Junior government and politics major
These days, consistently attending class in college means weathering countless comments about the worrisome proliferation of iPhones and tablets, the ubiquity of screens in young people’s lives and the impending loss of basic English competency. For a generation synonymous with technological and cultural change, one thing remains the same: We’ve managed to fuel our elders’ anxiety. One enduring source of apprehension is our distaste for patriotic appeals.
Reflecting the fears of an older batch of American cultural and political giants, Pat Sajak, decades-long host of Wheel of Fortune, recently expressed a lack of confidence in young Americans’ attachment to their country. He envisaged a widening gulf over “an emotional investment in our nation” between apathetic youths embroiled in a “cynical Twitter age” and Americans retaining an attachment to their nationality. And Sajak’s observations about a growing aversion among young Americans toward old patriotic ideals aren’t unfounded.
Young Americans’ relationship to their national heritage is strained at best and tortured at worst. An entrenched countercultural current in hip-hop critiquing establishment racism, police brutality and spiraling inequality has drawn on the irreverent instincts of younger generations.
Moreover, comedians such as Stephen Colbert have perfected the art of transforming patriotic pugnacity into sidesplitting satire, carving out a new genre devoted to riffing neoconservatives’ extreme nationalist dogma. Colbert cemented his status as a late-night star by drawing on a reservoir of sardonic mistrust for foreign-policy adventurism.
One explanation for young citizens’ mistrust in patriotism centers on political tactics exploiting Americans’ attachment to their country to drum up support for national security laws, surveillance programs and wars of choice. The cynical decision to label a bill curtailing long-treasured personal freedoms the USA Patriot Act captures this problem. Politicians, pushing an expansion of executive power, bend over backward to define their policies as patriotic, implicitly suggesting any opposition is un-American.
President Obama remained fiercely critical of former President George W. Bush’s national security and civil liberties record throughout the 2008 campaign, but he has replicated and extended key programs. Specifically, Obama has sustained Bush’s secretive drone war on suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, drawing criticism from human rights groups for the administration’s lack of regard for civilians’ safety and psychological welfare.
Furthermore, the June 2013 leak of National Security Agency documents orchestrated by former contractor Edward Snowden revealed to Americans the enormous scope of the post-9/11 U.S. surveillance apparatus. Although the leak catalogued multiple abuses by NSA officials and provoked widespread outrage about the program’s secretive nature and lack of proper oversight, Obama responded with characteristic paternalism, lecturing Snowden for causing “unnecessary damage to U.S. intelligence capabilities and U.S. diplomacy.” Unfortunately, the president continues to minimize the importance of maintaining any semblance of transparency in programs intended to bolster national security.
Obama’s dismissive attitude toward critics is especially disconcerting. Likely because national security elites are endowed with special knowledge of foreign threats and domestic defense strategies, many of these individuals harbor an unshakable confidence in their own wisdom and demand deference from less-informed citizens.
The threat of undermining government programs, whether these programs are approved by or even known to citizens, should be enough to deter would-be whistle-blowers. In effect, Obama has labeled dissent regarding secrecy, surveillance and executive excesses anti-American.
Attempts to equate criticism with subversion have a chilling effect on public discourse. To start, commentators and common critics might hold back on legitimate criticisms of government policy for fear of being labeled unpatriotic. Also, policymakers might become more concerned with presenting themselves as staunch patriots than advancing the most advantageous policies.
Young Americans are justifiably wary of attempts to cloak secretive and noxious programs in patriotic platitudes. They would do well to remember another important American tradition: approaching government with an appropriate measure of skepticism.
Charlie Bulman is a sophomore government and politics major. He can be reached at cbulmandbk@gmail.com.
