The Writing of a Great Address. By Peggy Noonan.

Cemetery Ridge at sunset. This monument overlooking the valley of Pickett’s Charge, represents Union soldiers using their rifles as clubs after running out of bullets. John Ferebee.

The Writing of a Great Address. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2013.

Lincoln began forming his thoughts just after the Battle of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg and the Eternal Battle for a “New Birth of Freedom.” By Allen C. Guelzo. Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2013.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. By John G. Nicolay. The Century, February 1894. Also here and here.

Address of Hon. Edward Everett, at the consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, 19th November, 1863 : with the dedicatory speech of President Lincoln, and the other exercises of the occasion. By Edward Everett et al. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1864.

Response to a Serenade, July 7, 1863. By Abraham Lincoln. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. A preview of the Gettysburg Address.


Noonan:

The air is full of the Battle of Gettysburg, whose 150th anniversary this week marked. Those who love history are thinking about Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, Culp’s Hill and the Peach Orchard, and all the valor and mistakes of men at war. The mystery of them, too. How did Joshua Chamberlain, a bookish young professor of rhetoric from Maine, turn into a steely-eyed warrior of the most extraordinary grit and guts at the exact moment those qualities were most needed? He was a living hinge of history. Why did Robert E. Lee, that military master who always knew when not to push it too far, push it too far and order Pickett to charge that open field?

 

At Gettysburg, great deeds were followed by great words. The battle won the war—it was the turning point—and a speech named the war’s meaning. We will mark the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address this fall.

 

What do we know of its writing? Still pretty much what John Nicolay told us in 1894, 31 years later. In an essay in The Century, a quarterly, Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s two private secretaries, sought to put to rest some myths.

 

On Nov. 19, 1863, President Lincoln would speak at the dedication of the new national cemetery. He had been invited just over two weeks before, so he wouldn’t have long to prepare his remarks. And he was busy with other things—a report to Congress, the day-to-day of the war.

 

“There is no record of when Mr. Lincoln wrote the first sentences of his proposed address,” wrote Nicolay. “He probably followed his usual habit in such matters, using great deliberation in arranging his thoughts, and molding his phrases mentally, waiting to reduce them to writing until they had taken satisfactory form.”

 

This is a somewhat unusual way to write an important document. It’s how Samuel Johnson often wrote his essays, getting it right in his head and then committing it, almost fully formed, to paper. From my observation, writers of speeches tend to jot down thoughts, ideas and bits of language and then compose, draft after draft, from the notes. I asked a friend, a writer and artist, if he knew of another writer who wrote as Lincoln and Johnson did. “No, but I know of a great composer who seems to have done exactly that—Mozart.”

 

Lincoln travelled to Gettysburg by train, arriving near sundown the night before the speech. In his pocket, not his hat, he carried an almost-finished draft, written in ink on Executive Office stationery. He didn’t write any of the speech on the trip—there was too much bustle around him, and the train jerked too much.

 

That night in Gettysburg, Lincoln stayed in the home of David Wills, a local “eminento” who’d pushed the idea of the national cemetery and helped buy the land. The little town was overrun with visitors. A crowd gathered at Wills’s house and called out to Lincoln to speak.

 

Here we see a nice moment of the egalitarianism and lack of reverence with which 19th-century Americans approached their presidents.

 

Lincoln came out and said: “I appear before you . . . merely to thank you for the compliment.” He would not deliver a speech for “several substantial reasons.” One is that he didn’t have one. “In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things,” he added.

 

“If you can help it,” shot a voice from the crowd.

 

Lincoln said the only way to help it was to say “nothing at all.”

 

The next morning, Nicolay joined Lincoln upstairs and stayed for about an hour as the president, with lead pencil, finished the speech.

 

Days before, Lincoln had told the reporter Noah Brooks that the address would be “short, short, short.” He wasn’t the main speaker of the day; that was the famous orator Edward Everett, who spoke at noon, for two hours.

 

From Lincoln the crowd expected something quick, maybe pithy, possibly perfunctory. “They were therefore totally unprepared for what they heard,” Nicolay recalled, “and could not immediately realize that his words, and not those of the carefully selected orator, were to carry the concentrated thought of the occasion like a trumpet-peal to furthest posterity.”

 

Nicolay sat a few feet from Lincoln. “It is the distinct recollection of the writer . . . that he did not read from the written pages,” that there was nothing “mechanical” in his delivery. He spoke instead from “the fullness and conciseness of thought and memory.”

 

In the end there were three versions of the speech, all the same in meaning but with small stylistic differences.

 

There was the draft Lincoln wrote in Washington and finished in Gettysburg. There is the version taken down in shorthand by an Associated Press reporter as the president spoke—this would be telegraphed across the country and splashed on the next morning’s front pages. And there is the revised copy Lincoln made after his return to the White House. He compared his original draft with the version in”the newspapers and included “his own recollections of the exact form in which he delivered" the speech. That draft is now the official, agreed-upon text.

 

More from Allen Guelzo’s new “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” a sweeping and meticulous recounting of the battle that never loses sight of its essentials. Mr. Guelzo, in an epilogue, says something about the Gettysburg Address I’d not seen noted in a life reading Lincoln.

