Via Ross, here is George Kateb’s essay against patriotism.  Within the first few paragraphs, he makes the classic mistake that nationalists tend to make when he says:

Are such feelings properly transferred to a country? Should love of country overwhelm all self-centered reluctance? In particular, is gratitude, a kind of love, the right emotion to feel towards one’s country? Although children are not usually asked to die for their parents, and most parents wouldn’t accept the offer if it were made, some defenders of patriotism imagine the state as a super-parent that may ask its children to die for it. The idea of patriotism is inseparable from killing and dying for your country. A good patriot is a good killer.

Right away this confuses the state and the country, and also rips out of context the obligation to defend one’s country against invasion.  Regarding Ross’ question, I don’t know what Mr. Kateb thinks about Prof. Lukacs’ crucial patriotism/nationalism distinction, but I can say that the distinction vitiates this objection to the connection between patriotism and force, because patriotism is essentially defensive while nationalism tends to be aggressive and domineering.  Children aren’t usually asked to die for their parents, but then their parents aren’t usually placed under threat of attack.  In the general course of life, episodes when one’s parents and country are under attack are happily rare, but would Mr. Kateb really say that there is literally no obligation to defend either when they are under attack?  Grant that your parents would probably not ask you to die that they might live–would you not rightly feel a duty to risk your life in their defense anyway? 

In any case, there are two different questions raised here: should the state be able to oblige you to serve it in a military capacity in the name of patriotism regardless of circumstances, or does a general obligation for all eligible citizens to serve in the military only become operative if your country itself is under attack? 

Next, Kateb focuses his attack on obligations one owes the political community, which is once again distinct from the obligations one owes the patria/patris.  Whether or not we should think of the polis as being prior even to the family, it seems to me that an obligation to one’s home country is prior even to obligations to the polis, which came into existence at some point in association with a particular place where people had already settled in some kind of community.  Arguably, in the case of Greek poleis the distinction between country and political community might be at its weakest, but even here it exists.  Nonetheless, what Kateb finds offensive is the idea of unchosen obligations to the political community.  The confusion between government and country continues throughout the essay.

Kateb’s essay is weighed down further by his reliance on contract theories of government, which advance pleasant fictions (the consent of the governed and social contract) as if they bore some relation to political reality anywhere in history.  If Kateb wants to argue that you can only be patriotic if you reject the fiction of social contract, I might be tempted to agree with him, but for a very different reason.  You need not endorse a Filmeresque idea of a paternalistic or absolute monarchy in which the monarch serves as father of the country to believe that you have obligations to both state and country to which you never consented.  It is telling that Kateb then acknowledges that even theorists of social contract could not, or at least did not, maintain a contrary view.

Kateb has raised two lines of defense for patriotism that are actually defenses of something else, has found both wanting and therefore declares that patriotism has no justification.  But patriotism won’t go away, and this worries Kateb because:

The trouble is that this brute fact contributes to the erosion of the sentiment that government exists by consent and has the status of servant to the people.

So the “brute fact” of patriotism helps to dispel a myth woven by 17th and 18th century political philosophers, which means that patriotism actually works to demystify the real structure of politics.  I suppose patriotism does facilitate “the erosion of the idea of rational consent,” which is mainly a problem for those whose defense of constitutional government is bound up with this implausible theory.  According to Kateb, unless we maintain this myth liberty itself is in danger.  Apparently there are no other arguments, prudential or otherwise, for checking the consolidation and abuse of power and providing legal protections to citizens against their own government unless we embrace the Whig fairy tale that the people are sovereign and have only delegated their sovereignty to some public authority.  This is not right.

All in all, what Kateb wants more than anything is to make an argument against war, and particularly against senseless foreign wars, but scarcely talks about war or the incentives that the state has in waging wars.  Instead, he pins the cause of wars on a sense of obligation to political communities, which he continually mistakes for patriotism, and then blames patriotism for all of it.  In general, what Kateb is complaining about, to the extent that it has anything to do with patriotism, is the tendency of the state to wrap up its war propaganda in appeals to patriotism.  Rather than focusing his criticism on the state for its war propaganda and its desire for more power, Kateb blames patriotism for creating the possibility for the state to exploit natural sentiments of loyalty to country.  The state claims the right to invoke the obligations owed to the country, even when its policies may be contrary to the interests of the country and patriotic duty may demand non-compliance or open resistance, and Kateb takes for granted that the obligations are the same.  Indeed, he makes the state’s conflation of the two the basis for his critique of patriotism.  Patriotism has been horribly violated by warmongers, and it seems that Kateb blames the victim. 

