Why do liberals love America? Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has written a beautiful essay about American ideals and what it means to love America, which has prompted lots of thoughtful comments and discussions from conservatives and liberals. The essay is short, the comments long, and all of it is well worth reading.
I love my country. I love it first because it is my country, ...But I also love it for the noble experiment I take it to be. We have never completely lived up to our ideals. We enslaved people, slaughtered the indigenous peoples of North America, and so on. But we also always had a set of ideals that we tried to live up to, however imperfectly, and these shine through even the darkest parts of our history, and let us see it as a still unfinished attempt to be something truly great.
...we are squandering the freedoms and the ideals that we inherited from those who have gone before us, and that have made this country great. This administration actually argued in court that the President has the right to decide that any citizen is an enemy combatant, and that if he so decides, he can detain that citizen without charges, access to counsel, or trial, simply on his say-so.
This administration has also argued (pdf) that...the President is not bound by laws when he is acting as Commander in Chief.
...We have imprisoned people who may or may not be enemy combatants for years in Guantanamo, and in prisons in Iraq...We have tortured people and killed them. We have sent them to countries like Uzbekistan, where they boil people alive, and where we surely knew they would be tortured.
...it would be a complete mistake to think that liberals in general, and I in particular, are moved by such motives [hating America], or that we need to be reminded that America has more often stood on the side of the angels. If we did not know that, our hearts would not be breaking. It is not because we hate our country but because we love it and all it stands for that this cuts us to the bone.
...Right after the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced, but before I had had time to truly assimilate them, I was at a working meeting with some Canadian academics. We were talking about the war, and one of them said: how, exactly, is America better than Saddam Hussein? That's an idiotic thing to say, I replied. We don't just throw people in prison for no reason and torture and kill them. At that point someone asked: are you sure?
I cannot describe to you (those of you who have not felt it) what it was like to think: no, I am not sure. Not at all. (And to think this while I was arguing what seems to me the obvious fact that we are not, and I hope will never be, in Saddam's moral universe.)
Hilzoy expands on the title "More Things We Throw Away" in a response to a commenter:
If this administration were sacrificing our honor for wealth and strength, we'd be having a different sort of argument. But we are squandering both halves of our inheritance. If our present course continues, we will have taken a wealthy country and left it hobbled by debt; we will have taken a strong country and destroyed both its army and its freedom of action (and, of course, the respect that it took generations to build up); we will have failed to act in the face of enormous challenges, including the emergence, for the first time, of countries whose internal markets are as large as ours; and, in the process, we will have sacrificed our ideals.
It was hard to excerpt only the parts above, because there is so much wisdom and power there. Read the entire essay. Via Rox Populi, who observed that there's a theme beginning, pointing to Amanda's post here, and adding to it her thoughts here.