 

It turns out Lincoln gave a kind of preview of the address only three days after the battle had ended. It was July 7. Word had reached the War Department of another Union triumph, on July 4, at Vicksburg, Miss. This greatly cheered a glum Lincoln, who'd been grieving Gen. George Meade’s decision not to follow and crush Lee’s forces as they retreated from Pennsylvania. What happened at Vicksburg underscored the momentum toward victory. Lincoln called the news “great. . . . It is great!”

 

Word swept through Washington. A crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and called for a speech.

 

Lincoln improvised from a second-floor window. Actually he rambled, but you can see where even then he was going. Guelzo puts Lincoln’s remarks in italics: “How long ago is it? . . . eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he said, had put the opponents of that truth on the run.

 

This, Lincoln said, was “a glorious theme,” but he was not prepared, at that moment, to do it justice.

 

He would, however, in the next two weeks, as he thought, and formulated, and decided exactly how he wanted to say what he wanted to say.

 

“How long ago is it—eighty odd years?’ would become, “Four score and seven years ago.” Less dry and numeric, that. Almost biblical, as if the events of 1776 were epochal in the history of man.

 

Which is what he thought.

 

And he was right.

 

Happy 237th Independence Day to America, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.


Guelzo:

Among my great-grandfather’s papers, carefully set down in his small, gnarled handwriting, is a copy of the Gettysburg Address. When Lincoln delivered the speech, my great-grandfather was 10 years old and living in Sweden, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. That inconvenient birth exposed him to the haphazardness of privilege—for although he was raised, petted and groomed by his father’s family, he soon understood that he would never have any real standing in that family or their world.

Over their protests, he left Sweden in his 20s, arriving penniless in New York in 1879 but still in possession of the American president’s words, the promise of a new nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, where no one—not even a baron's bastard—was obliged to remove his cap when his betters rode by.

For John Anderson (the name he assumed when he moved to Philadelphia in the 1880s), the Gettysburg Address was the title-deed to his new world. Little did he realize how very narrowly that deed had come to being lost.

The Civil War was in its third year when Abraham Lincoln was invited to deliver his “few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. For most of those three years, the war had not gone well for the Union he had been elected to lead as president. A breakaway Confederacy of 11 Southern states had seceded, playing on their declared right to self-determination and fighting off every effort by Union forces to subdue their uprising.

Lincoln understood that their appeal to self-determination was dubious at best. The self-determination the Confederate states desired was the freedom to protect the legalized slavery of 3.9 million black people, purely on the basis of their race, in defiance of what the Declaration of Independence had to say about equality.

And having taken that step away from equality, the Confederacy had kept moving further and further away until its entire life came to resemble a European aristocracy. The Confederacy established an internal passport system for all persons, levied a steeply graduated income tax, appropriated private property for military use, and nationalized Southern industries—iron-making, clothing for military uniforms and even railroads. Even among whites, a disdainful hierarchy of thousand-bale cotton planters and poor white sandhillers emerged.

“The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy and gentry, is undisguised and apparently genuine,” marveled the British journalist William Howard Russell in 1861. King Leopold I of Belgium, in 1863, hoped that the Civil War would “raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.”

No wonder, then, that Lincoln exulted when the Confederate army under Robert E. Lee met with a climactic defeat by Union forces at the small Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg in July 1863. In Lincoln’s mind, there was a symbolic coincidence in receiving the news of the Gettysburg victory on the Fourth of July. It was, he told a crowd of well-wishers in Washington, as though a bright line had been drawn between “the first time” in 1776 that “a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self evident truth that all men are created equal,” and 1863, when “the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” had “turned tail” and run.

When the invitation came to dedicate the Gettysburg cemetery in November, Lincoln painstakingly drafted a deeply compressed statement of what he understood the battle, and the Civil War as a whole, to be about. He began with a quasi-biblical flourish: “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War had assumed the form of a test, whether "that nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated can long endure." But could it?

The problem—as those Southern aristocrats would have been quick to point out—was that democracy also injected an element of instability into society. If the humblest man had equal access to participating in government, what myriad kinds of chaos were likely to result from a government composed of “equals”—of shopkeepers, schoolteachers, farmers or mechanics—rather than by those who had been bred from their cradles to rule the land? The answer was argument, dissension and civil war, which is why the South’s secession so delighted its aristocrats.

Gettysburg provided the most eloquent refutation of their world view. The soldiers who died on the battleground to preserve the Union had been exactly those dull, commonplace boors the aristocrats disdained.

The real question Lincoln wanted to pose in his address was whether the American people were still willing, as had been the “honored dead,” to devote themselves to “that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” On that hung the issue, not just of slavery, but of democracy itself. If Americans could so rise, Lincoln said, then the nation could experience a political version of a revival—a “new birth of freedom”—and the government of the people so despised in every European palace “shall not perish from the earth.”

The age of plantations and masters has passed away, helped in no small measure by the people who rallied to Lincoln’s challenge. But the perverse suspicion that the people understand too little to determine their own fate has by no means disappeared. And if it no longer marches in epaulets and cocked hats, it still speaks in the accents of efficiency and centralization. Not hierarchy, but bureaucracy, has become the new agent for imposing stability and “fairness” handed down from on high.

