Can You be Patriotic and Progressive?

By Tom Kando

For a number of years during the middle of my career at the University, I acquired the reputation of being Conservative. This was the kiss of death in that environment, and as a result I was ostracized by a majority of my colleagues for many years. But the charge was a malicious slander.

Here is what my position has always been - back then, and now: I love America and the American people. This magnanimous country has given me everything, as it has given so much to millions of others and to the rest of the world. The American people are the most generous people in the world. But they are naive and easily swayed. Those who sway them are a plutocracy of powerful and grotesquely rich men who have no soul and who value only one thing: $$$$$$$$$$. This “elite” has no love for the country, for its fellow citizens, or for human beings anywhere. Their only value is unlimited greed.

American culture is forever individualistic. Americans praise individual responsibility, courage, honesty. Admirable qualities, which at the same time makes them ineffective in improving the collective welfare of all Americans, including the lowliest among them. The focus tends to be on the winners, and losers are ignored.

At the University, I was surrounded by America-haters. When America was floundering overseas under the weak leadership of President Carter, I called for greater strength and national resolve. Many of my colleagues preferred to burn American flags. During the Cold War, I saw no salvation in Marxism, but many of my colleagues did. When legitimate movements such as feminism, civil rights and gay rights were sidetracked into absurd political correctness, leading to speech polices, unfounded sexual harassment charges, “affirmative action” appointments of incompetents, non-starters such as proposals for reparation payments for slavery, the disparagement of heterosexual monogamy and parenthood, and meaningless “identity politics,” I criticized these trends. And I continued to loath anti-Americanism, both overseas and at home.

So I confess to being a patriotic American. I confess that I love America - my adoptive land. I am also a socialist, an environmentalist, I support full equality for gays, I am vehemently pro-choice, anti-gun, and for strengthening the separation of church and state. I oppose three-strikes laws and other mandatory minimum sentences. Only Darwinian evolution should be taught in biology classes, never “intelligent design,” or creationism. Human-caused global warming is a proven scientific fact. I deplore the country’s growing economic injustice, the collapse of the social safety net, of public transportation and education, of the infrastructure, the gridlock in Washington and in Sacramento caused by the Republican Party of No. I favor redistributing wealth and rebuilding the country by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. America should stop exhausting itself by trying to police the world. It should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now.

I am a flag-waving patriotic American. The real traitors to this country are the multinationals and Wall Street. They sell out the American worker. They “outsource” our jobs, preferring to hire Indonesian slave labor for 5 cents an hour instead of paying anyone decent wages. They sell out to China and to billionaire oil sheiks.

My progressive patriotism got me in trouble with many of my America-hating colleagues in the academe, and it gets me in trouble with the selfish, greedy folks on the right. Neither of these groups understands that there is no contradiction between being patriotic and being progressive. leave comment here