Anti-Patriotism As Political Promiscuity
But to fully love a woman, or a country, is to love some one particular thing. Now, it is surely better to love a woman than to love her qualities. But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly. ~Will Wilkinson
In other words, if America were to become unfree it would be time to abandon it and move on to greener pastures? It’s not clear to me how this is a credit to the love of freedom, since it basically entails getting out of town as soon as freedom is seriously restricted. Instead of staying and fighting for freedom and country, this approach involves leaving your country when the going gets tough. Then again, you wouldn’t want to be oppressed and limited by community or patriotic loyalty, since that might get in the way of your own success.
4 Responses to “Anti-Patriotism As Political Promiscuity”
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Daniel,
I understand you to possess strong federalist principles. In other words, you believe that power should be allocated to the smallest possible institutional structure, avoiding concentration and centralization.
This prevents government from being too oppressive and if it becomes so people can vote with their feet and leave to a state that is more hospitable to their interests (or freedom as the case may be).
How does rootedness and dedication to community and country factor into that position?
That’s a good question. As I see it, the argument for federalism is first and foremost preventing the concentration of power in central government. The next valuable thing about it is that it allows government policy to be adapted to local conditions and community standards. Having states “competing” with each other with a variety of policies is a much less important consideration. I would argue that greater decentralism does make it possible for people to relocate to states where the politics are more to their liking, because there is greater variety of policies, but I would say that instead of leaving they should try to stay and change the politics of their home state. In other words, I think local patriotism should typically trump the pursuit of more desirable conditions; local patriotism should drive people to try to improve conditions where they are, rather than embark on an endless search for ever-more amenable conditions. Constitutional liberty wasn’t won by leaving the country, but by staying and contesting for legal protections.
It’s also important to note that decentralized government makes for a greater possibility of patriotic loyalty to communities other than one’s nation. This is something that the Cato discussion seems to me to have overlooked. When Kateb and Wilkinson rail against the excesses of “patriotism” (read nationalism), they don’t stop to consider the possibility that it might be the love of, e.g., state, town, parish, neighborhood, and family, rather than some sort of indiscriminate devotion to the good of humanity as such, that might provide the most useful corrective to the kinds of “anti-democratic” tendencies they’re trying to expose. This is the sort of point that Bill Kauffman likes to make: in order to sustain its hegemony, the national government has to undermine local autonomy and the kind of provincialism that comes along with it. But rejecting the (supposed) demands of one of the communities of which one is a part does not entail throwing away the bonds of communal loyalty altogether.
[...] Larison replied: In other words, if America were to become unfree it would be time to abandon it and move on to greener pastures? It’s not clear to me how this is a credit to the love of freedom, since it basically entails getting out of town as soon as freedom is seriously restricted. Instead of staying and fighting for freedom and country, this approach involves leaving your country when the going gets tough. Then again, you wouldn’t want to be oppressed and limited by community or patriotic loyalty, since that might get in the way of your own success. [...]