Post by RPankn on Jul 27, 2005 22:42:10 GMT -5
DLC | Blueprint Magazine | July 23, 2005
Valuing Patriotism
American voters know that 9/11 put national security back at the center of politics. Democrats should unify behind a new progressive patriotism.
By Will Marshall
Since 9/11, patriotism has become the most potent "values issue" in U.S. politics. To compete in America's heartland, Democrats must challenge Republicans' claim to be the authentic voice of American patriotism.
The problem for Democrats is that an important part of their base -- upscale white liberals -- seems torn about the meaning of patriotism. Republicans are ruthlessly effective in exploiting this ambivalence. Questioning Democrats' patriotism has been an ugly, but undeniably effective, GOP tactic from last year's "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign against John Kerry to Karl Rove's recent canard that liberals counseled "therapy and understanding" rather than retaliation in response to al Qaeda's attacks on America.
Even so, many Americans are beginning to wonder just how much more Republican-style patriotism they can afford. In Washington today, conservative hotheads abound who think diplomacy is for sissies and who delight in throwing America's military weight around. They belittle longtime allies who have the temerity to disagree with Bush administration policy. They complain, illogically, that the United Nations is both hopelessly weak and an intolerable check on U.S. sovereignty. This belligerent, overbearing chauvinism has stirred anti-American passions around the world, made U.S. efforts in Iraq more costly and difficult, and tarnished America's moral reputation.
You might think that Congress would have its hands full with escalating violence in Iraq, exploding public debts, a growing competitive challenge from Asia, and plunging public confidence in President Bush's Social Security plan. But GOP super-patriots ignored such distractions and found time recently to ram through the House a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning -- of which there was a grand total of one incident in the entire United States last year.
Such antics give Democrats an opportunity to expose what lies beneath the fulsome facade of GOP patriotism -- an atavistic nationalism in which the ruling passion is the will to power, not love of country. The right answer to GOP jingoism, however, cannot be left-wing anti-Americanism. Of course, progressives can criticize their country and still be patriotic. Indeed, one of the highest forms of patriotism is being honest about your country's flaws and taking responsibility for fixing them. But it is what's in your heart that counts. Are your objections rooted in a warm and generous affection for your country, or in a curdled contempt for it? Too many Americans aren't sure if the left is emotionally on America's side. And that's a big problem for Democrats.
The left's unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, "the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism." As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.
When Americans ponder such questions today, their frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.
Winning the war on terror. Democrats' most important task is to articulate a tough but smart strategy for winning the ideological struggle against Jihadist extremism. Yet many liberals remain fixated instead on Iraq. It's true that Team Bush has badly fumbled the occupation, but an anti-Iraq message alone won't reassure voters that Democrats can take charge of the nation's security. On the contrary, the conflation of partisan animus toward Bush with anti-war sentiment has shoved Democrats in a decidedly dovish direction.
Intellectually, of course, it's possible to separate Iraq and the war on terror. But as University of Maryland professor William Galston observed after the 2004 election, "President Bush succeeded in transforming the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism into questions of basic values and American national identity." And that, Galston wrote, exposed old fissures among Democrats:
"While Republicans stood united in their belief in American exceptionalism, Democrats were badly divided, as they have been since Vietnam. President Bush was able to rally his party by sounding the trumpet of American virtue on the global stage. By contrast, John Kerry struggled to bridge the gap between Tony Blair Democrats, who agreed with the president's principles but deplored his inept policies, and Michael Moore Democrats, who rejected, root and branch, the idea of a global fight against terrorism and for democracy."
A recent Century Foundation study found that just one-half of Democrats say dismantling al Qaeda should be among America's two top foreign policy goals; more actually ranked outsourcing as a bigger worry. Only 51 percent of Democrats trust their party more than Republicans on "maintaining a strong military." And 71 percent say the Iraq war has made them more reluctant to back the use of force in the future.
Such attitudes aren't likely to allay voters' doubts about Democrats' resolve to make them safer from terrorist attacks. Neither are demands by left-wing Democrats and the anti-war group, MoveOn.org, that the United States withdraw its troops from Iraq. Rather than offering fresh fodder to Karl Rove, the party would do better to heed Sens. Joe Biden, John Kerry, Evan Bayh, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who have set an example for responsible, progressive patriotism. They have balanced blunt criticism of the Bush administration's blunders with concrete suggestions for relieving the strain on U.S. forces in Iraq, broadening international support for the Iraqi government, and speeding up the pace of reconstruction.