The Battle of Gettysburg ended 150 years ago. But the democratic principle it was fought for still requires defending. And in the long view, its best defense may be the 272 words Lincoln uttered at Gettysburg. My great-grandfather seems to have thought so, and so do I.

Remember, Remember, the Third of July. By Avi Isaacharoff.

Remember, remember, the third of July. By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, July 3, 2013.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was the spearhead of a series of Islamist victories in the “Arab Spring.” As of Wednesday, that’s over.

A Steep Fall for the Muslim Brotherhood. By David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim. New York Times, July 2, 2013.

Egypt’s Crisis Signals the Unraveling of Yet Another Arab Nation-State. By Karl Vick. Time, July 2, 2013.

The Irony of Tahrir Square. By Ashraf Khalil. Foreign Affairs, July 2, 2013.

Female Foreign Journalist Gang-Raped in Horrific Tahrir Square Attack. By Callie Beusman. Jezebel, July 1, 2013.

Just How Bad Is It for Women in Egypt? Very. By Erin Gloria Ryan. Jezebel, June 28, 2012.

The myth of political Islam has been exposed in Egypt. By Bessma Momani. The Globe and Mail, July 3, 2013.

Momani:

What to make of huge turnout for protests against President Mohammed Morsi in Egypt – the most populous Arab country and bedrock of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence? The myth of Islamist political ideology as a solution to all political and economic woes has been broken.

 

Political Islamists throughout the Arab world had been forced into the background of political life – or the underground – in the years when most Arab governments discredited their right to participate in political life. But these Arab regimes were often corrupt and based their support on crony capitalism and sham elections. This helped Islamists, ironically, to be the champions of virtue, clean government, social welfare, and justice. With the single slogan “Islam is the solution,” they effectively captured the imagination and hope of millions in the Arab world, making people believe that they had an alternative to tyranny.

 

This first year under the Morsi government in Egypt – by far the largest pilot project ever staged for Islamists’ political ideology – has exposed the myth that Islamists have a real alternative.

 

Under Mr. Morsi, no new economic or political ideas were brought to the political table. Yes, the Egyptian “deep state” of Hosni Mubarak-era cronies prevented change, particularly in the judiciary and elements of the public sector. But Islamists had no real solution to the everyday problems of Egyptians such as traffic, garbage, insecurity, unemployment and the sheer chaos that characterizes the mundane life people lead. Like his predecessors, Mr. Morsi tried to court foreign capital, international donors, and international creditors such as the International Monetary Fund. In essence, Mr. Morsi's economic policies were business as usual.

 

Undoubtedly Mr. Morsi inherited an economic mess and a corrupted system that would take more than a year to weed out. Also, one could argue that like all countries, Egypt must play by the international economic rules, and has taken an economic beating with a depreciating exchange rate and rising debt burdens. The Islamists are also capitalists themselves, albeit small- to medium-sized businesses and not national oligarchs. So Islamists are not likely to shake the economic system underpinning Egypt.

 

But the point here is that Islamists never claimed governing was hard; in essence they simplified good governance to a single and effective slogan: “Islam is the solution!” To many Egyptians this is now an empty slogan and there is a demand for real policy ideas. This is a good thing as it sets the stage for political parties to mature beyond rhetoric into developing policy platforms.

 

Islamists will retain the respect of having cleaner hands than the Mubarak regime, but Egyptians and perhaps Arab electorates in other transition countries will also demand more. In a devout region, religious credentials will matter less than offering specific solutions to life's mundane problems.

This Is the Land. By Qanta Ahmed.

“Ascending a precipice [in southern Israel], we approach a lone tree reaching upwards to its Maker.” (photo: Qanta Ahmed).

The is the land. By Qanta Ahmed. The Times of Israel, June 26, 2013.

On her first visit to Israel recently, Dr. Qanta Ahmed saw the country “as God sees it.” The Muslim physician, professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants was smitten by the natural beauty, history and modern achievements that came into vivid focus.

The many faces of Dr. Qanta Ahmed, an unlikely defender of Israel. By Judy Maltz. Haaretz, May 31, 2013.

Maltz:

Her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says, have been strongly influenced by her own family’s experiences.

 

“When India and Pakistan were divided overnight by partition [in 1947], my parents − who were little children then − were immediately relocated because they were in Hindu territory,” recalls Ahmed. “When I lived in Saudi or traveled to other countries in this region, one of the most vociferous things I would hear is that, because of Israel, the Palestinians were dispossessed from their property and land.

 

“I don’t know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in any kind of detail or with any kind of authority, but I do know what it was like for my parents to move with their parents because there were new borders, and I’ve seen how they’ve created lives migrating again. I also see how people came to Israel, some of them barely surviving the Holocaust, to a land where they were not used to the climate and where they had no family, and yet somehow managed to build this extraordinary, complicated nation. Some people will think it’s an unfair comparison, but both Israel and Pakistan were created to protect a minority that global powers believed was being persecuted.”

 

Does that justify the Israeli occupation? No, responds Ahmed, describing the occupation as a “terrible burden” both on the Palestinians and on Israel. “Those who are occupied are not liberated and not autonomous, but the occupation is also a burden on Israel for the same reasons it was on the U.S. in Iraq − it involves huge costs, a huge price and huge risks.”

