The First Refuge of a Scoundrel

I mran Khan, the numbskull playboy cricketer who somehow found his way into the highest office in an unstable country with nuclear weapons, tried to out-Trump Donald Trump: Faced with a no-confidence vote he was likely to lose, he invented an imbecilic conspiracy theory and preempted the vote before it could take place, a marked improvement on inventing an imbecilic conspiracy theory after the vote.

Two cheers for Pakistani innovation!

The Pakistani high court has ruled that Khan’s action was unconstitutional, and ordered that he face the vote. He did, and lost. Khan should not feel singled out for humiliation: No Pakistani prime minister has ever completed a full term in office. It’s that kind of government and that kind of country, and it has been since Jinnah.

In much the same vein as any other comparable demagogue, what Imran Khan lacks is the thing he pretends to value most of all: patriotism.

There are many competing definitions of patriotism, but the simple one will do here: Patriotism is the willingness to put the interests of one’s country above one’s own interests. It is adherence to the motto of the Union League: Amor Patriae Ducit — the love of my country leads me. Pakistan is suffering a kind of slow-motion nervous breakdown as the world leaves it behind: Pakistan’s estranged twin sister, India, though far from being a rich country, now has a GDP per capita nearly twice that of Pakistan, and it has become if not a great power then at least a respected player in world affairs. Pakistan is today slightly poorer than Haiti, but what Imran Khan cares about is holding on to power — country is thought of second, if at all. He claims to be motivated by love of his country and argues that his political difficulties are the result of foreign plotting — but, as anybody with eyes can see, that is the opposite of patriotism: It is using one’s country as a human shield and its people as hostages for one’s own self-interest.

Patriot is one of those words that has a warm glow around it, a glow that is partly tribal and partly moral. Dr. Johnson famously observed that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and he was correct for a couple of centuries, until patriotism became the scoundrels’ refuge of first resort. The worst people in this country call themselves patriots when they are at their most criminal and most unpatriotic, hiding behind red-white-and-blue camouflage. The most dramatic recent examples of this were the so-called patriots who attempted to overthrow the government of the United States after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, but they are not alone.

Consider the Democrats and their media allies, who went to such extraordinary lengths to quash reporting about Hunter Biden’s greed-and-cocaine-fueled shenanigans in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Like Imran Khan in Pakistan, they claimed that Biden’s political troubles were the result of foreign plotting — Russian disinformation, in this case. When the fearless New York Post reported on the Hunter Biden laptop, the same people who are forever lecturing us about necessity of the free press in a democracy colluded to smear the Post and its work, and to suppress the story with the help of the major social-media platforms. The New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, recently acknowledged that the New York Post was on solid ground — but only after cowering behind the fiction of a Russian plot was no longer a viable option.

You know that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others were in this case practicing partisanship rather than journalism, because they have the journalistic resources to have torn apart that New York Post story if it had been false — and nothing would have pleased them better. We’ve seen the media dissect other fictitious stories, notably Rolling Stone’s transparently false account of a brutal rape at the University of Virginia that in reality never happened. No such effort was made to debunk what the New York Post reported — because it was true. Instead, Democrats and their media allies tried to ignore or discredit that reporting, hiding sanctimoniously behind the specter of the Russian intelligence services.

Democrats did the same thing in 2016, when doddering old Hillary Rodham Clinton lost the presidential election to a fruity game-show host, an outcome Democrats insisted — risibly — was the result of Russians’ “hacking” our election, rather than of their candidate’s inability to conduct a full and robust campaign. It was another version of the same story: hiding behind a fictitious Russian plot to avoid political embarrassment. (No, Sunshine, a few hundred low-rent Borises and Natashas posting half-literate Facebook memes does not amount to “hacking the election.”) That is what Democrats have done, what Donald Trump and his daft cultists have done (Venezuelan superspies rigged the election!), what Imran Khan has tried to do, and what every other backward demagogue and Third World potentate around the world does.

The parallels are not perfect. But we ought to keep in mind that Hillary Rodham Clinton insists that the election she lost was illegitimate, and Donald Trump says the same thing about the election he lost. These self-serving lies undermine faith in elections, corroding and distorting the political system in ways that last long past Election Day. It is extremely damaging to the country, to the political health and well-being of its people.

But to hell with them, right? So say the Clintons, Trumps, Khans, etc.

I know that I am beating the same drum here, but I will repeat: Patriotism, honesty, moderation, and other civic virtues are not disembodied moral abstractions amounting to nothing more than hash marks on some imaginary ethical scoreboard. They represent eminently practical — and necessary — goods: A free society cannot endure for very long without them.

At the risk of injuring Pakistanis’ national pride, Pakistan’s is not the example we should be looking to follow.