Patriotism versus Partisanship
This evening I found myself on a political commentary site called The Constitutional Matters Project. CMP lets authors on both sides of American politics post articles, apparently the more far out and divisive the better. I usually avoid these name-calling competitions, but someone had pointed to this site as having a cleverly-implemented comment form. I was there to check it out as inspiration for a site I’m developing, and ended up reading an article about patriotism.
The article, written from the “conservative” perspective, was typical of the kind of Radical Right nonsense that’s practically self-parody. What motivated the article, however, was a fallacious far-Left argument that I’ve heard repeated ad nauseam. It makes me just as mad as it made the right-wing CMP author, but my reaction is very different.
This post started out as a comment on CMP about true patriotism and its incompatibility with blind party allegiance. It became almost as long as the original article, so I ended up posting it here. Warning: mild rant ahead. (more…)
