John Schwenkler, who has written another very insightful post, takes apart that Joe Klein column from another angle, and makes a vital point:

To start, what exactly does it mean for one country to be “greater” then another, let alone for a single country – especially one riddled with all of the sorts of tremendous problems that ours is – to be the “greatest” of them all? What could make such a thing true? How in world would we set ourselves to finding it out?

There are many different kinds of standards for measuring greatness, of course, but even then there is a nationalist impulse to rank and set nations against one another.  The point is not to deny virtues where our country has virtues or to obsess about its flaws, but to acknowledge that every nation has both and it should be the patriot’s business to attend to his country and not dwell on the failures, real or imagined, of other nations. 

Contrary to Yglesias, I don’t think that it is necessarily the “liberal” understanding of patriotism that it is contingent.  This is, in fact, a basic assumption of paleoconservatives and, I think, of pomocons as well.  Indeed, the contingency of our loyalties is what gives them their meaning.  This is also why we generally prefer particularism over universalism and particular identities over grand, abstract and universal ones: one derives from experience, and the other is derived from ideology or theory.  You don’t love your mother because she is the Greatest (even if she is as far as you are concerned) or because she instantiates the form of Motherhood or embodies an abstract principle, but because she is your mother.  Furthermore, a student of Lukacs and Kuehnelt-Leddihn has no problem whatever agreeing with Yglesias when he says, “a cosmopolitan in the real world doesn’t become one by purging himself of particularist affections, rather he multiplies them and recognizes that others have affections of their own and that these sentiments are all owed a certain amount of respect and consideration.”  The patriot has to recognise that each people regards its customs as best and best-suited for them and that each people loves its country just as he loves his country.  This is not simply to say, “How would you like it if a foreign government invaded your country and tried to remake it in its image?”  That’s a useful exercise, but the point is much deeper than a foreign policy Golden Rule.  It is not just that these efforts will fail, but that it is good that they fail, because it is inherently wrong to attempt them.  More to the point, even if it were true that our country is demonstrably “the greatest” in something, I think Chesterton’s famous saying is the key to understanding patriotism and what is wrong with a lot of Americanism: “the patriot boasts not of the largeness of his country, but of its smallness.”  This is related to the patriotism Prof. Lukacs described in his biography of Kennan, the love in spite of, which leads the patriot to love his country even if he finds much of it to be flawed.

Rod is right that Democrats today suffer from the public perception and the stereotype of insufficient patriotism, but as the discussions of the last few weeks have made clear much of this stereotyping has to do with a misunderstanding of what patriotism requires.  If you come to believe that patriotism has something to do with the national security state and power projection overseas, and that failure to support these things with sufficient zeal is “unpatriotic,” this has inevitably stacked any policy debate in favour of intervention, surveillance and increased police powers.  As Lukacs noted in Democracy and Populism, Democrats have been the less nationalistic party for at least the last half century and Republicans have been more so, and in the last half century this seems to have worked to Republicans’ advantage. 

Most of the time when I see the bumper sticker, “peace is patriotic,” I shake my head.  That isn’t because peace isn’t patriotic, because it is pretty much always desirable for one’s country to be at peace, but because the formulation conveys that the person using this phrase feels the need to assert what should be obvious.  (The phrase can potentially obscure the virtue of fighting in self-defense as well.)  The far more damaging part of what some have called the “defensive crouch” is the belief not just that so-and-so is “weak” on national security (which for the last 18 years has meant “unwilling to start unnecessary wars”), but that he is “weak” because he is not as patriotic as his opponent.  That transforms a disagreement about policy into an argument about whether or not the dissenter or opponent is loyal enough to be allowed to participate meaningfully in the discussion.  That is the really appalling thing about Barone’s article, which falsely imputes to Obama and his “academics” a general and total disrespect for the military and those who serve in the military.  Once again, this conflates criticism of certain policies with some supposedly “unpatriotic” contempt.