Cannon to the Left of Them
By Callimachus | Related entries in General Politics, Ideas“You’re either with us or with the evildoers.”
Only George W. Bush says stuff like that? Not entirely. Todd Gitlin, who has a long history on the left (and unlike Hitchens and others, still is there), discovered the mirror image of that mantra recently when he wrote approvingly about the idea of a liberal American patriotism.
This is nowhere more true than on the left. I’ve been rediscovering this cardinal principle since publishing a book a couple of months ago in which I argued what seemed to me to be the not-soterribly-controversial point that it was possible to be liberal and patriotic at the same time. A slightly iconoclastic idea, maybe, but for many of my longtime colleagues on the left, that was all it took. The night of the long knives had begun.
Why is the left so determined to eat its own? Sometimes it can be explained as the fervor of fighters determined to root out impurities. These keepers of the true flame are convinced that they have the people’s interest at heart â€â€? and harbor the suspicion that the people are being misled by wolves masquerading as shepherds. The misleaders must therefore be thrashed.
There’s more, worth reading. I often dispute what Gitlin writes, but I also own some of his books and I do think he’s a serious thinker, worth the trouble of reading and debating. Which is not true of many of the people who are attacking him.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 and is filed under General Politics, Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 11th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Heh, I hear that. My conservative friends all think I’m a “flaming liberal” and my liberal friends all think I’m a “sneaky conservative”. Ahh the trials of being economically conservative and socially liberal — everyone thinks you’re an enemy. :-P
April 12th, 2006 at 9:56 am
I like this line:
“a patriotism of substance versus a patriotism of symbols”
True. And in the aftermath of 9-11, I found that lefties had a canary if you wanted a patriotism of substance, and righties had a canary if you weren’t moved in a knee-jerk way to worship the symbols.
Freethinkers are the canaries in the coal mine.