Thomas Jefferson did not actually say, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” The dodgy New York City mayor John Lindsay did say it. Yeah, that’s a comedown . . . but it was the Sixties, Lindsay was the original “limousine liberal” — to hear Mario Procaccino, a Bronx pol of my youth, tell it — and who on the center-left wasn’t saying it by then? Vietnam had become Nixon’s War.
Decades later, as a U.S. senator, Sixties deb Hillary Clinton revived the thought, in her less-than-sonorous way: “I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.”
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