by Ben Shapiro
After all of that breast-beating, Obama undoubtedly felt better. Confession is good for the soul. Unfortunately, Obama wasn’t confessing his own sins—he was confessing America’s collective sins. Or, more accurately, he was confessing America’s non-sins to the rest of the world in an attempt to seize the mantle of World Citizen, distancing himself from American parochialism in the process.
Obama himself admitted as much back in 2007, when asked about American exceptionalism—the notion that America is an exceptional place, different and better in its foundational ideas from other countries. Sure, he acknowledged, America has some terrific ideas embodied in its Constitution and law—although they’re imperfect. But that doesn’t mean that America is exceptional enough to dictate its values to others. Rather, America is exceptional in the same way other countries are exceptional. In the words of Obama’s apparent foreign policy spokesperson, Barney the Dinosaur: we are special; everyone is special in his or her own way. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” said then-senator Obama, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Perhaps we’re slightly more special than other countries; perhaps not. In any case, America has to “compromise.”10
Compromise. It always sounds so nice. But the consequences of American compromise are slightly less pleasant for the rest of the world. As it turns out, it’s bad for both America and for the globe when America slashes her military budget, as Obama seeks to do—it incentivizes nasty regimes to engage in aggression (see China, North Korea, the Viet Cong, Iran, the old Soviet Union, the Nazis). It’s a problem when the United States unilaterally disarms itself of nuclear weapons, while simultaneously failing to develop missile defense. It’s a bad thing when the anti-American, Nazi-allied, terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood is emboldened in Egypt (Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, hilariously termed the Brotherhood a “largely secular” organization “which has eschewed violence”), and when American ally Hosni Mubarak is overthrown with tacit American support. The world suffers when America hits a “reset button” with Russia that involves her selling Eastern Europe down the river. Millions prepare for decades more in chains when the president of the United States bows to the dictators of Saudi Arabia and China. When America actively undercuts a democratic coup in Honduras, supports an Islamist coup in Libya, tries to push the population of the Falkland Islands into the hands of the dysfunctional Argentinian government, and leaves the Iranian mullahs to slaughter their citizens in the streets—these are all bad things.
When America sublimates her international interests—when we put the United Nations or Vladimir Putin in charge of foreign policy—that’s a net negative for the globe.
But for the left, and for President Obama, it’s a grand triumph.
In this, Obama is the apotheosis of the 1960s generation. Since that tumultuous time of three-way sex in the mud at Woodstock and violent race riots in America’s biggest cities, the left has seen America as a force for ill in the world, a neocolonialist power bent on world domination, strong-arming peaceful and/or democratic nations into embracing our favored policies. Obama’s perspective is different in tone from that of Jeremiah Wright; Obama isn’t nearly as strident, and he’s far cleverer than Wright in presenting his anti-Americanism. But at its root, Obama’s philosophy is still Wright’s: it’s a “God damn America,” “US of KKKA,” “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” perspective. Contrary to popular media belief, you don’t sit in the pews of your spiritual mentor for two decades without imbibing a few of his ideas—even if your name is Barack Obama.
President Obama may pose with the incoming coffins of our corpsmen at Dover Air Force Base,11 but it’s clear that he sees our “corpse men” as a “photo op” (his words) rather than a group of heroes never to be exploited for political gain. After all, when Obama isn’t there to monitor them, our troops are busy “air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”12
President Obama may speak in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and talk about how veterans were “sometimes blamed for the misdeeds of a few . . . sometimes denigrated when you should have been celebrated,”13 but he has no problem associating with Bill Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, proclaiming that he wanted to see a “U.S. defeat.” It also hasn’t stopped Obama from taking donations from “Hanoi” Jane Fonda, who famously went to North Vietnam and labeled our soldiers “war criminals,” or Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA), who suggested that our soldiers had routinely “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,” etc. Kerry, in fact, is widely considered Obama’s foreign policy surrogate.14
President Obama may mimic the patriotic words of the founding fathers but he sees the Constitution as a deeply problematic document. He blames America for global inequality—hence his constant focus on the percentage of world resources Americans consume versus the percentage of the world population we represent. And he blames “the powerful” who maintain this inequality for both domestic crime and international terrorism.15 Growth of American power can only mean more of both.
This perspective certainly doesn’t serve American interests. In fact, it coincides with the interests of Al Qaeda, who also want to see American power wane. So do the communist Chinese. And the power-mad Putin regime. And countless other nasty characters around the world, most of whom can be found in the UN scenes of Team America.