Of course, as the opposition party, Democrats have a responsibility to hold the White House accountable for the painfully high price we've paid in Iraq, the thousands killed and wounded, and the billions of dollars spent. But they must do so in a way that makes it clear they are rooting for America to succeed in Iraq.
As they catalogue the administration's many mistakes, Democrats should also attend to the other side of the balance sheet. That side shows that our forces and their allies have toppled one of the world's most odious tyrants; upheld the principle of collective security; liberated a nation of 24 million; made possible Iraq's hopeful experiment in representative self-government; and changed the strategic equation in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
These are considerable, and noble, accomplishments, but they could all be squandered if we give up and come home too soon. Just as the Bush administration has made itself look foolish by its relentlessly upbeat assessments of a supposedly waning insurgency, progressives shouldn't leap to the premature conclusion that we are doomed to failure in Iraq.
Democrats should also bring a sense of proportion to the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. These sickening deviations from America's core principles have damaged our country's moral reputation around the world. True patriotism demands not denials and whitewashes, but a thorough, independent investigation, punishment of those responsible, and clear policies to prevent a repetition.
Yet the revelation that some U.S. troops aren't saints should not come as too great a shock, at least to grownups. By dwelling obsessively on U.S. misdeeds while ignoring the far more heinous crimes of what is quite possibly the most barbaric insurgency in modern times, anti-war critics betray an anti-American bias that undercuts their credibility.
Amnesty International likewise stumbled into the quagmire of moral equivalence in a report that absurdly analogized Guantanamo Bay, where 500 prisoners remain, to the Soviet gulags, where millions perished. The usually level-headed Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was forced to apologize after falling into the same trap. Activists rationalize such witless hyperbole by saying it's the only way to get Americans to pay attention to what their government is doing wrong. But this is the political equivalent of a compound felony: insulting voters' intelligence while offending their patriotic sensibilities.
Democrats and the military. Americans are justly proud of their Armed Forces. Along with the flag and the English language, the U.S. military is an honored emblem of national identity and unity. This is especially true in the heartland battleground states, where Democrats must do better if they hope to recapture the White House and Congress. Unfortunately, the Armed Forces have long been estranged from Democrats in general and liberal elites in particular. So another key task for progressive patriotism is to close the cultural gap between Democrats and the military.
Traditionally nonpartisan, today's military is even more polarized than the rest of society. According to a 2004 Annenberg survey, 47 percent of officers identify themselves as Republicans, 31 percent as independents, and a scant 15 percent as Democrats. A 2003 Military Times poll showed a similar ideological skew, with 50 percent of officers identifying themselves as conservatives, 40 percent as moderates,and just 7 percent as liberals. (Among voters in the 2004 presidential election, 34 percent were conservatives, 21 percent liberals, and 45 percent moderates.)
Conversely, the military is not always held in high esteem in what might be called the European wing of the Democratic party -- secular liberal elites in the deep-blue Northeast and West Coast. Frank Schaeffer, a Boston writer, tells the story of how shocked his upper-middle-class neighbors were when, in 1999, his high-achieving son joined the U.S. Marine Corps rather than follow his peers to elite universities:
"Why were I and the other parents at my son's private school so surprised by his choice? During World War II, the sons and daughters of the most powerful and educated families did their bit. If the immorality of the Vietnam War was the only reason those lucky enough to go to college dodged the draft, why did we not encourage our children to volunteer for military service once that war was done?
"Have we the wealthy and educated Americans all become pacifists? Is the world a safe place? Or have we just gotten used to having somebody else defend us? What is the future of our democracy when the sons and daughters of the janitors at our elite universities are far more likely to be put in harm's way than are any of the students whose dorms their parents' clean?"
How can Democrats start healing this breach? For starters, they can speak out against colleges that ban military recruiters or the Reserved Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) from their campuses. Thirty years after the Vietnam War ended, such Ivy League campuses as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth continue to ban ROTC. The message this sends is an offensive amalgam of class bias and anti-military prejudice: Service in the Armed Forces might be OK for dumb-ass Southerners or small-town kids with limited prospects, but it's not a smart career move for our best and brightest. Democrats should demand an end to this disgraceful legacy of the Vietnam protest era, by denying public funding to schools that deny the Armed Forces access to their campuses (see sidebar).
Congressional Democrats sometimes make the mistake of believing they can spend their way back into the military's affections. So they call for big increases in veterans' benefits, health care, housing, and other programs to enhance military families' quality of life. These are important, but military families don't want to be treated as just another special interest group. What matters most are intangibles -- being recognized and honored for the sacrifices they make to preserve our way of life.
