Staying Patriotic in Trump’s America
Loving the country while hating its government.
This morning’s “peace” talks between the Trump team and Russia appear to be off to an awesome start, as Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich reports:
The US and Russia are proposing a three-stage peace plan, according to multiple foreign diplomatic sources close to the talks in Saudi Arabia. The plan includes a ceasefire, elections in Ukraine, then signing of a final agreement.
Multiple foreign diplomatic sources tell FOX the US and Russia consider holding new elections in Ukraine to be a key condition for the success of the settlement process. This piece is certain to stir controversy, as Russia does not hold true elections and the Ukrainians balk at the prospect of installing a pro-Russia puppet president.
Hey, what’s a little foreign election interference among wannabe-dictator friends? Happy Tuesday.
A Patriotic Opposition
by William Kristol
Looking at photos of the American and Russian delegations meeting today in Saudi Arabia, I had two reactions.
The first was my hope that this American mission abroad fails.
The second was how discomforting it is to root for that failure.
Americans of my generation have been very lucky. We live in a free and prosperous country, one that has become increasingly free and prosperous during our lifetimes. We’ve enjoyed this freedom and prosperity without having to fight a civil war or world wars. And we’ve been able to take pride in the twin facts that our liberties have expanded here at home, and that, most of the time and at times decisively, we’ve been on the side of liberty abroad.
So for many of us it’s been easy to be patriotic. It’s been easy to be proud to be an American. It’s been easy to “thank my lucky stars / To be living here today.”
But it’s more complicated today. What happens when the government of the United States is no longer clearly on the side of freedom, at home or abroad?
What happens when we can no longer be proud of the behavior of our own government and its leaders? How are we to react when bigotry is given sanction, when lying is routine, when corruption is rampant, when public-spirited officials are forced to resign?
There have been plenty of presidents with whom many of us have disagreed. There have been many administrations whose policies we have disapproved of. But there’s been nothing, at least in my experience, that’s challenged our basic pride in our own government until now.
If the situation is bad at home, it’s perhaps even worse abroad. Can we really say the government of the United States stands with those fighting for liberty and against dictatorship? Our president expresses admiration for dictators, and our vice president goes to Germany to make the case for the Alternative für Deutschland. Between Russia and Ukraine, between a brutal and dictatorial invader and a brave people defending their nation and its freedom, this administration is—at best—neutral.
And so we place our hopes for freedom abroad not in the actions of America but in those of our European allies and the people of Ukraine. And we who are used to rooting for American diplomats abroad hope their talks fail.
Does all of this make some of us less than patriotic?
I hope not.
And I take hope from the words of the greatest American, Abraham Lincoln, eulogizing his “beau ideal of a statesman,” the great senator Henry Clay, in 1852:
Mr. Clay's predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.
“He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.”
That is a striking statement, whose boldness is somewhat concealed by its placement in the midst of what seems otherwise to be a conventionally patriotic eulogy.
But it leaps out to some of us today.
We love our country in large part because it is a free country. We oppose the actions of the current administration because we want this nation to remain a free country and once again to become a friend of freedom abroad. We oppose the current administration not because we’re ashamed of America but because we’re proud of America.
Which means that while I’m not rooting for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to succeed in Riyadh, I’m still rooting for the U.S. hockey team Thursday night in Boston.
Quick Hits
GO ON, HIT ME: In recent days, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been sharing educational resources to help migrants know their rights when dealing with federal law enforcement. Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, is starting to get pretty steamed about it. Yesterday, Homan made multiple appearances on Fox News where he boasted of asking Trump’s Justice Department to criminally investigate Ocasio-Cortez.
“It’s like AOC and others don’t want ICE to enforce the law that they enacted,” Homan told Fox News. “I’ve asked DOJ, where is that line of impediment, where is that line of interference?”
In response, Ocasio-Cortez was defiant. “Go ahead,” she wrote on social media. “Let the people see you for what you are.”
Today’s MAGA Republicans are on a raw-power bender the likes of which we’ve never seen. Years spent fruitlessly yearning to grind the hated libs beneath their heels have suddenly given way to a glorious moment where the barriers have all fallen away at once. They control all the power, and they’ve jettisoned all compunction about how they’re going to use it. The time has come at last, they rejoice, to crack some skulls.
What can Democrats do? Well, here’s something they can do—if, like Ocasio-Cortez, they’ve got the stomach for it. They can step forward and put a target on their own backs. They can spit in the eye of the authoritarian bullies, not because they foolishly believe the bullies won’t retaliate, but because they know they will. They just can’t help themselves. Authoritarian bullies never can.