But American interests are not paramount to the left. Quite the opposite: anti-American interests are paramount to the left, and to President Obama as their chosen representative. As Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy under President George W. Bush, said, Obama is “undertaking a radical reformulation of 70 years of American foreign policy. At least since the U.S. entered World War II, there has been a view of the United States as a leading power, a democratic power, a country that acts boldly in its own interests. I think President Obama does not believe that’s the role America should play in the world. . . . Essentially, the President wants to cut America down to size—he would say make America a better citizen of the world. But what he is talking about is moving America away from a position of leadership.”16
If you think America should not play the leading role in the world, you are not a patriot. It’s that simple. Patriotism doesn’t require that you believe that American history is free of mistakes. That would be frivolous and nonsensical. It does require, however, that you recognize that America’s founding ideology is the greatest single governing ideology in the history of mankind; that America’s military has been the greatest fighting force for freedom in world history; that America does not require apologizing for, but fighting for.
The left has disowned this perspective for decades.
Only the left sees terms like flag-waver, jingoist, and super-patriot as insults. Patriotism, in their view, is bad.
They don’t believe this, because they’re globalists. It’s not as easy as that. Globalism is not anti-patriotism. Going back millennia, both Socrates and Diogenes claimed they were “citizens of the world.” But you can be a citizen of the world without disowning America. Citizens all over the world wish their countries were more like America. When Ronald Reagan said that the United States remains the “last best hope for a mankind plagued by tyranny and deprivation,” he wasn’t being jingoistic. He was being a good global citizen and a good patriot.
The left is filled, however, with self-professed good global citizens and bad patriots. Or rather, anti-patriots. Anti-patriotism means something more than belief in the brotherhood of man. It means an active dislike for America, and American power.
The left is anti-patriotic. What’s more, they bully all those who dare disagree. They’ve twisted the American education system to teach generations of Americans that their country is a planetary scourge, second only to global warming in the pantheon of great moral evils. Anti-patriotic bullies slander their opponents as jingoistic boobs in thrall to the military-industrial co
mplex, racists who want to kill brown and yellow people. They say we’re terrorists, and actual terrorists are freedom fighters, as Michael Moore famously spluttered between bites of bacon burger.
Worst of all, the anti-patriotic bullies redefine patriotism to fit their own agenda. Traditional patriotism, it turns out, is bullying; true patriotism is leftist dissent. This leads to the logical conundrum pointed out by John O’Sullivan of the National Review: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Treason is the highest form of dissent. Therefore treason is the highest form of patriotism.”17
But to the left, treason is the highest form of patriotism. No one was more gleeful than the left when Private Bradley Manning leaked a bevy of classified military documents to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks—they saw Manning’s activity as a form of patriotism rather than treachery. Kevin Zeese of the Huffington Post said that Manning’s actions showed “the true meaning of patriotism.” Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com wrote, “Manning clearly believed that he was a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives, and probably was exactly that . . . [a] national hero.” At the Nation, Chase Madar called Manning a “patriot”; Manning, according to Madar, “brought these wrongdoings to light out of a profound sense of duty to his country, as a citizen and a soldier, and his patriotism cost him dearly.” Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic—he is one of President Obama’s favorite bloggers—decried Manning’s placement in solitary confinement, calling it “prisoner abuse.” Michael Bérubé of Dissent magazine labeled Manning a “patriotic whistleblower.” The city of Berkeley, California, actually discussed a resolution that would have called Manning “an American hero” and noted “the good that has been done.”18 Of course, the city of Berkeley actually thinks that marijuana cultivation is a charming hobby and that Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant woman. So we have to take their opinion with a grain of salt.
But the point remains: If traditional traitors are newfound patriots, then traditional patriots are newfound traitors. And they must be stopped at all costs.
And that is precisely what the left seeks to do.
WHEN LIBERALS WERE PATRIOTIC BULLIES
Ironically enough, before leftist anti-patriotic bullying, there was leftist patriotic bullying. It was fun for modern leftists to suggest that George W. Bush wanted to send them all to the gulag for opposing the war in Iraq, but it wasn’t any truer than Tim Geithner’s tax returns. Nobody got arrested for opposing President Bush. In fact, anti–Iraq War “patriots” like Cindy Sheehan were lionized by the mainstream media, granted “absolute . . . moral authority” by deep thinkers like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times.19 It was only when Sheehan stopped paying her taxes that the left decided she no longer deserved papal infallibility.
But historically, the same hasn’t been true for liberal presidents. When they believed something was unpatriotic, they became the world’s biggest bullies. President Woodrow Wilson was the leader of the early-twentieth-century progressive movement, the basic underpinning for today’s liberalism. He campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the promise to keep America out of World War I. When he failed to do so, public outcry reached massive proportions. So Wilson did what leftists always want to do: he locked up his critics in jail and threw away the key. Wilson forced a Sedition Act through Congress that prohibited “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military.” The government was granted the power to prevent distribution of any publications that didn’t meet Wilsonian standards. What violated those standards? As Jonah Goldberg reports in his book Liberal Fascism, Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson explained that such standards were violated when anyone “begins to say that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for the wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the Government for going into the war. They cannot say that this Government is the tool of Wall Street or the munitions-makers. . . . There can be no campaign against conscription and the Draft Law.”
