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CHAPTER FOUR

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POSITIVE PATRIOTISM

HOW TO TAKE PATRIOTISM BACK

What is the role of patriotism in an age of terror? Radcons emphasize pledging allegiance, showing the American flag, and singing the national anthem. They label as “traitors” anyone who criticizes the President or questions any detail of America’s “war on terrorism.” Their goal is to keep America the most powerful nation on earth, and force into submission any other nation that might threaten us. Their patriotism is all about expunging “evil” outside our borders. Terrorism is another evil that must be eliminated through discipline and force. And the war on terrorism is another example of us against them—if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

The Radcon version of patriotism requires no real sacrifice by most Americans. And it asks nothing of the more fortunate members of our society. Radcons don’t link patriotism to a citizen’s duty to pay his fair share of taxes to support the nation. And they don’t think patriotism requires that all citizens serve the nation. Theirs is a shallow patriotism that derives its emotional force from disdaining foreign cultures and confronting foreign opponents. As such, it imperils the future security of America and the world, for reasons I will outline in a moment.

Yet many liberals have been silent about patriotism. They seem wary of it or, at best, embarrassed by it. Perhaps that’s because, in recent decades, patriotism has so easily morphed into crass “America First” chauvinism. But that’s not the only form patriotism can take.

Liberals should embrace patriotism—not the negative and imperialistic version the Radcons are peddling, but a positive patriotism that’s better suited to our time: a patriotism that’s based on love of America, but not on contempt for what’s not American; that cherishes our civil liberties and our democratic right to dissent; that understands that our national security depends as much on America’s leadership and moral authority in the world as it does on our military might; and that emphasizes what we owe one another as members of the same society.

This hopeful and reformist version of patriotism has deep roots in American liberalism. Unlike the Radcon’s chest-thumping pride—exhibited by all great powers in history, from Rome to imperial England—the liberal version flows from an awareness that America is defined by its ideals. As John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison well understood, American power is not an end in itself; it is a means of preserving and advancing those ideals.

WHY IT’S NATURAL AND EVEN HEALTHY TO LOVE AMERICA FIRST

Think of yourself standing at the center of a set of concentric rings spreading outward in every direction, reflecting how connected and responsible you feel toward those within them. Inside the closest ring is your immediate family. Inside the next are your close friends. Within the next is your community—neighbors, other friends and acquaintances, colleagues at work. Eventually you reach the nation as a whole. Beyond that national ring may lie another one, which includes all the people of the world. Most of us feel vaguely connected to other people on the planet simply by virtue of our common humanity—73 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “I regard myself as a citizen of the world as well as a citizen of the United States"¹—but the closer the ring, the stronger the feelings of affinity.

Some on the left—the remnants of sixties activism—don’t love America first. They consider themselves citizens of the world rather than of any particular nation. By the same token, there are conservatives who don’t seem to love America first, either. At a recent college reunion I came across a former classmate (I’ll call him Jim) who’s now a top executive at a large global corporation. Jim told me proudly that his company has customers, investors, and employees from all over the world, and that he himself owns homes in Connecticut, the Bahamas, and southern France. Politically, Jim described himself as a “staunch free-market Republican conservative.” But when I brought up the subject of American patriotism, he winced. He said he felt no more connection to Americans than to the citizens of other nations where he does business or resides. Jim isn’t the first global executive I’ve met who feels no special moral allegiance to any particular country.

Thankfully, for most of us, there is a moral difference. We’re connected to other Americans in ways we aren’t connected to people living outside our borders. We may have a general moral obligation to every human being on the planet, but we feel a special bond with other Americans. We also feel a particular responsibility. As citizens, we have entered into a compact with one another.

Every nation and culture possesses such a compact—sometimes implicit, sometimes spelled out in detail; usually a mix of both. In fact, a nation is defined by its social compact. It is found within the pronouns “we,” “our,” and “us.” We hold these truths to be self-evident; our peace and freedom are at stake; the problem affects all of us. These pronouns are powerful because they reflect feelings of affinity and connection, not because they draw upon hate or contempt for “them” outside the compact.

Patriotism that springs from feelings of affinity and responsibility is different from patriotism that glorifies our nation and denigrates others. Both kinds of patriotism give priority to “us” over “them.” But the two kinds draw on different emotions, and have different consequences.

The first kind—call it “positive patriotism”—involves a special concern about the well-being of other Americans, but not necessarily to the exclusion of others around the world, and not at their expense. The second kind—negative patriotism—wants Americans to do better and be better than anyone else. Negative patriots also want to keep careful control over our borders, lest American culture and language become “diluted” by what’s outside.

Negative patriotism is just about all we hear from Radcons. Talk-show host Michael Savage’s harangues are typical: “[O]ur future as a nation depends on reawakening to the American identity that made us the greatest nation on the Earth. What is that identity? Borders, language, and culture.”²

Robert Bork fears for the unity of the nation. “It was still possible to think of the United States as more or less culturally unified in the 1950s,” he writes. “But now we are reversing direction and becoming a chaos of cultures that cannot, or more accurately will not, be unified. . . . [M]ulticulturalism is essentially an attack on America, the European-American culture, and the white race, with special emphasis on white males.”³

These sentiments are poor substitutes for thought. Savage and Bork long for a cultural purity America never had. They echo tirades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the country’s previous great wave of immigration. Xenophobic rants are as unwarranted now as they were then. Our unique strength as a culture has always been our pluralism, diversity, and tolerance. Most of us are descended from people who crossed our borders from somewhere else, with a different language and culture. Eventually they and their descendants merged into America. And they also changed it.

Negative patriots want Americans to believe in the “superior goodness of the American way of life,” as Bill Bennett puts it. Patriotism, to him, requires that we tell ourselves and our children that America has provided more freedom, equality, justice, and prosperity, and spread it more widely “than any nation in the history of mankind” and that “our open, tolerant, prosperous, peaceable society is the marvel and envy of the ages.”⁴

This is pure drivel. First of all, Bennett should get his facts straight. As I’ve said, income and wealth are distributed less equally in the United States than in any other major advanced economy. When it comes to life expectancy, the percentage of children in poverty, or health insurance coverage, America still lags behind Canada, France, Germany, Britain, and Japan. We rank forty-second in the world in infant mortality, behind all of Europe as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. And “peaceable” isn’t one of the adjectives that immediately comes to mind when comparing the United States to other major nations in rates of murders and assaults.

But facts aside, why, exactly, is it so important to think we’re better than everyone else? It’s entirely possible to love America more than any other country without believing it’s the best in all respects. In fact, thinking we’re the best may lead to smugness that stands in the way of our becoming better or learning from others.

Radcons celebrate American preeminence itself. But being “superior” is nothing new in history; the world has known many great powers that rise and subsequently fall. America’s uniqueness is found not in our bravado but in our ideals. America was invented as an aspiration—“conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men [that is, all people] are created equal.” This was the great liberal insight of our Founding Fathers, and it became America’s gift to history. It’s a goal still worth fighting for.

National security is important to both kinds of patriots—positive and negative. But they have very different views about the best way to achieve it. Positive patriots see security as the by-product of strong alliances with allies who share our basic values, of international cooperation backed by military strength when necessary, and of America’s moral leadership in the world. They also understand that a nation whose citizens have a well-developed sense of mutual responsibility will be stronger than one whose citizens feel disconnected, because the former are more likely to support and serve their country.

