July 2018.

     My Better Half and I found ourselves, as per custom, in Portsmouth-Norfolk for the Fourth of July holiday.  On the day, we bought a copy of The Washington Post.  It contained an editorial by Meghan McArdle on how to modulate one’s nationalism properly.  I doubt that I can add anything to what others have said about Ms. McArdle.  I thought the op-ed was clueless and wrote a letter to that effect.  The Washington Post exercised a peremptory strike against it.

Here’s Megan McArdle’s opinion:

Megan McArdle, “The Nationalism We Need,” The Washington Post, 4 July 2018, A17 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-needs-more-patriotism/2018/07/03/aa16f54e-7f00-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

     Megan McArdle’s political myopia is rivaled only by her capacity to frame a specious equivalence.  Her exhortation that all genuflect to national symbols to preserve American unity is absurd.  She conveniently forgets that labeling political opponents as unpatriotic is a particular impulse of the right and long predates the current moment.  Is it difficult to draw a line from George H. W. Bush’s vow to be the “pledge-of-allegiance president” to Sarah Palin’s courting of “real Americans,” then to the political zero-sumism of the Tea Party movement and House Freedom Caucus, and then finally to the current chief executive’s casual demonization of all dissenters without gainsay from a supine national GOP?  When Mr. Trump applies the Stalinist pejorative “enemy of the state” to a free press, blithely obliterates democratic norms, and openly admires dictatorial rulers, open expression of dissent is not only patriotic but also a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism.  Will Ms. McArdle next propose a national loyalty oath to sustain our tribal cohesion?