Patriotism vs Partisanism

As I mentioned earlier, this post is originally by Cenk Uygur, a former Republican who has become disillusioned with the current administration. He has not given up his Republican beliefs, he has simply decided that the party has fallen under the control of a small group who have taken it in directions contrary to the philosophies of the party and the good of the country. It is this group (commonly called "neocons") having taken the party away from its traditional basis that fuels my own belief that regardless of who replaces it, this administration has to go.

And so Mr. Uygur wrote this essay to describe how he got to where he is now, and my hope is that conservatives can accept from a fellow conservative an argument they can't as well accept from an independent. That argument is that it is not partisan politics, nor unpatriotic, to decry the actions of the President, an Administration, or even the entire leadership of a party, if those people are behaving in ways you perceive to be ultimately harmful to the country.

Without further ado, Cenk Uygur.



Put Your Country Above Your Party

by Cenk Uygur, reposted by permission.

Many of the responses I have received to my posts lately have started with the premise that I am a partisan. The supposition is that I want to bring down the Bush administration because I am a liberal Democrat.

Well, here’s the funny thing – I’ve been a life-long Republican. I just happen to care more about my country than I do about my party.

I’m not a Zell Miller like pretender, a Democrat posing as a Republican. I supported Ronald Reagan (though I understand that he had many faults). I voted for and whole-heartedly supported – and to this day continue to support – George H.W. Bush. I’m against affirmative action, I’m a fiscal hawk and I held pro-war rallies during the first Persian Gulf War.

I’m not playing. I really am a conservative in many ways. But I grew up believing that being a conservative didn’t mean you didn’t care. It meant that you had a different idea of how to get the best results for the people of this country.

For example, I think affirmative action is a band-aid on a giant problem of inequality. It’s too little, too late. It stigmatizes minorities and separates us by race. I’m not the kind of conservative who thinks the better idea is to do nothing instead. I think we should start equalizing education at the elementary school level (a far more radical idea since it involves messing with the public school money of rich communities). And I think we should equalize opportunities based on socio-economic considerations, not based on race.

On foreign policy, I do believe in spreading democracy and our way of life to other countries and cultures. And again, here I am even more radical than the neo-conservatives – I think we should take on other cultures and try to make our culture the dominant force on this planet.

But the question isn’t, “What is our objective?” The question is, “How do we achieve our objective?” I can’t, for the life of me, believe that the neo-cons thought the best way to spread American ideals throughout the world was by invading other countries.

That seems so astoundingly dumb that it shocks the conscience they were able to take over this country ideologically – and that they still haven’t been kicked out of power.

Of course, people are going to respond with nationalistic fervor if you invade them. Of course, you are going to get stuck in a morass of urban warfare if you try to occupy a country indefinitely, especially a country with a culture that already feels humiliated and oppressed by you.

This is exactly why we warned the administration not to go into Iraq before the invasion on our show. This is exactly why George H.W. Bush decided not to go into Iraq in 1991. This is exactly why I left the Republican Party.

The party went from being dominated by practical moderates, like the first Bush, to ideological and fundamentalist zealots, like the second Bush. In the interim, President Clinton gave us balanced budgets, welfare reform and a war in Kosovo so brilliantly conducted we did not lose a single soldier and completely achieved our objective.

In the face of the evidence that Bill Clinton had accomplished everything I had wanted out of government and that the second Bush was headed in a disastrous direction in foreign and fiscal policy, I could have stayed the course and kept arguing for my party. But I decided to do the rational thing, to do the patriotic thing instead – change course.

I knew, as did every one who was paying attention at the time, that Iraq did not attack us on 9/11. I knew that if we sent 150,000 troops to Iraq while we only had 10,000 troops in Afghanistan fighting al-Qaeda, that we would be hurting the war on terrorism. I knew our priorities were completely out of whack. And that we were going in with rose-colored glasses, thinking that the Iraqis were going to treat us as liberators.

But if all of this wasn’t enough to convince me to let go of my party so that I could help my country, certainly what we did next would be. We started torturing people in the name of America. To stand by an administration that does that would not only be willfully ignorant and unforgivably partisan, it would be un-American.

America is supposed to stand for all that is right in the world. If we stoop to the level of our adversaries in a misguided attempt to outdo them in savagery and brutality, then they have won because they have converted us to their way of life, instead of the other way around.

We will win this war on terrorism (more accurately, this war on fundamentalism) when we win the hearts and minds of not just the Middle East, but the world. Every commander in the field will tell you that. You can’t kill enough people to win militarily. You have to win ideologically.

When our top priority should have been protecting and spreading our way of life, our culture, our idea of America, we sullied the good name of America instead.

And I was supposed to stand with my party through all that? I’m far too much of a patriot to do that.

After all this, we now see one more shining example of how Republicans are clinging to their party rather than their country. The president’s top political advisor has admitted to revealing the identity of a CIA operative (for political purposes at that). His main defenses are that he explained who she was, but didn’t technically give her name and that he revealed that she was a CIA agent, but he might not have known how secret her identity was (if it wasn’t secret, why did he have to reveal it?).

If you’re a partisan, you will stand by your man and argue the finer points of the legal case at hand. If you are a patriot, you know instinctively that it is a reprehensible act to leak classified information about a CIA agent that might endanger her life and the life of her contacts. She put her life out on the line for us, and now the partisan hacks are going to argue over legal minutia?

If you’re a Republican reading this now, you know it’s wrong. You know it down to your core. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen are serving life sentences for revealing the identities of U.S. agents. At the very least, on an ethical level, it is unconscionable. It is un-American.

So, do I still call myself a Republican after all this?

Hell no. I care too much about my country to put a political party over the interests of our nation. Could there come a time again when I go back to supporting Republicans? Of course. When they go back to representing what we used to believe in and when they go back to representing the ideals of this country.

Until then, I think it’s not only crazy but un-patriotic to support these Republicans.



(You can visit Mr. Uygur at his website at www.youngturk.com.)