Besides, the best way for Democrats to show support for our Armed Forces now is to rescue them from the Bush administration's attempts to win the war on terror on the cheap. Almost the entire burden of this fight has fallen on just two groups of Americans: members of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. Many defense analysts warn that the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the Army to the breaking point. The Army has failed repeatedly to meet its recruiting targets, as have the Guard and Reserves, whose members have been forced under "stop loss" rules repeatedly to extend their overseas deployments.
At the same time, many military leaders are furious with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other civilian officials for ignoring their advice that a larger force was necessary to secure the peace in Iraq. They believe Rumsfeld's insistence on a relatively small force (now 139,000 troops) made it impossible to stop looting, protect economic infrastructure, and pacify the rebellious Sunni triangle. The result has been a steadily growing insurgency that has claimed many more U.S. casualties than the Bush administration led the nation to expect.
Democrats ought to insist on a major expansion of the military, by as many as 100,000 troops. Some of these troops should be channeled into the post-conflict and nation-building specialties that we have been chronically short of in Iraq: linguists, special forces, psychological operations, civil affairs, and economic reconstruction. Rather than add to Bush's budget deficits, however, Democrats should insist on paying for a larger force by rolling back the administration's unconscionable wartime tax cuts. This would neatly frame the real choice facing patriotic Americans: a stronger military versus tax cuts for the privileged.
National service and shared sacrifice. True patriotism is at odds with the selfish individualism that shapes the Republicans' anti-government ideology. It means accepting obligations to the community to which we all belong and must contribute if we are to enjoy the fruits of membership. In wartime, not everyone can fight, but everyone can find ways to sacrifice for the common cause. Bush has sent U.S. troops into battle, but he hasn't challenged the rest of us to do our part.
On the contrary, he's made life even sweeter for the fortunate by cutting their taxes, and he's plunged the nation deeper into a debt that our children will have to pay. He has also allowed special interests to write energy policies that increase our dangerous dependence on oil. Worst of all, Bush's governing style has polarized the society, encouraging Americans to fear and mistrust each other rather than unifying them to meet the common danger.
Democrats should aim higher. To match the sacrifices our troops are making, they can call on every American to pitch in, give something back, and share the burdens that must be borne to defeat Islamist extremism, put our fiscal house back in order, and make our country more competitive. They can invoke the selfless and patriotic ethos of the New Deal and the New Frontier, which linked our nation's security explicitly to economic and social reforms -- social insurance, civil rights, high-quality schools, help for the poor and vulnerable -- that made us stronger at home. But all this requires that Democrats be bold enough to abandon the play-it-safe tactic of attacking Bush's policies relentlessly, while venturing few alternatives of their own.
Finally, Democrats should rediscover one of their own best ideas: national service. During the last decade, the AmeriCorps program President Clinton launched has put more than 400,000 volunteers to work. A comprehensive analysis by the Progressive Policy Institute found that AmeriCorps has proved its ability to perform public work that communities value, delivers services that neither government nor markets provide, and returns social benefits greater than its costs. But at 75,000 volunteers per year, Ameri-Corps remains a small demonstration project for an idea with big potential. It's time for Democrats to call for scaling up national service so that hundreds of thousands of Americans have a chance to serve their communities and their country.
One way to put service on more young people's radar screens is to replace the Selective Service System with a new National Service System. Such a system would sign up women, as well as men, and encourage them to volunteer for military or civilian service.
Another way to enlarge Ameri-Corps would be to link federal student aid to national service. Under such an arrangement, only those who agree to serve would be eligible to receive Pell Grants or to apply for subsidized student loans. Those who serve would receive more generous tuition aid -- say $10,000 per year -- than is now available. Such conditionality would bolster civic reciprocity -- the idea that rights and responsibilities go together and those who receive the community's support have an obligation to put something back into the communal pot. That is patriotism rightly understood.
By putting the war on terror first, ending the party's alienation from our military, and issuing a new call for service and sacrifice, Democrats can define a more compelling patriotism than the GOP's chauvinist bluster.
Patriotism is the ultimate values issue. Democrats need not be embarrassed by it. And they ought not to let Republicans monopolize the emblems of national pride and honor. Democrats need to be choosier about the political company they keep, distancing themselves from the pacifist and anti-American fringe. And they need to have faith in their fellow citizens: Americans will accept constructive criticism of their country if they know the critic's heart is in the right place.
Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=124&subid=307&contentid=253472
Valuing Patriotism
American voters know that 9/11 put national security back at the center of politics. Democrats should unify behind a new progressive patriotism.
By Will Marshall
Since 9/11, patriotism has become the most potent "values issue" in U.S. politics. To compete in America's heartland, Democrats must challenge Republicans' claim to be the authentic voice of American patriotism.
The problem for Democrats is that an important part of their base -- upscale white liberals -- seems torn about the meaning of patriotism. Republicans are ruthlessly effective in exploiting this ambivalence. Questioning Democrats' patriotism has been an ugly, but undeniably effective, GOP tactic from last year's "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign against John Kerry to Karl Rove's recent canard that liberals counseled "therapy and understanding" rather than retaliation in response to al Qaeda's attacks on America.
Even so, many Americans are beginning to wonder just how much more Republican-style patriotism they can afford. In Washington today, conservative hotheads abound who think diplomacy is for sissies and who delight in throwing America's military weight around. They belittle longtime allies who have the temerity to disagree with Bush administration policy. They complain, illogically, that the United Nations is both hopelessly weak and an intolerable check on U.S. sovereignty. This belligerent, overbearing chauvinism has stirred anti-American passions around the world, made U.S. efforts in Iraq more costly and difficult, and tarnished America's moral reputation.
You might think that Congress would have its hands full with escalating violence in Iraq, exploding public debts, a growing competitive challenge from Asia, and plunging public confidence in President Bush's Social Security plan. But GOP super-patriots ignored such distractions and found time recently to ram through the House a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning -- of which there was a grand total of one incident in the entire United States last year.
Such antics give Democrats an opportunity to expose what lies beneath the fulsome facade of GOP patriotism -- an atavistic nationalism in which the ruling passion is the will to power, not love of country. The right answer to GOP jingoism, however, cannot be left-wing anti-Americanism. Of course, progressives can criticize their country and still be patriotic. Indeed, one of the highest forms of patriotism is being honest about your country's flaws and taking responsibility for fixing them. But it is what's in your heart that counts. Are your objections rooted in a warm and generous affection for your country, or in a curdled contempt for it? Too many Americans aren't sure if the left is emotionally on America's side. And that's a big problem for Democrats.
The left's unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, "the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism." As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.
When Americans ponder such questions today, their frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.
Winning the war on terror. Democrats' most important task is to articulate a tough but smart strategy for winning the ideological struggle against Jihadist extremism. Yet many liberals remain fixated instead on Iraq. It's true that Team Bush has badly fumbled the occupation, but an anti-Iraq message alone won't reassure voters that Democrats can take charge of the nation's security. On the contrary, the conflation of partisan animus toward Bush with anti-war sentiment has shoved Democrats in a decidedly dovish direction.
Intellectually, of course, it's possible to separate Iraq and the war on terror. But as University of Maryland professor William Galston observed after the 2004 election, "President Bush succeeded in transforming the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism into questions of basic values and American national identity." And that, Galston wrote, exposed old fissures among Democrats:
"While Republicans stood united in their belief in American exceptionalism, Democrats were badly divided, as they have been since Vietnam. President Bush was able to rally his party by sounding the trumpet of American virtue on the global stage. By contrast, John Kerry struggled to bridge the gap between Tony Blair Democrats, who agreed with the president's principles but deplored his inept policies, and Michael Moore Democrats, who rejected, root and branch, the idea of a global fight against terrorism and for democracy."
A recent Century Foundation study found that just one-half of Democrats say dismantling al Qaeda should be among America's two top foreign policy goals; more actually ranked outsourcing as a bigger worry. Only 51 percent of Democrats trust their party more than Republicans on "maintaining a strong military." And 71 percent say the Iraq war has made them more reluctant to back the use of force in the future.
Such attitudes aren't likely to allay voters' doubts about Democrats' resolve to make them safer from terrorist attacks. Neither are demands by left-wing Democrats and the anti-war group, MoveOn.org, that the United States withdraw its troops from Iraq. Rather than offering fresh fodder to Karl Rove, the party would do better to heed Sens. Joe Biden, John Kerry, Evan Bayh, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who have set an example for responsible, progressive patriotism. They have balanced blunt criticism of the Bush administration's blunders with concrete suggestions for relieving the strain on U.S. forces in Iraq, broadening international support for the Iraqi government, and speeding up the pace of reconstruction.
