We're not likely to see the nation disintegrate over any issue, perhaps because there is nothing as morally reprehensible as slavery growing in our midst. The seeds of the Civil War were planted in the inability of our Founding Fathers to come to terms with slavery more than fourscore years before the conflict turned bloody.Read Full Article
But the self-righteousness of today's extreme voices isn't harmless hyperbole. When radio hosts with millions of listeners liken the president to Adolf Hitler, or when would-be leaders warn Americans that they need automatic weapons to protect themselves against their own government, we need to take a deep breath.
That talk is clearly harmful. But it is, in fact, only a small step beyond the insistence of some in the political milieu that anybody who works with their political opponents to achieve compromise is a traitor. Here's the truth: Such "traitors" have patriotically forged the progress of our country for centuries.
We are divided in 2014 by issues that fairly invite moralizing: abortion, LGBT rights, access to guns, the right to privacy versus national security. The assertion that only one point of view on these issues can possibly be right — indeed, that one stance alone must reflect the will of God — can lead us toward the same sort of polarization that arose in America during the 1850s.
It was 227 years ago today that America's Constitutional Convention agreed upon what came to be known as The Great Compromise — including a two-house national legislature, apportioning power among both small and big states. It was a key step that allowed the deliberations that created our nation to go on.
Patriotic Americans rightly revere our Constitution, which is why it's astonishing that many in the name of patriotism now abhor the dynamic that brought us its many blessings.