A Strange Patriotism: Confederate Values and Republican Deceit.

Its well known that the anti-Obama fervor among the Republican voter base increased dramatically over the last week, with McCain-Palin rally attendees deriding the Democratic nominee as a terrorist and a socialist and shouting cries of ‘Treason!’

Underneath the outright hatred for Obama and all he represents to everyday Republicans– which, from the commentary captured in this video, isn’t exactly clear or very well articulated — is the deeply flawed assumption that Republicans are more patriotic than Democrats.

Sarah Palin in one of her campaign stumps last week said she was ‘just so fearful that Obama doesn’t see America the same way you and I do… as the greatest force for good in the world.’

Barack Obama is a Constitutional Scholar who has spent the majority of his life studying the fabric of American history, society, and law.  This would be a rather strange course in life for someone intending to commit treason to take. While Obama was President of the Harvard Law Review, Sarah Palin was ‘palling around’ with the Alaska Independence Party, a group who advocates outright secession from the United States. Treason, anyone?

Somehow, in the logic of the everyday Republican, this ‘Government get out of our business and let us govern ourselves’ attitude is almost the very definition of patriotic. Its a pretty tough argument to make. Secession as patriotic.  Unless of course, your ‘patriotism’ is not towards country as it is, but country as you believe it should have been 147 years ago.

Intended or not, the ‘government get out of my hair’ patriotism is a retro-active patriotism to the values of the Southern confederacy.

In this interview, former head of the AIP and Sarah Palin pal describes his personal arsenal, talks about secessionist movements, and notes that ‘Abraham Lincoln was wrong to invade the South’. What, you may ask, is a Southern-style secessionist doing way up there in Alaska? The answer is that those confederate values are more prevalent than we’d like to admit. Rustbelt Intellectual posted an article last week on how the values of the Northern working class have been almost entirely replaced nationwide by the ‘leave us alone’ values of the Southern white working class. I think he’s spot on.

In 2005, I spent four months on the road with NASCAR. We crisscrossed the United States from North to South and East to West. My tour crew — as was quickly and often noted by the Alabama/Tennessee/Virginia contingent– was evenly split on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. (Though the A/T/V contingent didn’t really know what to make of my New Mexico roots, unsure of what camp we fell into in 1861). The first night I spent on the NASCAR tour bus, I was force-fed moonshine and asked about my views on the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’ If I had a dime for every Confederate Flag I saw on the road — in every state from New Hampshire to Michigan to Pennsylvania to New York — I’d be able to retire and start my own little secessionist kingdom.

My time on NASCAR was actually quite brilliant; I had every stereotype I’d had of middle America shattered and other stereotypes drastically reinforced. But the common thread in every political discussion I had was a sense that government should stay the hell out of people’s lives. Among the more extreme tour crew members, there was outright condemnation of the North and repeated references to the Civil War. To say the least these divergent political views led to some heated discussions, but usually we’d just laugh it all off with some name calling and descend into typical tour crew toilet humor.

From what little I saw on the road, there are legitimate reasons for the resurgence of ‘hands off’ values and even positive things to be drawn from them.  There is an American rebelliousness, restlessness, and independence that drives us and serves us well in everything from our economy to our inventiveness to our creativity.

But there are also two giant misnomers at work here. One is that the Republican party best represents these values, and two is that to embrace the other side of that which is truly American — intellect, study, equal opportunity, freedom of religion — is somehow unpatriotic.

With the attacks on Senator Obama on the rise, I think its important to reflect on what patriotism is and what it isn’t. So I’ve broken the flawed logic of everyday Republican patriotism down into several falsehoods.

1. Wanting smaller government = being more patriotic

Government, like it or not, is and always will be directly involved in and responsible for the lives of the people. Republican ’smaller government’ has not had less impact on the lives of working class Americans; quite the opposite, it has unarguably had more impact. Less regulation does not equal less impact. Its a mantra that bears repeating.

