How to Turn the Tables on Republicans Who Claim Kerry's No Patriot
The speech had precisely the opposite effect. Why?
One reason is that Kerry, by staking his candidacy on his service in Vietnam, capitulated to the Republican canard, now a generation old, that Democrats simply do not make good patriots. Democrats don't, this argument goes, because they insist on distinguishing between soldiering itself as the essence of patriotism and soldiering on behalf of a politically valid, militarily feasible, morally defensible cause. Republicans regard such distinctions as a sign of weakness. Anything but unquestioning loyalty to the government in wartime abets our enemies and demoralizes our troops.
By insisting that he too is a good patriot on Republican grounds, Kerry let his adversaries set the political agenda. And they wasted no time producing witnesses to malign his military record and impugn his manhood. Having committed his candidacy to his military record, Kerry naturally fights back. Thus we are treated to a month in American politics like the month just passed: with Democrats and Republicans trading insults and accusations while neglecting the real challenges confronting the nation.
Surely a month in which the Democratic candidate measures his patriotism by a GOP standard only helps the Bush campaign.
It needn't have turned out this way. In the middle of an ill-conceived, unpopular, and unsuccessful war, Kerry might have drawn on his opposition to the Vietnam War to redefine patriotism as self sacrifice and civic vigilance on behalf of American principles. It is not enough simply to fight, Kerry might have told the delegates in Boston; what matters is to fight in a cause worthy of the United States. It is the patriot's job to, among other things, ensure that no soldier is asked to sacrifice his or her life in an unworthy or un-winnable war.
To be fair, recent American experience provides little guidance in connecting American patriotism to a principle beyond arbitrary soldiering. Perhaps history can help. The current reduction of patriotism to militarism is a legacy of the national reconciliation struck by Union and Confederate veterans at the end of the nineteenth century. Prompted by politicians North and South, Civil War veterans subordinated the causes for which the Union and Confederacy had fought to abstract martial valor. Thus the future Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., addressing the graduating class of Harvard College on Memorial Day, 1895, praised the faith that "leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use."
The problem with such a vision, as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, is that it renders patriotism and soldiering morally arbitrary. "We are sometimes asked," Douglass protested in 1871, "in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember, with equal admiration, those who struck at the nation's life, and those who struck to save it--those who fought for slavery, and those who fought for liberty and justice." Douglass would not abide a redefinition of patriotism and military valor that would, in effect, reduce to the same moral plane the American soldier and his Nazi or Taliban adversary, which is exactly what happens when we lose sight of the cause for which we are fighting.
This distinction could be the ground on which Kerry stakes his presidential campaign. He is right to expose the hypocrisy of Bush and Cheney, who, despite avoiding the killing fields of Vietnam, arrogantly dispatch others to be killed in Iraq. But this should be the mere starting point of Kerry's patriotism. We need a patriotism suited to the challenges of the contemporary world. In the mantle of patriotism, Kerry could promise American troops the best protection our nation can afford: that they will never be put in harm's way on account of some reckless, self-serving political agenda. Committed to America's military strength, Kerry's patriotism would transcend militarism itself. Consecrated to defending Americans' civil and economic liberties, it would remind us that our liberties will never be secure in the face of political and economic injustice at home or abroad. Worthy of our principles and democratic tradition, such patriotism could help restore America's tarnished image in the world, thereby making America more secure.