Negative patriots, on the other hand, tend to think national security comes from being the most powerful nation on earth—with the biggest armaments, best military technology, and strongest fighting force. They want America to be free to assert its power anywhere, unconstrained by treaties. (A “core” principle of conservatism, says columnist George Will, is “to preserve U.S. sovereignty and freedom of action by marginalizing the United Nations.”)⁵ They emphasize the superiority of America rather than the mutual responsibilities of Americans.

Positive patriots have to stand ready to stop aggression and genocide, of course. But positive patriotism doesn’t need a foreign enemy to define itself or in order for it to flourish. At its best, the American tradition of liberal internationalism has reflected our drive to expand our founding ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy.

Negative patriotism, by contrast, automatically sets nation against nation, culture against culture. When well-being and security are assumed to depend on having more wealth and power than anyone else, there can be only one winner. Negative patriotism is fueled by the threat of evil foreigners “out there” eager to destroy us or to poison our culture. Without that threat, negative patriots wouldn’t have much to talk about. Guided by negative patriotism, American activism in the world is the bullying typical of every great power in history.

My paternal grandfather, Alexander Reich, was born in New York in 1891. His future wife, Minnie Gottlieb, was born there a few years later. Both families were Jewish. Al and Minnie met each other when they were still in their teens and married in 1913. But their parents wouldn’t attend their wedding. Why? Because Alexander’s had come to America from Austria, and Minnie’s had come from Hungary. The Austrians looked down on the Hungarians; the Hungarians resented the Austrians. Al and Minnie weren’t trying to marry outside their Jewish religion or even, for that matter, outside their same five-block section of New York City. Austria and Hungary had even been part of the same empire. Nonetheless, the two families were so blinded by negative patriotism, they missed the wedding.

If missed weddings were the worst consequence of negative patriotism, it wouldn’t be so dangerous. But negative patriotism linked to nation or tribe causes bloodbaths. In recent years it has led to slaughter in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Kashmir, Liberia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Israel, to name some of the killing fields. It has fostered anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant violence in Europe. And it nurtures terrorist hate.

Certainly, America must be on guard against terrorists and other evil aggressors “out there.” But a patriotism based on the combination of fear of certain outside groups and unquestioning glorification of America will only harm us. If America, as the remaining superpower, is to lead the world—guide, not try to dominate or control—we have to respect other nations and cultures.

After college, I went to England for graduate study. Bill Bennett may disagree, but the English way of life isn’t so bad. Though I don’t much care for English cooking, their gardens are spectacular, and they do have a way with words. Oxford University, where I studied philosophy and economics, is still one of the best institutions of higher learning in the world, some four hundred years after its founding. Moreover, as the world’s oldest democracy, England has done more than its share to spread freedom, justice, and tolerance—although its record is far from perfect.

I was a bit lonely when I arrived. I figured the best way to meet English students was to get involved in a dramatic production. Even if they don’t recite Shakespeare in their sleep, most Brits love the theater. When I went to read for a play, I met a young Englishwoman who was also auditioning. We began talking, and within minutes I was smitten. Not wanting to appear an overly aggressive American, I didn’t ask for her name and address—a terrible mistake. There were ten thousand students at Oxford, and there was little chance that either of us would get parts. What to do? My ingenious American mind came up with a plan. I decided to direct my own play, and put posters up all over Oxford announcing my auditions a few days later. Sure enough, she appeared, and I cast her in the female lead. That was thirty-five years ago and she’s still my leading lady. To this day, Clare thinks she got the part on the basis of her acting ability.

Okay, I confess it: I married an Englishwoman. I could have married American, but I chose English. Sorry, Bill Bennett and Michael Savage. But I still love America.

WHY RADCON POLITICAL
CORRECTNESS IS DANGEROUS

All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

—Hermann Göring⁶

Radcons charge liberals who look for ways to improve this country with “blaming America first.” It’s an old debater’s trick: Impugn the motives of someone who levels a criticism, and shift the conversation away from the content of the criticism to the person making it. The maneuver silences those who might be tempted to criticize and gives the public an excuse to ignore those who do. It tags anyone who questions American policy as unpatriotic. Bill Bennett says liberals have “turned a simple and noble impulse, love of country, into a suspect category—or, just as corrosively, an unfashionable one.”⁷

It’s a ludicrous accusation. Being critical of the nation is a far cry from being unpatriotic or anti-American. In fact, most social criticism—Bennett’s included—is based on a love of America’s ideals and a concern we’re not living up to them. If our nation’s social critics didn’t care so much, they wouldn’t bother.

Suffragettes didn’t “blame America first” when they demanded that women have the right to vote. They were patriots who rested their entire case on the ideal of American democracy. Muckraking journalists such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens didn’t blame America first when they discovered corruption in high places. Labor leaders who demanded a minimum wage, a forty-hour workweek, and safe working conditions rested their case on America’s founding ideals. So did civil rights leaders who pointed out the wide gulf between America’s promise of equal opportunity and the reality that black Americans experienced every day.

Among my earliest memories is my father telling me what a wonderful place America was and what a privilege it was to live here. Even though he worried about making enough money to support our family, he always thought of America as a land of wondrous opportunity.

Dad was a member of what’s now called the “greatest generation.” He lived through the Great Depression and served in World War II, although he wasn’t exactly a war hero. He spent most of his time during the war taking urine specimens. One day a country boy approached his desk. “What am I supposed to do?” the boy asked.

“Pee into one of those jars,” my father answered, pointing to the row of small containers on the wall.

The boy looked surprised. “From here?”

Dad told this story at least a thousand times.

My father was a patriot, but that didn’t stop him from being critical of America or of the people who lead it. He thought Senator Joseph McCarthy was a villain, and, years later, that Lyndon Johnson deceived the nation about Vietnam. He was the first person I heard say Nixon was a crook.

Dad’s patriotism was grounded in American ideals. He got upset when he noticed a wide gap between those ideals and what actually occurred. And in these moments he was participating in the very essence of Americanism.

That gap is still with us and always will be. The ideals are just that—ideals. They’re goals and aspirations. But unless we acknowledge the gap, we can’t even begin to close it. If we accept the Radcon view that good citizens should keep their criticisms to themselves, we won’t ever be able to mobilize the political will to do better.

A childhood friend of mine, Michael Schwerner, went to Mississippi during the summer of 1964 to register black people to vote. Mickey was in his twenties, brimming with optimism and courage. He was murdered by racist thugs, along with two other civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. What motivated the three of them to participate in “Freedom Summer” was that they loved America enough to risk their lives for it, and they were determined to help close the gap between American ideals and American practices. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were true patriots.

Radcons label anyone who criticizes their unilateral militarism as “anti-war,” and assume anyone who’s “anti-war” must hold the same critical view of America that many of the young people who opposed the Vietnam War more than thirty years ago did. “The liberal tendency to dismiss or underestimate threats to the United States seems to be a permanent condition,” says columnist Mona Charen.⁸ According to Bill Bennett, “where armed conflict is concerned, the arguments of today’s ‘peace party’ are basically rooted in the period of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. It was then that the critique of the United States as an imperialist or ‘colonialist’ power, wreaking its evil will on the hapless peoples of the third world, became a kind of slogan on the Left.”⁹

This is political correctness at its worst. Radcons consider any criticism of the “war against terrorism” so offensive that they ignore the content of the criticism and attack the motives of the critic. Just as attacking liberals for fomenting “class warfare” or advocating “partial-birth abortion” subverts discussion of what’s really at stake in these debates, accusing those who oppose the Radcons’ methods of countering terrorism of being anti-war zealots from the sixties is a debater’s ploy to shut down discussion about the validity of those methods.

