The hilarious dilemma of liberal patriotism, redux

Right after the election, I was keeping track of the amazing twists and turns of the Democrats as they tried to come to terms with their loss and to figure out how to change themselves and improve their future electoral prospects, and I concluded that they weren’t going to change at all. Here’s a column that says otherwise. Zell Miller’s withering criticisms of the Democratic party, both in his book, A National Party No More, and in his fiery speech at last year’s GOP convention, have become conventional wisdom among many Democratic pols, who are saying the party has got to become less alienated from religion, less anti-gun rights, and, most importantly, more pro-defense. On the last point, however, wasn’t that the entire theme of the 2004 Democratic convention? Remember those three days of shrill patriotic exhortation? The problem, of course, was that they didn’t mean a word of it. They knew it, and we knew it, and everyone knew that everyone else knew it. So, if orchestrating the world’s biggest-ever transparently phony display of patriotism didn’t hack it, how do the Democrats start to care, really care, about something that they don’t, uh, actually care about? (I wrote about this a couple of years ago in an article called “The Hilarious Dilemma of Liberal Patriotism.”) I see four years of Democrats self-importantly telling each other things like, “We’ve got to show that we’re patriotic, we’ve got to talk more about defense, we’ve got to show that we really care about protecting America from foreign enemies … ” But they never talk about defense, they talk about the need to talk about defense, like Howard Dean saying, “We’ve got to talk to the guy with the Confederate flag and the pickup truck.” He got in such trouble for saying that. But the funny thing was, he didn’t actually talk to the guy with the pickup truck, he talked about the need to talk to him. This is one aspect of the collapse of liberalism. Liberals are either opposed to or indifferent to the things that really matter, and their attempt to make it seem otherwise is only a post-modern game.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 14, 2005 02:12 AM | Send