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How Important Is the Nation-State?
Today I’ve been reading over the first issue of American Affairs, a new intellectual journal that appears to have grown out of the (largely Claremont-based) American Greatness movement. American Affairs seems to understand itself as a possible seed-ground for exploring an intellectual foundation to Trumpism.
I should admit forthrightly that I look on this project as a skeptic, and as one who considers that the founders of this project have taken a large (not to say foolhardy) burden on themselves. I’m not, in general, the sort of person who seeks to shut down ambitious intellectual projects. But to my mind, the trouble with American Greatness was always the extent to which it understood itself in rejectionist terms. The spirit of the thing seemed not to be, “The right could use some fresh ideas around now, so let’s explore,” so much as, “The whole conservative movement is intellectually and (probably) morally bankrupt, so we’re starting over. Sign onto our program or be rendered irrelevant.”
That kind of “convert or die” attitude makes it hard to climb aboard, especially if you think (as I do) that there’s quite a lot of good to be found in the conservative movement from Buckley through the dawn of Trump. I’m in favor of exploring new ideas and making needed adjustments, but I’m also quite opposed to chucking free-market economics and neoconservative geopolitics as though they were groceries past their expiration date. Reading the American Greatness blog, I regularly have the same thought: This is all fine, but apart from the overt belligerence, these arguments could easily have been advanced in the conservative movement of yesteryear. What has your blanket excommunication accomplished, except to insulate yourselves from critique that would likely be quite helpful?
Having said all this, I pulled up the first issue of the new journal resolved to give it a fair shot. I could only read three articles without subscribing, so I haven’t gone through the whole thing. Here’s my reaction thus far: This reads to me like choir-preaching. It’s hard to see how these arguments would be compelling to anyone who wasn’t already deeply sympathetic to the perspective being advanced. Perhaps that’s the idea; after all, if the rest of us anachronisms have already been excommunicated, maybe we’re not worth the trouble. Or we could just say (to put the point less snarkily) that it can be acceptable to have a journal. It still seems a little unfortunate, because after all, Buckleyite conservatism has been developed across many years, and even its origins involved some large and very theoretical brains. If the Great Americans are looking to toss out whole realms of conservative theory (or perhaps I have misunderstood?), they should really be revved to start laying some serious, theoretical foundations. I would have expected that to be the point of starting a journal.
Of course, it’s only the first issue. Maybe they’ll get there. But here’s a concrete example of where the argument seems so thin that I can only suppose that the author is presuming a sympathetic readership. In his opening article, Joshua Mitchell argues that Trumpism is not populist, because it in fact represents a struggle against a real enemy (globalists) on behalf of a real good (national sovereignty). Once we understand the evils of globalism, we will appreciate that Trumpism, as a part of the global war against globalism, is substantive and entirely coherent, and not (as detractors like me suspect) an emotion-driven uprising whose goals mostly boil down to a resentment-and-nostalgia-tinged wish-list. The globalists are deeply wrong, Mitchell argues, because they do not appreciate that national sovereignty is, “the final word on how to order collective life.”
At this point in the 9.000-word article, I was intrigued, presuming that Mitchell would now undertake to argue for the extraordinarily strong privileging of the nation-state that, in his view, is the motivating and justifying principle behind Trumpism. Although I have encountered a great many people who assert the primacy of the nation-state, I have yet to hear a really thorough defense. Here’s what Mitchell gives us to justify his principle:
The Peace of Westphalia, which formally inaugurated the modern European system of nation-states, came into effect in 1648. Shortly thereafter, in 1651, Hobbes wrote one of the great works in the history of political philosophy, Leviathan. In a now-common reading of that work, and correct so far as it goes, Hobbes’s Leviathan provides us with the individuated self, oriented by self-interest and the fear of death. These ideas are in Leviathan, but they only scratch the surface of that great work. Hobbes’s deeper concern in Leviathan was the English Civil War, which in no small part was a religious war involving the claims of Roman Catholics and Presbyterians. The doctrinal difference between the Roman Catholics and the Presbyterians need not concern us; what matters is where each of these Christian sects located sovereignty. Hobbes thought that Roman Catholics were guilty of what we might call “false universalism,” because they vested sovereignty at the supra-state level, in Rome. Hobbes thought that the Presbyterians were guilty of what we might call “radical particularism,” because they vested sovereignty at the sub-state level, in private conscience. The English Civil War occurred, on Hobbes’s reading, because of these religious wagers that peace and justice were possible without national sovereignty. In his estimation, these supra- and sub-state alternatives are perennial temptations of the human heart. Their defenders may promise much, but neither “commodious living” nor justice are possible through them. Only by vesting sovereignty in the state can there be improvement for citizens and workable understandings of justice.
