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Entry: Nationalism is What We Need Now--The Case for an "Unpatriotic Conservatism" Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/nationalism_is_what_we_need_now_a_case_for_an_unpatriotic_conservatism#23423 Post contents: "What’s worse, and the error into which I fear my friends are falling, is that of believing that our wholesome feelings are incapable of leading us into folly—that all evil comes clearly labeled and packaged and is external." Of course not. And it's certainly true that those who spent over two years drawing the country into a war with Iraq played on the actual patriotism of average Americans. The problem with your analysis, Dan, is that you're assuming that that patriotism is the <i>cause</i> of the war. The Bush administration was able convince many patriotic Americans to support a war that George W. Bush wanted to fight even before he entered the Oval Office. Those patriotic Americans, however, didn't vote for Bush <i>in order to bring about such a war</i>. That, in a mass democracy, patriotic impulses can be manipulated by demagogues to support nationalist goals is no real surprise. That's why I'd never make the fallacious argument that "our wholesome feelings are incapable of leading us into folly." You, on the other hand, seem to be making the equally fallacious argument that, if our wholesome feelings do lead us into folly, they can't possibly have been wholesome. (And just to make clear, the folly here is not the war, which the average American was incapable of bringing about, but believing the President and his cronies when they declared that the war was in the national interest.) Sent at: 2008 05 16