I see that last bullet point as being huge: Liberals talk too much about ways other countries are better than the U.S.

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Yes. I agree with this comment.

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A while ago, I posted something in which I said "I don't want to be ashamed of my country" and got into a conversation with kirisutogomen, who didn't think that "my country" is something one could be / ought to be proud of or ashamed of at all. If I were to try to mash a whole lot of political opinion down to one slider, I'd rank myself as more liberal than him.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, this quote has been haunting me since I saw Copenhagen:
"You said it would be easy to imagine that one might have less love for one’s country if it’s small and defenseless. Yes, and it would be another easy mistake to make, to think that one loved one’s country less because it happened to be in the wrong."

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You're certainly more conventionally liberal than kirisutogomen, but he's hardly a conventional conservative. :-)

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Well, that was why I stuck all that caveat to my statement. :)

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(nods)

I think being proud of my country is rather a lot like being proud of my parents. It's problematic if I want to take credit for it, but there does seem to be a sense in which it makes sense. Although perhaps the right word for that is "admire."

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"America" in that context is the thing from '50's TV shows about suburbia. It has nothing to do with any empirical measure of what opinions, demographics, or cultures actually exist inside the political boundaries of the United States in 2008. So your things it does mean are all more-or-less right, and your second and third things it doesn't mean are close to things it does mean: Liberal's don't support Eisenhower-esque domestic and foreign policy, and Liberals criticize '50's American cultural values. Conservatives can criticize all those other subgroups who happen to live inside the borders of the United States in 2008 without considering themselves inconsistent because they aren't *really* America, they're parts of it that have rotted away.

Ok, that's a slightly broader brush than I really think is accurate, but it's a good first approximation.

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Yeah, I'm familiar with this answer. It's easy and it resonates; I'm not sure it's fair or true. Though it might be.

Certainly, yes, there's an exclusiveness at play here. "Jewish culture" is not part of "America" in this context, although individual Jews can be. Ditto other groups.

But... does President Bush support Eisenhower-esque domestic and foreign policy?

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But you're not *looking* for something fair or true. You're looking to know why "conservatives" manage to make something untrue resonate so easily.

And I have no idea what Eisenhower's actual foreign policy was. I think it was pretty isolationist. But the mythical Eisenhower was the Great Hawkish General who Protected America, and Bush is totally playing into that.

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I'm with tirinian - what we're talking about is a myth of America. Not that it never happened, but in the sense of a story that binds a culture together, a story of America that conservatives tell each other about how things should be and what America stands for.

So not liking "America" in this context has nothing to do with actual Americans or the country as a whole, but with having a different conception of what the American myth is. I suspect the confusion arises because if you tell yourself the same story enough, you accept its truth without questioning, and so conservatives conflate their version of the American story with a more complex reality.

Liberals do the same thing, mind you - just that their conceptions of what the absolutes should be are different. I was reminded of this while reading something over the weekend which asked the question "Why is free speech valuable?", and I realized that I believed free speech is a basic right without ever really questioning _why_ it should be. The ACLU fights for free speech as an absolute when sometimes the question is more nuanced than that - the relative value of free speech and community would be the sticking point between liberals and conservatives.

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The ACLU fights for free speech as an absolute when sometimes the question is more nuanced than that - the relative value of free speech and community would be the sticking point between liberals and conservatives.

I disagree.

I don't think there's a huge sticking point between liberals and (most) conservatives on that point. The sticking point is *which* community is being threatened by free speech (if any). Liberals will draw the line a lot further on the side of "community" when it's a community that is largely liberal than otherwise, and the same for conservatives.

I think conservatives are more likely to have a wide difference there (caring far less about "other" communities and far more about "in" communities than liberals do), but most people I've known on both sides express a double standard on the question, IMO. (Including me, until I specifically try to adjust my biases on the issue, and I probably don't manage to calibrate that perfectly either)

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I've muddled over this one before but never really came to a conclusion that satisfied me. (And this reply probably won't bring it any more into focus.) My ill-defined perception though, is that many liberals are more willing to perceive themselves as somehow separate from America itself, rather than from an adminstration's policies or from the segment that holds their opposite view. As liberals, we hold a tremendous number of the countries rights and freedoms as sacred, but you won't hear a conservative claiming they're Canadian abroad for example, or burning the flag except in the very, very far right fringes.

To vastly oversimplify, Conservatives tend to present themselves like their country is under attack and they are striving to defend it, ignoring the fact that the country they claim to love is built on the right to make those attacks. Liberals often present the idea that the whole country is flawed and the whole system must go, but in claiming that, they ignore that it's that self-same system that gives them the right to try to change things. There are more measured and intelligent liberal and conservative philosphies up and down the spectrum obviously, but when you look at the zealots on either side, they seem to fall into those categories.

