Dead on.

Yep. And you're right to give the guy credit for being honest about it. It's refreshing.

The point's been made and bears repeating, liberals do not love America as she is, the love the America they think she should be. Or they deceive themselves about what she is.

If the phrase hadn't been co-opted by the Soviets to refer to a particular ethno-religious group, "Rootless Cosmopolitans" would actually be a fine description to append to these lefties.

I guess we'll have to settle for Transnational Progressives -- "Tranzis."

I prefer "trogs."

I've always thought of patriotism as a natural practical application of the leftist motto "think globally, act locally". Wherever you happen to be born, your political efforts should be spent first and foremost on making your country the best it can be, which is called patriotism. Everybody in the world should do this. (And if you happen to be born in a place like Iran, well, as the leftists always remind us, "dissent is patriotic", which is true, because ridding your own country of tyranny is very patriotic.)

I think the problem is that leftists, who view economics as a zero-sum game, seem to believe that what's good for one country must be bad for another. Thus, promoting American interests means helping the richest country at the expense of poorer ones, which would clearly be unjust. But the truth is, American values of capitalism and justice are good for everybody. The more countries that adopt them, the better off we'll all be. But the leftists don't believe this. They've been permanently derailed by Marxism, so their world-view is inherently based on conflict, and they have a hard time with patriotism.

But if your values and ideology are in the right place, there is no conflict between patriotism and global compassion.

"Kith" comes from the Old English noun "cyth," referring to "knowledge" i.e., "that which is known," or "those who are known" i.e., familiar places, acquaintances and friends.

(Never in my life did I think that there would be a reason to share this kind of information. Then again, never in my life did I think I'd find a place where you can, in the span of a single day, read about both intelligence failures and do-it-yourself diorama castle molds. So, go figure.)

Coming soon from AT&T Wireless -- the Kith and Kin Plan.

Then again, never in my life did I think I'd find a place where you can, in the span of a single day, read about both intelligence failures and do-it-yourself diorama castle molds. So, go figure.)

Ain't INTERNET grand?

I've always wanted to ask these people: if there's no difference between here and somewhere else, then why are you here rather than somewhere else?

The answer is: the tranzis are mostly cretins. They are the coddled sons and daughters of affluent Westerners who wouldn't last for a day in the slums of Calcutta or Conakry. Whey they know of actual "world history" you could fit into a thimble. They love the UN for their hippy-dippy notion of what it could be rather than what it is (inept, dishonest, racist, obstructionist, wasteful).

You don't find many tranzis among people who actually have to work for a living.

Well, I've met some who had to work for a living Monty.

And they are very, very resentful about it.

The hypocrisy of the left goes beyond the corruption and abuse of the term "patriotism." Note that while almost every nation acts in a decidedly self-interested manner (France, Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, etc.), contra the tenets of transnational progressivism, it is the US and Britain who are besieged by the criticisms of liberal "patriots."

lauraw:

Oh, tell me about it! I used to work with a young lady who had recently graduated college with a poli-sci major, discovered that no one gave a crap what she thought about world politics, and had to go back to community college and take some computer courses so she could get a secretarial job. Nothing wrong with that, but she was so bitter about it...she griped constantly about how the work was benath her skill-level, how much more money she should be making, and how it was nothing but sexism that was holding her back. She'd hold forth for an hour on the evils of capitalism and Western democracy if you got her going.

The saddest part of this story is that she was a stone-cold hottie and made my pants feel tight. Why are the pretty ones always deranged?

Monty:

Why are the pretty ones always deranged?

Why are the pretty ones always deranged?

Just realized how badly that last comment read. I should have said, "... than your typical coddled American tranzi." That was my whole point, actually. In fact, the person of whom I speak was damn grateful to be here, and thought Reagan was the greatest president ever for his role in destroying the Soviet Union. She had very little patience with "progressives" who were forever talking about how evil America was, and how rough it is to live in this country.

