Nice piece by E. J. Dionne today, one after my own heart, on
the consolations today offers to those who know America isn't perfect, even if they're working on it.
[T]he 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.
He has a nice riff on Fredrick Douglass' "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?" too. Haven't read it (in a while)?
Take five minutes. Here's a taste:
[A] religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, "stay there" and to the oppressor, "oppress on." It is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind.
Dionne's column is going onto the Readings list in the sidebar.
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