What is frustrating about all of this is that Kateb seems to accept on its face the lie that an “activist foreign policy,” which he clearly opposes, has something to do with patriotism.  Yet it is almost never the case that what we are calling an “activist foreign policy” serves the interests of our country.  Unwittingly, Kateb endorses every critique, whether expressed openly or not, that says that opposition to such a foreign policy is in some sense unpatriotic; it cedes patriotism to nationalists, ideologues and warmongers, when they have the least claim to it.  This is not simply a question of not alienating the broad patriotic majority, but it is really a question of whether we are willing to endorse the deception that imperial misadventures have something to do with the defense of the United States.  Needless to say, should opponents of such a foreign policy ever concede such a fundamental point they will deserve to lose.  The question is also whether we want to endorse this deception for the sake of defending the fiction of government by consent. 

I would argue that it is this fiction that the government owes its existence to popular consent and the system of mass democracy that encourage this fiction that represent the real threats to constitutional liberty both in theory and in practice.  Without the myth of government by consent, the argument that government represents the interests of the people or of the country would be much less persuasive, which in turn would make it much harder for patriots to identify the best interests of their country with whatever the state was doing.  Without mass democracy encouraging people to identify themselves, their country and the government, patriotism would be harder to exploit in the service of government policies, whether focused on “security” at home or “defense” overseas.  The “danger” of patriotism, such as it is, is that citizens mistake their patriotic duty for more or less unquestioning support for unjust and/or illegal state policies and mistake criticism of those policies for attacks on their country, which they naturally resent.  Instead of combating this dangerous confusion, Kateb reinforces and endorses it, which is why he has embarked on the misguided task of discrediting the very patriotism that tells this anti-imperialist that an “activist foreign policy” advanced through unjust and illegal wars is contrary to the best interests of America, a threat to constitutional government, the cause of increased consolidation of power in fewer hands and the pretext for the violation of numerous constitutional liberties.

A three-day old Rasmussen poll shows Obama ahead 53-39 with 8% “not sure.”  Even if most of the late deciders go for Clinton, then Obama still ought to win by five points or more if we assume that these figures are right.  The crosstabs show a pattern very similar to South Carolina, where Obama wins almost every demographic by virtue of winning an overwhelming percentage of black voters.  The poll shows 22% of white voters backing Obama, which I believe is slightly lower than his share of that vote in South Carolina.

Dionne makes a heroic effort to argue that 2008 will be another 1932 in terms of the character of the election, but the reasons he gives are less than persuasive.  Issues related to religion and culture, he says, are fading into the background, and he argues that they always do when “great” crises occur.  There are two major problems with Dionne’s analysis.  One has to do with his assessment of the “long secular era from 1932 to 1980” and the other has to do with his description of the character of the current election cycle.   

Of course, the most notable crisis moment of the last eight years in America was 9/11, and this yielded not a weakening or minimising of religious and cultural divides, but rather an amplification of them because of the role of religion in the conflict and through the association of different sets of cultural values with attitudes towards the administration’s response.  An eruption of “new atheist” manifestoes and books warning about incipient theocracy have all been published in the last three or four years, and these tracts are feeding a growing demand for anti-religious nonsense.  On their own, they may not be terribly significant, but they are symptoms of a widening chasm between secular and religious in America.  The culture wars are not only continuing, but they are arguably intensifying and the belligerents are become more hardened in their opposition.  At this point Dionne will reply that this only represents the “extremes” and not the majority, but the “extremes” are where the energy and activism are.  Milquetoast moderation does not mobilise very many. 

Even Obama’s campaign and the movement building around the campaign are described all the time with religious language, whether half-jokingly, accusingly or out of admiration, and if his agenda is secular his progressivism nonetheless participates in the tradition of the Social Gospel of liberal Protestantism to which he personally belongs.  Likewise, the harshest and most unfair attacks on Obama have been aimed exactly at two things, patriotism and religious faith, that ought not to be gaining any traction in an electorate that is less receptive to culture war politics.  Clearly, it has gained some purchase, or else the campaign would have felt no compulsion to combat the falsehoods being spread about the candidate.  This election cycle is simply overflowing with issues of cultural symbolism, and Obama’s supporters have made no secret that they find his candidacy attractive because of its symbolism.  We are using a very denuded definition of culture and religion if we think that these are not prominent in the current campaign, and it would be a major mistake to assume that these issues are not important in this contest simply because traditional “hot-button” questions have momentarily receded from the center of the debate.  