Whatever hostility young people felt toward America more than thirty years ago is irrelevant to the debate we ought to be having now over how best to deal with terrorism. But, for some, Vietnam just won’t go away. Radcons are even rewriting history. “Liberals were horribly, catastrophically wrong about Vietnam,” insists Charen. “Liberal views, forged in Vietnam and tempered in Central America and beyond, got the world all wrong.”¹⁰

Charen never states precisely how liberals were wrong about Vietnam except to note that after the fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese executed many South Vietnamese and sent thousands of others to concentration camps. Charen and other Radcon revisionists apparently want us to believe that America’s continuation of the Vietnam War, even with the cost of many more lives, would have been preferable to ending it when we did.

I was one of millions who opposed the Vietnam War because I didn’t believe America’s national interest was at stake. I still think that the death and destruction America inflicted on Vietnam, and the casualties we endured, were unnecessary. The Vietnam War was a civil war between North and South Vietnam, not a front line in America’s cold war with Soviet communism. The so-called domino effect that the Johnson administration used to justify the war supposed that the fall of South Vietnam would set off a chain reaction of nations falling to communism across Southeast Asia and then elsewhere around the world. But the fall of Saigon didn’t presage the triumph of Soviet or Chinese communism in Southeast Asia. In fact, by 2004, Vietnam was well on the way to becoming a capitalist nation. Even China is a rapidly growing capitalist force, although still far from being a democratic one.

What Radcon revisionists don’t say is that by the time we finally left Vietnam, most Americans—not just those on the left—were deeply opposed to the war. They were not anti-American, nor lacking in patriotism. To the contrary, they were—and, presumably, still are—committed to the American ideals of liberty and democracy. America’s role in the Vietnam War violated those ideals. The anti-war movement of the sixties deserves great credit for helping to bring an end to one of the sorriest chapters of American foreign policy.

When Radcons accuse those who disagree with a president’s foreign policy of being “anti-American,” they discourage debate about issues the public needs to explore and understand. This is especially dangerous during wartime, when patriotic feelings run high and when a president, as commander in chief, has wide latitude to decide what’s in the nation’s interest. Considering that the “war” against terrorism is unlikely to reach a point where the United States can declare total victory—at least for a generation—the Radcon effort to suppress debate reduces our capacity to discuss our future. As such, it imperils the effort to control terrorism by discouraging an honest airing of facts and judgments that could help correct errors. Worse yet, it strikes at the heart of our democracy.

Attorney General John Ashcroft even questioned the patriotism of people who said the administration went too far in compromising civil liberties for the sake of homeland security. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.”¹¹ Phantoms of lost liberty? When anyone the administration chooses to label as an “enemy combatant,” including Americans, can be held indefinitely and denied access to lawyers and family members; when hundreds of detainees in Guantánamo can be held indefinitely, with no chance to contest their captivity; when the government can do secret searches of private homes and obtain records of anyone’s book purchases or borrowings from bookstores and libraries—when all of this is allowed, we are not dealing with phantoms. Liberty has been lost, plain and simple. And unless Americans can openly debate whether these lost liberties are justified by a wartime emergency, we are also in the process of losing our democracy.

No, Mr. Attorney General. You, too, have got it backwards. It’s your tactic of condemning critics of the administration that bolsters our enemies and worries our friends.

HOW AMERICA PLUNGED FROM
EDWARD R. MURROW TO BILL O’REILLY

Prior to 1987, when Reagan-appointed commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission overturned the Fairness Doctrine, broadcasters had to air opposing views on controversial issues if they wanted to keep their broadcast licenses. Now, it’s almost the opposite. Opinionated hosts of talk radio and talk television—almost all, Radcons—are interested in only one view: their own. And their view is relentlessly one-sided. Radcon media moguls reinforce the same right-wing messages.

In March 2003, as America moved closer toward an attack on Iraq, Natalie Maines, the lead singer for a country music group called the Dixie Chicks, told her fans during a London concert that “[w]e’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.”¹² In response, a number of Clear Channel Communications Company’s 1,200 radio stations stopped playing the Dixie Chicks. Clear Channel stations also sponsored a series of pro-military rallies around the country. At about the same time, Cumulus Media, owner of 262 stations, instructed all its country stations to stop playing the Dixie Chicks. “We pulled the plug out of deference to our listeners,” explained Cumulus’s chief executive. At a pro-war rally promoted by a Cumulus station in Shreveport, Louisiana, a bulldozer crushed a collection of Dixie Chicks albums. The Cumulus executive described it as “an event that was precipitated by listener demand.”

Nonsense. “Listener demand” couldn’t have been the reason Clear Channel and Cumulus “pulled the plug.” The Dixie Chicks’ albums continued to sell well. Nor was the group blackballed because their albums or song lyrics were allegedly subversive. The censorship here was more insidious and more dangerous. It was because their lead singer had the temerity to express a particular political view.

Both Clear Channel and Cumulus are among America’s largest media companies. As such, they’re particularly dependent on the Federal Communications Commission, whose then chairman was Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, President Bush’s secretary of state. At the time, the FCC was considering whether to expand the number of radio stations a single company could own. (In June 2003 the FCC did expand the number.) Moreover, one of the more prominent members on the board of Clear Channel (which also syndicated Rush Limbaugh’s shows) was Thomas O. Hicks, a wealthy investor with close ties to President Bush. Hicks bought the Texas Rangers from him, thereby helping make George W. Bush a multi-millionaire.

But what if it was listener demand? Suppose that, across the nation, tens of millions of radio listeners and television viewers decide they don’t want to hear or see anyone who makes a negative comment about the President. Suppose they don’t want to tune in to anyone who might say something even vaguely critical about the administration or its foreign policy.

Even this wouldn’t justify banning dissenters from the airwaves. Imagine the consequences if broadcasters routinely responded to “listener demand” by blackballing anyone who had voiced an unpopular political view. Careers could be ruined with an offhand comment that struck some major broadcaster as politically incorrect. The Dixie Chicks already had a large and loyal following. But knowing the consequences of the remark of their lead singer, how many up-and-coming artists, writers, or even pundits will now dare to criticize a U.S. president? More broadly, how many mid-level executives, young entrepreneurs, rising editors or producers, even presidents of universities seeking donations, will publicly express concern about administration policies? Freedom of speech is a fragile right. If its public exercise depends on “listener demand,” it doesn’t amount to much.

With escalating vituperation since 9/11, Radcons have been stifling any alternative views about the war on terrorism. Referring to people who protested against the war in Iraq, talk-show host Michael Savage said on MSNBC, “[t]hey are absolutely committing sedition, or treason.”¹³ Added Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who hosts a show on MSNBC, “[t]hese leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass.”¹⁴ One Fox News correspondent referred to war protesters as “the great unwashed.”¹⁵ Neil Cavuto, a Fox News host, told “those who opposed the liberation of Iraq” that “you were sickening then; you are sickening now.”¹⁶

Bill O’Reilly of Fox News instructed his millions of viewers that “we expect every American to support our military, and if they can’t do that, to shut up. Americans and, indeed, our allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway will be considered enemies of the state by me. Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand, and others who see the world as you do.”¹⁷

Even after the fall of Baghdad, the mere suggestion by an O’Reilly guest that Bush’s war against terrorism should be more fully examined summoned angry responses from viewers conditioned to O’Reilly’s rants.

