America’s Two Nationalisms: The Final Battle?

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The rise of nationalism and political parties promoting it has become an important and unsettling trend across the world.  Jill Lepore provides a concise history of nationalism and its relevance to history and politics in the United States in This America: The Case for the Nation.  Her intent is to make clear the battle that has always existed between two forms of nationalism in our country, and to encourage the liberal side to match the other with dedication and intensity.

Coherent nations of similar peoples with similar backgrounds did not exist.  If this concept of nationhood was to succeed, those within the national boundaries had to be convinced that they were, in fact, a member of a meaningful body of citizens.

“…as nation-states emerged out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they…incorporated all of the different people living in newly bounded territories, and the best way to do that was to invent a common history, telling tales about a shared past, tying together ribbons of facts and myths, as if everyone in the ‘English nation’ had the same ancestors, when in truth they were everything from Celts to Saxons.  Histories of nation-states are stories that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”

The stories people in a nation tell about themselves determine their values and aspirations.  Historians play a critical role in creating narratives that inspire an affinity between inhabitants and a love of nation sufficient to generate a willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of the state.  Popular histories need not be accurate, but they must be effective.

“’Historians are to nationalism what poppy growers…are to heroin addicts,’ as the English historian Eric Hobsbaum once darkly observed.  ‘We supply the essential raw material for the market’.”

Up to a certain point nationalism and patriotism had nearly the same meaning, but the twentieth century would see a perversion of nationalism from something healthy to something dark and dangerous.

“…it’s easy to confuse nationalism and patriotism, especially since they once meant more or less the same thing.  But in the early decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of fascism in Europe, nationalism had come to mean something different from patriotism, something fierce, something violent: less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don’t belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority.”

“Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.  To confuse the one for the other is to pretend that hate is love and fear is courage.”

Lepore tells us that historians were so repelled by what nationalism had become that after World War II they chose to stop writing stories that would encourage national cohesion and pride for fear of creating more violence and death.  However, people continued to need these stories and would accept them from people pushing an agenda if historians would not contribute. 

“Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past.  They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.”

“When serious historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die.  Instead, it eats liberalism.”

The world has seen a surge in the illiberal forms of nationalism that seem to be against people and things.  Each affected country has its unique issues.  The United States is not an exception.  In fact, as Lepore points, out it arrived at nationhood by a path fraught with hazards, some of which are contentious to this day.

The United States began as a confederation of states each of which contributed their own forms of nationalism to the political brew.  To get agreement on a federal constitution, a number of compromises had to be made.  These accommodations haunt the nation still.  The major issues were states rights versus federal control, and the acquiescence to slavery as a legal institution.

“The language of nationalism, when it surfaced in the United Stats in the 1830s, had less to do with feelings of national belonging than with the ongoing dispute between federal power and states rights.  To be a nationalist meant to advocate for the power of the federal government.”

“…stability rested on a compromise that allowed not only the continuation of slavery in the South, at a time when it was on the wane in the North, but also for the granting of disproportionate political power to slave states, in exchange for their willingness to stay in the Union.”

Intertwined with federal versus state issues were those associated with the slave versus nonslave states.  The nation was harboring two forms of nationalism, one striving to be liberal, the other resolutely illiberal.

“Liberalism is the belief that people are good and should be free, and that people erect governments in order to guarantee that freedom…Nations are collectives and liberalism concerns individuals; liberal nations are collections of individuals whose rights as citizens are guaranteed by the nation.  Liberal governments require a popular mandate to rule: liberal nations are self-governed.”

“’Ours is the government of the white man,’ South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting as citizens of the United States the people of Mexico, people he did not consider to be white…Calhoun’s was a race-based nationalism: the United States was to be a white nation.  This view was not confined to the South.  Oregon in 1857 adopted something close to a whites-only constitution: ‘no negro, Chinaman, or mulatto shall have the right of suffrage,’ it declared.  That same year, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Court ruled that no person of African descent could ever become a citizen of the United States, on the grounds that the framers of the Constitution had viewed Africans as ‘beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’.”

Americans like to think of themselves as an exceptional people, one who set an example of liberty and justice for those of other nations who lacked those benefits; that was the liberal nationalism at work.  Unfortunately, liberty and justice only existed for white males for most of our history.  Americans were also exceptional in sending out the message that America’s experience with nonwhite peoples proved the superiority of whites, determined that colored peoples were incapable of governing themselves, and demonstrated that social and economic discrimination against nonwhite peoples was appropriate and effective; that was the illiberal nationalism at work.

“An American nationalism descended from these illiberal traditions endures, a scourge to the country and the world.”

The history of the United States has been dominated by the conflict between these two forms of nationalism.  From the founding of the nation until the Civil War, abolitionists and proponents of slavery battled incessantly over that institution.  When it looked as though the slave states might end up a permanent minority they decided to succeed from the nation.  After much death and destruction, the slave states were defeated.  Slaves were emancipated and slavery was no longer possible.  However, the culture of white dominance never disappeared.  Instead it found other ways to apply social and economic constraints on the former slaves.  This system of formal discrimination endured for another century before its legality was finally eliminated.  Was this a sign of progress, or was it merely a time of preparation for another battle?

The civil rights struggles of the 1960s eliminated explicit racial discrimination but did little to ameliorate implicit forms.  The period that followed was not so much a time of racial peace as a reforming of battle lines in preparation for the next conflict.  It was not by accident that advocates of liberal policies ended up centered in the Democratic Party and advocates of illiberal policies ended up migrating to the Republican Party.  The degree of political polarization appears frighteningly similar in both geography and intensity to that which prevailed in years before the Civil War.  The illiberal thrust today is not associated with slavery, although racism and white supremacy is endemic to the Republican Party.  Rather, it is the attempt to restrict the rights of women over the issue of abortion.  From this source we derive this observation.

“Prominent figures on the Christian right in the US ranging from religious magazines to authors to elected politicians have warned that the fight over abortion rights could lead to a new civil war.”

The compromises made in forming the nation continue to contribute to political polarization.  Demographic trends and the peculiarities of our Constitution suggest that the Democrats will have a growing advantage in controlling the House, and to a lesser extent the presidency, but the Republicans, although a distinct minority, will have the advantage in controlling the Senate, and thus the Supreme Court.  This is not likely to engender bipartisan cooperation.  Instead, deadlock on almost all issues seems inevitable.

Is there a gathering storm leading to some final conflict whose outcome will finally break this curse of the two nationalisms, or just another skirmish in a never-ending war?

Stay tuned…