Nation: July 4

Never one to let priceless old bytes bite the dust without a bitter struggle, I have just been handed a rare opportunity to recycle some old but, I think, still timely comments of mine. Well, “handed” is perhaps a bit too strong. Let’s say I’m seizing the opportunity provided by a very interesting and well done comparison of The Nation and The Weekly Standard in L.A. Weekly (link via MediaMinded).

Even though the L.A. Weekly is an alternative paper, and embodies a perspective that is usually sympathetic to the left, The Nation definitely comes in a distant second in this two-horse race. You should read the whole piece, but essentially the author, John Powers, argues that “The Nation is a profoundly dreary magazine.”

The Standard is incomparably more alluring. The Nation makes you approach it in the same spirit that Democrats might vote for Gray Davis — where else can you go? …. [The Editors] are evidently content to keep appealing to the same small group of like-minded people who can’t believe the vast majority of America is so benighted. They need to talk some folks who own guns.

Actually, I own guns, and was in sympathetic and close association with The Nation for a number of years, even working there in a couple of different capacities for a while. In fact, one of my favorite tasks was to run an ad hoc, voluntary seminar for interns in which one of the most heated topics regularly was the contrast between The Nation‘s devotion to the First Amendment, often expressed in originalist terms, and its disdain for the Second.

But I digress. (Of course I do. What is recycling if not a vain digression?) I continued to publish there a bit after I left, but with decreasing frequency as my views and the magazine’s began to diverge even more. On one occasion the editor, Victor Navasky (whom I still regard as a fine fellow), rejected something I had submitted as too far beyond the pale, but, perhaps for old times’s sake or maybe simply a commendable bid for a bit of diversity, he asked me contribute to a special July 4 issue on “Patriotism” that, as it turned out, contained a large number of short statements by various writers in The Nation‘s orbit.

I would say, given the company I was it, my piece was way out in right field. But, given that company, it was so far out that it’s a mistake to regard me as having any company there at all. I can’t link it because that was back in the days before the Internet, even before computers. You can find it in Nexis or the library in the July 15, 1991, issue, but you needn’t. I still like it, and so I’m recycling, I mean reprinting, it in its entirety here:

FOR TOO LONG THE LEFT HAS TOO EASILY REGARDED patriotism as the first refuge of scoundrels. Perhaps the main source of this longstanding discomfort with patriotic sentiment is that patriotism celebrates, at least in theory, the national community as a whole while the left, especially in theory, is oppositional, outside, dissenting. Traditionally class based, with workers viewed as the engine driving society to a better future, the left is now largely a collection of racial, ethnic and gender interests plus some academic defenders of multiculturalism–progressives all, but with no agent of progress and hence no real reason to believe in progress, in sight or in mind.

With little to unite it except opposition to the dominant culture, the left today has lost both the desire and the ability to lay claim to any significant portion of the landscape of American values. Equal opportunity? It has a disparate impact. Free speech? It protects racist and sexist epithets. Self-determination? A principle useful only for bashing the Russians or protecting oil sheiks. This is overstated, to be sure, but not by much. From what precinct of the left today could an authentic voice claim something like “This land is your land, this land is my land . . .”? Patriotism is an expression of solidarity, a principle long favored on the left, but the term itself reveals our predicament. Solidarity of whom? With whom? For what? It is a far but revealing cry from “Solidarity Forever” to “Solidarity in Support of Diversity,” a banner displayed during the recent controversy over affirmative action at Georgetown Law School.

That’s a hard flag to rally around.

Say What? (3)

  1. The Fifth Recycling Of July 4th July 4, 2013 at 11:03 am |

    […] three separate occasions over the blog years — 2002, 2006, and 2008 — I recycled a short piece I wrote for a special July 4th issue of The Nation . […]

  2. […] three separate occasions over the blog years — 2002, 2006, and 2008 — I recycled a short piece I wrote for a special July 4th issue of The […]

  3. […] years ago, for the first time, here, I recycled an old, short piece I’d written on “Patriotism” published in The Nation, July 15, […]

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