The right to criticize

Our country and our ‘leaders’ are getting dumber all the time.

The world is laughing at us. We’re like a bunch of patsies.

Our country is in serious trouble; we don’t have victories anymore.

Clearly, the above statements, on their face, are not pro-American. But are they anti-American?

The answer for too many of us depends on who is doing the speaking.

It was President Donald J. Trump who uttered those comments, and his supporters would say he did so with an intent to make America better.

They might assign a different intent altogether if the speaker were someone else — someone such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whose birthplace of Somalia, Arabic name, head scarf and skin color have led some to question her American bona fides. Even though she’s a duly elected congresswoman. Even though she swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. Even though she’s an American citizen who came here as a child refugee.

The crossfire in recent days over patriotism and dissent and whether love of country can coexist with criticism of it has led us to ask a question:

What makes a true American?

Is it someone who blindly supports the current occupant of the White House — right or wrong? And if so, how many of us would truly meet that standard —either now or during President Obama’s administration? Or is it someone who believes as Carl Schurz, a German-born U.S. senator said in 1871: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”?

Americans have always debated this question, and politicians have always exploited it. During McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, during Vietnam, and now.

This week, the president tweeted a racist insult at four Democratic congresswomen of color, all U.S. citizens, including Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — saying they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

“If you’re not happy in the U.S., if you’re complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave.” Trump told reporters Monday.

Other Republicans parroted the derision, and only four out of 191 in the U.S. House — among them, Texas’ Rep. Will Hurd of Helotes — voted to condemn it.

As a private citizen, Trump spent years spewing insults and birther conspiracy theories at his predecessor, Barack Obama. His own inauguration speech was adystopian vision of “American carnage” and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.”

At a rally Wednesday, after indulging in an extended, falsehood-filled rant against Omar, Trump basked with approving silence at the crowd’s raucous chanting — “Send her back! Send her back!” — only to later say he didn’t agree with the statement.

At one point during the week, Trump tweeted: “This is about love for America.”

We beg to differ.

To love America is to love that it was born to stand against ancient notions of people’s coercive loyalty and allegiance to power. Obedience and compliance are the stuff of totalitarian regimes — not of the Declaration of Independence, which states: “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” any government that has become destructive.

True love of country is expansive, encompassing both pride in America’s exceptionalism and obligation to speak out against her failings.

The oath of citizenship doesn’t require a vow of silence.

Over its 243-year history, our country has often been prodded onto a better path by those who raised their voices against injustice — from the founding fathers who sloughed off the yoke of monarchy to the abolitionists who worked to dismantle slavery, from suffragettes who fought for a woman’s right to vote to Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders who marched for equality.

Trump, who also told black athlete Colin Kaepernick to “find another country” after he protested police brutality, parades in the mantle of American iconography --claiming he is defending the anthem, the flag, the Fourth of July — while he tramples the values those symbols represent.

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical,” Obama reminded us in a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., “that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”

As Americans, born here or journeyed here, it is our highest calling to work to “form amore perfect union,” to speak truth to power through votes and words. It is our duty to push back against despotism and those who would seek to divide us — especially if the divider resides in the White House.

“I love America more than any other country in this world,” the writer James Baldwin said. “Exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Indeed, it is un-American not to.