Michael Novak: Americans love belonging to a real, concrete nation

Just yesterday Lawrence Auster had a great post on how mainstream conservatives oppose globalism when it's promoted by leftists and Democrats but support it when it's promoted by Republicans. As if to prove the point, Michael Novak, in the course of criticizing Barack Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin, posted the following at National Review Online's The Corner today:

Real patriotism, [Obama] clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States.

This is the same Michael Novak who wrote a long, blustering article called "Global Liberty" saying that Western nations must spread the universal ideals of democracy and capitalism across the globe, who wrote a book called Universal Hunger for Liberty arguing among other things that the concept of liberty has deep roots within Islam, who has in fact made an entire career of pumping out inane, vacuous books and articles (any time I attempt to read anything by Novak I become so frustrated by the sheer emptiness of his prose that I promptly give up) arguing that all people the world over have an innate longing for liberty and that we must spread democracy and capitalism everywhere so that this longing in everyone can be fulfilled. But now that Barack Obama is promoting globalism, suddenly the great thing about us is that we love our land, soil, mountains, plains, and history.