Two Nationalisms: Reconciling Intellect and Emotion

Two Nationalisms

Many voices, worried about the toxic populism that has engulfed America, are appealing to our tradition of ‘civic nationalism’ as an antidote. Recently I heard former CIA Director Michael Hayden invoke it against whatever it is Trump stands for.

Civic nationalism means a patriotism and identity that rests on principles and core values that are universal and apply to everyone, embodied in a constitution and laws that are binding equally for all within a given territory. For Americans, these are the principles and values set forth in the Declaration and Constitution and Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s great speeches, refined and modified by key Supreme Court decisions, and exemplified by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their ultimate justification is a claim that they are true: based on inalienable rights that can be discerned by reason and translated into institutions and laws that earn our intellectual assent. If you accept and adhere to these you are an American. It is a nationalism that can be learned and acquired; this makes it perfect for assimilating immigrants and enabling social mobility.

Civic nationalism is usually contrasted with ethnic or ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, meaning a patriotism and identity that rests on shared characteristics such as ethnicity, language, culture, and religion. In America this often means a view that ‘real’ Americans are white, of European ancestry (preferably northwestern European), Christian (preferably Protestant), native English speakers, and so on. Being American is something you are born with, rather than something you acquire by affirming a set of principles. For ethnic nationalists, even principles such as “all men are created equal” are seen as something discovered by Protestant Europeans and not accessible to people from distant cultures. The source of patriotism is emotional and historical, not rational.

Blood and soil nationalism has led to terrible things. In 19th and 20th century Europe it fueled anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, fascism, colonialism, two world wars, and the Holocaust. In both Europe and the United States today nationalists are suspicious of immigrants, especially non-white immigrants from non-European countries. As blood and soil nationalists are well aware, the percentage of ‘real’ Americans is dropping as immigration and demography and cultural shifts make the US less white, less European, less Protestant.

Advocates of the civic version sometimes try to draw a hard line between the two types of nationalism. In America, however, the lines are blurred. Almost everyone has immigrant ancestors and knows something of his or her arrival story. The immigrant narrative is a central part of American identity, and many of us know that our ancestors came and struggled to learn English, to be accepted, to adopt local customs—in short, to become Americans. More importantly, for most Americans belief in founding principles is at least as much rooted in faith and tradition as reasoned understanding. Americans stand for freedom of speech, or the pursuit of happiness, more or less the same way an Englishman stands for the Queen. It’s what you were brought up with.

Furthermore, civic nationalism is not always an unalloyed good, and blood-and-soil nationalism bad. The Soviet Union is an example of a state that tried aggressively to suppress ethnic nationalism and replace it with a civic faith. The results were horrific, because in the Old World, keeping down longstanding national identities embodied in communities with centuries of shared traditions, languages, and religions could only be done with almost unimaginable coercion. Ultimately it was the passionate resistance of suppressed ethnic nationalisms—including Russian nationalism—that destroyed the USSR, just as earlier versions led to the breakup of the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires.

In the US too zealotry in defense of perceived core principles can be destructive. Second-amendment fundamentalists have mobilized to further the spread of guns with scant regard for the consequences. Neoliberals have fought with great success to reinterpret American principles as prioritizing property rights and corporate rights.

It seems to me one way of defining the task of modern statecraft is to harmonize these two sources of identity. While the United States is perhaps the original of modern ‘civic nationalism,’ (a classical version might be Imperial Rome, which extended citizenship and a considerable degree of cultural tolerance to non-Romans) other states such as France have their own versions or have adopted variations of models originally developed elsewhere. The UN and other international institutions have helped legitimize a set of individual rights and principles of good government. All over the globe a rational, rights-based patriotism that often has considerable popular support is in tension with a blood and soil narrative focused on language, ethnicity, history and attachment to a particular culture. (Some would argue that there is a third alternative in the modern theocracies of Iran or Saudi Arabia and ISIS. Religion is usually a component of ethnic nationalism, but making it the central source of national identity is a way of combining the strength of tradition with the strength of a set of bed-rock principles—but derived not from reason but from revelation. This view is present in America too, despite our separation of church and state, when people go too far in identifying our political principles with Christianity).

The biggest danger can come from a fusion of civic with blood and soil nationalism. We then see all the emotion and energy that comes from our natural attachment to place and tradition, combined with intellectual conviction and self-righteousness. This is what produced the Civil War in the US, where two distinct American experiences, with and without slavery, generated incompatible interpretations of founding principles.