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That's interesting.

So, what would I be missing if I reconfigured what you just said as:

1) "When conservatives say liberals don't
'like' America, one thing they mean is that liberals won't defend the country from attack?"

and

2) "When conservatives say liberals don't
'like' America, one thing they mean is that liberals are willing to destroy/deface America's symbols?"

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Hmmm... that is interesting. Maybe it's sort of like the difference between a diehard Red Sox fan and a casual sports fan?

3) "When conservatives say liberals don't
'like' America, one thing they mean is that liberals won't defend the country's position as the World's Superpower?"

Under that reading, "liking America" means doing whatever it takes to keep your team on top.

- Impeaching Clinton was a means to get a stronger leader into office.
- Immigration must be fought because it's just a backdoor method of conquering the country.
- Torture / War on Terror / Etc.

Not sure if that's exactly true, but it's definitely a metaphor I'll keep in mind.

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Conservatives think America is baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and motherhood.

Liberals think America is rape, loot, pillage, and burn, EAT BABIES.

More seriously, I think it's about what makes a Good Life and a Good Person. A lot of it is fetishizing a 1950's that never existed, but I think it's more than that.

The liberals in "liberals hate america" are a myth; they're not actually people with liberal politics. That's important. These myth-liberals are well-educated urban elites. They do and believe things that undermine the values that are important to the (also mythological) common american. Besides gender roles, and that's a huge huge thing, there's the kind of job you should have (blue collar or blueish tinge, and you should Make or Build something physically real); the kind of family you have (wife, 1.2 kids, dog); the kind of house you live in (suburban but not mcmansion); the kind of car you drive (SUV); the church you go to (protestant); the sex you have (straight, missionary) and the kinky shit you want (MFF three-way); the education you get (high school, trade school, or *practical* college). Your home is your castle, but otherwise you respect authority and fetishize the people who have it. You'd do anything to protect your kids. Finally, since you worked hard to get what you got, everyone else ought to, too. Patriotism and nationalism grab this in-group story and tell you that you are the best ever even though you're just a mechanic who can barely make ends meet, because by golly you're an american, and it's the best country ever.

"Liberals hate america" means those people who don't fit this world, won't pretend to fit into this world, and want to do things to change this world. These evil liberals want to destroy the institutions of normal life; they'll burn god on his cross, teach your wife to divorce you and take all your money, turn your daughter into a drunken whore, turn your son gay, send your job to china, trash your property values, and take all your money and give it to lazy drug addicts who can't be bothered to work for a living.

The thing is, the happy lifestyles of those good ol' american boys are actually threatened. The world is changing around them, and there is in fact nothing they can do about it. Most of the time, there's hardly anything they can do to protect themselves or their families. If they get unlucky one day, they are *screwed*. Demographics are against them; economic trends are against them. But they can at least trust that their country is strong... oh wait, no, it's vulnerable too, and now there's no more illusion that it could swing its dick in anyone's direction and make them obey.

It's way easy to look at a pink-haired tattooed lesbian and blame her for the end of america and life as we know it. Liberals are agents of change, change is sucking, so liberals hate america.

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I wonder if it's easier to think about if you abstract out the group.

Posit: Me-and-my-friends all have similar views. Now, if we call ourselves Bananamen, then I think it's a relatively short step to assert that we like Bananaism and we're proud of that.

Okay, so if we start waving a US flag around, we can easily substitute America for Bananamen.

My point is that we could also replace Bananamen with Texas A&M and get the same effect, I think. It has to be a group so large that it defies being easily defined, except via a convenient handle ("Americans", "Aggies", "Christians", "MIT people", etc).

---

Unless your whole point was to explore the caricatures. What I think is somewhat interesting is that _I_ don't have any definition of what it means to be an American, but I share the same belief (as written by cshiley) about what I think conservatives think being an American means. I find that interesting: "I don't know what I think, but I do know what you think" strikes me as amusingly absurd.

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You probably don't go around talking about what it means to be an American all the time, though. "I don't know what my opinion on that issue is, but I know what yours is" isn't actually absurd. :-)

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You think? Hmm. Maybe I'm going off into Pretzel Thought Land, but I feel -- oh, specifically in the context of "pride in America!" -- that this is a case of me conveniently assuming what others think without actually, y'know, asking what the hell they mean.