The post-1989 experiment with globalism and identity politics demonstrates that Hobbes was correct, so long ago, that supra- and sub-state sovereignty are perennial temptations of the human heart. The post-1989 version of that temptation saw global elites use the apparatus of the state to bolster so-called free trade, international law, global norms, and international accords about “climate change,” the advances towards which purported to demonstrate the impotence of the state itself. In such a world managed from above, the only task left for the Little People was to feel good—or feel permanent shame—about their identities, and perhaps to get involved in a little “political activism” now and again, to show their commitment (on Facebook, of course) to “social justice.” The Little People in such a world were not citizens, they were idle “folks,” incapable of working together, because what really mattered was not rational deliberation with their neighbors, but what they owed, or were owed, by virtue of their identities. Determining the calculus of their debt, in turn, were Very White Progressives in the Democratic Party who cared not a jot about the real outstanding debt of $19 trillion owed by the U.S. treasury. These Very White Progressives sought to adjudicate justice from above, by legal carve-outs or, if necessary, by executive actions pertaining, for example, to transsexual bathrooms, so that all “identities” could have their due. Fortunately, 2016 was year the American electorate decided this ghastly fate was not to be theirs.
That’s it. In two paragraphs, Mitchell dispenses with the absolute prioritizing of national sovereignty, and moves right along to lambasting universities, discussing different possible strains of nationalism, and complaining about the undue influence of European thinkers on Buckleyite conservatives. This is an absolutely crucial piece of his argument (and indeed, in his view, a dividing line so critical that people who fail to side with him should not even be regarded as Americans but rather as “proxies for globalism”). Nevertheless, he evidently regards those two paragraphs as sufficient to establish the point.
This seems to me like a pretty blatant example of what I call “the Fallacy of Confusing Complexity.” Political and moral reasoning are really so much easier and less complicated if we presume that we don’t have significant moral obligations to non-Americans. Once people start thinking they might have obligations that go “above” (cosmopolitanism) or “below” (individual conscience) national boundaries, who knows where we’ll end up?! Probably fighting among ourselves, like the English did! The only solution is to insist that national sovereignty is absolutely primary, and that no other sources of obligation can really count.
As a pragmatic claim it might be true. But of course, life often seems simpler when we dismiss as too messy or complicated obligations that may in fact still exist. I think patriotism and shared nationality mean something, but I don’t they don’t mean everything. I believe that I can have obligations to non-Americans for all sorts of reasons: Because they are my blood relatives or personal friends, or because they are my co-religionists, or because our nations are allies and have assumed obligations towards one another, or possibly just because they are human beings in great need. Any of those might, in some respect, affect my compatriots as well as myself, thus going outside (either above or below) national sovereignty.
In other words, I don’t see how national sovereignty can be the absolute “final word” on collective life. Moral obligation is indeed quite complicated at times! But we aren’t entitled to dismiss moral truths just because they’re complicated and confusing.
What do others think? Is there more to this argument than I have appreciated, or is it really as thin as it seems to me?
Published in General
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Right, but I still don’t see why my major/minor premise doesn’t describe the argument accurately. We are obliged to love our nation because “national sovereignty critically important” (a formal claim); in our case that implies (all the covenental stuff).
Which matters becuase if that *is* a fair way to capture the structure, then I’m not being unfair in saying that the two quoted paragraphs were the full argument for the critical importance of “national sovereignty”.
My apologies; I was wrong. I mis-remembered a Politico article on Krein from a few months back.
Summary of relevant section: Krein ran the Journal for American Greatness and consulted with both Kessler and Anton before founding American Affairs. Anton is not, as you say, otherwise associated with American Affairs.
I hear what you’re saying, but I think you’re over-invested in this point.
