DOES THE RIGHT REALLY LOVE AMERICA MORE THAN THE LEFT?

See below link for Joel Stein's recent piece entitled

DO REPUBLICANS LOVE AMERICA TOO MUCH?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-stein26-2008dec26,0,5178459.column

I don’t usually like Joel Stein, who, I find to be too cute and smarmy by half, but this is a wonderfully written piece. Wonderful, but dangerous as well.
In this article, Stein writes in a sometimes playful and ironic but ultimately self-critical mode; acknowledging that he and other liberals do not love America in the aggressive, flag waving ‘my country right or wrong’ way as does the Republican right. In fact, Stein affirms, he does love America, but he has a too nuanced view of reality to blather on about America being in the words of the atrocious Sean Hannity "the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth."

Obviously luxuriating in the false security of Obama’s victory, Stein is in an indulgent mood; ready to cede that kind of vulgar, blathering patriotism to the Right and good enough not to quote Samuel Johnson that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” I wish he had taken a harder-edged stand, because in affirming rightly that liberals are too civilized and universalistic to “bleed red, white and blue”—another one of the idiotic maxims Hannity employs to express his supposedly boundless love of America, Stein overlooks the reality that the super-patriotism of the right is a false pretense.

If nothing else, the Republican right’s strident opposition in the past few weeks to the modest bailout of the Big Three automakers made clear that they are far less in love with America than they are with Darwinian capitalism. Faced with the prospect of providing a $15 billion lifeline to GM, Chrysler and Ford—a lifeline with strict conditions and a fraction of the hundreds of billions that had already been provided to the financial industry---the GOP, in the thrall of southern senators like Mitch McConnell, Bob Corker and Bob Shelby and Richard Shelby, said, “Let the U.S. auto industry go bankrupt.” Their own states of Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama are filled with auto plants owned by Japanese and German automakers who came there so they could employ non-unionized workers at much lower wages than paid the unionized auto workers in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. So they were happy to write off GM, Chrysler etc, which would obviously be just fine for the interests of Honda and V.W. The only way the Repubs would agree to help the Big Three is if the UAW gives up all the protections and higher wages it has fought for 100 years to obtain for the auto workers.

So here were the vast majority of the 40-plus remaining GOP senators, backed up by Hannity and his brother in hysterical patriotism, Rush Limbaugh, saying in effect ‘Screw the America auto industry with an historic pedigree going back to 1900 and screw the American worker as well'. All that matters to these suppsed super-patriots is lean, mean profitability ’ and getting rid of unions. If that means favoring Japanese automakers over American ones, then so be it.

It is dismaying that few commentators have seen fit to pick up on this episoide as clear evidence of the falseness of the right’s claim to be the upholders of American interests and values. I guess they have been laying claim to that title for so long that they have managed to brainwash the rest of us into accepting it. But it would seem to me self-evident that the side pressing to have the government extend itself to save American companies and workers (not to mention the millions of non-auto workers who depend on the auto industry for their own economic well-being) should per se be considered more patriotic than the side saying, ‘Let all these fellow Americans go under.’ Indeed, its inexplicable that these people continue to get away with wrapping themselves in red, white and blue (not to mention holier than thou) as they go out of their way to hurt real Americans.

Nor is this double game something that just surfaced with the auto bailout issue. Throughout the Bush years, the right-wing lustily waved the flag as it enthusiastically trashed the environment, trashed basic consumer protections, and skewed the U.S. system in the interests of the very rich. If these charlatans love America so much, why do they support policies that hurt the interests of so many poor, working class and middle class Americans? If they love America so much, why do they implement policies that pour dangerous chemicals into our streams and air, and make possible the actual blowing up of mountains in West Virginia; all so that we can keep burning more coal and rendering the planet, which includes America as well, rapidly uninhabitable? Leave aside for a moment the mind-boggling short-sightedness of these policies; the question is how they ever came to be seen as an expression of love for America?

And how did Bush and Cheney get away for 8 years with promoting the notion that trashing the Constitution to legalize torture, electronic surveillance and holding people indefinitely without access to a trail, was a manifestation of true-blue patriotism? The right screams till they are blue in the face how much they love freedom and democracy and then they go and institute Big Brother. Yet so successful have they been in selling the notion that this is the patriotic course that Obama looks less and less willing to deconstruct the authoritarian security state with an omnipotent President that Bush and Cheney created. Even in their moment of defeat, they have reason for satisfaction that they were successful in moving America towards a permanent presidential despotism.

So Joel Stein is generous in a big-hearted, quasi-ironic way in his readiness to cede super-patriotism to the right, but it turns out we cant afford to do that if we really love America enough to want her to survive as a genuine democracy committed to the well-being of all of her citizens. Their vociferous claims to the contrary, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh don’t really love the core values of America; indeed, they despise all that truly made America in the past—and might even do so again—the last best hope of mankind on Earth. Somehow the right has managed to get away for 40 years with brainwashing the public into believing the notion that the best way to love America is to despise the American government and strip away its power to ameliorate social injustice to the point where it becomes a supine appendage of Wall Street, even as Wall Street was dropping off a cliff.

Let us hope that as Obama begins the historic work of resurrecting the federal government as a force for shaping an America that accords basic protections to all Americans, that he, like FDR before him, employs his gift for oratory in making people understand that predatory 'tooth in claw capitalism’ that cheerfully throws millions of Americans under the bus or out on the street, is not the true expression of American patriotism. If our new president doesn’t succeed in making that case, he is not going to succeed in doing anything else. Now is not the time to be bashful in advocating on behalf of a compassionate and inclusive expression of American patriotism that will allow all of us--including disaffected liberals like me--truly revel in the unabashed love for America we feel deep in our guts.