[Infowarrior] - A Dissident's Holiday

[Richard Forno]

A Dissident's Holiday

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, July 4, 2006; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/03/AR2006070300
925_pf.html

Have you ever noticed a certain hesitant quality to the expressions of
patriotism by progressives or left-wingers?

The patriotism of the conservative goes unquestioned. It's assumed that
every politician on the right will wear a flag on his lapel and effortlessly
hold forth on ours as "the greatest country in the history of the world."

You can be certain that on this, as on every July 4th, patriotic oratory
will flow as well from liberals declaring their love of flag, country and
the Declaration of Independence. Many will speak of how our constitutional
republic is to be revered especially for its guarantees of liberty and
justice for all and -- hint, hint -- limits on the powers of overreaching
monarchs.

But the progressive and the reformer have a problem with what passes for
unadulterated patriotism. By nature, the reformer is bound to insist that
the country, however glorious, is not a perfect place, that it is capable of
doing wrong as well as right. The nation that declared "all men are created
equal" was, at the time those words were written, the home of an extensive
system of slavery.

Most reformers guard their patriotic credentials by moving quickly to the
next logical step: that the true genius of America has always been its
capacity for self-correction. I'd assert that this is a better argument for
patriotism than any effort to pretend that the Almighty has marked us as the
world's first flawless nation.

One need only point to the uses that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King
Jr. made of the core ideas of the Declaration of Independence against
slavery and racial injustice to show how the intellectual and moral
traditions of the United States operate in favor of continuous reform.

There is, moreover, a distinguished national tradition in which dissident
voices identify with the revolutionary aspirations of the republic's
founders. Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned anti-slavery champion,
offered the classic text in his 1852 address often published under the
title: "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

"To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy,"
Douglass declared. "Everybody can say it. . . . But there was a time when,
to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies,
tried men's souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of
mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right,
against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, with the oppressed
against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all
others, seems unfashionable in our day."

This telling of the Fourth of July story identifies the day as part of a
long, progressive history and turns "agitators" and "plotters of mischief"
into the holiday's true heroes. The Fourth is transformed from an
affirmation of continuity into a celebration of change. The republic's
founders are praised not because they inaugurated a system designed to stand
forever, unaltered, but because they blazed a path toward what Supreme Court
Justice Stephen Breyer has called "active liberty." They set the nation on a
course that would, as Breyer put it, expand "the scope of democratic
self-government."

This is not a philosophy for the stand-patter nor a recipe for living in the
past. And it emphatically rejects any definition of true patriotism that
cedes to a current ruling group the right to declare what is or is not
"Americanism."

The Fourth of July is, of course, a celebration of national unity and of
shared love of country. But it need not bother us that there has always been
a struggle over the day's meaning. This is part of a larger argument over
how to interpret our national tradition, an ongoing quarrel that I suspect
the revolutionaries of '76 would understand.

Those who reject the idea of national perfection, who insist that the
Founders laid out a pathway and not a destination, should thus resist
defensiveness. They should embrace the creed offered in a speech to Congress
in 1990 by Vaclav Havel, the Eastern European dissident who became president
of the Czech Republic.

"As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word,
will always be no more than an ideal," Havel said. "One may approach it as
one would the horizon in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never
be fully attained. In this sense, you, too, are merely approaching
democracy."

That we're still trying, 230 years after we declared independence, is our
national glory.

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