Tim Worsetall (a British blogger) wrote about this. I thought y'all would appreciate his take and some comments:

"This will come across as all corny but if we remove the word "country" and substitute "culture" then I think the argument has a problem. That very general idea that holds the Anglosphere together, historically and worldwide a rather odd one, that it is the individual that matters, that governments are selected by us to do our bidding, that we own the State not the State owning us, these oddities such as the Common Law, assumption of innocence, jury trial by one’s peers (yes, I know that these are often observed only in the breach), that the Lords and Masters have to obey the same laws as the rest of us, that we don’t have to march in step to some preceived Nirvana, that such a thing would in fact be the very negation of a civilised society.....as I say, corny but yes I do believe that this is a better culture than any of the others on offer out there and thus I can and am a patriot without lying to myself."

My reply:

Here's another word to substitute: heritage. The arts (literature, theatre, dance, painting, architecture, landscaping, etc.) and sciences (military, physical, social, natural, industrial, etc) are what they are today because of the British and their influence on the world.

National pride is just like personal self-esteem: it's earned. Just as a person needs to honestly evaluate and correct flaws and mistakes, Britain has endeavored to reform itself over time (when was the last time anyone attended a hanging, let alone a Protestant or Catholic's being burned at the stake?). Anyone who sits through Last Night at the Proms without his heart swelling with patriotism needs to go on a museum and cathedral tour to learn exactly why he should be proud of his country, culture, and heritage.

(I'm American, but my husband is English; I love England second only to the USA.)

Angryeconomist’s reply to mine:

Last night of the proms!? come off it! utter tosh.
Q "(when was the last time anyone attended a hanging, let alone a Protestant or Catholic's being burned at the stake?)."

Well they found more effective ways to kill them in parts of the British Isles - guns, bombs - didn't they?
I am not particularly proud to be anything. I enjoy living in Britain, get a buzz out of it... here's another word - counterculture. What other culture could cultivate such disdain for its own heritage?! and have such an amusing time doing it!?
Another word... "make and ar*e of and pull off a lucky break or claim resounding success" - what other culture could make such an arse of things regularly and claim its actually brilliantly successful.
And Britain did not invent all arts and sciences! don't you watch "What did the ancients do for us?" where we discover that the ancient foreigners invented most of it all thousands of years ago whilst us Brits were giving each other tattoos and rustling each other's livestock.

To a large extent I like Britain, but find that such an inflated view of its importance in the world is setting us back as a nation immensely and cultivates arrogance and patriotic lies.

My final comment:

My goodness, you are angry!

I didn't mean to imply the British invented arts and sciences, merely that they made great contributions (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Sire Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Edmund Halley, Adam Smith, Jane Austen, Admiral Nelson, The Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington, Crick and Watson--well, you get the idea).

If you only see the negative aspects of your country, how miserable you must be, and you're just as biased as you accuse me of being. I'm not blind to the injustices and faults of the past, but instead of dwelling on them I recognize the great strides taken to redress the wrongs. Yes, the Proms may be corny to someone as enlightened as you, but I'll keep my sense of pride, even at the cost of your contempt.

Finally, I regret that you can't tell the difference between state-sponsored public executions (after a trial, however corrupt) and terrorism.

http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2005/08/monbiot_on_patr.html

This is an issue I've wondered about myself. But still, personally, I don't see how 'patriotism' must somehow become immoral, any more than a child's love for its parent must become immoral.

Each person is born into a certain facticity--parents, grandparents, country, even that person's own self--which that person was not able to choose beforehand. However, any person may (or may not) 'choose himself', as the existentialists say--by taking moral responsibility not only for himself, but for his family and his country. A moral patriotism is no more a knee-jerk reaction of 'my country is always right' (as Monbiot seems to think it is) than moral parenting is a knee-jerk reaction of 'my child is always right'. Patriotism is not an obligation to side with one's country which trumps all other moral obligations--it is not an absolute duty to one's country. Rather, patriotism is the moral obligation of a responsible person to LOVE his country, and to love it unconditionally--just as the son must love the father or the mother must love the daughter.