If you don’t like comparisons between Trump and fascists, you’re gonna be mad at David P Goldman, who compared him to Hitler during the Republican primary. Worth noting that he endorsed Trump once he won, and has an excellent piece in the first issue of American Affairs.
I could discuss conservatism for 9000 words without mentioning the word conservatism.
I just think these comparisons are fatuous and dumb. I don’t care who makes them.
To me, Mitchell’s article seemed descriptive rather than prescriptive. Somewhat clumsy, too.
Do I remember correctly that you wrote that one of your objections to Trump was that he didn’t have an overarching set of intellectual principles? What if you were right, and anyone purporting to discern them is talking through his hat? (Not that that has ever stopped intellectuals…)
BTW, here’s a quote from an guy with an interesting take on Trump’s speech before Congress (the writer is a South African expat, hence his diction):
You remember correctly. As it so happens, my first comment on this thread was:
^Interesting.
In your OP, you had first said,
I cannot be sure that Mitchell means to conflate national sovereignty with the nation-state, something I’ve explained at length scattered throughout these comments. I think you, though, do believe it’s reasonable to conflate them, and that has caused some of our talking past each other on this point.
When you re-state it as, Mitchell used those two paragraphs to establish the importance of national sovereignty rather than the nation-state, I am inclined to agree.
That said, Mitchell’s usage of “covenantal nationalism” is so funky that I wouldn’ be surprised if Mitchell believed it also could be used to incorporate the proper ordering of loves, all the way from love between individuals to love of God – that part of what makes America special is that it’s the nation whose citizens are called by God or destiny or something to love the sovereign just the right amount!
Anton does have a piece in the first issue, fwiw. So he’s clearly connected even if not on the board.
Is there room for a Democratic Socialist type in an exceptional National America?
So long as they are spectators in the political realm and not really have a political voice?
Just curious, because some of my neighbors may take exception to this mode of national outlook (call it a hunch).
A doc with a gun, a drink, and no friends. Mitchell. The best Mst3K show of all time.
How important is a Nation-State?
These are only words and a lot of words have been parsed here on this thread. What is going on with the American people and Trump is an exercise of sovereignty by the people. We have a country where government at the highest level is in the form of a federated republic with limited sovereign authority derived from the people acting through the States that form the Union. All sovereign authority not delegated to the federal government is retained by the States and the people. None lies beyond our borders. This is what defines American Greatness.
But the federal government has for a long time abused the authority delegated to it by the people and has usurped numerous other sovereign roles. I’m not going to make a long list but immigration is major in an era when jobs are disappearing because technology, any new jobs tend to require high skills, and our public education quality is poor.
Trump had some sort of vision of what it means for America to be great. I think he meant that average American workers should be able to compete for jobs and we should not be indiscriminately adding to our population through immigration when we are continuing to see Americans without jobs.
It looks as if the American people have agreed with this idea. There’s lots more to do, but immigration is big.
With Trump there’s the added hope that if you articulate Trumpism loudly enough Trump will hire you to think for him, so unlike Buffy scholarship there’s the prospect for an actual job with the proximity to real power.
On the bright side, Trump has been rich enough for long enough that I don’t think he’s so easily flattered by people sucking up as some Presidents in recent memory.
Are you bragging or complaining? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Seriously, though: At least with the various definitions of conservatism by 9000 words it’d be pretty clear which one(s) you meant.
I’m still maintaining that at this point anybody who writes about Trumpism as though he knows what he’s talking about is at best merely trying to define it and is more likely just blowing smoke or being nasty.
It’s a very strange fixation you have here. I mean, sometimes terminology can be used abusively, when we use a blanket term as a sort of filter to disguise distortions in interpretation. So, an obvious case would be if said something like: Mitchell is a Trumpite, and Trumpites are racist, so this racist argument must be destroyed. That would be unfair. Mitchell is something of an apologist for Trump’s popular movement (I think, and you’ve given no reason to think otherwise), and racism has played some role in that movement… but it’s only one of many components and it does not at all seem to me that Mitchell is personally racist.
Do you think I’m making some elision or unreasonable inference in that way? If so, I think you should try to explain it better rather than just harping on the term. Mitchell wants to say something about our political moment, the impact Trump’s politics have had on it, and how we should make use of that phenomenon moving forward… right? So why is it either confusing or abusive to refer to the movement with a familiar term like “Trumpism”? Just complaining because people are using convenient labels to simplify conversation seems kind of silly.