 

Still, Ahmed admits, she’s not sure what the alternative is: “I’m well acquainted with Jihadist ideology and suicide bombers in Pakistan, so I don’t know what you do apart from building a wall to safeguard the Israeli territory. How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslin leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?”

 

Her professional medical work, she says, has also been instrumental in shaping her political mind-set. In recent years, at her sleep disorder center, she began treating policemen, firemen and other individuals who were first and second responders when the Twin Towers collapsed in New York City on September 11, 2001. “It made me even more committed to distinguishing violent political Islamist ideology and nonviolent political Islam from what I see as my faith, because I can see the suffering caused by this deviant ideology,” she explains.

 

Ahmed doesn’t draw the line with radical Islam, coming down strongly on her new adopted homeland for its drone attacks on the tribal territories of Pakistan. “I’ve seen acres and acres of patients suffering from PTSD because of these attacks,” she says, “but am I going to abandon the U.S. because they’re using this barbaric technology with impunity? No, I’m going to stay and try to educate. And by the way, that’s how I feel about Israel, too.”

 

If there’s one thing that’s impressed her beyond all in Israel, says Ahmed, it’s the level of religious freedom and pluralism enjoyed in the country. “One thing you can’t complain about here is the right to worship as you see fit,” she remarks.

 

When told that many Israelis would find that statement almost laughable, considering the recent battle over the rights of women to pray as they see fit at the Western Wall, she responds: “I’ve heard these arguments in Reform synagogues in Long Island, and I was absolutely agog. But the fact is that at the wall, women are able to pray. In Saudi Arabia, in Mecca, there are now moves to confine where women can pray. American Reform Jews who complain that they’re not recognized here, I invite them to please visit parts of the world that I’ve seen where religious freedom is completely lacking. There’s no comparison. Absolutely no comparison.”

Fight the Delegitimizing Lies, Don’t Embrace Them. By Gil Troy.

Fight the delegitimizing lies, don’t embrace them. By Gil Troy. Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2013. Also at SPME.

Troy:

Israel’s Justice Minister and chief Palestinian negotiator, Tzipi Livni, just won what I am going to call the “Legitimizing the Delegitimizers Award” with a foolish, self-destructive speech in Eilat on Monday.

 

Livni legitimized Israel’s delegitimizers by echoing their unreasonable prejudices against the Jewish state to try encouraging Israeli peacemaking. Using inaccurate, harmful words like “colonialist” and “apartheid,” she echoed the rhetorical sloppiness of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak who have also used our enemies’ language, warning Israel about becoming an “apartheid state” – when in Israel there never has been the benighted South African regime’s institutionalized, biological, state-sponsored racism.

 

Appalled by seeing our leaders internalizing our adversaries’ language, I will grant this “Legitimizing the Delegitimizers Award” annually in these pages to condemn acts of outrageous rhetorical negligence – by smart leaders who should know better.

 

Because this award believes that words matter – here are Livni’s musings: “Europe is boycotting goods,” she said. “True, it starts with settlement [goods], but their problem is with Israel, which is seen as a colonialist country. Therefore, it won’t stop at the settlements, but [will spread] to all of Israel,” she warned. Then, praising young Israelis for protesting her own government’s decision to export natural gas, she insisted: “The time has come for the same youth to ask, to what kind of state do they want to leave the gas reserves? To a Jewish democratic Israel? Or to a binational Arab state? Or to an apartheid state?” Peace is only achievable if Israelis negotiate for the right reasons.

 

Israel should not compromise in an unrealistic attempt to woo Europeans, many of whose prejudices transcend what Israel does or does not do. Israel should compromise as part of a reality-based attempt at a just, necessary peace that preserves state security, maximizes individual satisfaction regionally, and respects Israeli and Palestinian national dignity.

 

“Europe” – which has a hard enough time cooperating about anything these days – is not “boycotting goods.” The European Commission website calls Israel “an important trading partner for the EU in the Mediterranean area, and the EU is the first trading partner for Israel with total trade amounting to approximately 29.4 billion euros in 2011” – some boycott.

 

Calling Israel “colonialist” is historically inaccurate and morally offensive. “Colonialism” means imposing foreigners on lands to which they do not belong. Calling Israel’s West Bank presence “colonial,” like using the words “settlements” to describe restored Jewish communities in Gush Etzion and elsewhere, ignores Jews’ historic, ideological, and legal ties to “Eretz Yisrael,” the land of Israel.

 

If the Jews have no valid national claim to Hebron, Jews have no valid claim anywhere.

 

Since the British Mandate, Jews have had the right to settle anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, despite the attempt to make the hastily improvised 1949 armistice “green line” sacred.

 

Of course, national greatness sometimes comes from refusing to assert all your claims, no matter how valid. 2013 is not 1913 or 13 BCE. Peace will emerge when most Israelis and Palestinians recognize that borders shifted, populations moved, so no one has exclusive claims, making compromise necessary.

 

Jews should no longer live in places like Hebron, where Palestinians outnumber Jews by more than 300 to 1. But those of us who acknowledge Jewish rights to Hebron and other parts of Jordan’s West Bank, yet would sacrifice them for peace, show far more commitment to peace – along with more historical authenticity and self-respect – than those who view Israelis there as colonialist brigands who should flee in shame.