Usually what less regulation does is benefit large corporate and financial institutions while simultaneously pulling the rug out from under the working class. Less regulation has a long toxic legacy of destroying every institution from the American farm to the American family (how many mothers died of cancer from the deregulated factories of the 1970s and 1980s)  to the American doctor to the American financial system.

Government is meant to provide social services and checks and balances; the absence of those services does not equal greater freedom, it equals greater poverty, less support, and an increasing inability to compete on the global scale.

In the VP debate, Joe Biden was derided for an earlier comment suggesting that paying taxes is patriotic. But he’s right. Paying taxes is certainly more patriotic than telling the government to shove off and advocating secession. And paying taxes, my Republican friends, will happen whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in office. Its just a matter of what — if anything — you get for those taxes.

2. Rekindling the rebelliousness of the confederacy = being more patriotic

Yes, one aspect of the multi-faceted nation known as America is our rebelliousness and our hands off attitude. But there is nothing inherently patriotic about being a ‘rebel’ if its not backed up with a clear analysis of what is best for the nation. Patriotism means acting in the interest of the nation. And intelligent analysis of what this nation needs right now points to things that ‘rebels’ can’t offer. Worldliness, intellect, sophistication — dirty words to most rebels — are 100% necessary for this nation if we are to remain competitive in the world.

As one Republican friend said when asked about the appeal of Sarah Palin: “Well, I sure wouldn’t want to drive a Chevy Cobalt, but there are a lot of people in America who do.”

The problem is, that Chevy Cobalt is going to be asked to compete in LeMans. And she’d clearly come in last.

As zeal-inducing as Sarah Palin’s ‘I’m going to ride into Washington with guns blazing and shake things up’ attitude is, there’s absolutely no analysis there of what type of a shake up Washington needs. If shaking up Washington is patriotic, then at least get someone who’s studied Washington for years and knows what to look for.

On the flip side, spending years of your life studying the Constitution of the United states and its legal framework is the height of patriotism. Knowing that document inside and out so that your words and deeds as President reflect it, is the height of patriotism.

Banning books from Alaska’s libraries is not.

3. Questioning your nation’s foreign policy = being less patriotic

What is more patriotic than trying to defend the citizens of your nation from harm? And no, I’m not talking about the brave and unfortunately misled young men and women in the US military serving in Iraq. I’m talking about those who tried to prevent them from having to die in the first place.

Barack Obama opposed the war in Iraq. And while the very same population whose sons and daughters are dying in Iraq are accusing Obama of ‘treason’, President Bush has gotten away with clearly impeachable offenses. He lied to congress about the threats that Iraq posed on multiple occasions. He deliberately misled us. This is not partisan politics, it is fact. So who’s a bigger patriot? The one who lied and has killed 5,000 of our sons and daughters, or the one who tried to keep them out of harms way in the first place?

Analysis of foreign policy is critical to the future of the nation. At this point, there is nothing more patriotic than having someone who is slower to pull the trigger and more likely to really understand the situation.

4. Being an intellectual = being less patriotic

Since the days of Nixon, Republicans have pursued a strategy of false populism and literally derided Democrats for their education. I won’t spend much time on this one, as my article Year Zero goes into the toxic effects of this strategy, but suffice to say that this country was founded by intellectuals, has always benefited from the thoughts, words, and deeds of intellectuals, and in the face of global crises, needs really, really smart people in office.

Here’s an intellectual who just won the Nobel Economics Prize. He saw the economic crash coming three years ago, only a certain President wouldn’t listen. Is he not a patriot?

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Being a patriot means embracing the entire, multi-faceted set of values and ideas this nation was founded on. Yes, independence and rebelliousness are two of them. But there are many more.

Come November 4th, if you want to be a real rebel, why not cast a ballot for the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a working mom from Kansas who beat all the odds and is really ready to shake up Washington — in fact, by beating Hillary Clinton and coming this far, he already has shaken up Washington. What could be more rebellious, what could be more patriotic than that?