First of all, no one should say such a thing, because it makes people very mad. I got really mad yesterday about it, and I'm still wiping spittle from my chin.

Of course, people are saying it a lot right now. Rightwingers are routinely accusing centrists of being "Anti-American" for not supporting the Iraq war plan in the way they would like it to be executed.

Let me explain why the charge is not just despicable, but false.
To be "Anti-American" one would have to be against the values that the United States is founded on.

This is very hard to do, unless one wanted to install a king over the country, an unelected ruler. That is something the founding fathers would have opposed. But let's not go there today.

The United States is an inherently liberal country because it was founded as an experiment. There were no constitutional republics in the 1780s. We had to invent the idea. We even created a way for the Constitution itself to change, via the amendment process.

People who hate laws need to understand that new laws are the fountain of democratic rule, because they allow the body to evolve rapidly and adjust to changing circumstances.

Sure, there were important conservatives in on the creation. Washington was a great man and a conservative. But even conservatives at the constitutional convention knew they were in the process of creating something new, that as designed to remain new through continuous experimentation (legislation) and correction (via the judiciary).

Other common governmental forms, like monarchy and theocracy, assume stasis, like a perfect machine that needs no retuning. Divine right casts a permanentizing pall over governmental proceedings. Democracy assumes continuous change because we are forever creating new "leaders" — new voters, with each generation.

In our own time we have seen how organizations, perhaps borrowing a page from democratic theory, have embarked on highly successful improvement initiatives — total quality, continuous improvement, participatory management.

The vision behind this movement is that there is always room for improvement, and indeed, if you are not constantly seeking ways to make things better, they get worse — because other organizations (countries) are free to make wise changes, and perform better than yours.