I was really enjoying Peter Beinart’s essay on patriotism in Time magazine until I came across the following:

McCain rarely discusses the dangers of mass immigration, but for many conservatives, the fact that some immigrants eat vindaloo or bok choy rather than turkey on Thanksgiving isn’t charming; it’s worrisome.

Horsepuckey. “Many conservatives” don’t worry about the diet of immigrants. What’s a shame is that in the next sentences, Beinart more or less gets it right:

They see multiculturalism as the celebration of various ethnic cultures at our national culture’s expense. And when that celebration is linked to the claim that America’s national traditions are racist–as it sometimes is on college campuses–conservatives begin to suspect that multiculturalism is leading to outright disloyalty. That’s why conservative talk radio and Fox News went berserk a couple of years back when some immigrant activists paraded through America’s cities waving Mexican flags. It confirmed their deepest fear: that if you let people retain their native tongue and let them spurn American culture for the culture of their native land, they will remain politically loyal to their native land as well.

That’s much closer to the mark, although I would note that the Mexican flag issue came amidst a discussion of illegal immigration — and note that opposition to legal immigration is much less common in conservative circles than opposition to illegal immigration. The driving motivation in this debate is not “those people are different from me,” or diets of vindaloo or bok choy; the issue is, “those people broke the law and continue to break the law, and no authority seems to be willing to do anything about it.” (Many of our friends on the left prefer to accuse their opponents of the inverse; it’s easier to dismiss your opponents when they’re motivated by xenophobia than a legitimate concern of widespread criminal activity.)

Later in Beinart’s piece:

Liberals are more comfortable thinking about America that way: as a nation that must earn its citizens’ devotion by making good on its ideals. For conservatives, the devotion must come first; politics is secondary. But for liberals, patriotic devotion without political struggle is often empty. Liberals think lapel pins are fine if they inspire Americans to struggle to realize the nation’s promise. But they worry that those symbols can become–especially when wielded by people in power–substitutes for that struggle and thus emblems of hypocrisy and complacency.

That paragraph is great, because it isolates a lot of the controversy surrounding the “for the first time in my adult, life, I’m proud of my country” statement by Michelle Obama – how conditional is your love of, or your pride in, your country?

To take one obvious contrast, Democrats won control of the House and Senate in 2006. You didn’t hear many conservatives or Republicans pledging to move abroad because they found the leadership so unacceptable. The quadrennial (usually-empty) threats of emigration from the Hollywood set essentially declare, “If my countrymen choose a leader I disagree with, I’m leaving. My identity as an American and citizenship are contingent upon a president I like.” Is your love of your country dependent upon the people choosing leadership you like? In your world view, are the American people allowed to make a choice you think is wrong and still be good people?

There are parts of this country and its national culture I don’t like: the tripe Hollywood churns out year after year, the ugliness of some suburban sprawl, the reverberating cultural effects of those who see misfortune as a way to luxury by suing anyone who they think will capitulate; the thousand little ways that public life seems to grow coarser, less respectful, inconsiderate. But none of them rise to the point where I say, “I don’t love my country” or “I’m not proud of my country.” Reading about the U.S. bombing of a Serbian television station during our military intervention in Kosovo, and killing women whose sole connection to Milosevic’s regime was applying makeup to those who went before the cameras, I can relate to the liberal who recoils and says, “I can’t believe my country did that.” But American misdeeds would have to go much further before I said, “I don’t love my country.”

By contrast, check out Charles Pierce’s essay in Esquire that’s allegedly a profile about Obama but that spends much time seething with rage not just against President Bush and the people who voted for him, but at “the people of the United States” who he contends “have been accessorial in the murder of their country.”

More than anything else, the presidential election ongoing is — or, as a right, ought to be — about ending an era of complicity. There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country’s name. The war powers of the Congress had been deeded wholesale to the executive long before Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and a passel of think-tank cowboys found within them the right of a fecklessly incompetent president to make war unilaterally on anyone, anywhere, forever. The war in Iraq is the powerful bastard child of the Iran-Contra scandal, which went unpunished.

If all of your love is for “America the not-yet-realized ideal”, sparing none for the country that is actually around you, then yes, I think it is okay to question your patriotism. If you loved your spouse, child, family member or friend for what they could be, as opposed to what they are, I think they would doubt whether you truly loved them at all.