 

Apartheid is an inflammatory word that should be banned from Middle East discourse. Apartheid imposed a biologically-based racist system of distinction between whites, blacks and colored.

 

The Palestinian-Israeli clash is national, not racial. Apartness is not apartheid, especially because more initiatives for true separation and purging of populations come from Palestinians, whereas most assume that Israeli Arabs will remain Israeli citizens even if Palestine becomes independent.

 

In the 1970s, egged on by Soviet manipulators seeking to woo the Third World and “South Africanize” Israel, Palestinian and Arab propagandists injected words like “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “racism” and “apartheid” into the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

Manipulators like Columbia University Professor Edward Said and the perpetual terrorist Yasser Arafat understood that if the conflict remained a local Arab-Jewish clash, the world would sympathize with Israel; but if the conflict could be globalized and linked to the broader – noble – fight against European crimes like racism, the Palestinians might win.

 

How ironic that the Jews, having been kicked out of Europe in the 1940s, were now being Europeanized in the 1970s – and that in 2013, some Europeans exorcise their collective guilt by self-righteously accusing Israel of European- style crimes.

 

How pathetic that some Israeli leaders – egged on by a worldwide propaganda campaign and inured to the truth by  Haaretz’s constant use of words like “apartheid” echo and implicitly validate this rhetorical assault on Israel’s legitimacy.

 

If Tzipi Livni and others want to nurture the Israeli peace consensus, weak arguments about making nice with Europe will fail. We need peace for our sake.

 

Those on the Left must be challenged to fight the delegitimizing lies about Israel to detoxify the environment and build an atmosphere conducive to peace.

 

Those on the Right must be challenged to acknowledge the realities of Palestinian demography and preserve Israeli democracy by finding new arrangements.

 

Smart leaders who build consensus by crossing political wires will win; scared politicians who want to be liked in Europe or elsewhere will lose. 

The “Legitimizing the Delegitimizers Award” comes with my free offer of bread crumbs, symbolizing the weak, cowardly, European Jews who used to beg for scraps in currying their oppressors’ favor. I look forward to a year when there will be no politician careless enough to win this booby prize.

 

 

Who Says Conservatives Are More Patriotic? By Ira Chernus.

Who Says Conservatives Are More Patriotic? By Ira Chernus. History News Network, July 2, 2013. Also at Tikkun.

The War Over Patriotism. By Peter Beinart. Time, June 26, 2008. NJBR, January 28, 2013.

Chernus:

As we got busy preparing for Fourth of July festivities, this question popped into my head: Are conservatives more patriotic than other Americans? If you were a foreigner spending some time in the USA, getting news from the mass media and just talking to people, you might easily get that impression – especially around the Fourth, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to display those big American flags.

 

In fact you might easily get that impression on any day of the year, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to put their love of country on display in all sorts of ways, aiming to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about their patriotism.

 

But what’s the truth behind the display? Are conservatives really more patriotic than others? Well, it depends on what you mean by patriotism.

 

And there lies the heart of the matter: Conservatives appear to be more patriotic because they have so much control over the very meaning of the term. Most of the time, when anyone uses the word “patriotism,” it turns out to mean what conservatives say it means.

 

Debates about the meaning of patriotism may rage in the margins of our political life. But in ordinary day to day America, where the real action is, nobody pays much (if any) attention, because the fundamentals of patriotism are generally taken for granted. And they are assumed to be pretty much what conservatives usually say they are: the right words (“greatest, and freest, country on earth,” “support our troops,” “I regret that I have but one life to give,” etc.); the right images (Uncle Sam, Statue of Liberty, Capitol dome, etc.); the right actions (waving the flag, singing the national anthem, etc.) -- the words, images, and actions that they love to flourish on the right. So of course most Americans say the right is more patriotic.

 

Oh, sure, on the Fourth of July you’ll find even the most liberal politicians throughout the land proclaiming their particular brand of liberalism as truly American and genuinely patriotic. Politicians of every stripe do that every day. Most organizations that have any significant clout, across the political spectrum, will loudly assert their patriotism too, if they are pressed to say anything about the issue. But expressions of patriotism outside the conservative orbit are widely received as a kind of window-dressing, not to be taken too seriously.

 

Conservatives’ expressions, on the other hand, are generally seen, in the main stream of the culture, as the genuine article. They are credited as totally serious and as an essential piece of the whole conservative package – naturally, since patriotism is defined so largely in conservative terms.

 

But the intrinsic special connection between conservatism and patriotism is only an appearance. It’s like a magic trick. A good magician’s tricks are so dazzling because the audience wants to be dazzled; the trick is a transaction between the magician and the audience.

 

In the same way, the idea that conservatives are especially patriotic – that they understand and feel patriotism more deeply, that it’s more fundamental in their lives – has taken root throughout American political culture only because everyone who is not conservative has agreed to play along. Conservatives control the meaning of patriotism because most everyone else lets them get away with it.

 

As long as conservatives have such a strong lock on patriotism, they have a built-in advantage in the political arena – especially among the 20 percent or so of voters who don’t have any special allegiance to either major party, leaving their votes always up for grabs.