To: Reich@brandeis.edu

From: abl87rct@attbi.com

Subject: you

Robert,

I just want to remind you that because America has gone to war, you exist. And freely at that!!! Would you talk like you do before the true Founding Fathers? They put peoples heads and wrists in racks for just spitting on the sidewalk. What would they do to people like you? Stop using their first amendment as your right to talk against America.

Anonymous

Stop using their First Amendment as your right to talk against America. Pardon me, but I thought it was mine, too. And I thought it existed to protect dissenting views.

I remember sitting next to Dad on our family’s maroon Castro convertible in 1954, squinting at a box with a small picture tube, our first television. I was seven years old. By then I’d taken on a few school bullies and held my own, at least to the point where I no longer felt threatened. Now America was being threatened and bullied. We had every reason to fear Soviet communism; five years before, the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb. No one knew whether or not they’d try to attack the United States.

Dad was as concerned as anyone else, but he also worried about another bully named Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy had been searching for subversives—communist “fellow travelers” in government. His search had extended to the media, to Hollywood, to writers and artists all over America. Careers had been ruined for no good reason, and criticism of America frozen.

We watched the small screen as McCarthy accused the U.S. Army of shielding communists, and even browbeat a young lawyer not involved in the hearings. That finally prompted Joseph Welch, counsel for the army, to ask, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Most of all, I remember watching Edward R. Murrow, a correspondent for CBS News, on a popular program called See It Now. On one particular evening in March 1954, Murrow devoted his entire program to the senator from Wisconsin. Murrow played tapes, read from transcripts, and allowed McCarthy’s own words to reveal his techniques for smearing people with baseless accusations. I remember Murrow’s summation at the end of that broadcast. It caused Dad to applaud. Since I couldn’t remember it word for word, I looked it up. This is what Murrow said:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. . . . We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent. . . . We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.¹⁸

Terrorism is at least as frightening as the specter of communism—more so, since the terrorists have already attacked America and so far claimed more than three thousand lives on American soil. We are justifiably afraid. Fortunately, America hasn’t yet re-created the McCarthy era, but we’re in imminent danger of confusing dissent with disloyalty.

At its core, terrorism is intended to terrorize a nation’s people, to inhibit their freedoms—not only freedom to travel, assemble, and engage in commerce, but also their freedom from searches without warrants, freedom from being held indefinitely without trial and without access to lawyers, and their freedom to speak their minds, which includes the freedom of dissent. To this extent, we are already its victims.

In the era of Bill O’Reilly, where can we find Edward R. Murrow?

WHY WE CAN’T FIGHT
TERRORISM WITH IMPERIALISM

Though I’m against the way the Radcons are waging the war against terrorism, I’m not “anti-war” and I’m certainly not “soft” on terrorism. I’m all for using military force when necessary. But the Radcons are using it irresponsibly. As a result, they’re increasing, rather than decreasing, the likelihood of further terrorist attacks.

The Radcons’ main strategy for fighting terrorism is to use bombs and troops to take over unfriendly nations. And if our traditional allies won’t help us do this, we’ll do most of it ourselves. While we’re at it, we’ll create a giant shield to protect ourselves from enemy missiles. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and foreign policy specialist Robert Kagan put the Radcon case bluntly: “The United States can ‘go it alone,’ and it is hardly surprising that the American superpower should wish to preserve its ability to do so.”¹⁹

This is a naked assertion posing as an argument. Who wouldn’t want to control all the marbles if you could do it freely and effortlessly? It’s what you have to pay for them and what you must give up in order to keep control that determine whether the effort is worth it. The mere fact that America can go it alone doesn’t mean we should. Here again, Radcons confuse means and ends. The goal is not to remain the world’s only superpower; it is for all of us to have secure and prosperous lives. If the price of remaining the only superpower entails sacrificing our security and prosperity, it is not worth the candle.

You have only to consider recent history. Our major reason for invading Iraq in the spring of 2003 wasn’t to end Saddam’s brutality, despite all the hoopla about “liberating Iraq” and the White House’s slogan OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM emblazoned across Fox News and MSNBC broadcasts. Yes, Saddam was brutal, and the Iraqi people are better off without him. But America often turns a blind eye to brutal tyrants. During the Cold War we helped despicably brutal regimes—the Shah, Mobutu, Somoza, Greek colonels, Korean generals, Pinochet, Marcos, the mujahideen. We advised them, trained their death squads, schooled and equipped their torture specialists, and helped them squirrel away their vast wealth. Not so many years ago we helped the Taliban in its war with the Soviet Union. We funneled aid to Saddam Hussein himself when he was battling Iran. Even now, as we fight against terrorism, we ignore repression in nations whose cooperation we need—Russia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China.

Cynics would say the real reason for invading and occupying Iraq was to secure Iraq’s oil fields against the possibility that the House of Saud wouldn’t be able to keep the lid on Islamic revolutionaries in Saudi Arabia. If this was the rationale, the invasion and occupation could backfire by inciting Islamic revolution all over the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.

But give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt and assume that the basic reason for the invasion was exactly what the White House originally said it was—to advance America’s “war against terrorism,” and reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks. By this measure, there’s evidence that the Radcons’ go-it-alone strategy is backfiring. Senior counterterrorism officials interviewed by the New York Times more than a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein said Al Qaeda benefited from a spike in recruitment after the U.S. invasion. New young leaders were moving into operational and planning roles. Training camps were opening up in Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan, and Chechnya.²⁰

In other words, the Radcons are making the world more, not less dangerous.

I’ve spent enough time in Washington to know that unless you’ve got your facts and objectives straight, you’re going to make big mistakes. It’s perilously easy inside the Beltway to lose sight of the basics. Washington is an echo chamber in which small tactical decisions are intensely repeated, debated, and criticized for days at a time, even while the basics are quickly assumed away.

Remember that the Radcons who are now in charge formulated their strategy in the nineties—well before 9/11. Their objectives included overthrowing Saddam Hussein and waging preemptive wars with or without U.N. backing. In developing their goals, they overlooked several important facts that are by now well documented:

1. The so-called war against terrorism is nothing like a conventional war. The enemy isn’t a hostile nation that can be defeated in some spectacular military action. It doesn’t have an army that can be outgunned. We will never be able to declare clear and decisive victory over it. Terrorism is a tactic; it is not itself the enemy.

2. Al Qaeda is bent on destroying the West, especially the United States.

3. Al Qaeda is not the only terrorist network harboring such goals. Al Qaeda is part of a global insurgency that includes the Jamaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia, Ansar al-Islam in the Middle East, Dhamat Houmet Daawa Salafia in Algeria, and Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya in Somalia, among many others.

4. Not every group using terrorist tactics is intent on destroying the United States. Chechnyan rebels, for example, want independence from Russia. But such groups could be lured into international terrorism against America and the West.

5. Terrorists are not easily identifiable. We have no means of knowing how many there are, or how many are being recruited into their ranks, or at what rate. They have no central registry.

