Yesterday I made a brief point about Jonah Goldberg’s claim about liberals and patriotism (read it here). The gist is that he thinks liberals are unpatriotic because they want to change America, which is not mutually exclusive, to be sure. But I have a bit more to say on this topic.

To say that one is more patriotic as another is an absurd statement. This is an emotion, and you can’t really compare what you feel versus what someone else feels with any accuracy. You can say that one side makes more displays of patriotism, but this is meaningless since external actions are not necessarily predictive of the internal state of a person. Such displays can be insincere or fake, of course, and complex expressions are expressed in different ways by different people. I don’t think someone putting an American flag up outside their house is insincere, I do think politicians’ rhetoric about patriotism often is, or is at the very least self-serving.

Wanting to make America a better place is hardly the act of someone who dislikes the country. Since circumstances both within and without the country never stop changing, simply preserving the status quo is a surefire path to decline and obsolescence. Strictly speaking, conservatism is supposed to be the mode of thought that recognizes this reality and tries to preserve what’s worth preserving in society while recognizing the need for change. The guiding value here is stability, one which political conservatives like Goldberg value not at all, preferring a mix of unsustainable stand-patism on things like finance and the environment, and radical experiments in neoliberalism, aggressive warfare, and so on. This is an obvious contradiction, but it’s always smoothed over by arguing that it’s returning to some idea of traditional America, before government moved in and ruined everything. But government bureaucrats didn’t just wake up one day and decide to ruin their America, of course. Changes in the function of the government came hand-in-hand with changes in technology, in science, in the composition of the population and social structure. It is, simply, impossible to go back to a pre-New Deal approach to government at this time without giving up post-1920s technology, deporting millions of people, etc., which is to say it’s not possible. Not without ending virtually all scientific research, aside from maybe a few vanity drugs that Pharma will pay for to turn a profit. Not without driving on dirt and gravel roads, or eating tainted food, or paying even more exorbitantly for medical care. It was the then-new problem of longer lifespans that made Social Security happen–people were living longer and there wasn’t a system set up for them. Then one was, and it made things better. Which is not to say that every government program works well, or is well run. Hardly.  There are some programs that have certainly lived out their usefulness because the problems they tried to solve no longer exist (we’re not suffering from a lack of wheat or corn at this moment in time). But the problem I have with a lot of conservative/libertarian critics of government is that they don’t think of government programs in terms of the problems that they’re intended to solve (since government is the problem they’re trying to solve). But the problems are what precipitated the solutions. This is not to say that patriotism requires a certain point of view, politically. But there’s a certain sort of narcissism on display here that you also see in the religious right, a notion that it’s their idea of the thing that’s most important to them, not an actual appreciation of the thing itself and why it is as it is, which would require a humility that they can’t bring themselves to exercise. The idea is quite debatable, after all. I don’t know how deep Goldberg’s patriotism goes, but this is the national equivalent of puppy love, so far as I’m concerned.