More generally, hmm, perhaps you're right. I'll hedge and say it's a case-by-case basis. ;)

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I think my point is to understand the claim. I mean, yes, I understand it's a claim being made about a caricature, and, yes, I might decide once I understand it that it's importantly wrong, but I want to understand what the claim is.

By way of comparison... when my liberal friends dismiss conservatives as evil Bible-thumping flag-draped hypocrites, I have a pretty good idea what they're talking about. I think they're being unfair and unhelpful and importantly wrong, but I understand what the claim is.

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"Good of the group is more important than good of the one"?

I.e., if only you jerkwads would stop complaining about how this rowboat is unfair to short people who don't have leverage, or disenfranchises lefthanded people, or isn't wheelchair accessible, and instead *get in the goddamn boat and row*, we could get some shit done.

I want to say there's a Respect Authority thread in there too. You don't questions cops; you say Yessir and do what they say. You don't say "but maybe the US is wrong to do X"; you instead say, "well, nobody's perfect, but we're generally doing the right thing here" which dovetails well with the "get in and row" sentiment.

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I think there's a tendency - not limited to conservatives, but possibly more common among them - to think, "America = What I Like."

Or maybe "America = How I Was Raised" is closer.

So, "Liberals hate America" = "Liberals hate how I was raised," which is really only a small jump away from "Liberals hate me and my family," which is pretty threatening.

This tendency is probably stronger among people who were raised in areas of relatively homogeneous cultures, which in most of America means mostly white, non-urban areas with low to no immigrant population - because if you grew up in an area of cultural diversity, it's more obvious that there is lots of America that wasn't raised the way you were yet isn't Evil.

Me, I started growing up in an area like that, but did a lot of important bits of growing up in Boston. And I read a lot. So I think both Liberals and Conservatives Hate America, i.e. Me.

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This deserves a dissertation, not a brief sleep-lagged commentary, but...

(Vast over-generalization follows).

I think your last bullet point is closest, but still a bit off the mark. I do think the left is more likely to criticize 'America' than the right - you really don't hear much 'I'm ashamed of America' talk from the right, even during periods when the left is in power, and there are structural reasons for this. For one, the right has a much lower baseline of evaluation - they more or less expect government to be corrupt, incompetent, and ineffectual. Even to the extent they don't, they tend to view many problems theoretically addressable by government as structurally inherent and not really solvable at all. But the right will view the criticism of the left through their own axioms, thus seeing them as bizarre and disproportionate.

(even more extreme strawman follows)

You particularly see this in international affairs. If you believe the truth is easily accessible by a priori reason, and that top-down action can ensure particular outcomes, and then you see bad outcomes, the logical conclusion is that the most powerful actor is unusually evil and/or incompetent. If, on the other hand, you believe these large-scale interactions are inevitably cynically self-interested and/or chaotic...

(Jacksonians, blah blah, etc. And to what extent do we mean Government, or Society, when we talk about America in this context...)

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Hm.
Let me echo that back to you to see if I got it.

First: the left and right might agree that some particular thing is suboptimal, but the left has a lower suboptimality threshold before they complain.

Second: there's a kind of feedback effect going on, where when the right hears those complaints, it assumes the left is claiming the thing is more suboptimal than it is.

Third: the left tends to blame political leaders for bad outcomes, the right tends to blame the system as a whole.

Did I get that right?

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I'm pretty sure it *does* mean so-called "conservatives" are claiming that "liberals" are traitors in the technical sense - sabotaging factories, spying out secrets, etc. I've seen it accused explicitly, many times.

I've also seen it explicitly said many times that not supporting the administration's policies constitutes nothing less than treason... as long as the administration happens to be from the republican party, of course. When the president is from the democratic party, suddenly dissent is patriotic.

I'm pretty sure that 3rd-century-bc greece is off the list of acceptable cultures to acknowledge cultural debt to now as well; too much homosexuality.

Dave, I think I fundamentally disagree with the way you're attempting to view this. You're trying to understand the thought process of the "liberal vs conservative" argument as if the "conservative" perspective comes from some particular view point that its arguments flow out of. I don't think that's the case. I think all of the "conservative" arguments are handed down from on high by the leaders of the movement as a set of cultural memes designed to keep the average ordinary member feeling smug about themselves and hostile to the views of the "other side". I think the common viewpoint is what makes them succeptable to believing the same things, but the actual beliefs are given to them from externally, and are not based on reality. That's why they're so mutable, like how it's "treason" to disagree with the president when he's a republican, but "patriotic" when he's a democrat; logic and reasoning are not part of it, blindly following the leaders of the party is the goal.

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(nods) You're far from being the only person I know who thinks this way... and yes, you're right that there's a fundamental disagreement here.

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