6. Terrorists are not dependent on a few “rogue” nations. They recruit and train in unstable parts of the world with weak or nonexistent governments, and they can move their bases and camps easily—from Afghanistan to Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan, Chechnya, the southern Philippines (Mindanao), northern Indonesia, or any other place where governments are weak.

7. Terrorists inhabit many countries, including Germany, Great Britain, France, Japan, and even the United States.

8. There is no finite number of terrorists. At any given time, the number depends on how many people are driven by anger and hate to join their ranks.

9. Terrorists are willing to die in order to impose death and destruction. We have been shown that a relatively small number of them can cause a large number of civilian deaths.

10. America’s borders are fairly porous. In a single year, 475 million people cross them, as do 125 million vehicles. More than 20 million shipments arrive at 3,700 terminals located in 301 ports of entry. In recent years, more than 1.7 million undocumented immigrants have walked or ridden across the Mexican and Canadian borders.²¹

Given these facts, our priority shouldn’t be attacking and occupying hostile nations. Fighting terrorism by taking over unfriendly regimes is comparable to fighting cancer by removing affected organs. Sometimes it can help, but it’s dangerous and it often comes too late. Taken to its logical extreme, this approach would require America to assert control over many of the world’s unstable regions. We would have to be a permanent occupying force, fighting guerilla wars over vast segments of the globe.

To some Radcons, this outcome would be just fine. Max Boot, former editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, claims that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”²²

Well, I have my doubts that the inhabitants of the world’s “troubled lands” cry out for an American version of British imperialism. But even if they did, it seems unlikely that most Americans are willing to bear the financial and human costs of empire. Moreover, an openly imperial America that occupied most of the “troubled lands” of the world would become an even larger target for terrorism than it is now.

The Radcons’ priority is wrong again. Our goal should be making the whole body more resistant, by reducing the likelihood that weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear devices, end up in terrorist hands. At its core, fighting terrorism isn’t about vanquishing and occupying hostile nations; it’s about policing the globe against dangerous and hostile groups. Radcon unilateralists don’t understand how much our success in accomplishing this depends on the cooperation of the rest of the world.

Radcons are erecting a missile shield around the United States, at huge cost. But this is no real protection from terrorism. A single terrorist could carry a suitcase into the United States containing nuclear material. Or highly toxic bacteria could be hidden away in a shipment of fruits and vegetables—or in a bale of marijuana. In fact, a missile is the least likely way a weapon would enter the United States. Missiles are difficult and costly to produce, hard to hide, and they leave unambiguous return addresses.

Terrorists intent on setting off a nuclear device in the United States don’t need to wait until a nuclear power sells or gives them the necessary material. They could steal or buy it on the black market. In 1999, Italian police seized enriched uranium from an organized-crime group trying to sell it to someone with presumed ties to terrorists. The uranium came from a U.S.-supplied research reactor in the former Zaire—presumably stolen or illegally purchased. Russia still has an arsenal of thousands of poorly maintained and guarded nuclear weapons, and enough highly enriched uranium and plutonium to make almost 70,000 more.²³ A lot of this is still not adequately secured against theft or black-market sale. As of this writing, the United States spends only $1 billion a year helping Russia and other former Soviet republics secure it, out of our total defense budget of some $400 billion. This is absurd.

America is focused on the so-called axis of evil—an occupied Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Yes, these are dangerous places; the last two are developing nuclear weapons. But we’re not spending nearly enough time, energy, and resources preventing illegal distribution of thousands of nuclear weapons already in existence in Russia, Pakistan, India, and other nuclear powers. And we’re paying almost no attention to highly enriched uranium and plutonium in many other countries that terrorists could turn into nuclear weapons.

Radcons have their priorities backwards still again. What’s needed is a tough global standard for preventing distribution (by theft, sale, or other means) across any national border of nuclear devices or material, or of biological or chemical weapons capable of mass destruction. And we need adequate resources to secure nuclear material, inspect to make sure it’s secure, and apply force when necessary.

Effective policing involves “cops on the beat”—highly trained intelligence agents who can gain the confidence of people likely to know where trouble looms, get ongoing information about the locations of terrorist networks, directly infiltrate terrorist groups, and find out where dangerous materials are on the move. This requires the active cooperation of intelligence units and counterterrorism squads all over the world—exchanging information, sharing know-how, monitoring flows of money, tracking dangerous materials, intercepting communications, stopping transactions. So far in the war on terror, the biggest breaks have come from intelligence specialists in Pakistan, Britain, Spain, and Germany.²⁴

But if we seem more like a global bully than a world leader, we won’t get this cooperation.

FIGHTING TERRORISM BY GETTING
THE WORLD ON OUR SIDE

Consider the following two fables. In important ways, America’s security depends as much on which fable most people around the world come to believe as it does on our military strength.

Fable 1: The world is blessed with an advanced civilization renowned for its dynamism and freedom. Most of the world’s peoples admire and emulate it. But this civilization fails to notice a primitive, diabolical force that emerges at its margins, intent on destroying it. Motivated by envy and hate, this force exploits the openness of the civilization to wreak havoc. Only in the nick of time does the civilization find the strength and moral fiber necessary to destroy this force and thus save humanity.

Most Americans believe this describes the United States, but quite a number of our traditional allies have started to doubt it, and most of the Islamic world and many of the world’s poorest people don’t believe it at all.

Fable 2: The world is ruled by a giant corporatist power that exerts control through spiritless technologies and materialist comforts. This sinister force acts to seduce, brainwash, monitor, and intimidate the world’s people. But a few descendants of a former, more spiritual world, hidden away in mountains and teeming cities, keep the old faith alive. Through their cunning and bravery, these outlaws discover weaknesses in the system, and they exploit those weaknesses to destroy it and thereby liberate humanity.

Fable 2 is absurd, of course. But most terrorists believe it. And they want millions of others to believe it, too. Their job is easier if the entire Islamic world believes it; still easier if the entire Third World believes it. Then they can recruit almost a limitless supply of people willing to die to kill Americans and those who collude with them, and they can foil attempts to sabotage their plans. Their work is harder to accomplish if most of the world believes Fable 1, and almost impossible if the Islamic world comes to believe it.

Part of fighting terrorism is consciously reducing the credibility of Fable 2. Yet the Radcons’ unilateral “you’re either with us or against us” militarism does just the opposite, playing into terrorist hands.

Radcons claim that hostility toward America is rooted in envy of America’s success and, in the words of Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “the inescapable reality of American power.”²⁵ Wrong. It is precisely the Radcons’ insistence on moving preemptively and unilaterally, and using military power to deal with so many obstacles and threats, that’s fomenting anti-Americanism almost everywhere outside the United States.

Hostility to America was already there, of course, long before the Radcons embarked on their imperialist mission. America’s Cold War history of support for anti-communist dictators didn’t leave an endearing legacy in many parts of the world. As the world’s last remaining superpower, moreover, we’re automatically the object of envy, blame, and suspicion.

Yet in the months immediately following September 11, 2001, the world was mostly on our side. You probably heard it and saw it. Maybe, like me, you got e-mails from friends elsewhere around the world who expressed outrage at the deed and solidarity with the United States. Two hundred thousand Germans marched in Berlin to show solidarity with Americans; Le Monde, France’s most prestigious newspaper, ran a banner headline proclaiming, “We Are All Americans.”

