Pride and Prejudice

The false choice between patriotism and skepticism

Jacob Sullum from the November 2002 issue

Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, by William J. Bennett, New York: Doubleday, 170 pages, $19.95

9-11, by Noam Chomsky, New York: Seven Stories Press, 125 pages, $8.95

Like many Americans, my wife and I put out a flag after 9/11. It was not a fleeting impulse; in fact, it took me a while to find a flag holder, since all the local stores had been cleaned out of patriotic paraphernalia. But neither was it something we thought about deeply; it seemed a natural expression of solidarity. So I was surprised by the mixture of bewilderment and scorn I sensed from out-of-town visitors that November. "What's with the flag?" said one.

At the same time, I had a similar reaction to people who seemed to be going overboard in expressing their love of country, trying to outdo each other with electrical displays, multiple bumper stickers, or little flapping flags that made their cars look like they'd gotten separated from the rest of the presidential motorcade. And as the weeks went by, I started to wonder how long our flag should stay up. Some of our neighbors seemed determined to leave theirs out until the war on terrorism was over, and it wasn't clear to me that it ever would be. Then there was the question of what to do on Independence Day. Take the flag down?

But my discomfort with excessive flag waving was a mere quibble compared to the position taken by The Nation's Katha Pollitt. "My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window," she wrote shortly after the twin towers fell. "Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."

In Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, William Bennett cites Pollitt's response to her daughter's suggestion as an example of leftish contempt for patriotism, a knee-jerk reaction so strong that it could overwhelm the feelings of shock, sadness, sympathy, anger, and defiance aroused by 9/11. He has a point. It's obtuse to insist that flying the flag means endorsing everything the U.S. government has ever done. If a Catholic can wear a crucifix without supporting the Inquisition and the Crusades, an American can put up a flag without justifying "jingoism and vengeance and war." In both cases, the person displaying the symbol has in mind particular values, at least some of which Katha Pollitt surely shares. To many of us, the flag represents liberty, tolerance, and the rule of law, the principles on which the nation was founded but which its government has not always honored.

Still, it's no use pretending that flag waving has never been associated with the kind of unreflective patriotism that assumes nothing done in America's name could be wrong. Because of this connection, I must admit that at a certain point I started to worry that continuing to display our flag might be interpreted as support for whatever the Bush administration decided to do in the name of fighting terrorism. Bennett himself reinforces that equation in his book, which blurs the distinction between suspicion of government and hatred of America. He is impatient with critics and skeptics generally, not just the ones who cringe at the idea of flying the flag, and he cannot bring himself to acknowledge that the United States has ever been anything but a force for good.

The opposite sort of blindness afflicts Noam Chomsky, the self-proclaimed dissident intellectual (and best-selling author) who rehearses his litany of America's sins in 9-11, which endeavors to show that what Al Qaeda did to us was nothing compared to the suffering we have inflicted on oppressed people around the world. Bennett and Chomsky summed up each other's shortcomings during a clash on CNN last spring. "I think you should acknowledge [America's] virtues a little more often, Mr. Chomsky," said the former drug czar and perpetual scold. "And you should acknowledge its crimes," Chomsky responded. Americans who are prepared to do both will be comfortable neither with Bennett's uncomplicated love-it-or-leave-it attitude nor with Chomsky's reflexive condemnations of the U.S.

As Bennett reminds us repeatedly in Why We Fight, he has made a career out of "worrying about the moral disposition of the American people": their drug use, their insufficient familiarity with the classical virtues, their taste in music, TV, and film. But 9/11 was a test of our character, and Bennett has graded our response. To his surprise, we passed with flying colors. Literally. "For the first time in a long while there was a palpable, shared sense that this was indeed our country, and that it was a country worth fighting for," he writes. "The problem is not that Americans are unpatriotic. That is hardly the case. The problem...is that those who are unpatriotic are, culturally, the most influential among us."

If you can get past Bennett's condescension in judging the moral fiber of his fellow citizens, you probably will find much to agree with. He rightly takes issue, for instance, with Reuters' agnosticism regarding the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist: "The last time I looked, there was a crystal-clear distinction between a terrorist and a freedom fighter, and it had to do with the morality of means: A freedom fighter does not massacre innocent civilians in pursuit of his ends."

In a similar vein, Bennett offers a sampling of foolish post-9/11 comments from people with an ideological ax to grind (almost all of them leftists, although I can recall some jaw-droppers from right-wingers as well). "A professor at Brown University," he reports, "instructed his audience that if 'what happened on September 11 was terrorism,' what America had done 'during the gulf war was also terrorism.'" He also quotes the eminent leftist historian Eric Foner: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."

But when Bennett's quest for easy targets leads him to cite "a mother in Kennebunk, Maine" ("Killing people won't prove anything; it's just more of the same") and "a Columbia University sophomore" ("I don't think the solution to violence is more violence"), you start to wonder if such thinking is really as influential as he fears. While most Americans do not share Eric Foner's perspective, he argues, "the Foners of the United States" sow doubt and sap the national will. "I sensed in my bones," he says, "that if we could not find a way to justify our patriotic instincts, and to answer the arguments of those who did not share them, we would be undone." Maybe, but Bennett presents no real evidence (from polling data, for example) to back up his skeletal intuition. If you look hard enough, you can find someone to parrot just about any kind of doctrinaire drivel, especially if you talk to college sophomores.

Among people who spout off for a living, there was no shortage of the moral clarity Bennett craves in the weeks and months after 9/11. But it troubles him that a few commentators, with various degrees of finesse, brought up the question of what the United States might have done to piss people off so much.

"How was it," he writes, "that in the wake of the bloodiest and most devastating attack on American citizens in our history, sensible and patriotic people could ask, 'Did we bring this on ourselves, by the way we have behaved in the world?'"

Bennett phrases the question tendentiously. Obviously, the people who were murdered on that awful day did nothing to deserve their fate. But inquiring into the motives of terrorists does not excuse their crimes, and it was perfectly natural to wonder whether U.S. foreign policy had something to do with the anger on which organizations like Al Qaeda feed. Was it really just a matter of hatred for our values and way of life, as the politicians insisted?