Boston Globe:
  • After generations of finding their voice in dissidence, some on America's left wing are adjusting not only to a new, postelection comfort with patriotic symbols, but the political reality they represent. Believing in Obama after inauguration day will mean identifying with the machinery of American power.

    "There's a left-wing tradition of being systematically opposed to the US government, knee-jerk reactionary - most of our presidents have made it fairly easy to do," said Jo Freeman, author of "At Berkeley in the Sixties," a memoir of her student activism. "Those who view everything the US does as automatically suspect already have a problem doing that with Obama."

    At Berkeley, the university has, quite deliberately, chosen to host its first-ever large-scale observance of a presidential inauguration in a spot most closely identified with its radicalism, said Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. At Sproul Plaza, site of the self-described Free Speech Movement protests beginning in 1964 - now commemorated with a monument declaring "this soil and the air space above it should not be part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction" - students will gather around giant television screens to take in the nation's most solemn ritual.

    "It will be a patriotic celebration," Birgeneau said in an interview. "That small circle will now be surrounded by a lot of students who are happy to be members of a nation that just elected its first African-American president."

    Not since Franklin Roosevelt turned the federal government into an aggressive agent of liberalism - pushing the New Deal at home and confronting fascism abroad - has the left felt such a deep attachment and invested such hopes in a head of state.

    "People in the '30s felt that for once the government was on their side," Pulitzer Prize-winning Berkeley historian Leon F. Litwack said in an interview. "They had never had that kind of relationship to a president before."

    Disagreements with American foreign policy, particularly in Vietnam, fueled a cynicism about American might and its trappings, said Litwack. He has written in praise of Free Speech Movement leaders for "eschewing the conventional flag-waving, mindless, orchestrated patriotism. . . . They defined loyalty to one's country as disloyalty to its pretenses, a willingness to unmask its leaders, and a calling to subject its institutions, government, and wars to critical examination, not only the decisions made by rulers but often their indecision."

    Such a view of patriotism was so hardened in Berkeley - where, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Fire Department removed flags from its trucks for fear that they could become targets of antiwar demonstrators - that a gathering of College Republicans made the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 2003 for walking down Telegraph waving flags and singing "America the Beautiful" as a sardonic provocation.

    A similar, if earnest, display on election night "did strike me as funny and ironic," said Mark Rudd, who organized campus protests in the 1960s as a national leader of Students for a Democratic Society. "For the last eight years - and probably for much longer - most radicals have been mourning for our country. . . . Obviously the empire is not going to fall overnight, but at least there's been a popular vote that changes the direction of the last 40 years."

    The Star Market, a small Berkeley grocery with a robust selection of legumes, recently posted next to its cash register a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle imploring readers to fly the Stars and Stripes on the day of Obama's inauguration. "In recent times, our flag has been displayed more by one side of the political spectrum than the other," wrote Paul Templeton of Berkeley. "Let's rescue it from unreflective, knee-jerk patriotism."

    Such spontaneous patriotism was the reaction to Obama's victory for many in neighborhoods where displays of Tibetan nationalism had been more common than its American equivalent. Election-night revelers in Harvard Square sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Those in West Philadelphia chanted "USA.!" A celebrating mob in Manhattan's Union Square screamed, "This is what democracy looks like," emptied of the sarcasm that made it a favorite refrain of anti-globalization protestors.


So, the upshot of all this is that the radical left doesn't love this country and never did. They only love their new glorious leader and the opportunity to seize power.