 

A lot of those uncommitted voters stay that way because they don’t see much clear-cut difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. When you look at two alternatives that appear roughly equally balanced, any one factor can tip the scales. Who knows how many votes Republicans get from voters who see the two parties as roughly equal, except that the GOP appears to be so much more devoted to patriotism. The GOP will always have that advantageous appearance as long its control over the language, imagery, and ritual of patriotism goes unchallenged.

 

Moderates and liberals could push back. They could take a firm stand in favor of their own brands of patriotism; show that theirs are just as genuine as any conservative’s; insist that patriotism is just as important in their lives as in any right-winger’s; make the meaning of patriotism a defining political battleground, as important as gender rights or immigration or Social Security. Even on the progressive far left, there is plenty to contribute to a conversation about patriotism.

 

Trying to challenge conservatives on this ground would be an uphill struggle, to be sure, because they have a major advantage on the right: They are generally quite sure that they know what patriotism is, and they tend to agree with each other on their definition. So they present a pretty solid united front (at least when viewed in the rather hazy, general terms that most Americans see all things political).

 

Everywhere else on the political spectrum there is a lot more questioning, disagreement, and uncertainty about the true meaning of patriotism, though the degree will surely vary from point to point on that spectrum. The further you go toward the left, the more uncertainty there is about whether patriotism of any kind has any value at all. Eventually you reach a point where it’s widely taken for granted that patriotism is something bad, something to be rejected out of hand.

 

That extreme stance is not likely to win too many votes, so it doesn’t have much direct political power. Nevertheless it has an important political effect: The questions about patriotism raised so pointedly on the far left have seeped across the whole left side, and even into the center, of the political spectrum, stirring up the uncertainty that weakens the Democratic Party on this issue.

 

It’s been going on for a long time. In the 1830s William Lloyd Garrison, the great preacher of nonviolent abolitionism, wrote: “Breaking down the narrow boundaries of a selfish patriotism, [I have] inscribed upon my banner this motto: My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.”

 

But the most important historical root of our current situation is, without doubt, the Vietnam war. As the antiwar movement grew, so did the belief that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrels who had led us into, and now perpetuated, the war – from Johnson and Nixon on down to the millions who gave unwavering support to those presidents’ war policies.

 

Those millions waved their flags and spouted patriotic rhetoric as a sign of their support for the war. So it was perhaps inevitable that, from the antiwar side, it became harder and harder to distinguish patriotism from militaristic chauvinism.

 

To be sure, some antiwar activists went out of their way to insist that they were the true patriots; they even carried American flags as they joined the protesting crowds. But their message was drowned out by the louder voices on their side decrying patriotism as a root of the war’s evil. And antiwar patriots were largely ignored by the mass media, who were eager to put the spotlight on every “Amerikka” sign they could find.

 

One telling example: When Martin Luther King first publicly denounced the Vietnam War (a year to the day before he was murdered) he stressed that he was speaking out because of his deep love for his country and its ideals. But in antiwar circles then (and in liberal circles now) his patriotism was almost always ignored. All that got remembered was his eloquent critique of the war and of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

 

The Vietnam war era raised questions about the meaning and value of patriotism more profoundly and persistently than ever before in U.S. history -- questions that large numbers of Americans found unsettling, at least, even if they never bothered to think them through very systematically. The war excised the taken-for-granted patriotism that had once been the heart of American political culture. Instead of sparking a public debate about patriotism, though, it left only a gaping hole in the body politic.

 

Surely one part (historians will always argue about how big a part) of the rightward shift of the latter 1970s was a desire to escape that unsettled feeling and fill that hole by returning to the “good old days” of unquestioned patriotism. Ronald Reagan was the ideal pitchman for the job, selling the old-fashioned wine of patriotism in new bottles that perfectly suited the times. The demand was huge. But the supply, from Reagan and the right-wing movement he led, was unlimited.

 

Those who refused to buy Reaganism also refused to buy the heady brew of patriotism he was peddling, and vice versa. But they had no alternative vision of patriotism to offer because they were caught in the uncertainty about, or outright rejection of, patriotism that the war had brought them.

 

So the deal was sealed: Patriotism would come from the right. And whatever came from the right would be – by definition – the accepted meaning of true patriotism. Where else could that meaning come from, with the rest of the political spectrum in such disarray on the subject?

 

Moreover, the right was offering expressions of patriotism that had deep roots in America’s past, while the rest, if they wanted patriotism at all, would be happy only with some genuinely new formulations. At a time when so many Americans felt like changes were coming too thick and fast, the seemingly old had a natural advantage over the new. Conserving the familiar expressions of patriotism was more popular than the alternative of liberating patriotism to find new meanings and new values.

 

This was one of the many lasting effects – and one of the great tragedies – of the Vietnam war. How different things might have been if all the war critics, all the liberals, even all the radicals, had followed Dr. King’s lead and framed their antiwar sentiment within an overarching patriotism: a commitment to making a better America because they loved America so much. They might have declared, in all honesty, that they were trying to save America, as well as Vietnam, from all the evils the war brought; that they clearly loved their country more than conservatives, who applauded a war that did the U.S. (and, of course, Vietnam) so much harm.

 

It didn’t happen that way, and the damage was done. But it’s never too late for moderates, liberals, and even leftist progressives to start proclaiming their patriotism loud and clear. Yes, it would be an uphill struggle to break the perception of a conservative monopoly on patriotism. The conservatives do have all those advantages. But fighting for what’s right against daunting odds is the American way. What could be more patriotic?

