The Atlantic Magazine email I got today leads with

The Future of the American Idea. As The Atlantic celebrates its 150th anniversary, scholars, novelists, politicians, artists, and others look ahead to the future of the American idea.

So I click through the link, and I get to (subscriber-only, I believe):

Consider The Atlantic’s passage: through a permanent revolution in technology, from the telephone, to the practical fountain pen, to the radio, to the note pad, to the television, to the Internet; through financial crises, beginning in 1857 with what The Atlantic called a national “flurry” over credit (or liquidity, to use the present flurry’s term); through national arguments over slavery, suffrage, evolution, immigration, prohibition, anticommunism, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, evolution and immigration (again); through the international contests of ideology that defined the last century and into the new contest that so far is shaping this one. How has The Atlantic endured? More to the point, why?
…
The Atlantic was created in Boston by writers who saw themselves as the country’s intellectual leaders, and so its scope from the start was national, if rather theoretical. It was founded on an encompassing abstraction, expressed in the words that appeared in the first issue and that appear again on the cover of this one: In politics, it would “honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.” That sounds pretty good.

And pretty good to me as well. They continue:

In the pages that follow, George F. Will rings an alarm over the danger inherent in embracing a singular American idea, but many of the contributors agree on a rough definition of the idea itself…the easy part, as John Hope Franklin suggests.

So I click through to Franklin’s piece, since I’m a big believer in starting with the easy part.

If the American idea was to subdue Native Americans and place them at the disposal of European settlers, to import several million Africans to the New World and subject them to a lifetime of slavery, to impose on Asian immigrants a lifetime of discrimination, then perhaps the American idea was not so admirable.

If the American idea, once the Civil War had concluded, was to sentence the freedmen to a lifetime of racial segregation, discrimination, and humiliation, then perhaps the American idea was not so praiseworthy.

A litany of abuse and failure follows. I keep digging, looking for an idea, or a pony, and find:

The American idea is the nation’s holiday garb, its festive dress, its Sunday best. It covers up an everyday practice of betraying the claims of equality, justice, and democracy. It calls for Thomas Jefferson to advise his young protégé Edward Coles to abandon his plan to emancipate his slaves and migrate to Illinois, and to reconcile himself to his country’s “unfortunate condition.” While Coles did not accept Jefferson’s advice, many of his contemporaries did, thus strengthening the American idea of inequality and injustice.

It is fairly late in the game, but one hopes that there is still time to grasp the reality of American life for those of different racial and national backgrounds and to embrace the country’s professed ideals of freedom, equality, and justice.

If that’s what ‘the country’s intellectual leaders’ really think, we’re well and truly f**ked. What’s worse is that it reads almost word for word like a slam that I laid out against just that kind of thinking. I did a post on patriotism back in 2002 (yes, I obsess over the issue) and in it I said:

I know two really bad parents. One is a couple that simply refuses to control their children; they love them totally, and so, they explain, they love everything they do. Unsurprisingly, they are raising two little monsters. The other is a single mother who explains that everything bad in her life is the fault of her child, and that everything he does is wrong. Unsurprisingly, her child is depressed, withdrawn and equally badly damaged.

I’ll define patriotism as ‘love of country’. Both the parents above (all three of them, actually) claim to ‘love’ their children. But to blindly smile and clean up when your child smashes plates on the floor is not an act of love. And blindly smiling and waving flags when your country does something wrong is not an act of patriotism.

But – there is a point where criticism, even offered in the guise of love, moves past the point of correction and to the point of destruction. It’s a subtle line, but it exists. And my friend (who is less of a friend because I can’t begin to deal with her fundamentally abusive parenting) is destroying her child. And there are liberals who have adopted an uncritically critical view of America. Who believe it to have been founded in genocide and theft, made wealthy on slave labor and mercantilist expropriation, to be a destroyer of minorities, women, the environment and ultimately they argue, itself.

I’m sorry but their profession of love for America is as hollow to me as that [bad] mother’s profession of love for her son. Are those things true? As facts, they are an incomplete account of this country’s history. As a worldview, they are destructive and self-consuming.

