Patriots Or Not?

Larrey Anderson writes an interesting perspective piece at the American Thinker today. Whether you agree or disagree, it's worth thinking about for a few moments:

Most conservative political commentators tiptoe around the unpatriotic positions maintained by many liberals in America. We hear prominent conservatives say things like this, "I am not challenging Mr. Liberal's patriotism. I am challenging his point of view."

The fact is that much of the new left is unpatriotic. And that is okay. The Founding Fathers knew that not all Americans would be patriots; in fact, they counted on it. In this article I will show why the culture of the left is not patriotic. My basic contention is that patriotism is now the responsibility of the right -- abandoned by the left.

He uses the Oregon County Fair as his test environment. The short version is that the two-day event was filled with left-wing anti-American garbage, environmental tripe, and precious little of redeeming value, but go check out the article for all the details.

He then finishes with the following:

My initial reaction to the fair was bemused outrage at the hypocrisy and self-deception. It was unsettling to witness thousands of my fellow citizens denigrate the country that I love and respect. It was frightening to listen to their descriptions of the society that they would have take America's place.

But I thought about it again. Our most cherished freedom is the one that allows us, any of us, to try and make the country the way that we think it should be. It follows that part of the greatness of America is the freedom of its citizens to believe and to advance bad ideas -- even to promote ideas that would (and are) ending America as we know it.

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the nearly paradoxical freedom that was being granted to the citizens of our new republic. Their solution was to balance the various political factions against each other, to make the proponents of these rival ideologies compete for control of a limited central government. The founders realized that some people wanted a much more powerful federal government -- and that some people favored little or no central control.

In a free representative republic like America "the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects."[iv]

The Founders left the job of preserving this delicate balance of opposing factions to the sincere friends of the republic -- to the patriots.

I realized, after my trip to the Oregon Country Fair, that it is our job, as conservatives, to preserve this system that allows the various political factions to compete for power. I now understand that this is a two-fold burden for conservatives. First, it is our obligation, as conservatives and as the champions of individual freedom, to allow the left to pursue its utopian socialist vision. Second, it is our duty, as patriotic Americans, to stop them from achieving their goal.

America is a market place of ideas. All Americans are free to enter almost any idea into this market.[vi] As conservatives, we must defend the right to the free and open expression of ideas in order to protect our own freedom of expression and we must protect the freedom of expression of those with whom we disagree. Because the far left no longer supports a limited federal republic (as we have seen, some are opposed to the very idea of a nation-state), this task has fallen to those of us on the right.

The right must protect and defend our representative republic because the left will not. Conservatives are "the sincere and considerate friends of republican government." We are the patriots. It is time we started acting like it -- and saying it.

This strikes me as a very good piece of analysis. While they will deny it to their dying breath, Lefty liberals have clearly redefined 'patriotism' as simply disagreeing with Bush and conservatives. They clearly seek the benefit of those outside America over the benefit of Americans. They clearly see America as being to blame for just about all evil in the world.

My entire blog is full of examples of these statements, so I will not go into any more right now. The truth is the truth, however, and an objective observer cannot come to any other conclusion than this. While Anderson's evidence is anecdotal at best, I believe he is accurate on a much larger scale, too. I also agree with his assertion that it is time for conservatives to start calling out our liberal friends on their actions and words. Anderson is right that this is a tough balancing job - defending the freedom for liberals to say all the vile and anti-American things they want to say while preventing them from actually achieving their goals. It's not easy, and that's why conservatives face an uphill battle. Still, it's a battle that MUST be fought.

When anti-patriotism rears its ugly head, we should call it what it is. By dancing around the topic, we as conservatives not only show a distressing lack of courage, but we also allow the Left to redefine words into something unrecognizable. Once we allow that redefinition to occur, we lose the ability to debate intelligently. When we can't even agree on the definition of 'is', or when we consider statements like 'this war is lost' to be 'patriotic', there is a problem.

That problem is liberalism, and the Left needs to be held to account. It starts with us conservatives.

There's my two cents.