 

So this Fourth of July, if you’re sitting in a crowd waiting for the fireworks to begin and you’re not a conservative, you might seek out someone to your political right and say, “Hey, let’s talk about the real meaning of patriotism.” Maybe offer them a cold beer, too. It’s the American way.

 

Evaluating the Obama Administration’s Response to Unrest in Egypt.

Evaluating the Obama administration’s response to unrest in Egypt. Video with Ralph Peters and Marc Thiessen. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, July 3, 2013.

How Did the U.S. Lose the Egyptian People? By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 2, 2013.

Wall Street Journal Attacks “Blood and Soil” Republicans. By Joel B. Pollak.

WSJ Attacks “Blood and Soil” Republicans Over Opposition to Immigration Bill. By Joel B. Pollak. Breitbart, July 3, 2013.

A Pro-Growth Reform. Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2013.

Does War Between Egypt and Israel Loom? By Lee Smith.

Will Egypt Save Itself From Total Collapse by Going to War With Israel? By Lee Smith. Tablet, July 3, 2013.

Smith:

What is unfolding in Egypt is not about politics or the economy, it is simply a medieval carnival of grievance and rage, where every appetite, no matter how vicious, can be indulged, because no one feels a stake in preserving any larger, inclusive whole—however that whole is described. It is easier for Western commentators to get a fix on the chaos when it appears to be motivated by religious hatred. Last week, four members of Egypt’s minuscule Shia community were surrounded, beaten, and stabbed to death in their village outside Cairo. Since the mob was incited to murder by a Salafi sheikh, it was clear who was responsible for this bit of butchery, an Islamist fanatic.

 

The chain of accountability is a little more difficult for those same Western analysts to track when it’s the anti-Morsi forces who are drawing blood. All of the Muslim Brotherhood’s offices across Egypt have been stormed, and the national headquarters was torched. Sixteen people are dead, allegedly including Brotherhood supporters, whose apparent sin was backing a political party that won a free election—the last one that Egypt is likely to see for quite a while.

 

If foreign journalists and analysts have failed to be appropriately appalled by the demonstrations, it is because in their worldview, the Islamists are the bad guys and the secularists are the good guys. Now that Egyptians are mad at Morsi, the thinking goes, the Egyptians will get their liberal revolution back—along with that cool guy from Google. Reporters are told in man-on-the-street interviews that Morsi is the problem. The complaint should sound familiar because that’s exactly what the same protesters said about Mubarak. The one thing everyone is definitely agreed on is that the problem with Egyptian society isn’t the Egyptians themselves.

 

A competent leader, likely not Morsi, will soon come to see that he has no choice but to make a virtue of necessity and export the one commodity that Egypt has in abundance—violence. So, why not bind the warring, immature, and grandiose Egyptian factions together in a pact against Israel, the country’s sole transcendent object of loathing? Indeed, it’s not entirely clear why Egypt’s venomous strains of anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic sentiment have not yet hit fever pitch. Yes, Morsi doesn’t want to get the White House angry. And there’s also the obvious fact that Egyptians are too divided against themselves right now to be unified against anyone else. But that can’t last for long, or else Egypt will implode.

 

So, here are the facts that Egyptians and Western reporters alike would rather not face: There is simply no way that today’s Egypt can feed its own people, or fuel the tractors that harvest its crops—let alone attract tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment to grow a hi-tech miracle along the banks of the Nile. That’s fantasyland stuff—like the fantasy of an American-style constitutional democracy run by the Muslim Brotherhood and guaranteed by the Egyptian army.

 

So, what’s left? A short war today—precipitated by a border incident in Sinai, or a missile gone awry in the Gaza Strip, and concluded before the military runs out of the ammunition that Washington will surely not resupply—will reunify the country and earn Egypt money from an international community eager to broker peace. Taking up arms against Israel will also return Egypt to its former place of prominence in an Arab world that is adrift in a sea of blood. But even more important is the fact that there is no other plausible way out: Sacrificing thousands of her sons on the altar of war is the only way to save Mother Egypt from herself.

The Americans Who Risked Everything. By Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr.

The Americans Who Risked Everything. By Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr. RushLimbaugh.com, July 3, 2013.

New York Times Questions the Emperor. By Walter Russell Mead.

NYT Questions Emperor: So, About Those Clothes . . . By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 3, 2013.

Chaos in the Middle East Grows as the U.S. Focuses on Israel. By Mark Landler and Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, July 1, 2013.

Gettysburg: Why They Fought. By David Brooks.

Why They Fought. By David Brooks. New York Times, July 1, 2013.

The Terror of Being Black at Gettysburg. By Kevin M. Levin. History News Network, July 2, 2013.

General George Gordon Meade: The Hero of Gettysburg. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, June 30, 2013.

Orientalism, 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-Builders. By Edward Said.

Orientalism, 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-Builders. By Edward Said. CounterPunch, August 5, 2003.

Rush Limbaugh on Fox and Friends.

Rush Limbaugh on Fox and Friends. RushLimbaugh.com, July 2, 2013. At Real Clear Politics, YouTube.




KILMEADE: The secretary of state is focusing on Israel and the Palestinians, which is Hamas. Why is he there? Even the New York Times said that’s a sideshow.

