It has been said on numerous occasions and by various politicians and pundits that it was an extraordinary week in the life of the nation of Iran. On June 12, from the very moment that the Iranian presidential election results were announced, the international community and the international press questioned the results. The primary reason for our disbelief in the declared result is that millions of paper ballots were collected and counted in mere hours. This occurred even before the extraordinary demonstrations in the street began.

The disbelief on the part of the international community was shared by many Iranian citizens. And while the defeated candidate launched a legal appeal, what ensued on the streets of Tehran, at least according to the BBC, were the largest public demonstrations in the Islamic republic’s 30-year history. It seems that many Iranians have gotten a whiff of freedom and are willing to lay down their lives in the streets of Iran to secure that freedom.

Sadly, as the people have rallied the Iranian government has responded with more violence and oppression, causing numerous fatalities and the arrest of dissidents. We have learned of reporters prevented from making their reports public and the jamming of electronic communications. We may well be witnessing a Tiananmen in Tehran.

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In one of Redstate’s previous iterations, several years back, some of us maintained a running debate on the meaning of patriotism. The old archive site does not lend itself to facile searching, so I fear that much of what follows will be both repetitive and inadequate; but this was always (for me at least) a fruitful conversation, despite its many difficulties and frustrations, and I see no reason why it should not continue.

The parties to this debate are many, their individual nuances and complexities abundant, but the main lines of argument cluster around a series of questions. (1) How much of the content of patriotism is ideological, that is, how much does the love of one’s patria depend upon the political ideas associated with the patria? (2) What is the role of pre-rational passion or affection or veneration in the formation and maintenance of patriotism? (3) How do the reasoning and feeling aspects of man bear upon his love for his native land?

Each of these questions presents us with some presuppositions and some implications. Question (3), for instance, presupposes that man is a dualistic creature; that reasoning and feeling mean different things, but are each part of what it means to be man. Question (1), meanwhile, implies a disputation not merely over what political ideas should be included in patriotism, but even over whether political ideas, of any kind, should be included at all.

Let us briefly consider a single political idea, or at least a single category of political idea, in its relation to patriotism: democracy. The word means rule by the many, which in practice translates to some kind of majoritarian, plebiscitary, or representative rule. Democracy also strongly implies political equality as a driving principle. This brings it into some tension with another common political idea, namely freedom, because freedom, in order to have any meaning, must allow for possibility of unequal outcomes. Democracy, especially when it is preached as a universal ideal, also comes into tension with particular loyalties. Strictly speaking, the natural family is an offense against equality: its internal arrangements are hierarchical and particular, especially with respect to those outside it. And from the universal perspective, favoring one’s own nation or people is certainly an offensive against equality.

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Todd Beeton at MyDD argues that the right is out of touch on taxes and quotes Gallup. It turns out that his argument is mere sophistry. Gallup says:

A new Gallup Poll finds 48% of Americans saying the amount of federal income taxes they pay is “about right,” with 46% saying “too high” — one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956. Typically, a majority of Americans say their taxes are too high, and relatively few say their taxes are too low.

Compare these with who actually pays taxes who actually pays taxes, which Ari Fleischer reminds us of. Gallup says that 48% say that they are paying “about right”. But 40% don’t actually pay income taxes:

When you make almost 26% of the income and you pay only 0.6% of the income tax, that’s a good deal, courtesy of those who do pay income taxes. For the bottom 40%, the redistribution deal is even better. In 2001, these 43 million Americans, who earn less than $30,500, made 13.5% of the nation’s income but paid no income tax. Instead, they received checks from their taxpaying neighbors worth $16.3 billion. By 2005, those checks totaled $33.3 billion.

If I didn’t pay tax, I would probably argue that I am doing “about right” too. The 8% that does pay taxes and says that they are “about right” is what Beeton is really arguing about that. That’s not a really compelling argument. And then, according to Gallup, there are 3% who think that they are paying too little.

So 11% of the population both pays taxes and thinks that they are paying “about right” or “too little”. And 46% think that they are paying “too much”. So about 1 in 5 tax payers are happy with what they are paying, while 4 in 5 income tax payers think they are paying too much.

In fact, Gallup’s numbers support Fleischer’s argument, not Beeton’s. As Fleischer notes, George W. Bush took people off the tax rolls:

According to the CBO, those who made less than $44,300 in 2001 — 60% of the country — paid a paltry 3.3% of all income taxes. By 2005, almost all of them were excused from paying any income tax. They paid less than 1% of the income tax burden. Their share shrank even when taking into account the payroll tax. In 2001, the bottom 60% paid 16.3% of all taxes; by 2005 their share was down to 14.3%. All the while, this large group of voters made 25.8% of the nation’s income.

Of course the numbers of “about right” are at an all-time high. The number of people not paying income taxes are at an all-time high.