Do we see something similar today? I would argue that for a long time very distinct American experiences have been in tension and led to distinct nationalisms. An urban, more educated, more pluralistic experience rooted in both external and internal migration (of rural white and black Americans) has been growing, while a rural, small-town experience (now relocated largely to the suburbs) and rooted in the ‘rugged individualism’ of Westward expansion has been in decline. This tension has often been fruitful as generation after generation of Americans has migrated to cities and gone to college and mingled a more traditional set of values with newer norms. But the fear of losing their social and economic privileges has often caused an explosive reaction among white, rural Americans, as with the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, or McCarthyism in the 1950s, or George Wallace in the 1960s. Today it has exploded again with the rise of the Tea Party and populism.

The divide between the two is not that one is ‘civic’ and the other is ‘ethnic.’ Both versions contain principled appeals to founding principles and emotional appeals to tradition and culture. Both versions claim to represent the ‘real’ America. The urban/immigrant variant puts more emphasis on tolerance, pluralism, and a view of the United States as an imperfect work-in-progress, a country that is different in degree but not in kind from the rest of the world. The more conservative rural variant emphasizes America as a unique “city on a hill” that requires adherence to a set of strict founding principles that cannot be separated from their European and Christian origins. Immigrants or minorities or educated elites who deviate from the standard model are viewed with suspicion.

One of the dividing points between the two is a different understanding of the individual and his or her relation to the larger community and the government. The conservative version emphasizes individual rights and downplays duties to community or state; its American hero is the frontiersman, taming the West with a horse and a six-gun. In comparative polling, Americans (followed by England and other former British colonies) are always the most individualistic, as seen in answers to questions about whether success is due to hard work or good luck, or whether welfare hurts individual initiative. This is why the US continues to tie itself in knots when it comes to constructing a modern welfare state: our efforts to prioritize property rights and individual choice have led, for instance, to our insanely complicated and too-expensive medical system.

This uncompromising individualism can make the American model attractive in other countries—where people often chafe under powerful social norms—but also deeply disliked. Most other peoples place more value than Americans on family, village, and state. It is an almost universal criticism of America in Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America that the American ‘way of life’ undermines familial and communal ties. It is viewed as glorifying a me-first struggle for wealth and power.

This has become more true in recent times. Individual rights and opportunity have always been a central part of the American identity, but the thrust of modern American conservatism, the neoliberal version dominated by Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, has been to double down on these strands of our history while denigrating alternatives. Fear of anything that requires a strong central government (except, inconsistently, the military) has become the dominant nationalist narrative. This has created an odd world where conservatives, who would seem naturally to stand for strong traditions and emotional ties between citizens, have become tightly bound to radical theories of free markets and individual choice that are destructive of all traditions and non-rational commitments. But however inconsistent, a nationalism with a civic side emphasizing individualism and limited government, and an ethnic side that rests on white, European, Protestant traditions has become a potent political force.

The liberal alternative, true to its more pluralistic dna, has not found an equally coherent way to define its own version of nationalism. Its civic side draws on deep American principles in emphasizing equality and democracy over individualism, but its emotional appeal has tended to dissolve in identity politics—an orientation now mirrored with equal if not greater vehemence by white nationalists. Liberal nationalists are put off by what they see as the defiant, flag-waving, chest-thumping, military-focused assertion of national superiority that passes for patriotism among conservative nationalists. This sometimes leads to a carping narrative that only sees American shortcomings. The conservative emotional appeal is strong but narrow, and as many have pointed out, based on a shrinking part of the electorate. Liberal nationalism is more inclusive but weaker and sometimes divides more than it unifies.

To create a stronger nationalism, liberals must be clearer on how equality and democracy are endangered by too much individualism. America is most true to itself when we help all our citizens get ahead, not when a distorted meritocracy produces a few winners while the rest struggle. And it must dial back on the perception that lifting up non-white minorities comes at the expense of the majority. Conservatives must understand that neoliberal individualism destroys traditional values, and flirting with white nationalism amounts to mirroring the worst aspects of the identity politics that most conservatives loathe.

Intellectual and emotional attachment must both be present for any viable American nationalism. America starts with a powerful set of principles, but it also has a magnificent land, stories of sacrifice, heroes and villains, great works of music and literature, amazing scientific and technological achievements—in short, all the ingredients to engender a healthy pride and bonds of kinship and trust, without falling back on race or religion. For the most part we interpret our successes as the realization of these principles, and our failures as falling short. In this way founding ideas explain the good things we have done and infuse all our history, and also spur us to do better. This is a powerful combination that I think can continue to serve us well, as long as we avoid the reactionary temptation to interpret our story as perfect, or the revolutionary temptation to interpret it as constant failure.