Love It or Leave It

The fireworks are barely cold and the flag memes are still flying, and one of them keeps landing in my feed. America, it says, a country so great even its haters won’t leave. It is meant as a mic drop, and it lands a real punch. It is also half right in a way worth taking seriously and half wrong in a way worth correcting, because it is reaching for a true thing and grabbing the wrong end of it.

Start with what it gets right, because it gets more right than its critics will admit. Economists have a name for it: revealed preference. What a person says he wants is cheap. What he does with his feet is the real testimony, and on the question of America the feet have returned a verdict that is not close. People risk their lives to get in. They cross deserts and oceans and wait years for a lottery number. Almost no one is lined up at the exit. The crowd trying to get into this country and the crowd trying to flee it are not in the same universe of size. And the specific target of the meme is real too. There is a whole genre of American who announces he is moving to Canada every time an election goes the wrong way, and somehow the moving van never comes. His feet are calling his mouth a liar, and the meme is right to notice.

It is right about something else, too, something people on my side of the fence are sometimes too polite to say out loud: this country has enemies. Not critics. Enemies. There really are people who hate the American thing and would be glad to see it gone. So the meme is onto something true. Where it goes wrong is in how it aims. It uses “complains about the country” as its test for a hater, and by that test it arrests the wrong suspect every time, because the loudest critic is very often the truest patriot, and the real enemy is frequently soft-spoken. We have to pull apart two things the meme crushes into one word.

The first is loyal criticism, and it is the opposite of hatred. The founders looked at the government they lived under, called it tyranny in writing, and signed the charge at the risk of the noose, and they did not emigrate. They stayed and remade the place. Frederick Douglass, invited to mark the Fourth of July in 1852, gave one of the most withering indictments of American hypocrisy ever delivered, and he gave it not on his way out the door but as a man staking his claim to the country’s own promise, holding America to words it had written and not yet kept. Lincoln, King, every movement that ever forced this country closer to its founding sentence, none of them left. They held America against its own standard and demanded it do better. I argued a few days ago that America is less a place than an argument, and people like these are the argument working as designed. They are friends of the country, however furious, and “love it or leave it” aimed at them is exactly the illiberal reflex I want no part of.

The second thing is not criticism at all, and it would be naive to wave it away just because the first thing is real. Not everyone who wants to transform America wants it to become more like itself. Some want to pull the founding proposition out by the roots and plant something hostile in the hole. The collective owning the individual, which is communism, and the softer authoritarian collectivisms that swear the ownership will be gentle this time. A state that fuses throne and altar and governs by a holy law, a theocracy, and it makes no difference whether its banner carries a crescent or a cross, because the American answer to established religion of any kind was to forbid it. None of that is criticism of America. It is opposition to America, to the actual idea at the center of it, which is the sovereign individual and a government that serves him rather than owns him. Calling that hatred of the nation is not a smear. It is an accurate description of a real and serious thing.

So the line that matters is not who complains and who salutes. It is the standard a person appeals to. Hold America against the Declaration and demand it finally live up to the words, and you are its friend, no matter how harsh you get. Try to swap the Declaration out for the manifesto or the caliphate, and you are its adversary, no matter how softly you talk. One of them wants the country to keep its promise. The other wants it to break the promise and become something that could never have made it in the first place. Those are not two flavors of the same patriotism. They are a patriot and an opponent, and a country that cannot tell them apart is in danger either way, whether it exiles its friends or embraces its enemies.

Here a free country has to keep its footing in both directions at once, which is the hard part. It does not get to reach into a citizen’s skull and expel him for what he believes, and the reflex that tells everyone who grumbles to get out stays the illiberal mistake it always was. But a free country also does not owe an enemy of its founding the courtesy of pretending he is just a loyal critic with spicy opinions. You answer him. You out-argue him in the open, you defend the proposition without apology, and you hold the line hard at the exact point where his project stops being speech and turns into force. Tolerating an idea is not surrendering to it. A confident country can let a man argue for the commune or the caliphate all day long and still refuse, flatly and forever, to become either one.

I will hold my own side to this too, because it has its poseurs. The performative American who can find nothing in two hundred and fifty years worth a single word of thanks, and who then, tellingly, never actually leaves, is not Douglass, but he is not much of an enemy either. He is mostly a tourist of his own contempt, and his feet already gave him away. Gratitude and criticism were always supposed to travel together anyway. Grateful and unsatisfied, at the same time, on purpose.

So here is the meme with its aim corrected. The country does have haters, and the test of one is not the volume of his complaints. It is whether he is trying to make America keep its founding promise or trying to trade that promise away for the rule of the collective or the rule of a holy law. Sort people by that, and not by how loudly they argue, and most of the “haters who won’t leave” turn out to be the citizens doing the actual work, while a few of the quietest smiles in the room turn out to be the real thing. A country earns its loyalty by being worth the argument. It keeps itself by knowing the difference between the people arguing toward its promise and the people arguing to be rid of it. Love the promise. Argue for it. And defend it, without apology, from the ones who want it gone.