Of course, as the opposition party, Democrats have a responsibility to hold the White House accountable for the painfully high price we've paid in Iraq, the thousands killed and wounded, and the billions of dollars spent. But they must do so in a way that makes it clear they are rooting for America to succeed in Iraq.
As they catalogue the administration's many mistakes, Democrats should also attend to the other side of the balance sheet. That side shows that our forces and their allies have toppled one of the world's most odious tyrants; upheld the principle of collective security; liberated a nation of 24 million; made possible Iraq's hopeful experiment in representative self-government; and changed the strategic equation in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
These are considerable, and noble, accomplishments, but they could all be squandered if we give up and come home too soon. Just as the Bush administration has made itself look foolish by its relentlessly upbeat assessments of a supposedly waning insurgency, progressives shouldn't leap to the premature conclusion that we are doomed to failure in Iraq.
Democrats should also bring a sense of proportion to the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. These sickening deviations from America's core principles have damaged our country's moral reputation around the world. True patriotism demands not denials and whitewashes, but a thorough, independent investigation, punishment of those responsible, and clear policies to prevent a repetition.
Yet the revelation that some U.S. troops aren't saints should not come as too great a shock, at least to grownups. By dwelling obsessively on U.S. misdeeds while ignoring the far more heinous crimes of what is quite possibly the most barbaric insurgency in modern times, anti-war critics betray an anti-American bias that undercuts their credibility.
Amnesty International likewise stumbled into the quagmire of moral equivalence in a report that absurdly analogized Guantanamo Bay, where 500 prisoners remain, to the Soviet gulags, where millions perished. The usually level-headed Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was forced to apologize after falling into the same trap. Activists rationalize such witless hyperbole by saying it's the only way to get Americans to pay attention to what their government is doing wrong. But this is the political equivalent of a compound felony: insulting voters' intelligence while offending their patriotic sensibilities.
Democrats and the military. Americans are justly proud of their Armed Forces. Along with the flag and the English language, the U.S. military is an honored emblem of national identity and unity. This is especially true in the heartland battleground states, where Democrats must do better if they hope to recapture the White House and Congress. Unfortunately, the Armed Forces have long been estranged from Democrats in general and liberal elites in particular. So another key task for progressive patriotism is to close the cultural gap between Democrats and the military.
Traditionally nonpartisan, today's military is even more polarized than the rest of society. According to a 2004 Annenberg survey, 47 percent of officers identify themselves as Republicans, 31 percent as independents, and a scant 15 percent as Democrats. A 2003 Military Times poll showed a similar ideological skew, with 50 percent of officers identifying themselves as conservatives, 40 percent as moderates,and just 7 percent as liberals. (Among voters in the 2004 presidential election, 34 percent were conservatives, 21 percent liberals, and 45 percent moderates.)
Conversely, the military is not always held in high esteem in what might be called the European wing of the Democratic party -- secular liberal elites in the deep-blue Northeast and West Coast. Frank Schaeffer, a Boston writer, tells the story of how shocked his upper-middle-class neighbors were when, in 1999, his high-achieving son joined the U.S. Marine Corps rather than follow his peers to elite universities:
"Why were I and the other parents at my son's private school so surprised by his choice? During World War II, the sons and daughters of the most powerful and educated families did their bit. If the immorality of the Vietnam War was the only reason those lucky enough to go to college dodged the draft, why did we not encourage our children to volunteer for military service once that war was done?
"Have we the wealthy and educated Americans all become pacifists? Is the world a safe place? Or have we just gotten used to having somebody else defend us? What is the future of our democracy when the sons and daughters of the janitors at our elite universities are far more likely to be put in harm's way than are any of the students whose dorms their parents' clean?"
How can Democrats start healing this breach? For starters, they can speak out against colleges that ban military recruiters or the Reserved Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) from their campuses. Thirty years after the Vietnam War ended, such Ivy League campuses as Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth continue to ban ROTC. The message this sends is an offensive amalgam of class bias and anti-military prejudice: Service in the Armed Forces might be OK for dumb-ass Southerners or small-town kids with limited prospects, but it's not a smart career move for our best and brightest. Democrats should demand an end to this disgraceful legacy of the Vietnam protest era, by denying public funding to schools that deny the Armed Forces access to their campuses (see sidebar).
Congressional Democrats sometimes make the mistake of believing they can spend their way back into the military's affections. So they call for big increases in veterans' benefits, health care, housing, and other programs to enhance military families' quality of life. These are important, but military families don't want to be treated as just another special interest group. What matters most are intangibles -- being recognized and honored for the sacrifices they make to preserve our way of life.