As tragic as the events of 9/11 were, the aftermath offered a critical opportunity for global cooperation. Yet during the following two years that sympathy largely vanished. By acting as though world opinion didn’t matter, Radcons squandered that good will.

Not since the Vietnam War has there been such a profound loss of faith in the moral authority of America. A survey of international opinion in some twenty countries after America invaded Iraq, undertaken by the Pew Research Center, found that the war “has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global support for . . . the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance.” For example, in 2002, before the Iraqi war, 61 percent of Indonesians had a favorable impression of the United States; after the invasion, only 15 percent did. Majorities in Indonesia, Jordan, and areas administered by the Palestine Authority expressed “at least some confidence” in Osama bin Laden.²⁶

If we behave more like the world’s bully than its beacon light, why should we expect our friends to help us reduce the odds of further terrorist attacks here? If Fable 2 offers the world’s destitute and angry a more convincing explanation for their condition, how can we prevent the ranks of terrorists from growing?

An American public scarred by 9/11 and fearful of future terrorist attacks is especially susceptible to demagoguery about America’s unalloyed virtue and a worldwide conspiracy of evil that threatens our survival. A similar narrative captured the American mind in the 1950s when communism seemed poised to obliterate us—and, remember, in the fifties we hadn’t been traumatized by thousands of civilian deaths on American soil. The consequences this time around could be a more uncompromising American militarism abroad that gives the rest of the world even more reason to believe Fable 2.

History provides abundant examples of how extremists gain power when politics becomes polarized around opposite views of reality. Each of these fables reinforces its opposite: The more one fable is believed and acted upon, the more plausible the opposite fable becomes to those who thereby feel threatened by the “evil” on the other side. And as those who are threatened act upon the opposing fable, they confirm the fears of those who cling to the other. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups would like nothing better than for America to pursue a go-it-alone militarist mission. As the two fables gain credibility among opposing camps, the danger is that they both become greater realities.*¹²

HOW TO BE THE WORLD LEADER
RATHER THAN THE WORLD BULLY

Radcons say we have no obligation to anyone beyond our borders and should act only where our national interest is directly at stake—mainly to enhance our power and to control events outside America. This is a fundamental premise of their negative patriotism, but it’s utter nonsense. Liberals have long understood that power is different from influence. And influence is what we need most right now. Liberals have also known the difference between leadership and control. We need to lead the world; we can’t possibly control it. The only way America can get active cooperation from other nations is if we act in their interests, too.

Herein lies the basic tenet of liberal internationalism. In an interdependent world, America’s efforts to relieve human suffering and spread prosperity around the globe serve our national interest. They also increase our legitimacy as world leader. This is the lesson we applied after World War II when the Soviet threat made us take a broader view of national security. Not only did we rebuild Europe and Japan, but we also created and supported new international institutions—the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which became the World Trade Organization)—to advance our interests and to promote peace and prosperity around the globe. The two goals are mutually reinforcing.

The current terrorist threat should cause us to think no less broadly and generously.

Think about these numbers: While the global economy has grown at an average of 2.3 percent a year during the past three decades, the gap between the best- and worst-off countries is ten times wider now than it was thirty years ago.*¹³ Of the six billion inhabitants of the planet today, almost half are struggling to survive on less than $2 a day. And the number of poor are growing faster than the number of rich.²⁷

What are we doing about this? In many cases, the opposite of what we should be doing. America has turned its back on liberal internationalism. For example, we take care of domestic producers at the direct expense of the world’s poor. The George W. Bush administration increased subsidies to America’s corporate agribusinesses and hiked up import barriers on steel. These actions made it harder for poor nations to export food and steel to us—and earn the cash they need to pay their debts and build their economies. The yearly subsidy we give just to our own cotton farmers is three times our total foreign aid to Africa. (I should emphasize that on the issue of economic protectionism, Democrats are no better than Republicans and often worse.)

Meanwhile, we don’t adequately support international efforts to reduce the debt burdens of poor nations, thus condemning them to years of crushing payments that suck up about 60 percent of their budgets. And our direct aid to poor nations is a joke. Even though we’re the richest nation in the world, we give poor nations the equivalent of about $29 a year per each American, or one-tenth of one percent of our national product. This places us next to last among twenty-two donor countries in aid as a share of income—roughly one-third of European levels.²⁸ In 2003 the President asked for $200 million for the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. That was equal to about one and a half days of the cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

I’m not suggesting that global poverty is the direct cause of terrorism or that helping to spread prosperity will itself deter it. But we fool ourselves if we think there’s no relationship between Third World poverty and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism—even to a remote island like Mindanao in the Philippines, where corn farmers are desperate because they can’t compete with corn produced by American agribusinesses generously subsidized by the U.S. government.²⁹ While it’s true that a lot of terrorists around the world are educated and middle class, they come from societies where there is general despair. And this despair provides fertile ground for new recruits and tactical support. If we sit back and allow the gap between the world’s haves and have-nots to continue to widen into an unbridgeable chasm, we invite hundreds of millions more to despise us and we make Fable 2 all the more convincing.

America has more muscle than any other kid on the block. But leadership doesn’t depend on brute strength. It depends on moral authority—setting an example for other nations to follow; providing a vision that’s widely endorsed because it’s likely to benefit everyone; and using our power to advance broad goals that help the planet survive.

The liberal tradition of American foreign policy has followed this moral principle. But the Radcons have opposed it. Rather than try to amend treaties we don’t like, they reject them out of hand. They walk away from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and choose to do almost nothing about greenhouse gases. They reject the biodiversity convention, the International Criminal Court and the World Court, the treaty on land mines, the treaty on small arms, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Radcons thumb their noses at the Geneva Conventions for treatment of war prisoners. Those conventions require, among other things, that prisoners of war be given accommodation and medical care equal to that of the troops guarding them, and that if a war prisoner is charged with a war crime—such as a terrorist attack on the United States—he be tried in a military court with the same procedural protections accorded troops who are court-martialed. In the “war against terrorism,” these conventions are being ignored.

Radcons also turn their backs on nuclear arms control and decide to develop America’s own low-yield “mini-nukes.” They reject the U.N. charter, which bans the use of force except in self-defense or under a Security Council mandate. They scoff at the Nuremberg judgments, which treat preemptive attacks as war crimes.

When it comes to reconstructing Iraq, Radcons limit the contracts to a few major U.S. companies. They award the first major contract to the Bechtel Group, a politically connected company whose board includes a former U.S. secretary of state, and another to Halliburton, whose former chief executive is the vice president of the United States.

This isn’t the conduct of a world leader. It’s the behavior of an arrogant bully that cares nothing about the opinions of a skeptical world. Liberals should identify it for what it is.

All are by-products of negative patriotism, the idea that America’s well-being and security depend on having more wealth and power than anyone else—so much wealth and power that we can simply ignore world opinion. From the Radcon perspective, foreign policy is a contest for dominance, where there can be only one winner. But this view overlooks America’s growing interdependence with the rest of the globe—economically, ecologically, strategically, and politically.