Overall, tens of thousands were arrested by the Justice Department under the Sedition Act. “Obey the law: keep your mouth shut,” read one letter to the German community from the Wilson administration (the same letter should be sent today to all of Gloria Allred’s clients). “A Hollywood producer,” Goldberg reports, “received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution.”20
If George W. Bush had been as much of a bully as Woodrow Wilson, then Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Barack Obama, the entire newsroom at MSNBC, and most college professors would have found themselves in San Quentin pretty quickly.
During the Great Depression, FDR bullied Americans who disagreed with him in similar fashion. Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson led the charge on FDR’s National Recovery Administration, the civilian regime charged with healing the economy; he said Americans who bucked FDR deserved a “sock in the nose.”
Products were labeled with the Blue Eagle—a piece of symbolism designed to show that people were in compliance with FDR’s regulations. In what could aptly be termed a war on women, Johnson said, “It is women in homes—and not soldiers in uniform—who will this time save our country. They will go over the top to as great a victory as the Argonne. It is zero hour for housewives. Their battle cry is ‘Buy now under the Blue Eagle!’ ” As Goldberg writes, FDR “questioned the patriotism of anybody who opposed his economic programs, never mind the war itself.”21 FDR, never hesitant to question the patriotism of his opponents, was more than happy to use bully tactics against them, too.
THE ANTI-PATRIOTIC LEFT RISES
It was in the 1960s, however, that liberal patriotic bullying turned to liberal anti-patriotic bullying. With the rise of the anticolonialist left, America shifted from global good guy to global bad guy in the minds of liberals. John F. Kennedy’s assassination opened the door to the Marxist left’s view of America as global colonizer, a raping, pillaging force intent on world domination for capitalist gain. Where once the left under Wilson had jailed those who protested that war was waged for Wall Street or weapons manufacturers, now the left claimed that war was waged for the military-industrial complex. Where once dissent had been considered unpatriotic, now it was supremely patriotic.
In fact, only traditional patriotism was now unpatriotic.
The backlash against patriotism itself started in the aftermath of World War II. Post–World War II literature was replete with it. Irwin Shaw’s 1948 bestseller, The Young Lions, described patriotism as a pastime “for the rich.”22 In James Jones’s 1961 bestseller, The Thin Red Line, the shirt of a dead soldier became “some forever windless flag symbolic of the darker, nether side of patriotism.”23 This strain had been building since World War I, when it had been a strong but minority viewpoint, with authors like John Dos Passos and Elliot Paul making the case against nationalism. It carried forward and grew during the Korean War. Leftist favorites like World War II bombardier Howard Zinn summed up the philosophy well decades later: “Is not nationalism—that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder—one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? . . . We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history. We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.”24
But there was one tiny problem: American patriotism is unique. If nationalism was the obstacle to world peace, American nationalism was the solution. American patriotism had a solid basis: we had saved Europe twice, resisted the lure of fascism at home, ended slavery, and moved toward perfecting the union in terms of race and sex. All in all, America had a lot to be proud of.
But not for long. The left decided to rewrite history. American patriotism had to be debunked. And so revisionist historians began portraying America as a nasty place, a colonialist land dedicated to the wiping out of brown and yellow peoples. The Founder
s were a bunch of rich white oligarchs intent on protecting their property. Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War for economic rather than moral reasons. World War I was about competing colonial powers beating the snot out of one another. World War II—well, that was about mashing up Europe to make new markets for American capitalism.
After JFK’s assassination, the left ran off the rails. They were no longer proud of their country. In fact, true patriots were ashamed of their country.
In 1962, the initial founders of the radical left group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met in Port Huron, Michigan, to draft what would become a defining leftist statement about America. Their perspective was clear: America was a lie.
In typical leftist fashion, they made themselves feel good by pleading mea culpa for their own wealth. “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” But they weren’t grateful for this—they were ashamed of it.
“Freedom and equality for each individual,” the statement continued, “government of, by, and for the people—these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.” But that complacency was shattered by the leftist reality that America was rotten to the core: “As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss.” America, said the Port Huron statement, was racist, militaristic, materialistic, classist, sexist, and nasty. The only thing worse than America was finding half a worm in your apple.
But while America—and most nations—were evil, people collectively were tons of fun. Men, said the statement, were “infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.”