Just a few months ago, it seemed that quite a few people were fretting that this election cycle had become all together too infused with religious rhetoric, imagery and quarrels.  Obviously religion played some significant role in the Republican nominating contest, and it is wrong to conclude that McCain’s victory represents even a temporary decline of culture war politics.  Let us recall that prior to Romney’s withdrawal McCain was routinely getting perhaps 33-36% of the vote, while the two rivals who were explicitly identifying themselves with more or less credibility as social and cultural conservatives received together almost twice as much support.  The very existence of Mike Huckabee’s insurgent campaign is a testament to the enduring power of this kind of politics.  A candidate so closely identified with evangelical Christianity has never come as far in a nominating contest in my lifetime, and I suspect that this is a sign of more things to come rather than a last hurrah.  Obama and Clinton have started to make more use of religious rhetoric, but this does not herald an end to the culture wars, but instead represents a modest transformation of how people are expressing clashing cultural values. 

The exact cultural issues that will be salient may not remain the same from cycle to cycle.  Gay “marriage” was one of the flashpoints in 2004, but so were rehashed arguments over Vietnam and all the original late-’60s and ’70s culture war baggage these entailed.  After all, contemporary and post facto arguments about Vietnam were never entirely about military involvement in Southeast Asia, but also concerned the definition of America and American-ness.  Even to the extent that Obama frames his entire candidacy around abandoning these arguments, the proposal to stop the argument is itself still part of the same clash, and while Obama may offer the opportunity to move “beyond” the Boomers the election will nonetheless be decided largely by the Boomers and will be fought over the cultural baggage of the late ’70s and ’80s.  To the extent that he is compared to or models himself on liberal heroes of ’60s myth, he represents the wish-fulfillment of liberal Boomers, and it is almost inevitable that the nomination of the first minority major party candidate for President will open or re-open divisions over race and affirmative action that existed in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.

As Ross has suggested more than once, the “long secular era” was the exception.  It was related to the conditions of the country for the war generation, and to post-war economic expansion and a fairly high degree of cultural homogeneity during these decades.  He was referring more specifically to post-war politics, but I think it applies to this entire period.  Post-1965 immigration and cultural fragmentation that came out of the “age of abundance” are part of what created the conditions for the disputes of the last thirty years.  We are still living in the world shaped by cultural radicalism and the reaction against beginning in the ’70s, and the legacies of both seem to be set on trajectories that take them ever farther away from each other.  The “polarisation” so many people complain about is part of our social life and is based on, among other things, the significantly divergent interests of married and religious voters on one side and unmarried and secular voters on the other.  Also, you cannot have ever-greater cultural fragmentation aided by consumer capitalism and increasingly specialised social networks geared towards connecting you to people who are mostly like you and have a new era of amity and collaboration at the same time. 

An excess of cultural diversity in a republican or representative system ultimately means the crisis and breakdown of that system into either an authoritarian or monarchical regime of some sort or a crack-up of the polity into numerous, relatively more homogenous states.  We are probably still quite a long way away from such a crisis, but until it comes political polarisation will keep increasing as citizens come to have less and less in common with one another.

In the spirit of fairness, I should note that some of Obama’s other advisors on foreign policy are catching flack from the left for having been insufficiently interventionist in Rwanda and Bosnia (and “alarmingly” so).  Now that SamanthaPower is fortunately out of the campaign, this arguably might make Obama’s foreign policy team somewhat less appalling.  Of course, it is the candidate people are electing, and this reminder about what some of his advisors did (or, more importantly, didn’t) do thirteen or fourteen years ago doesn’t really change my assessment of his views.  It’s a bit like finding out that Scowcroft is on board with McCain: it’s slightly reassuring that there is at least one voice of reason in the cacophony of madness, but only slightly.

Another week, another surprising general election match-up poll from Rasmussen.  McCain and Obama are essentially tied in Washington at 45-44%.  Obama loses independents, splits moderates evenly and loses 16% of Democrats to McCain, gaining just 11% of Republicans.  Once again, remarkably enough, he loses 18-29 year olds and those 65+, but wins voters in their thirties and forties and even the 50-64 group.  This poll puts Obama nine points behind Kerry’s 2004 result in the state.  The only consolation for Democrats is that Clinton is running worse in the state than Obama.  Needless to say, polls that show Democrats losing Washington in this cycle are hardly encouraging for supporters of either candidate.  By way of comparison, I would note that even Dukakis won Washington by a point.  Someone will point to this same fact and say, “Even Dukakis carried the state, so what are the odds of Obama losing it in reality?”  Perhaps, but then winning Washington will be cold comort if the rest of the country responds to Obama as it did to Dukakis in November.

