It Feels Like 2002 All Over Again

Seizing on Obama's electoral victory, the left in general and the media in particular have begun displaying a creepy cultishness that we haven't seen since . . . well, six years ago. For those of you whose historical memories are even shorter than I imagined possible, 2002 unfolded in the wake of September 11 and the natural hysteria it engendered, and anyone who dared question the wisdom of George W. Bush's actions was labeled as an "appeaser" or a "traitor." The true believers on the right began hailing Bush as "our leader" in a manner that Paul Craig Roberts correctly denounced as The Brownshirting Of America.

Yet here were are today -- in the wake of an economic calamity that has generated its own brand of hysteria -- and the same jingoistic spirit has sprung up among the people who were once its victims. The neo-connish website Newsbusters has already documented several instances where the true believers in Obama have not only built him up as a man-god in the style of Caligula, but have also excoriated any dissenters as ignorant, racist, or evil.

At times like this it might do well to recall what patriotism truly consists of, as Theodore Roosevelt once observed:

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiently or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.

My first book attempted to make this point when arguing that love of country is not synonymous with love of government (i.e., merely one institution among many in the country). It is precisely because I love America that I have denounced and will continue to denounce a government that completely disregards the supreme law of the land, and I will not "unite" behind any politician -- whether it's Bush or Obama -- who persists in that lawlessness to achieve his followers' fevered dreams of bringing the kingdom of heaven to Earth. I believe, as my ancestors who founded this country believed, that government is a necessary evil at best and an intolerable one at worst. If the people of this country discard that wisdom to follow a politician into the very abyss that the Founders clawed out of, then you'll do it without me, and I don't care what label you hang around my neck to smother your own embers of doubt.