Is it possible to shake Americans out of their vague, obtunded conviction that Trump just wants to make the government more efficient, inject some “common sense” into our immigration system, and lower the price of eggs? Nobody knows—which is why stepping forward takes courage. But staying in the arena requires faith that people can still be reached. Ocasio-Cortez is openly daring Trump’s goons to make a martyr of her—to show their America as the kind of absurdly illiberal place where the federal government tries to throw you in jail for educating people about their rights while dealing with law enforcement. It’s a leap of faith. It’s a remarkable act.
WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?: “Move fast and break things” might be a perfectly fine mantra for running a software company. Somewhat less so for the federal government, as we’re all learning over and over these days about Elon’s Muskapades.
Here, for instance, is a horrific affidavit—surfaced yesterday by Politico’s Kyle Cheney—from a USAID employee stationed overseas who testified that the State Department had pulled the plug so quickly on his work that his wife was blocked from receiving needed emergency health care for her high-risk pregnancy:
Because of the stress and strain of the constant onslaught by my employer in recent weeks, my wife has repeatedly been in the hospital with a life-threatening condition and stress-related complications. Because of these medical complications, she was told she needed to immediately evacuate because of a high risk of hemorrhage, which would be life-threatening to both my wife and our baby . . . However, the request for medical evacuation was denied twice by the State Department Washington, first on February 4th and again on February 6th, with a message from State Med stating that “there is no USAID funding for medevacs.” The staff in the Medical Unit who shared this determination with me did so through their own tears as they assured me they knew this was wrong and could be incredibly dangerous for my wife and unborn child.
According to the affidavit, the employee eventually managed to get in touch with his senator to get his wife’s medevac approved, but too late: His wife had begun hemorrhaging and even a short medical flight was now too dangerous. “Now I’m afraid for her and my baby’s health because of this rushed, haphazard and cruel push to shut down the agency,” the employee wrote. “This didn’t have to happen. I don’t know how to explain to our daughter, who is living through all of this with me and my wife, that our own government is doing this to us.”
BUT YOUR HONOR, I’M SIMPLY A HUMBLE ADVISER: A coalition of Democratic states sued Elon Musk in his governmental capacity this week, arguing that his DOGE rampage through the government was illegal because he had not been nominated to any high-level Senate-confirmed position. In response, the federal government last night made a remarkable argument: What gave you the wacky idea Elon is in charge of DOGE?
In a filing, Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher testified that Musk was a “senior advisor to the president” with “no greater authority than other senior White House advisors” and “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”
“Mr. Musk,” Fisher wrote, “is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.”
This might be a clever way to try to dodge a lawsuit—you can’t sue Elon for breaking the government if he’s not technically the one doing it!—but out in the real world it doesn’t pass the smell test. Everyone from Elon on down knows Elon is in charge of DOGE, a team he staffed with a motley crew of former interns from his companies. He has spent weeks boasting of the cuts “we” are making: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” and so on. His personal authority hangs thick in the air as DOGE fights to usurp decision-making powers at agency after agency. As Rolling Stone reported last week: “‘Do I need to call Elon?’ one DOGE member barked at a federal security official while demanding access to sensitive information at one agency this month.”
In Trump’s authoritarian project, of course, this vagueness is not a bug but a feature. A lack of clear chains of authority make it more difficult to hold the government to account. Trump wants Elon to remain a nebulous figure, waging guerilla warfare against his executive branch: appearing with no warning, firing a bunch of people more or less at random, breaking a bunch of stuff in the name of “efficiency,” then fading quickly back into the mist, where lawsuits—he hopes—can’t reach him.
Cheap Shots
A quick note on patriotism and what it really means to be patriotic:
Patriotism *is not* flag-hugging and thinking that your country is the greatest. That is what nationalism is. Patriotism is love for one's country, and is really easy to distinguish from nationalism because people who love their country will make sacrifices for it just as those who love their family members will make sacrifices for them. Nationalism is not patriotism and you can tell the difference because nationalists will hug flags but oppose making personal sacrifices for the country at every turn. This is why conservative culture tends to be the opposite of patriotic culture because it elevates the individual and what is good for the individual over what is good for the country. That is a culture defined by selfishness and individualism rather than common cause with their fellow countrymen and progress for the country.
So Bill, don't feel unpatriotic for opposing nationalists who hug flags behind a culture of individualism that refuses to make sacrifices for the country. In fact, feel patriotic about that. When the nationalists who celebrate individualism are in charge, it is patriotic to root for their failures.
This country voted for the return of Trump to the presidency. Through that vote they repudiated pretty much everything I ever loved about this country. It was bad in 2016, but at least then I could look at the numbers and say there were 3 million more of us who didn't want this. Can't say that now. All those stories I've read and watched on TV and seen in the movie theaters where the United States is the power behind the good guys has ended. Just how am I supposed to love what is left behind? We're the bad guys now and I hate that.