(Note the clever tie to the comment thread below and the connection between patriotism and marriage)

Franklin’s piece is to America what that abusive mother is to her child. An intelligentsia that adopts that kind of attitude is not going to create a culture in which mutual connection and a sense of patrimony exist – the root of patriotism as a concept.

Let me go on for a moment and try and explain why it is so important that we have a healthy patriotism here in America (and why other countries need to have them as well).

Schaar explains it well –

“To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts; one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.”

Successful societies are ones in which each member adds to the social capital that can be passed on to the next generation. To do that – to save, rather than spend, to build rather than consume – requires some sense of obligation, of one’s place in a chain that stretches from your ancestors to your descendents – and which is broad enough to expand ‘ancestor’ and ‘descendent’ to include other than your blood kin.

Habermas talks about it differently. He bases his view in Marxist and Enlightenment philosophy (unlike the Frankfurt School of post-Marxists, he embraces the Enlightenment). He’s always a difficult read, and his arguments are hard (impossible, really) to reduce to bloggable soundbites.

I’ll do something on his views over the weekend.

But the reality is that someone who sees the central American Idea as Franklin does owes – what, exactly – to the future of America?

Yes the things he talks about are part of the American history, people, and idea. But they do not define the American idea, and people who believe they do – as does Yglesias, I’ll suggest (from his own words and from his suggested reading in the area) are fundamentally missing what it is that Middle Americans see in America. And in doing so, they do two things – as the ‘shapers’ of our culture, they mis-shape it in fundamentally damaging ways (thank God for hysterisis), and they isolate themselves increasingly from the mass of American people who are grateful for the patrimony America has given them, and who are willing to contribute to the future.

Perhaps that’s why children are so out of fashion in certain circles…

Welcome Instapundit readers…it appears to be ‘patriotism’ week here, so please check out the four posts I’ve done this week on the subject: ‘Patriotism – Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias‘, ‘You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me‘, ‘Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again‘, and ‘Rorty on Patriotism‘

I don’t ask you folks for much – no tip jar, I pay for my own laptop by working a day job, etc.

But I really, really would appreciate it if you could take a few moments today and write one letter to one of the companies on the list of businesses that do business with Burma.

Let them know what you think of the situation there, and what you think of them for profiting from it.

Yes, it’s not something that will have an immediate or massive impact.

But if we can get enough people to do it, it will have some impact.

Yglesias has his response on patriotism up at the Atlantic, and I’m wondering if he can get some of his Harvard money back.

Patriotism is – wait for it – just like being a Knicks fan. There are good Knicks fans, and bad ones.

The attitude toward America that conservatives like to champion is like this latter batch of Knicks fans — not people animated by a special concern for our fellow-citizens and a special appreciation for our country’s virtues, but by a deep emotional investment in a certain kind of national hagiography and myth-making.

The patriotism = fanboy equivalence is one that’s often made by people who don’t believe – or know – much in patriotism. It makes patriotism cute, and kind of demeans it is a backhanded way. because you, know, my wife is still a Cubs fan even twenty years after she left Chicago, so isn’t that just cute?

But the most obsessive Cubs fans don’t get linked to a polity of other Cubbies fans with whom they have to share power.

The mechanisms by which our – or any – political structure are maintained within our culture are kinda significant if we want those structures to survive. Habermas has the best (if most awkwardly written) description of this process, I think, in ‘Legitimation Crisis‘ – I’ll try and do a post on this over the weekend.

Yglesias goes on to recommend Anatol Lievin’s book on American nationalism – which, based on the Publisher’s Weekly review, seems shockingly predictable:

In this provocative and scholarly work, Lieven, senior associate at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment, argues that normative American patriot ism …an optimistic “civic creed” rooted in respect for America’s institutions, individual freedoms and constitutional law – contains a monster in the basement: a jingoistic, militaristic, Jacksonian nationalism that sees America as the bearer of a messianic mission to lead a Manichean struggle against the savages.

plus,as a bonus…

Lieven’s provocative final chapter argues that much of U.S. support for Israel is rooted not in the “civic creed” (e.g., support for a fellow liberal democracy) but in a nationalism that sees the Israelis as heroic cowboys and the Palestinians as savages who must be driven from their land, as Jackson did the Cherokees. Throughout, Lieven takes to task the American liberal intelligentsia for abandoning universalist principles in favor of ethnic chauvinism and nationalist fervor.