A positive, liberal approach to global leadership would use our power to advance broadly shared goals around the world. It would see the struggle against global terrorism less like a war against a hostile foreign nation than a continuing international police action against global criminals. It would work with other nations, and through international organizations, to block dangerous weapons and their components from moving across borders. It would seek a global system for sharing intelligence and infiltrating terrorist networks. It would treat captured troops either as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or as criminals under criminal law. Simultaneously, it would try to reduce global poverty, disease, hunger, and hopelessness—the soil in which terrorist hatreds take seed. As a result, the well-being and security of Americans would be enhanced, as would the well-being and security of most others on the planet.

IT’S YOUR COUNTRY

What should be asked of individual American citizens in this emergency? Radcons don’t ask much more than uncritical support for their policies. That’s the peculiar thing about Radcon patriotism—how little it really asks of Americans. I listened recently to a Radcon radio talk-show host fulminate against liberal “anti-American traitors” who criticize American foreign policy. Within a minute, he was on to another one of his favorite topics—taxes. “It’s your money,” he thundered, repeating the Radcon line we’ve heard so many times before. “It’s not the government’s money!” He bloviated on about why it was perfectly okay for citizens to use every tax dodge they could find to avoid paying Uncle Sam.

“It’s your money” makes it sound as if citizens have no duty to support America. But how can we afford to fight terrorism if everyone tries to avoid paying taxes? What kind of patriotism is this? Real patriotism requires real sacrifice. Those who honestly love America feel a strong sense of responsibility to it. Displaying an American flag is easy. Paying your fair share of the cost of the nation requires some sacrifice.

We don’t know exactly how much the fight against terrorism will cost in the years ahead, but it’s bound to be far more than the $400 billion now budgeted annually for the Defense Department. I remember a White House meeting years ago when the President’s national security adviser asked for billions of dollars more than had been budgeted for the Defense Department in order to go into Bosnia. It struck me as odd. I’d assumed the whole reason for spending hundreds of billions each year on defense was so the military could take military action. But it turned out that the purpose of the defense budget is to be ready for military action. Military action itself costs much more. “Battles are extra,” I remember him saying.

We have to spend hundreds of billions more rebuilding Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries we’ve pledged to help. We’ll need to spend a bundle policing against terrorism around the world, even if other nations are also pitching in, too. Helping Russia and other nations secure all nuclear fissile materials will be a further major expense. Add to that the substantial cost of beefing up homeland security. As I’ve noted, exercising true world leadership is also expensive: It will require far more money, as well as attention, than we devote to it today.

Who’s going to pay for all this? And for everything else the nation has to do? In 2003 almost 20 cents of every federal dollar was spent on national defense, including intelligence and homeland security. More than 40 cents went to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. About 9 cents was for interest on the national debt. What remained—about 30 cents—was for everything else, including highways, schools, the environment, law enforcement, criminal justice, and veteran’s benefits.

Of course government can and should be more efficient. I don’t like the idea of paying for the equivalent of gold-plated toilet seats in military installations or $200 hammers. We need to keep pressure on military contractors, school administrators, and bureaucrats to weed out unnecessary expense. But even after you subtract “waste, fraud, and abuse,” there’s still a huge tab. We can’t have a great nation on the cheap.

“It’s your money?” It’s your country! If you weasel out of what you owe in taxes, either someone else has to pay more taxes to make up the difference or there’s less of what’s required—roads, hospitals, troops, cops, safety inspectors, teachers—to keep it great.

Billionaire Steve Forbes, scion of the Forbes family fortune and publisher of Forbes magazine, speaks of taxes’ “corrosive impact on our civic life.” Well, taxes may corrode our wallets, but one thing they don’t corrode is our civic life. If we didn’t pay taxes, we wouldn’t have a civic life. The eminent Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., got it right when he said, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”³⁰

For years now, Forbes has been peddling a “flat” tax. His idea is that everyone should pay the same percentage of his income. In other words, chuck the graduated income tax. This may be a fine idea for people like Forbes, who would end up paying a lot less. But if the rich pay less, citizens of more modest means will have to pay more.

If we’re serious about patriotism, the principle ought to be equal sacrifice. That’s been the liberals’ goal since the graduated income tax was introduced in 1913. I don’t see why we should abandon it now, especially in wartime.

Equal sacrifice means that in paying taxes, people ought to feel about the same degree of pain—regardless of whether they’re wealthy or poor. Logically, this means that someone earning $2 million a year should pay a larger proportion of his income in taxes than someone earning $20,000 a year. Even Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century guru of free-market conservatives, saw the wisdom of a graduated tax: “The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion.”³¹

Traditionally during wartime, taxes were raised on top incomes to help pay for the extra costs of war. The estate tax was imposed by wartime Republican presidents Lincoln and McKinley. It was maintained through World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Only in 2001 did Radcons start to phase it out.

During World War I the income tax rate on the richest Americans rose to 77 percent. During World War II it was over 90 percent. In 1953, with the Cold War raging, Republican president Dwight Eisenhower refused to support a Republican bill to reduce the top rate, then 91 percent. By 1980, the top rate was still at 70 percent. Then Ronald Reagan slashed it to 28 percent. Because Reagan kept spending record sums on the military, the federal deficit ballooned. A few years after that, the Berlin Wall came down, ending the Cold War. We congratulated ourselves, and then faced the largest budget deficit since World War II.

Now we’re back at war. But instead of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for it, the Radcons want to cut them. Pardon me for asking, but where, exactly, is the patriotism in this?

Radcons say it’s only fair and logical that the rich benefit most from income tax cuts because they pay most income taxes. What should be clear by now is that the rich pay so much in taxes in the first place because their incomes have skyrocketed in recent years, much more than everyone else’s.

Liberals must do the arithmetic for the American public. Compare the after-tax earnings of families in the top one percent with the after-tax earnings of families in the middle. Between 1980 and 2000, the after-tax earnings of families at the top rose more than 150 percent, while the after-tax earnings of families in the middle rose about 10 percent. The Bush tax cut of 2003 raised the after-tax incomes of most Americans by a bit over one percent, but raised the after-tax incomes of millionaires by 4.4 percent. Apparently, in this time of national emergency, the wealthy have less of a patriotic duty to provide for the financial support of their country than do families of more moderate means.

Even if you’re a billionaire, it’s not just your money. You earned it because you live in America. As multi-billionaire Warren Buffett put it, “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later.”³² President Theodore Roosevelt made the case in 1906, when arguing in favor of continuing the wartime inheritance tax. “The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”³³

It’s your country. And right now your country needs every American to sacrifice, in fair proportion. Liberals embrace this sacrifice. Radcons want to evade it.

Pointing out that the wealthy are paying less and less proportionally to support the nation isn’t inviting class warfare, as Radcons often charge. It’s exploring a deeper meaning of patriotism. The basic question is what we owe one another as citizens. That question is especially pertinent in a newly dangerous world in which we have to pull together. “Tax avoidance,” FDR once quipped, “means that you hire a $250,000-fee lawyer, and he changes the word ‘evasion’ into the word ‘avoidance.’ “³⁴

An acquaintance from law school is now a partner in one of Washington’s biggest and wealthiest law firms, with offices in many different countries. With great glee he explained to me one day over lunch how he and his partners use tax rules to create offsetting taxable gains and losses, then allocate the gains to the firm’s foreign partners who don’t pay taxes in the United States. That way, they keep the losses here in the United States and shelter their income abroad.