So the big electoral news over the weekend was the special election victory by Democrat Bill Foster in the race to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert.  He defeated the well-funded and slightly too well-known Jim Oberweis, who had last been seen in state politics being pushed out the side door in the 2004 Senate race to make way for the glorious Alan Keyes.  As everyone has noted, this was a Republican-leaning district, which had voted solidly for Bush both times.  The election was bizarrely on a Saturday and turnout was pathetic, which makes a Republican loss is all the more telling.  Republicans should overperform in special elections relative to general elections, because they tend to vote at higher rates in irregularly scheduled and “less important” contests.  Democratic turnout is historically more closely tied to presidential elections, which suggests that general election turnout for Democratic voters may be huge.  The result certainly reflects the demoralisation of GOP voters and the far greater enthusiasm of Democrats.  The district’s capture by a Democratic challenger shows the continuing trend throughout Illinois’ suburban districts towards the Democrats that we have already seen in the election and re-election of Melissa Bean in IL-08 and the remarkably competitive IL-06 race in 2006 between Roskam and Duckworth to determine who would get Henry Hyde’s old seat.  This suggests that other vulnerable Midwestern Republicans, including some who survived the Ohio slaughterhouse last time, may be in greater jeopardy than in the previous cycle.  The open Ohio and Minnesota seats now seem especially vulnerable to flipping to the Democrats.  This result also has to be disconcerting for Mark Kirk in IL-10, Schmidt in OH-02 (the Heather Wilson of the east) and Walberg and Knollenberg in Michigan, all of whom were narrowly re-elected and all of whom are in at least partially suburban districts. 

What may be happening is a strong pro-Democratic trend in the Congressional races combined with a split electorate for the Presidential race, which seems likely to remain split or even tilt towards the GOP as the Democrats thrash out the rest of their nominating contest over next three months.  What should have been the Democrats’ 1952 or 1920 may turn out to be another 1988.

Update: If you were to list all of the Republican-held seats that voted between 50 and 58% for Bush in 2004, you would have at least 43 seats that could be flipped, including the now-open AZ-03 (Shadegg’s seat), MN-06, Michelle Bachmann’s seat, and both the aforementioned IL-06 and IL-18.

Put this in the “how Republicans will run against Obama” file.  What’s remarkable about the coverage of this statement and Obama’s reaction to the statement is that King’s comments are mostly run-of-the-mill rhetoric against so-called “appeasers” who are “weak” on national security, augmented with very deliberate use of Obama’s middle name and precisely the reversed form of Sullivan’s argument for Obama that I said could be used against him:

The other problem with this talk of Obama as a bridge-builder with the Islamic world is that people might take it rather too seriously and see him as being too close to the Islamic world.  

Declaring that King’s language “has no place in politics” is all very well, but you might as well demand that all war supporters to stop imputing treachery and disloyalty to war opponents.  For that matter, you could ask the sun not to rise.  When Romney announced that continuing his campaign would “aid a surrender to terror” (i.e., the election of a Democrat), I’m sure many people laughed, but no one was particularly scandalised by the statement because it has become so commonplace in Republican circles.  Caricaturing their opponents as “defeatists” is the mainstream GOP’s idea of a coherent national security argument, which doesn’t mean that it won’t win votes.  Typically, winning “national security” messages are long on fear and short on reason.  Demagoguing terrorism is all these people have left, but we would be foolish to assume that it isn’t still a powerful message.  I’ll tell you this much: if Obama tries to dismiss this “appeasement” line of attack in the way that he dismissed King’s comments, he is going to find himself at a significant disadvantage.

Technical problems seem to be resolved now.  Posting should return to a more normal basis.  Many things have happened over the weekend and today that merit some comment, not least of which is the surprising defeat for the GOP in IL-14, but this item flagged by Sullivan caught my attention.  The press man for Republicans for Obama, Tony Campbell, appeared recently on the Laura Ingraham Show.  As it happens, I caught the interview, such as it was, as I was driving home from my lecture, and his account doesn’t match what I recall hearing.  He complains:

I told her she was the one who wasn’t a Republican, that she and others like her had given up the core of the party with this cultural/socialism kick they’ve been on; making personal decisions about people’s private lives, from the FCC’s ruling on Howard Stern to Congressional intrusion in the Terri Schiavo case. All she could say at that point was that I must be liberal because I teach at a university. But people like Laura Ingraham have basically paid for their houses and cars by feeding on the fear and division of the American people. Partisanship is not the end-all, be-all of our existence. Obama, at least, seems to recognize that.