…I can’t wait to read it…

Welcome Instapundit readers…it appears to be ‘patriotism’ week here, so please check out the four posts I’ve done this week on the subject: ‘Patriotism – Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias‘, ‘You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me‘, ‘Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again‘, and ‘Rorty on Patriotism‘

The Burmese junta is now searching out the activists who marched peacefully and hauling them away.

Please go to www.free-burma.org to learn more, as well as the invaluable Global Voices Online.

We have little or no diplomatic leverage over the Burmese government, who is really a client of the Chinese. I’m typing this on a Lenovo notebook; to be honest, if I were shopping today I doubt that I would buy another one – yes I know that virtually all notebooks are made in China – but Lenovo is a Chinese company, and so by withholding our business, we may be able to make them pay attention.

Unocal – the “Union 76” Chevron the gas company – is also elbow-deep in Burma. Gas is easy to find elsewhere, as well.There is a complete list of companies doing business with Burma here.

These are useless and impotent gestures. In reality, it would take the Pacific Fleet to do anything meaningful, and we’d be at war with China. But I’m a warmonger anyway…

Actually, I’m sending the ‘dirty list’ to all the bloggers I know. I’ll also ask each of you to click through, pick a company and write one letter. One letter, please.

Update: go check out the comments on this at the NY Times ‘Opinionator’ blog…OTOH, they did call us ‘idiosyncratic’, so I’m happy…

Jonah Goldberg is contemplating patriotism in the LA Times.

I’ve come around to the view that the culture war can best be understood as a conflict between two different kinds of patriotism. On the one hand, there are people who believe being an American is all about dissent and change, that the American idea is inseparable from “progress.” America is certainly an idea, but it is not merely an idea. It is also a nation with a culture as real as France’s or Mexico’s. That’s where the other patriots come in; they think patriotism is about preserving Americanness.

I’m not sure I completely agree with him (more in a second) here, but I think he’s hitting on the divide that I think matters.

He goes on:

Many liberals hear talk of national culture and shout, “Nativist!” first and ask questions later, if at all. They believe it is a sign of their patriotism that they hold fast to the idea that we are a “nation of immigrants” — forgetting that we are also a nation of immigrants who became Americans.

As the host of the “Today” show in 2003, Couric said of the lost crew members of the space shuttle Columbia: “They were an airborne United Nations — men, women, an African American, an Indian woman, an Israeli. . . .” As my National Review colleague Mark Steyn noted, they weren’t an airborne U.N., they were an airborne America. The “Indian woman” came to America in the 1980s, and, in about a decade’s time, she was an astronaut. “There’s no other country on Earth where you can do that,” Steyn rightly noted.

For cosmopolitans like Couric, however, the very best thing you could say about those heroic astronauts was that they weren’t part of the national “we” but of the global “we,” for the only “we” that counts is that of “we are the world.”

Matt Yglesias disagrees, or would, if he found the question interesting enough:

So I read Jonah Goldberg’s column here and I’m left wondering, does he really think that American nationalism is insufficiently present in American television news? Like, sincerely believe that in a way that would make this a subject worth arguing about?

Yglesias reduces Goldberg’s serious question to a silly one: is there enough patriotism in the news? (Note: I don’t think there is, but that was another story.)

But it’s not just Couric – Yglesias himself is a great case study in what Goldberg is talking about.

Here’s Matt in 2004:

Well, that was yesterday. I remember back in 1997 talking to a Czech guy who was confused as to why Americans would have a holiday commemorating Independence Day. The real point, though, is this: Not be an left-wing America-hater about it all, or to deny that our Founders had some legitimate grievances* but in retrospect wouldn’t America and the world both be better off if the USA had remained more closely associated with the British Empire and her Commonwealth? After all, if the erstwhile “greatest generation” had gotten in on the Hitler-fighting action at the same time as Canada and Australia did, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided. See also World War One.

