Look Who's Waving the Flag Now

THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11 in New York and at the Pentagon fell like an axe across old political groupings, threatening alliances of many years standing, as people realized, perhaps for the first time, how strange their bedfellows were. Conservatives discovered that there are other conservatives who think the worst thing about war is that it spends money, and tends to grow government. Liberals found that there are other liberals who think the worst thing about war is . . . the flag.

On Sunday, September 30, the New York Times ran three different attacks on Old Glory as being somehow oppressive and sinister. On the op-ed page, there was Maureen Dowd accusing George W. Bush of "playing the flag card" to curb free expression. In the magazine, George Packer explained why the flag wasn't displayed in his liberal household: "Display wasn't just politically suspect, it was simply bad taste, sentimental, primitive, sometimes aggressive." And on page one of the opinion section, Blaine Harden explored the dark side of patriotism, of which "the flag, as much as any symbol, embodies the paradox...constitutional rights, which supposedly form the core of patriotism's appeal, suddenly lost ground to fear." None of this was the view of the Democratic political classes, which were out waving flags with the best of them.

The war has revealed the deep split in the party between the patriotic and the patronizing, between the large body of elected officials (and those who vote for them) and the noisy group of chattering asses who are elected by no one, and spend their time talking. The first group define themselves by their policies; they love their own country, and argue with conservatives about the best ways to bring the good life to more people. The second group may share these policy views, but they define themselves largely by attitude, which is adversarial. They distrust their country, detest conservatives, but detest most of all the tastes of the masses whose interests they claim to protect.

This schism is of long standing. In his indispensable Our Country, Michael Barone traces its origins back to the Adlai Stevenson campaign of 1956. Stevenson had run in 1952 as a traditional Democrat, upbeat and chipper. But when he lost, he began to think he was too good for the country, a theory his more intense fans would readily agree with. "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture," Barone writes--"the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting....When a woman assured him that all thinking people were for him, he responded, 'Yes, but I need to win a majority.' . . . It is unthinkable that Franklin Roosevelt would have ever said those things, or that those thoughts would have ever crossed his mind." Stevenson was not brighter than Eisenhower, just more ironic; and he read much less than did his future rival, John Kennedy. But to the horde of independent minds that clustered around him, his losses had given him the appeal of a martyr, if not of a saint. As Barone writes, "What was attractive to them was not his platform, but his attitude--his irony, his skepticism, his critical detachment from the roaring course of American life....They sought from the seemingly diffident Stevenson not so much changes of public policy, but a validation of their own cultural stance."

Stevenson was beaten by Ike, and four years later, by the more red-blooded appeal of Kennedy; but in 1968 the losing primary campaign of Eugene McCarthy, a man still more educated, more remote, and more cold-blooded than Stevenson, established the model of the outsider as the emotional template for a generation of liberals who defined themselves by their opposition to middle-class values and tastes. The culture itself, from which all else flowed, had begun to seem sinister. In her recent book "Inventing Herself," Elaine Showalter gives us this glowing account of the young Susan Sontag: "The ordinary details of American life...drove her crazy; led her to grind her teeth, twirl her hair, bite her nails, overeat. Especially popular culture. 'The weekly comedy shows festooned with canned laughter, the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games and prize fights...were an endless torment.' Later, she would attach the same feelings of exasperation to television--unless it was French."