 

RUSH: It’s John Kerry. He doesn't know what he’s doing. Everything about this administration is image, sideshow, perception, photo op, optics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on since the Bible was written. John Kerry doesn’t have the answer to it. Nobody in this administration has the answer to it. The only way that conflict is ever going to be solved is like any other conflict is solved. That is when there is an acknowledged loser who surrenders.

 

CARLSON: Mmm-hmm.

 

RUSH: Until that happens, all of this is just meaningless. It really is. I’ve been doing my radio show for 25 years and topics are now starting to repeat, you guys – and nothing changes. This is all just . . . It’s all part and parcel of the pattern of events. Look at all the work Clinton and Arafat did. Why? It didn’t matter a whit, did it? Look at all the work Jimmy Carter did. It didn’t matter a whit, did it? Arafat was given everything he asked for at one point. He pulled out ’cause he didn't want the conflict to end, just like certain leftists in this country don't want the conflicts they’re involved in to end. Because if you solve the problem, there is no reason for them to exist anymore. So all of this, to me, is just sadly – really sadly – predictable. I’m not trying to be cynical about it, but I am.


Hamas Victory: A Clarifying Development. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, January 26, 2006.

Rush:

 

Here’s my first observation on this election in Israel. I know some people think it’s Palestine. I still think it’s Israel. I want to phrase this, and put this within the context of what I’ve always called the Limbaugh Doctrine. The Limbaugh Doctrine, ladies and gentlemen, is very, very simple: Peace does not come about with words and doctors and nurses and clean water. Peace follows victory. If you look at any conflict worldwide in modern history, in recent history, or long-ago history, in history, period – you will see that peace follows victory. We didn’t get peace with Germany and Japan by virtue of words until after we had defeated them. Now, this Israeli-Palestinian thing is not going to be any different than any other such conflict, and in that sense, I think that the Hamas victory in these elections could end up to be a good thing – and here’s why. I don’t think there’s any difference between Hamas and Fatah at all. They both stand for the same thing, and that is the elimination of Israel.


O to Israel: Go Back to ’67 Borders. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, May 19, 2011.

Rush:

Peace results from one side emerging victorious in the conflict, the other side losing and surrendering.


Rush Limbaugh on Israel’s Problems with the Palestinians. IsraPundit, May 21, 2003.

Rush:

The point of this commentary is that the Palestinians don’t want peace and the Arabs in the Middle East don’t want peace. They want the end of Israel. They want the destruction of Israel. More and more of these pieces are being written because the truth is inescapable now. There have been so many overtures for peace, there have been so many efforts made, and the closer it appears to be getting to peace, the more violence erupts. All the liberals of the world say that dialogue is the most crucial ingredient to peace, do they not? Clearly the most crucial ingredient to peace is victory. You don’t get peace unless it is preceded by victory. That’s called the Limbaugh Doctrine, but liberals think you can bring peace by appeasing your enemy, and through dialogue, nurses, doctors, clean water, exchange programs, etc.

 

There was going to be “dialogue,” a little meeting between Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian official this week and what happened? Attack after attack after attack, suicide bombing after suicide bombing. The last thing these people want over there is peace. I don’t care whether you call it Oslo or Camp David or Camp David II, or the road map to peace, the fact is that there’s no Palestinian, no Syrian, no Iranian, who will accept an Israeli state.

 

Everybody talks about establishing a Palestinian state, but the real effort being made here is the destruction of the Israeli state. If we've learned anything since September 11th, it’s that you simply cannot negotiate with terrorists. Why we have learned this everywhere but the Middle East is beyond me. I’m a big believer in democracy and republican government, but the conditions for democracy among the Palestinians don't exist.

Boys Punished for Being Boys. By Walter Russell Mead.

Boys Punished for Being Boys. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 2, 2013.

Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School. By Jessica Lahey. The Atlantic, June 18, 2013.

The War Against Boys. By Christina Hoff Sommers. The Atlantic, May 2000. Also here.

Allen West Attacks Lady Gaga for Defiling the National Anthem.

Allen West: Lady Gaga Singing “Home Of The Gay” In National Anthem “Reprehensible.” By Paige Lavender. The Huffington Post, July 2, 2013.

Allen West blasts Lady Gaga for “defiling” national anthem. By Jessica Chasmar. Washington Times, July 2, 2013.

Allen West Facebook post, July 1, 2013.

Having served in the US Army for 22 years alongside some very brave men and women, I find Lady Gaga’s defiling of our National Anthem reprehensible. We are the land of the free because America has always been the home of the brave from Lexington and Concord to Kandahar. This young lady should be taken to Ft. McHenry and given a history lesson as to why Francis Scott Key wrote those words incredible words. In this week where we remember the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the 237th anniversary of our Independence is further evidence of the level of ignorance and disrespect some have for our national character. She and all those who cheered her abomination should be ashamed and apologize to every serving and retired member of our Armed Services. But perhaps I ask too much . . .


Lady Gaga Singing the National Anthem at the NYC Pride Rally 2013. Video. Lisa Murphy, June 28, 2013. YouTube.




Lady Gaga: Bad Romance. Video. LadyGagaVEVO, November 23, 2009. YouTube.