I think Trumpism could be viewed as moral at the sub-national and supra-national level. Sub-nationally, Trumpism subordinates the individual’s atomistic desire to consume globally produced goods to economic classes’ obligations to value the product of each others’ labor. Trump would ask how it could be moral to ship a man’s job abroad and in return give him only the cold comfort of being able to save money purchasing the good he used to make.
Supra-nationally, Trumpist foreign policy might view tough love vis a vis our allies world-wide as preferable to letting our allies believe that we will always be there to protect them. Let me break it to you, we won’t. Considering that they are not as lucky as we are to live between a benign developed country and an only slightly annoying third world country, a little lesson in how the world works long term might benefit the world order. World orders collapse gradually and then suddenly.
I think Trumpist foreign policy can be roughly summed up by Matt Damon’s explanation at the end of Good Will Hunting for why he shouldn’t work for the NSA.
But, is the secrete to the popularity of Trumpism the fact that it blurs the lines. Where some people hear only patriotism and other hear blood and soil nationalism? So the need to keep the language muddled is to, in essence, be able to speak out of both sides of your mouth, while giving you the ability to claim you are only speaking in the socially approved meaning? Is it possible it is a form of dog whistling maybe an inadvertent dog whistle? From a purely academic perspective how can you assess this? Is it just a giant Rorschach Test? Where we all just see different things?
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Is that because in this case you think national is equivalent to country rather than a distinct ethnic people? I guess this is the issue with all these words: nation, state, country, they are too often used interchangeably.
Do you think that’s what Reagan did to form his coalition?
Mitchell:
There are lots of familiar terms which are so ambiguous as to be obfuscatory when used deliberately, pejorative when used in scare quotes, and confusing when used thoughtlessly. By “Trumpism” do you mean “a populist revolt?” “A revolt in the name of national sovereignty?” Or do you mean something else?
I know you are capable of precision; its absence looks deliberate. I’m inferring animus from the repetitive use of scare quotes.
[continued from #172]
Mitchell’s contention is that the Westphalian nation state system has lasting utility, and he tried – not altogether successfully – to distinguish between different organizing principles that such states have historically had.
He correctly identifies a division in the Republican Party which does not fall along the more familiar “conservative/moderate” fault line: there are self-described conservatives whose preferred policies erode U.S. national sovereignty. There are certainly moderates and those who go along with the increasingly Leftist Democrats to get along who do the same. But there are, there have long been, others in both and other camps who disagreed.
As Kiron Skinner and Annelise Anderson demonstrated, Reagan had long been thinking through the positions and programs that later correctly became known as Reaganism.
Trump…
Consider the border wall.
The Mexican government has long encouraged its citizens to head north and send money back. The US has functioned as a safety valve to keep a series of monstrously corrupt regimes in place.
Mexican immigration per se has declined somewhat in the last few years… but Central American immigration through Mexico has gone up. Mexico doesn’t want them, so they forward them to us.
But “Trump’s wall” has become a useful shorthand that is inducing Mexico to reconsider its border policies.
Is this a Machiavellian craftiness on Trump’s part? Is that what you mean by “Trumpism?” or do you mean “Trump’s dumb luck?” “The spectrum of dissatisfaction that led people to vote Trump?”
No, and yes.
The US has long been firmly slotted into the Westphalian system in which “nation-state” is something of a term of art; national sovereignty is a property of Westphalian nation-states. Kissinger’s Diplomacy was an eye-opener.We often read histories written from economic, or social, or military standpoints; Kissinger gives us a diplomat’s eye view which, since he begins with the Congress of Westphalia is highly relevant. Yes, it’s Kissinger; of course he’s blowing his own horn, but he is both a scholar of and was a major player in the diplomatic side of the system.
Has anyone considered looking at his use of covenantal nationalism through the lens of covenantal theology. Not to relate the two, but the use of the term seems to be used in his description in a similar way its used in covenantal theology to describe that theology.
On the matter of words – I’ve described myself as a nationalist for 16 years now, probably for lack of a word that describes a loyalty to a nation. It never occurred to me that nationalism was pigeonholed into support for a nation-state.
Also, our founders considering themselves Virginians first does point to some idea of a national identity if you limit your view of national to the local states – which from my understanding of our founding documents is a valid way of looking at the states and the United States.
