When I think about why I love my country I don’t think about the reasons some people love it more. One thing I’ve done in my life is to study my country and learn about all it’s shortcomings. That has taken some of the lustre off, but it actually deepened my fondness for this place. I will not wake up one day, after having read about some particularly unsavory piece of nastiness, and experience disillusionment. I love America with all its warts because I believe that progress is possible within this system. It’s not the kind of love that blindly insists that America is the only great country in the world or that it is in some sense the best country. But there is a sense in which America created and bestowed principles that much of the world has adopted to its advantage and the rest of the world has not adopted to their detriment.
I usually do not bother to mention this positive legacy of America because I think it is abused to make excuses for our failings and because I think the distinction has mostly outlived its usefulness. I think Europe, parts of East Asia, Canada, and Latin America have learned and adopted the most important American principles and they no longer need our instruction. In fact, I believe many of them have taken what’s good in our system, thrown out much that is bad, and have matured politically to the point that they have more to teach us than we have to teach them. This is particularly true in the post-Cold War era, where America has begun to succumb to some of the temptations of empire that bedeviled the British before us.
It’d be nice to erase the Bush years from history, but even if we could do that we’d find that the seeds of disaster were germinated in the Clinton years and planted during the late 20th-Century. That history is beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s important to remember that Bush may have driven us off course but we were headed down the wrong road to begin with.
The essential goodness of America is found in its founding documents and in the imperfect struggle to live out the meaning of our creed (in other words, through the progressive movement acting within the construct of our founding principles). Even the sometimes stultifying effect of our two-party system provides the context within which we can achieve progress with stability.
Yet, respect and love for this country doesn’t mean loving it for right or wrong. It means a dedication to the proposition that wrongs can be righted, eventually, by following the principles of our system. That is why Glenn Beck’s kind of patriotism seems like the opposite of love. His love is the love of the besotted. It’s all surface-level and fantasy. One day Glenn Beck will wake up and discover that his princess is a pumpkin or his prince is a frog. But, that too, will be a fantasy because pumpkins and frogs are worthy of love, warts and all.
