Patriotism and Dissent

For Monday, along with the DuBois essay, let's discuss this, from the late Sen. J. William Fulbright, in The Arrogance of Power:

To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that a country can do better than it is doing. In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste but its effect, not how it makes people feel in the moment but how it makes them feel in the long run. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism, a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals of national adulation.