As far as I remember, Mr. Campbell didn’t say much of anything, and he didn’t say half of what he claims he did.  Part of the reason for this was Ingraham’s aggressive approach, as she kept demanding Campbell to identify why he supported Obama on the basis of policy and he kept trotting out the rather tired “I don’t agree with him on everything” dodge, which made for a very uninteresting interview.  Ingraham hardly covered herself in glory, repeatedly conflating the categories of conservative and Republican (which, judging by her endorsement of Mitt Romney, she does not care to distinguish very carefully) and at one point she did indeed declare that Campbell had to be a liberal because he was an academic.  Nonetheless, the rest of this account does not ring true, since Campbell barely had a chance to get a word in edgewise, and when he did he made an entirely unpersuasive claim about Obama’s “leadership,” of which he had no examples. 

This new material referring to the “cultural/socialism kick” is remarkable, which fits nicely into the bizarre fiction that social conservatives somehow dominate GOP priorities.  The reference to the Schiavo episode is particularly revealing, since Obama did not oppose the unanimous consent motion that allowed federal intervention in the Schiavo case, which he has said recently in a debate he regrets.  Obviously, people can change their minds, but what does it say about his “leadership” that Obama ducked on a controversial case where non-intervention was actually the right move both legally and morally?  Again, when the going gets tough the hopeful are nowhere to be found. 

Why invoke this episode as a reason for abandoning the GOP when Obama did nothing to oppose it either?  It is typical of this kind of critique of the supposed hyper-moralism of the GOP that the episode that purportedly demonstrates so-con dominance more than any other actually had members of both parties acquiescing in a bad decision.  What’s more, the episode reflected no real policy initiative and has advanced the cause of life not at all, and has probably functioned more as a political setback.  It was a symbolic gesture without any greater significance.  It reflects the shallowness of the GOP leadership’s support for life, not its intensity.  Meanwhile, in his desire to transcend partisanship Mr. Campbell goes from backing the party that went overboard in the Schiavo case to supporting the candidate who voted “present” on the state version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, going literally from one extreme to the other.  That is apparently what “pro-life” post-partisanship involves.

These attacks are supposed to show that Obama can’t be pushed around. But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama’s big theory is bankrupt. You can’t really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules. ~David Brooks

But the big theory, the idea that “voters are tired of the partisan paralysis of the past 20 years,” is based on a complete misreading of public frustration with the political class.  The frustration with the two parties does not relate to how or whether they do or do not cooperate, but relates instead to what they propose to do and not do.  There hasn’t been “partisan paralysis” during the past 20 years, but all too often collaboration of members of both parties in policies that do not have the support of large parts of the public or that serve narrow interests at odds with the interests of the majority.  There have been a number of fairly significant pieces of legislation moved through Congress and signed into law during the past 20 years, but the public’s frustration with the system comes from the quality of that legislation and the consequences of the policies of at least the last 20 years, especially as it relates to trade, immigration and, to some extent, foreign policy.  Lack of representation, not lack of cooperation or lack of action, is what frustrates the tens of millions of people who would contemplate backing an independent candidate.  Obama gave the wrong diagnosis, and so prescribed the wrong cure: despite some rhetorical maneuvering on trade, Obama stands with the establishment consensus on all those issues where the disconnect between the public and the political class is greatest, and offers the “healing” of post-partisanship while proposing almost entirely the same content in his agenda as any establishment candidate.

One of the things I missed with my computer’s untimely demise this week was Obama’s absurdly short press conference earlier this week.  Now Obama’s limited availability to the media has become very noticeable over the last few months, and it has remarkably coincided with the wave of favourable coverage that had been going on for at least the last six months (and, really, for the last 14).  For those who missed it, Obama ended this press conference after eight questions.  You may recall another candidate and then President who disliked the formal ritual of the press conference and held very few for years–his name is George Bush.  In Bush’s case, he stayed away from these things to avoid having to speak on camera more than necessary, since he was hardly a master of elocution, but in Obama’s case the reluctance to talk to the press in these formats is odd and more damaging.  It feeds into an impression of arrogance that the “cult” atmosphere of his rallies already creates, and it undermines his calls for transparency in campaigning and politics.  Surely one of the better ways to have transparency is for politicians to speak with the press on a reasonably regular basis.  Obama has been a media darling in spite of his coolness towards them, but that may not last forever and won’t if he can’t give straight answers to questions.  As far as the Rezko business goes, Obama seems to have no reason to avoid questions about it, since there appears to be nothing that ties him to any of Rezko’s wrongdoing, so the evasions are creating problems for him where none should exist. 

Update: John Heilemann views the press conference brush-off in much the same way:

It also gives off the distinct whiff of arrogance and entitlement that’s lately been emanating from him.  Eight questions! OMG! That’s, like, three more than I usually answer — and five more than I should have to answer!”