In fact, ensuring that there’s ample room for dissenters is the height of patriotism.
In fact, ensuring that there’s ample room for dissenters is the height of patriotism.
P oof! Just like that, dissent became unpatriotic again. From “#Resist” to “Whose side are you on, anyway?” in just over a year. Who says that Americans have become incapable of innovation?
There are many circumstances in which representatives of the United States government are compelled to put their institutional obligations above their personal political views until they return to private life, but in a free country such as ours, no such rules can apply to the citizenry. Absent specific action, there is simply no circumstance in which it is outré for a private citizen or political organization to criticize the foreign policy, public demeanor, diplomatic competence, or even mental acuity of an elected public official. To do so is not “treason,” as Harvard’s Larry Tribe proposed earlier this week; it does not imply a preference for America’s rivals, as Matthew Dowd believes; it does not suggest confusion about the location of America’s adversaries, as MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt submits; it is not “unpatriotic sh**,” as Representative Ted Lieu contends; it does not indicate a willingness to “rally around the flag — the Russian flag,” as Paul Krugman asserts; it is not “disloyal,” as Bill Kristol claims; and it is not “siding with our enemy,” as CNN’s Joe Lockhart argues. There are good foreign-policy arguments, there are bad foreign-policy arguments, and there are downright stupid foreign-policy arguments, but there must not be such a thing as a seditious foreign-policy argument. In the United States, the military is subordinate to the civil power, the civil power is accountable to the citizenry, and both must suffer their slings and arrows as a result. We have a rich enough political language to object to sentiments such as “On the war in Vietnam, I sing this song / I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong” without resorting to accusations of subversion.
Besides, criticisms of “disloyalty” quickly become logically absurd. If it is unpatriotic for an individual to believe that the president is doing a bad job dealing with our enemies, how should we describe the majority of American voters? Yesterday, Gallup reported that 56 percent of Americans disapprove of President Biden’s handling of “foreign affairs” in general, while 55 percent disapprove of his handling of Russia in particular. If, per Dowd, Lieu, Kristol, Krugman, Lockhart, Hunt, and co., it is unacceptable for the Republican Party to argue that Biden is showing weakness on the world stage, how might we regard the majority of Americans who evidently agree that he is? In every other circumstance, we’d call such a display “politics” — or even (gasp!) “democracy.” Do we really want a country in which Americans are tolerated if they dislike the White House’s record on the economy, but considered turncoats if they disdain the diplomacy it is conducting in their name?
One would certainly hope not. Compared with the rest of the world, the United States has an admirable record on free speech, and yet it has suffered greatly from the temptation to carve out a narrow exception for speakers who were deemed to be undermining the country with their words. (Before my time, this magazine featured an article that made that mistake.) Sometimes, this thinking has made it into law. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 granted the federal government the power to imprison anyone who criticized the prospect of an American war with France — a development that prompted James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, to complain that, a mere decade into its infancy, the new republic had curtailed the “right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people.” Mercifully, that law lasted just two years, but its spirit was briefly brought back during the Wilson administration in the form of a pair of laws, the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act, that sought to punish “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States,” and to render it illegal for an American to “promote the success of [America’s] enemies.” Before they were repealed in 1920, these laws led to the imprisonment of more than a thousand Americans, including Charles Schenk, who was incarcerated for handing out anti-war leaflets encouraging Americans to peacefully disobey the draft, and Eugene Debs, a socialist presidential candidate who just so happened to be a rival of President Wilson’s.
I tend toward the hawkish side on Russia, especially as it relates to Ukraine. But that’s beside the point. The vast majority of the people who disagree with me from either the more-hawkish or less-hawkish position are no less American for their beliefs, and they do not deserve to be treated as such in the culture or in the law. Be he George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or George Washington himself, the president of the United States is nothing more grand than a public servant, and public servants may be criticized for any reason without inspiring insipid accusations of disloyalty. Before all else — before quotidian politicking is begun, before arguments on the merits are heard — the first priority of the free citizen must be to ensure that there is ample room for the objectors. That, and not reflexive support, knee-jerk opposition, or arrogant superintendence of the debate, is patriotism.