A liberal (which, in the old-fashioned sense, I consider myself) or any other person does not offend against patriotism if he truly believes his country has committed a moral evil and that he is now obligated to work against the majority of his fellow countrymen. Rather, he offends against patriotism, first, if he does not also hold himself personally responsible for the sins of his country as well as its virtues; second, if he has allowed himself to cease to love his country.

Both of these last, however, would make 'dissent' a far less trivial matter for the individual--more like an act of personal repentance and atonement than the cheap hankering after an honored place in history that it becomes when the dissenter has severed all emotional ties and moral obligations to his country in order to stand--'pure' and untroubled--apart from it in judgement.

Alex:

The problem with your interpretation is that everybody has a personal standard for "moral evil," giving us some 300,000,000 definitions of patriotism in this country alone. They are practicing patriotism to their personal vision of the country, which is to say, they're simply doing what they feel is right. That doesn't make them patriots, it just means they're opinionated.

Actually, a lot of Tranzis work on Wall Street and its environs, making good $$ for themselves and the big banks and corporations, and taking every tax break they can get. Then they bitch that America is stingy. I keep telling them that they can voluntarily pay more tax, but they just give me dirty looks.

Geoff--

I believe you may have misunderstood me.

That there are certainly many different personal definitions of 'moral evil', doesn't really affect what I attempted above as a definition of 'patriotism' (except insofar as my own conception of patriotism is itself simply another example of the plurality of ideas which arises naturally among free citizens)--that it calls a person, essentially, ALWAYS to feel a similar responsibility and affection for his country to that which he feels for his family or for himself--but that it does not also mean that this person is also NECESSARILY morally compelled to assist in or at least never to actually work against every action which the majority of his countrymen have agreed on as their best course.

In other words, I believe that there is a moral imperative to patriotism--defined as a personal responsibility for and affection for one's country--but I also believe that this does not mean that one's country is (as--God help me--Maureen Dowd would say) an 'absolute moral authority'. There are (as I think almost everyone recognizes) higher obligations than the obligation to one's country--just as there are higher obligations than those to one's family and one's self.

I was certainly not proposing that one's patriotism--one's moral responsibility for the actions of one's country and filial love for that country--should be conditional on the degree to which one's country fulfills one's own personal fantasy of the perfect utopian republic.

Europeans learned many lessons from the two World Wars, most of them wrong. For example, they believe patriotism is a cultural malignancy that, left unchecked, inevitably results in Mrs Cohen getting shoved into an oven. They believe war is always, always, ALWAYS wrong and that arriving at a consensus is the same thing as being right. Mostly, they believe they are ethically and intellectually superior to Americans because they believe these things.

Wait, I thought dissent was the "most patriotic thing you could do"! Geoff said correctly: "it just means they're opinionated." They SHOULD be patriotic because it's patriots that give the right to dissent. Dissent just means you're FREE.

Monty said:
what it could be rather than what it is
That's exactly what their problem is about EVERYTHING. They refuse to deal with reality; it's all about Utopian idealism. We suck because we're not perfect, according to their standards. Nevermind that we're as close to "utopia" as is possible as long as humans inhabit the earth, we still suck. And they "dissent" (how patriotic!) as long as those other pesky humans who don't share their utopian idealism are around mucking things up.

As a first generation American, and having been raised in a neighborhood of other first generation American children, my feelings of patriotism are slightly different. My parents were the staunchest patriots you would ever want to meet. My father thought paying any less than the full amount on his income tax was unthinkable. The first spanking I got for a bad report card grade was for getting a "S" in citizenship. I should be so PROUD to be an American! Maybe people who have lived under other governments are the only ones who can really appreciate what we have here. I can honestly say that until 9-11 I never really felt strongly about being an American. It was just something that I was. But after 9-11, when everyone wore flags and we were all so united, I was very proud to be American, proud af all my fellow Americans, and the feeling never went away. I think that the unifying effect that 9-11 had on America is a big part of why we were never attacked again. It galvanised our country in a way that nothing else could. Another attack and we would all have been yelling for another Hiroshima.