In that light, it seems to me that while the Revolution should not be condemned, it is something to be regretted: a failure of Imperial policy and an inability of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to work out some thorny governance and burden-sharing issues. Not much of an occasion for fireworks.

He revisited the issue:

That’s almost certainly right. I wouldn’t want to be understood as saying that the Founders should have known better than to rebel. There’s no way they could have seen the sort of geopolitical conflicts between the English-speaking world and various Teutonic and Slavic (and now, perhaps, Arab) tyrannies, nor is it by any means clear that Britain and her dominions would have developed such benign governance structures absent the Revolution to cause them to rethink a thing or two. I just want to consider what sort of emotional response we should have to the fact of the Revolution.

Hold the fireworks seems to be the right sentiment for him.

Now I’ve argued on and on that we need an anticosmopolitan liberalism, one rooted firmly in the American Founding if liberalism is going to get any traction here in US politics. I’ve slagged and been slagged by the usual cast of Netroots characters over this issue, and I’ll point out that the Netroots liberalism for all the sound and fury hasn’t signified much in the political scene except to – almost certainly – hand the nomination to the least liberal candidate running, Hillary Clinton.

The basis for much of my argument has been the work of John Schaar, a little-known political theorist who happened to be one of my professors. Who I admit I should have paid more attention to back then.

The work I keep pointing to is his work, ‘The Case for Patriotism’ (excerpted here).

Here are two quotes I think worth thinking about in the context of Steyn and Yglesias.

“Patriotism is unwelcome in many quarters of the land today, and unknown in many others. There is virtually no thoughtful discussion of the subject, for the word has settled, in most people’s minds, deep into a brackish pond of sentiment where thought cannot reach. Politicians and members of patriotic associations praise it, of course, but official and professional patriotism too often sounds like nationalism, patriotism’s bloody brother. On the other hand, patriotism has a bad name among many thoughtful people, who see it as a horror at worst, a vestigial passion largely confined to the thoughtless at best: as enlightenment advances, patriotism recedes. The intellectuals are virtually required to repudiate it as a condition of class membership. The radical and dropout young loathe it. Most troublesome of all, for one who would make the argument I intend to make, is the face that both the groups that hate and those that glorify patriotism largely agree that it and nationalism are the same thing. I hope to show that they are different things–related, but separable.

Opponents of patriotism might agree that if the two could be separated then patriotism would look fairly attractive. But the opinion is widespread, almost atmospheric, that the separation is impossible, that with the triumph of the nation-state nation. Nationalism has indelibly stained patriotism: the two are warp and woof. The argument against patriotism goes on to say that, psychologically considered, patriot and nationalist are the same: both are characterized by exaggerated love for one’s own collectivity combined with more or less contempt and hostility toward outsiders. In addition, advanced political opinion holds that positive, new ideas and forces–e.g., internationalism, universalism; humanism, economic interdependence, socialist solidarity–are healthier bonds of unity, and more to be encouraged than the ties of patriotism. These are genuine objections, and they are held by many thoughtful people.”

and

“But if instinctive patriotism and the patriotism of the city cannot be ours, what can be? Is there a type of patriotism peculiarly American: if so, is it anything more than patriotism’s violent relative nationalism?

Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.” [emphasis added]

The problem with Yglesias shrugging at the 4th of July is that what is really being shrugged at is the complex civic religion that makes my immigrant neighbors as American as I am – more American, I’ll argue, than Yglesias. That civic religion has kept this Republic alive for 200 years, and serves as the compass point for countless people throughout the world, as well as the uniting force – the weakening uniting force – in American politics.