Besides, the best way for Democrats to show support for our Armed Forces now is to rescue them from the Bush administration's attempts to win the war on terror on the cheap. Almost the entire burden of this fight has fallen on just two groups of Americans: members of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. Many defense analysts warn that the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the Army to the breaking point. The Army has failed repeatedly to meet its recruiting targets, as have the Guard and Reserves, whose members have been forced under "stop loss" rules repeatedly to extend their overseas deployments.
At the same time, many military leaders are furious with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other civilian officials for ignoring their advice that a larger force was necessary to secure the peace in Iraq. They believe Rumsfeld's insistence on a relatively small force (now 139,000 troops) made it impossible to stop looting, protect economic infrastructure, and pacify the rebellious Sunni triangle. The result has been a steadily growing insurgency that has claimed many more U.S. casualties than the Bush administration led the nation to expect.
Democrats ought to insist on a major expansion of the military, by as many as 100,000 troops. Some of these troops should be channeled into the post-conflict and nation-building specialties that we have been chronically short of in Iraq: linguists, special forces, psychological operations, civil affairs, and economic reconstruction. Rather than add to Bush's budget deficits, however, Democrats should insist on paying for a larger force by rolling back the administration's unconscionable wartime tax cuts. This would neatly frame the real choice facing patriotic Americans: a stronger military versus tax cuts for the privileged.
National service and shared sacrifice. True patriotism is at odds with the selfish individualism that shapes the Republicans' anti-government ideology. It means accepting obligations to the community to which we all belong and must contribute if we are to enjoy the fruits of membership. In wartime, not everyone can fight, but everyone can find ways to sacrifice for the common cause. Bush has sent U.S. troops into battle, but he hasn't challenged the rest of us to do our part.
On the contrary, he's made life even sweeter for the fortunate by cutting their taxes, and he's plunged the nation deeper into a debt that our children will have to pay. He has also allowed special interests to write energy policies that increase our dangerous dependence on oil. Worst of all, Bush's governing style has polarized the society, encouraging Americans to fear and mistrust each other rather than unifying them to meet the common danger.
Democrats should aim higher. To match the sacrifices our troops are making, they can call on every American to pitch in, give something back, and share the burdens that must be borne to defeat Islamist extremism, put our fiscal house back in order, and make our country more competitive. They can invoke the selfless and patriotic ethos of the New Deal and the New Frontier, which linked our nation's security explicitly to economic and social reforms -- social insurance, civil rights, high-quality schools, help for the poor and vulnerable -- that made us stronger at home. But all this requires that Democrats be bold enough to abandon the play-it-safe tactic of attacking Bush's policies relentlessly, while venturing few alternatives of their own.
Finally, Democrats should rediscover one of their own best ideas: national service. During the last decade, the AmeriCorps program President Clinton launched has put more than 400,000 volunteers to work. A comprehensive analysis by the Progressive Policy Institute found that AmeriCorps has proved its ability to perform public work that communities value, delivers services that neither government nor markets provide, and returns social benefits greater than its costs. But at 75,000 volunteers per year, Ameri-Corps remains a small demonstration project for an idea with big potential. It's time for Democrats to call for scaling up national service so that hundreds of thousands of Americans have a chance to serve their communities and their country.
One way to put service on more young people's radar screens is to replace the Selective Service System with a new National Service System. Such a system would sign up women, as well as men, and encourage them to volunteer for military or civilian service.
Another way to enlarge Ameri-Corps would be to link federal student aid to national service. Under such an arrangement, only those who agree to serve would be eligible to receive Pell Grants or to apply for subsidized student loans. Those who serve would receive more generous tuition aid -- say $10,000 per year -- than is now available. Such conditionality would bolster civic reciprocity -- the idea that rights and responsibilities go together and those who receive the community's support have an obligation to put something back into the communal pot. That is patriotism rightly understood.
By putting the war on terror first, ending the party's alienation from our military, and issuing a new call for service and sacrifice, Democrats can define a more compelling patriotism than the GOP's chauvinist bluster.
Patriotism is the ultimate values issue. Democrats need not be embarrassed by it. And they ought not to let Republicans monopolize the emblems of national pride and honor. Democrats need to be choosier about the political company they keep, distancing themselves from the pacifist and anti-American fringe. And they need to have faith in their fellow citizens: Americans will accept constructive criticism of their country if they know the critic's heart is in the right place.
Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=124&subid=307&contentid=253472