Also, because a comment from me without poking a stick at Jamie wouldn’t be complete – if its the American people that makes America exceptional and we wouldn’t have the government we have without those people that valued such a government, then how do you propose keeping it if you keep bringing people in who have absolutely no cultural underpinnings to understand, value, or keep our constitutional governance? Our founders were heavily tied to western civilization, an appreciation for history, and a unique political philosophy of natural rights and limited government from their English heritage. What you describe as American exceptionalism IS Blood and Soil.
An excellent question and observation. America was not, is not, and never will be a universal nation, despite the paeans of open-borders lunatics and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the latter of whom recently wrote: “…the contemporary U.S. belongs to all nations, including the natives of the land.”
I had inferred the use of “covenantal” would have something to do with a literal or metaphorical covenant with God. Beyond that, though, how much can we infer based on Mitchell’s article?
Covenant theology is a Reformed term of art. Covenantal theology is a Catholic term of art, having to do with exegesis, it looks like. All biblically/theologically literate Christians are familiar with covenants in a general sense. Being one of the latter, I’m still left wondering what exactly Mitchell had in mind.
For example, I wasn’t just joking when I said to Mitchell, perhaps American covenantal nationalism means that nationalism in America reflects the proper ordering of loves – given what very little Mitchell gave us to work with, even I can make the case for that: The highly subsidiary government structure Mitchell identifies as “covenantal” for us is, because of its subsidiarity, better adapted to proper ordering of love, in families, in “little platoons”, in neighorhoods, etc. And spreading out government power across levels, each with its own sphere and none too majestic by itself, should reduce unwarranted awe toward the state.
Yet at the same time, I sense this is largely my speculation based on the scanty evidence of a few sentences, rather that what Mitchell might really be saying.
While I can understand where you’re coming from (I do get the sense “patriotism” no longer suffices as that word for many people), to many other decent people, “nationalism” is pretty well pigeonholed as support for a nation-state. Nor is it a matter of these decent people putting the worst interpretation on the word in order to so pigeonhole it: it’s simply what they learned nationalism was.
“Nationalism” came into the English language during the nineteenth century (between 1836 and 1892), after the rise of arguments for the primacy of the nation-state, and the term was used to describe arguments for nation-states made at the time, arguments I believe Mitchell would call ethnic nationalist in nature. “Nationalism”, unadorned, does unfortunately carry with it the baggage of nation-state-ism and what Mitchell specifies as ethnic nationalism. Modifying the word somehow, as in “civic/liberal nationalism” may help to avoid confusion, though. For me, it was immensely helpful that Mitchell sought to make the distinctions he did, even though I’m still not quite sure all that “covenantal nationalism” entails.
Seemed to work just fine for 200 years. These arguments against immigration aren’t new. They were all used against the Irish and the Italians – those evil papists with their loyalty to a foreign sovereign in Rome.
Yeah, it seems so. It’s not called “country sovereignty”. The nation-state use of “nation” is ethnic, the sovereignty use is “the thing with the borders you see on a map”, even if the borders don’t match ethnic groups.
The founders were not keen on the use of the term ‘national’ as descriptive of anything related to the federal government. And there is nothing inherently national in its makeup. The federal republic is granted (delegated) powers to deal with matters external to our borders, matters needing uniform and consistent treatment between and among the sovereign states and to insure equal treatment under the law and guarantee a republican form of government and the individual sovereignty of the people of all of the states.
We have something I would call ‘Federal Republic Sovereignty’ not ‘National Sovereignty’, and it is limited, which is what makes it different.
A major issue in the last election period was ‘globalism’, a term that many who express opposition to President Trump, use to describe international trade or world commerce. Then there is discussion about whether that trade is free or fair. Federal oversight in these matters is appropriate but elections will influence the direction. The pejoratively flavored ‘globalism’ is more political and involves movements focused more on international laws and installing sovereignty in regional or world organizations and this is not something our ‘federal government’ has any authority to do.
Our American Greatness rests in this government structure and the underlying ‘ideas’ embodied in our ‘founding documents’. We should not give this away or relinquish it in any way. Immigrants willing to live with allegiance to these ideals are welcome but Americans will make the determination of numbers required for assimilation.