Late in life, George Kennan speculated that the United States had simply got too big to be a functioning democracy and a responsible international actor. To preserve the Republic, the Republic would have to be destroyed, broken up into ten to twelve smaller states. Suppose Bacevich became convinced of something similar – what on earth would he do with such knowledge? No one would call Kennan “anti-American” – he was profoundly patriotic, greatly in love with and greatly loyal to his country. But his was not, ultimately, a critique of this or that policy of the American government – it was a radical critique of America itself. And once you are critiquing the very nature of your country, what’s the practical difference between an argument from love and an argument from hate if both arguments end in a similar conclusion? ~Noah Millman

This mixes together a few things that should be kept distinct. If Kennan was profoundly patriotic, greatly in love with and greatly loyal to his country, does it follow that he should not embark on a radical critique of the polity that existed at the present time? Might it not be that profound patriotism, great love and great loyalty to country demand such a radical critique of polity? I said the other day that Kennan was something of an exile in his own country, a position with which I sympathize more and more all the time, and I have remarked before on the striking similarities between Kennan and Solzhenitsyn, who were ironically at odds over questions of policy by the time Solzhenitsyn had come to be an exile in this country. No one really doubted that Solzhenitsyn loved his country and desired something very different from those who hated his country, and indeed his witness against the evils of the Soviet regime stemmed from his love of country. There is a vast practical difference between those who desire renovation and devastation.

In a less extreme way, Kennan’s patriotism and his common-sense recognition of what Montesqieu and Antifederalists knew over two centuries ago–that an extended republic cannot survive as a genuine republic–required him to question the status quo of a continental nation-state that had grown too large for the kind of self-government that had once been ours. This is not a “critique of America itself,” but a critique of a kind of polity, one that is actually far removed from much of the American experience. “America itself” is different from and more than its polity. The nature of America is not in its government, or at least not entirely or primarily in its government. Indeed, “America itself” contains the elements of many different Americas that found greater expression in a more genuinely federalist system, and which might once again find full expression in a more decentralized political order. It is natural that regimes would want to define loyalty to country as disloyalty, because loyalty to country threatens the regime’s monopoly on loyalty, but it is not required that we go along with it.

I am doubful that no one would call Kennan anti-American. Had he not been an important public figure, had his name not been tied to containment doctrine, I am not so sure that Kennan would have been protected against such invective during his lifetime. Indeed, I am not absolutely certain that no one ever flung such a label at him on account of his opposition to Vietnam or other foreign adventures. The views Kennan professed over the course of his mature life would have assuredly qualified him for the label anti-American in the minds of a great many people. That would not have made it so, but it should cause us to think very seriously about the difference between loyalty to America and the idolatry that is Americanism.