In recent months, the "treason" theme has become very popular among progressive Democrats. Many have been publicizing the administration's outing of Valerie Plame, in particular, as a clear sign of the Republicans' loyalty to country over party.
I understand people's reasons for doing this, but I disagree with this strategy, and I think it could ultimately hurt the progressive movement. I surely agree that the White House conspiracy to blow Plame's cover was deeply immoral, and highly unpatriotic -- but it wasn't immoral because it was unpatriotic.
If outing Plame had been beneficial to humanity as a whole, but harmful to the narrow interests of the U.S., we should support rather than oppose it.
It's understandable why Democrats and progressives want to run with the "treason" idea here. First, it exposes the hypocrisy of the GOP's constant appeals to patriotism to justify whatever they want to promote -- the war, repeal of basic civil liberties, and acceptance of law-breaking by the executive branch among other things.
Second, it has the benefit of being a valid criticism: much of the Republican program is deeply harmful to the country as a whole by any reasonable measure. Their tax cuts, the Iraq war, and their divisive social program have all predictably weakened the United States.
Furthermore, they openly promote the idea that loyalty to the Christian religion should take precedence over one's duty to obey the laws of the state. Former Judge Roy Moore's gubenetorial campaign is built on that idea alone.
However the idea of jumping all over the GOP for accepting and engaging in treason when it benefits them, and more generally putting other interests ahead of the interests of the United States, is deeply misguided. Providing aid and comfort to the enemy during wartime may be illegal, but it need not necessarily always be immoral.
For instance, the GOP has long waved the bloody shirt of the Left's opposition to the Viet Nam war as proof positive that American leftists are traitors who undermined the possibility of American military success. We have been left to defend ourselves by arguing that the war was never winnable, and that it wasn't worth getting American youths killed over.
Fair enough, and almost certainly true. But also completely irrelevant.
In the Viet Nam war, over a million non-American human beings were killed, most of them non-combatants, and that number would only have continued to rise had the war continued. All other reasons for ending the war pale in comparison to that. To offer another rationale for opposing it amounts either to a calculated lie of omission or else to inhuman callousness. The weakness of the usual America-centered approach to justifying opposition to the war is exemplified by Jimmy Carter's reason for refusing to apologize to Viet Nam for US aggression: "The destruction," he said, "was mutual."
The implication that the Vietnamese were somehow equally complicit with the US in the destruction of a million human lives should be unacceptable to any civilized person familiar with the history of the war. Carter was likely saying this to distinguish the Democrats' opposition to the war from that of the supposedly bad, "unpatriotic" American left, which opposed the war because it was an enterprise based on the wholesale torture and greusome murder of human beings for the offense of resisting assimilation into the US empire.
In other words, he was giving the only answer which "patriotism" would allow him to give: a million Vietnamese lives cannot be considered by an American to have any worth whatsoever, except as instruments to promote the goals of the US. If US interests require that those lives be destroyed by the dropping of bombs and burning chemicals from US planes, so be it. Nothing to apologize for there.
Now we are engaged in another imperial war which is trending rapidly in the same direction. Again, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed by American guns and bombs, most of them innocent civilians.
It would represent the basest cowardice and worst immorality if our prime reason for opposing this slaughter was the damage it was doing to Americans, however severe that has been.
Yes, I regret the deaths of American soldiers. But at least every one of them had a choice whether to participate or not, which is more than the Iraqi victims of the war have ever received. And even with the weakening of the constitution, the bankrupting of the treasury and the loss of the irreplacable lives of young people who chose to serve their country, we will never undergo the kind of suffering we have inflicted upon the people of Iraq.
And that is the real reason why the war is wrong.
If the war were a total victory for the US -- with not a single American killed or even wounded, with oil revenues more than paying the cost of the war, with civil liberties and the constitution protected and respected at home -- and yet the costs to the Iraqis were the same as they are, I would still oppose the war.
Even if that meant I was giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy at the expense of my own country.
No, that still would not fall within the definition of treason legally. But many people would say it would be treasonous more informally speaking, and it certainly would be unpatriotic by any standard.
But that would not make the war right, or my opposition to it wrong. And I believe many of us -- probably most of us -- would feel the same.
The problem is that we are rapidly building a political vocabulary for ourselves, based on patriotism and love of our country, which would be incapable of acknowledging the rightness of our opposition under those circumstances.
I think progressives have been so gleeful in finding that we have completely patriotic grounds to oppose the war, and the Republican program altogether, that we have ignored another set of reasons for opposing it, one which is stronger and more relevant: it is harmful to humanity as a whole.
Why is it so hard for so many Democrats to oppose the war in those terms?
I think there are two reasons: political and substantive.
The political reason : Many progressives, especially Democrats working closely with candidates or the party, feel that opposing the war on "unpatriotic" grounds would be unacceptable to much of the US. Maybe they are right. But suppressing those grounds in our public statements may only be perceived as disingenuous. While we have debate after internal debate over why the public perceives Democrats as less patriotic than Republicans, we have overlooked an obvious possibility:
Maybe we are.
And that's not a bad thing, it's a good thing.
Sometimes patriotism is bad. Sometimes treason is good.
Yes, our policies have been better for America than Republican policies, hands down. But that is in some sense an accident of history. There may come a time -- maybe even quite soon -- when the interests of the US and the interests of the world as a whole cease to align.
The "unpatriotic left" which is maligned by so many, even at this site, at least made a serious attempt to grapple with the question of how to proceed in that circumstance. We, their descendents, have not considered that question seriously. And yet we pride ourselves in that ignorant refusal to consider the possibility, condescendingly imagining that our forbears just "didn't understand" that "you can be progressive and patriotic too!" I think they understood perfectly well that you could be progressive and patriotic at the same time under some circumstances. And they also understood, far better than we today, that under other circumstances you cannot.
Sometimes you have to be a traitor to your country in order to be a patriot to humanity as a whole.
And are we so sure the public is incapable of understanding that?
There is no one out there whose loyalty to the US is perfect. Nor should there be! Many Americans are recent immigrants, with strong ties to family in other countries. Many have religious beliefs which are at odds with the demands made on them as US citizens.
People navigate conflicting loyalties every day, and with very few exceptions, no one considers his duty to further the interests of the US as an all-powerful claim which trumps all other loyalties. And we as progressives are not enhancing our credibility by suggesting that we do so consider our duty.
There is also the substantive argument in favor of patriotism and against treason: if no one felt any loyalty to the US, our society would collapse. The only way the country survives and prospers is that people sometimes sacrifice other interests to further the national good.
I would not argue with that at all, and indeed many countries have suffered because people's loyalty to their more parochial interests -- such as a religious sect, or a tribe, or clan, or a party -- have taken precedence over their loyalty to their country as a whole.
The trouble with that argument is, it also applies on a broader scale. It is clear that the world at large is suffering because in certain respects people are putting their parochial loyalty to country above their loyalty to the human family at large. Resource wars, the inability to curb global warming, and the nuclear arms race are all examples of the harm that people, not least we Americans, have done to the world in the patriotic pursuit of conflicting national interests.
Under most circumstances, patriotism, love of country, andsacrificing for the national interest, are good things.
The point I want to make is that they aren't always. And I don't think we will benefit by trying to convince people that they are.
Sometimes patriotism is wrong.
Sometimes treason is right.