When this religion gets shrugged off, we will lose far more than Couric or Yglesias think. And because it is a civic religion that can be freely assumed, the nature of the ‘Americanness’ Goldberg worries about is less cultural and less a national identity as the French see it and more explicitly political – in a uniquely American way, thankfully…

Welcome Instapundit and Opinionator readers…it appears to be ‘patriotism’ week here, so please check out the four posts I’ve done this week on the subject: ‘Patriotism – Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias‘, ‘You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me‘, ‘Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again‘, and ‘Rorty on Patriotism‘

Folks, apologies. TG’s mom died Friday and – of course – TG had her huge annual conference to help run over the weekend, and so she was obviously the priority for this weekend and will be for the next few days. There is a bunch of stuff I owe people comments on and things I’d like to be doing here – but it will have to wait a bit. Apologies, and think good thoughts for TG and her family.

Vaclev Havel – someone who has obviously BTDT in dealing with opening societies – has a piece up at Comment is Free on Burma.

How many times and in how many places has this now happened? Worse, however, is the number of countries that find it convenient to avert their eyes and ears from the deathly silence with which this Asian country chooses to present itself to the outside world.

In Burma, the power of educated Buddhist monks – people who are unarmed and peace loving by their very nature – has risen up against the military regime. That monks are leading the protests is no great surprise to those who have taken a long-term interest in the situation in Burma.

An overwhelming number of Burma’s Buddhist monks have found it difficult to bear the central and regional governments’ efforts to corrupt their monastic orders, and to misuse the example of the monks’ self-restraint to increase the pressure on other believers. Of course, without universal and coordinated international political, economic, and media support for these brave monks, all development in Burma may quickly be put back nearly 20 years.

He goes on to excoriate the international diplomatic regime:

On a daily basis, at a great many international and scholarly conferences all over the world, we can hear learned debates about human rights and emotional proclamations in their defense. So how is it possible that the international community remains incapable of responding effectively to dissuade Burma’s military rulers from escalating the force that they have begun to unleash in Rangoon and its Buddhist temples?

For dozens of years, the international community has been arguing over how it should reform the United Nations so that it can better secure civic and human dignity in the face of conflicts such as those now taking place in Burma or Darfur, Sudan. It is not the innocent victims of repression who are losing their dignity, but rather the international community, whose failure to act means watching helplessly as the victims are consigned to their fate.

The world’s dictators, of course, know exactly what to make of the international community’s failure of will and inability to coordinate effective measures. How else can they explain it than as a complete confirmation of the status quo and of their own ability to act with impunity?

So we will stand by while diplomats sip tea and feel very, very bad about how things are going – here’s Australia’s former ambassador in Newsweek:

In 1988, faced with similar protests, the government killed an estimated 3,000 people as it reimposed control. Nineteen years later they’re still in power. If they use force again would they likely succeed again?
It could have the same result. Mind you, it’s quite often not mentioned that in 1988 there was chaos on the streets. There were a lot of cases where people took the law into their own hands, and some of the deaths were of police and soldiers being summarily executed. The regime argues they were restoring order. That’s not to disguise the fact that the troops had orders to fire, to kill, and they did. And today the troops are already deployed and ready to move whenever the order is given. It’s quite difficult to ensure that whatever action they take is going to end without [more] people dying. And that’s why I think that, given that this is all happening in slow time, there is an opportunity…maybe…to convince the military government that they ought to allow some kind of international visit.

The international diplomatic regime is badly broken and needs to be rebuilt.

AP (via TPM):

Last spring, with insurgents apparently holding three American soldiers in Iraq, it took the U.S. government more than nine hours to begin emergency surveillance of some of the kidnappers’ electronic communications.

The bulk of that time was spent on internal legal deliberations by Bush administration lawyers and intelligence officials, according to a timeline from the office of the director of national intelligence. One of the soldiers was later found dead. The other two are still listed as missing.

Read the whole thing.

In talking to veterans and military folks, the image of a bureaucratic, overlawyered war keeps coming forward.

I won’t lay the blame for causing this – entirely – at the feet of the Bush Administration. But I will say that it’s up to them to fix it.

Global Voices is reporting that soldiers in Mandalay are standing down and letting the monks march.

This could be very big…go over there are read it all.

I noted arrogant ass who believes his position puts him above the law is immaterial to me. He just needs to go with what dignity he can muster, do good works or whatever and stop sullying the Senate with his presence.

In case you agree with me, the message form for his Senate office can be found here.