Attempting to read that was painful; if I had come across it and hadn't been asked to read it by anyone I think the first sentence was enough to turn me off. Glaring grammar errors, a wad of unsupported assertions, a series of straw-man arguments trivializing the opposition without bothering to understand it...that's almost like something
I would write.
Later in his post he mentions the importance of criticism--a very left-leaning attitude for "theconservative dash voice" but one that I approve of. I think reading this section is what made me view his post in a new light: usually when someone who self-identifies as conservative bashes others for not being patriotic, they're complaining about those who criticize the country at all. To acknowledge that criticism is actually a patriotic act is in itself a positive point I found in the post. However, I think it's easy nowadays to feel like you personally don't have a voice. I can sympathize with early democracies which restricted citizenhood to a subset of the population that demonstrated a vested interest in the preservation of society. I also acknowledge that this creates fundamental inequalities--enough so that I don't advocate it for our own democracy--but it's difficult for someone who honestly and truly cares about the issues that face our nation when she knows her vote is going to be eclipsed by the majority of apathetic and uninformed voters. When you add in politicians who care more about their own agendas than their constituents, it's honestly easy for patriotic critics to become jaded cynics who have grown bitter towards the system they once felt such fervor for.
I personally view patriotism very dimly, primarily because it frequently ends up being blind patriotism. I think it is monumentally inappropriate in modern times to take a nationalistic view simply because people are people and I don't think which side of a border those people are on changes that. If anything, nationalism helps foster the exact same attitude that contributes to war and unrest--for example, the view that everyone in Iraq is a radical Islamic terrorist who has it out for the US and whose motivations are incomprehensible and foreign, while everyone in America loves peace and democracy and apple pie and really just wants to live their lives in peace, and why do those troublesome Iraqis gotta make us hurt them? We're all in this together, folks, and nationalism honestly impedes that.
I think the duty of a nation is to uphold the rights of its citizenry and to protect them from harmful forces that they cannot control. I don't think this is a duty the United States discharges particularly well, but it doesn't do particularly badly either. There's nothing wrong with loving your nation, and if you want to see a country that takes it too far the other way just look at Germany. Just like racism is the huge hot-button issue in American society, nationalism is the big social sin there--to the point where they don't even play the national anthem at sporting events (admittedly
Deuchland uber Alles is pretty jingoistic, but even I don't think they should change it to
Deuchland, it's pretty okay, I guess?). I just think that saying it is the duty of Americans to love their country is really going too far. There's a lot to like about America but also a lot to dislike, and let's not get so caught up in the former that we blind ourselves to the latter.
Side note: there was a
thread about this several years ago, but some of the posts got lost when we converted from IPB to SMF. Just pretend like my blank post contains some awesome logic and reasoning and you'll pretty much have it.
