It is deeply illiberal to accuse those who criticize the president of treason. It’s un-American. It is, in fact, the kind of rhetoric that exists in tyrannies.

Yet numerous liberals have accused those critical of Joe Biden’s impotent handling of the Ukrainian crisis of sedition.

Harvard prof Laurence Tribe, a favorite of the “resistance” — back when dissent was still patriotic — recently argued that Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other Republicans he claims are praising Russian President Vladimir Putin have provided “aid and comfort” to an “enemy” and thus would meet the definition of “treason” under Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution.

Reacting to a House GOP tweet censuring Biden for “weakness,” one-time Republican Michael Steele stated, “This is what disloyalty at home looks like.” Jennifer Rubin, the White House’s favorite columnist, contended that every Republican needs to decide: “Are you on team Trump/Putin or team US/democracy. You cannot be both.”

Those, of course, aren’t the two teams. Americans do not owe Joe Biden — or Donald Trump, Barack Obama or George W. Bush — any loyalty. The right to political dissent is a hallmark of healthy liberalism. And disparaging elected officials is the God-given right of every American.

Though it may be difficult for partisans to comprehend the difference, disparaging the president’s decisions is not tantamount to attacking the United States.

Most conservatives maintain that Biden is incompetent, ineffectual and perpetually wrong on matters of foreign policy. Certainly, accusing Biden, who has a long history of obsequious behavior towards the Putin regime, of being weak is well within the norms of political debate.

When our Iraq nation-building experiment went south, Democrats condemned Bush as a failed warmongering autocrat. As was their right. When Trump eliminated Iranian terror leader Qassem Soleimani, virtually every liberal, including presidential candidate Biden, criticized his action. Were they “disloyal”?

Indeed, when the Trump administration abandoned the Iran deal, not only did the opposition party widely condemn the president; Democrats like former Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) secretly met with officials from Iran, a nation actively funding terror groups and targeting Americans (and Jews) worldwide, to undermine the administration.

But, as usual, we are expected to live by two standards.

Of course, no matter where you stand on the situation developing in Eastern Europe, an American owes Ukraine no loyalty either. Carlson isn’t engaged in sedition or undermining “democracy” for disagreeing on what constitutes national interests. Biden only recently argued that protecting Afghanistan was not in our “vital national interest.” Does that mean that he’s in league with the Taliban — a group that murdered Americans? Are all the Democrats who oppose aid to Israel, our staunchest ally, guilty of treason as well?

Protecting the ability to dissent is patriotic, even if the dissent itself is not. Some conservatives, unfortunately, admire and repeat Putin’s talking points. Some champion the idea that Ukraine is nothing more than part of greater Russia. These people might be ignorant of history, or they might be embracing bad or destructive reasoning, but they are guilty of neither treason nor patriotism.

Note, too, that while there are numerous idealistic reasons to defend dissension, there are also obvious practical ones. Presidents have long led us into quagmires and wars based on false pretenses and flawed policy. We need to challenge those in power — especially in efforts that may lead to war. It should not escape the attention of liberals that some Republicans accused anti-war activists during the buildup to the Iraq War of belonging to a fifth column as a way of nullifying dissent.

These days, the American left spends an inordinate amount of time working to censor debate and dictate what is and isn’t appropriate speech. The effort to smear dissenters is no different.

It’s the kind of thinking that, at best, undermines open debate and, at worst, leads to things like Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-18, when our 28th president threw anti-war activists such as Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs into prison. It was Wilson who was disloyal to the Constitution, not Debs.

And today, it is those who would quash dissent who harm our freedom. 

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and author of “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”