Apparently 81% of Americans are Unpatriotic

For reasons I cannot explain, big publications keep hiring Jonah Goldberg to write columns that make everyone dumber for having read them. The latest publication to inflict Goldberg upon us is The USA Today, which today published his column entitled Obama's Real Patriotism Problem.

With a title like that, you might think that Goldberg would at least find an original way to imply that Obama hates America, rather than highlighting the standard Republican talking points (i.e., he doesn't wear a flag lapel pin, he thinks rural Americans are "bitter," and his wife isn't sufficiently "proud" of her country.) You'd be wrong, though. That's exactly what he does. And the prose isn't even that good.

The only somewhat original contribution Goldberg makes is providing a definition of "real patriotism." He writes:

Definitions of patriotism proliferate, but in the American context patriotism must involve not only devotion to American texts (something that distinguishes our patriotism from European nationalism) but also an abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation. We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is. It's the "good as it is" part that has vexed many on the left since at least the Progressive era.

Not to make too obvious a point (is there such a thing with Goldberg?), but there's another thing that's happened "since at least the Progressive Era"--progress! And I'm going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that much of that progress would not have occurred had we all been good patriots in the Goldbergian sense of the word.

If you didn't have the right to vote, you probably didn't think America was "good as it is." If you lived under Jim Crow and segregation, you probably didn't think America was "good as it is." If you were starving to death during the Great Depression, you probably didn't think America was "good as it is." If your son was drafted to go fight and die in a useless war like Vietnam, you probably didn't think America was "good as it is." I could go on and on, but this point is far too obvious to waste any further words.

Indeed, in April a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 81% of Americans now think that America is on the "wrong track." Does that mean 81% of Americans are unpatriotic?

The notion that a key element of American patriotism is a belief that America is "good as it is" strikes me as absurd. To the contrary, it seems to me that what sets America apart from many other countries, historically, is a willingness to re-examine basic premises and genuinely strive to become a more perfect union. The founders of this country engaged in a bold and risky experiment, declaring independence from England, and endeavoring to create a constitutional republic. And in that cherished document, the Declaration of Independence, they made clear that "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." In other words, these were not "good as it is" type people. That point was underscored a decade later when these same Americans scrapped their first system of government entirely and drafted a new Constitution from scratch, a document that began with the now famous lines: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

It seems to me that one of the primary factors that has propelled America to its current station in the world is a widely-shared belief that we are not yet as good as we can be, that there is always significant work to be done. It is that belief that staves off complacency, that keeps us from resting on our laurels and drives us to continue our efforts to forge a perfect union. Can there be any doubt that the people most cherished in American history, the Abraham Lincolns and Martin Luther Kings and Susan B. Anthonys, were the people who were the least willing to indulge in the simplistic belief that America is "good as it is"?

Come to think of it, the very idea that a country, a nation, can--in Goldberg's words--possess an "inherent and enduring goodness" is absurd. A nation is not an entity; it has no soul. Nations have citizens and governments and laws. If one year from now (or 20 or 100), a cabal of fascists were to take over the country and start summarily executing citizens and launching unprovoked attacks on neighboring countries, would America still be "inherently good"? Of course not, at least not in any meaningful sense of the phrase. It's like saying that the New York Yankees are an "inherently good" baseball team, as if the quality of management is some immutable reality (try putting George Bush in charge of baseball operations and see how long it takes them to become the "inherently sucky" Texas Rangers.)

If you peel away the talking points and the cheap shots, the essence of Goldberg's criticism is that Obama's expectations for America are just too high, that true patriots should be content with a much lower standard of greatness. But if it weren't for Americans with high expectations of their country, we would never have gotten even half as far as we have come as a nation. If prior generations of Americans had all been Goldberg-style patriots, I doubt that even Goldberg himself would now think this country is "good as it is."