I noticed he had an American flag lapel pin. “You’re supporting our troops,” I said, referring to it. “Yup,” he replied, entirely missing my point. “And I can’t stand all those naysayers who are knocking America. We stand or fall together.”

Radcons think of patriotism in the symbolic terms of flags, Pledges of Allegiance, and non-dissent. But if patriotism isn’t about taking on a fair share of the burden of supporting the nation, it doesn’t count for much.

DOING YOUR FAIR SHARE

True patriots not only pay their fair share of taxes to support America; they also do their fair share to defend the nation and keep it strong. Here again, Radcons don’t seem particularly interested in having everyone pull his or her weight. A liberal, positive patriotism would ensure that. If America is serious about patriotism, we should require that every young person spend two years in the military or in some other form of public service.

The United States has what’s called an “all-volunteer” army, but the term is misleading. You don’t “volunteer” for the military the way you volunteer to work in a homeless shelter. The job of soldiering is voluntary the same way any paid job is voluntary—you’re not forced to do it; you’re paid to do it. “All-volunteer” means there’s no draft. People enlist because serving in the military is the most attractive job available to them.

Sure, some who serve in the military do so because of patriotic feelings, but pay is the major motivator. When military salaries and benefits are raised, more people sign up, the caliber of recruits is better, and they remain longer. That’s why Congress lifted pay and benefits through the 1980s and 1990s, and why, by the late nineties, the average enlistee had higher scores on standardized tests than in 1973 when the draft ended. It’s also why, during the George W. Bush administration, Congress pushed military pay scales even higher. By 2003, signing bonuses for jobs in high demand, like helicopter mechanics, reached $20,000. The army was paying recruits up to $50,000 to offset education costs and repaying up to $65,000 in student loans.

Paying for your army, by the way, has a long tradition in America. In the first American draft, during the Civil War, those who were called but didn’t want to serve could hire a substitute to take their place. The market price varied from a few hundred dollars to $1,500 per substitute. When the variation in pay caused discontent among the ranks, Congress established a flat fee. If you were called and didn’t want to serve you’d have to pay someone else $300 to replace you, roughly the year’s wages of a laborer. Still, it struck many at the time as unseemly that the richer could buy their way out of military service.

Although the current system is better than the Civil War one because it puts the costs of hiring on society as a whole rather than only on people unlucky enough to be drafted, that’s just a difference of degree. When taxpayers foot the bill, young Americans with better job prospects don’t have to serve.

As a practical matter, this means the military is composed of fewer young people from rich families than the population as a whole. In the first Gulf war (no data are as yet available for the Iraqi war), enlistment rates for children of the richest 15 percent were one-fifth of the national average. When compared with other groups of the same age, the military also has more southerners and fewer northeasterners, and a higher percentage of blacks.³⁵ Black women in the army outnumber white women.³⁶ Only 3.5 percent of enlisted men and women have four-year college degrees. Most come from the same kind of blue-collar households whose incomes have gone nowhere for more than two decades.

Most of the children of America’s elite don’t serve in the military. Most children of journalists, lawyers, doctors, politicians, and investment bankers don’t come near a fighting front. Charles Moskos, a sociology professor at Northwestern and an expert on military affairs, notes that in Princeton’s class of 1956, from which he graduated, 450 of 750 men served in the military. In those days, America still had a draft. In 2002 only 3 of Princeton’s 1,000 graduates served.³⁷

Two years of required public service would exemplify positive patriotism at its best, and liberals should embrace this notion. The service could take many forms. Homeland security will require a large number of inspectors, monitors, and border patrols, as well as people trained to guide the public during an attack. Other young men and women will be needed for missions around the globe (the current war on terrorism is already straining the military and putting large burdens on reservists). The Peace Corps could be revived and expanded, offering young Americans ways to help people directly and maybe even improve America’s image. AmeriCorps should be expanded on the home front, including more opportunities for young people to “Teach for America.”

Recruits would be paid a modest stipend—at least living expenses plus interest payments on any education loans. That would be less than the current pay of “all-volunteer” army recruits.

Some might object that the wealthiest and best-connected young people would still end up with the safest and cushiest jobs. That’s something to try to guard against. But of course it was an issue even when America had a draft. Young men from well-to-do families often seemed to end up at the safe desk jobs. At least under a system of universal public service every young person would have to put in two years.

Some object that compulsory service will create disciplinary problems. They point to the Vietnam War, when young men were still being drafted. In those days, the military was overwhelmed with desertions, AWOLs, and drug abuse. “Fragging”—the killing of officers by enlisted men—took at least a thousand lives between 1969 and 1972.³⁸

But the draft itself wasn’t the culprit. The problem was the Vietnam War. Many conscripts detested it. So, obviously, did the millions who avoided the draft. By the end of 1972, more than thirty thousand American draft resisters were living in Canada. More than a half million young men violated the draft laws, including a quarter million who never registered and thousands more who burned their draft cards. College students got deferments during their studies, and most young graduates continued to evade the draft with a variety of ailments or subterfuges.³⁹

Vice President Dick Cheney got four separate deferments to stay out of harm’s way during Vietnam. His explanation? He “had other priorities in the sixties than military service.”⁴⁰ Cheney wasn’t alone. The entire Radcon defense brain trust—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Bill Kristol—also managed to avoid military service during Vietnam, although they were prime for the picking.⁴¹

Bill Clinton famously got a graduate deferment based on entering ROTC after Oxford, until he drew a high number in the draft lottery and no longer needed an excuse.⁴² George W. Bush jumped over a long waiting list to get into the Texas National Guard in 1968, far out of harm’s way, and then apparently skipped more than a year of National Guard service.⁴³ Rush Limbaugh avoided the draft on account of a persistent boil on his buttock.⁴⁴ Howard Dean had a bad back. As for me, I failed the physical—two inches too short.

Soon thereafter, Richard Nixon officially ended the draft and created a paid military. He did it mainly to take the wind out of the sails of the anti-war movement, and he succeeded.

Now that we’re in a permanent struggle against terrorism—a struggle that, unlike Vietnam, has already caused thousands of civilian deaths in the United States and threatens our very survival—universal public service should be the norm.

Many Radcons are firmly opposed. They blocked George W. Bush’s modest proposal to expand AmeriCorps; in 2003 the House even failed to come up with enough money to maintain current levels. “The entire concept of paid volunteerism is an oxymoron,” grumbled the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal,⁴⁵ apparently oblivious to America’s “all-volunteer” paid army. Dick Armey, as House majority leader, refused even to schedule a vote on Bush’s proposal, calling it “obnoxious” and suggesting he’d fight any attempt to move it through Congress. “We give least well when we give at the direction and supervision of the government,” he told the Washington Times. “[T]he idea that government can teach charity to America rings very hollow with me.”⁴⁶ With no strong push from the White House, the proposal died.

Universal service isn’t about government teaching charity. It’s about practicing love of country. The virtue of universal service—like that of a truly progressive tax—is that every family bears an equal share of the burden, regardless of income or social class. And it enables young Americans of different social classes to get to know one other. Supporting America in these ways should be considered part of the responsibilities of citizenship. They reflect an understanding that we’re all in it together. They give each of us a direct stake in what this nation stands for and in what it does.

 

Positive patriotism—a direct descendant of our liberal tradition—offers us the best chance of being relatively secure in a world becoming less predictable and more perilous. The Radcons’ bullying, negative version of patriotism is making us less secure by the day.