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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
I don’t think cleaning the slate and starting over is the intent, but getting back to our founders principles. I have many old books, some showing pictures of parades, classrooms, Americana throughout the 20th Century. The sweet and proud common theme, even though it was weaved through hard times and upheavals, was pride of country and all it stands for. That, to me, has been lost. Somewhere we’ve been told our belief system (The Constitution) is not unique, that the minority is the new majority when it comes to policy, instead of the will of the people. This is also happening across the globe. I guess globalism means having a world view (not a bad thing), and that eventually trumps (no pun intended) one’s country. It can’t work well and it hasn’t.
I do understand that elements of this nationalism movement across the world can cause pause and reminders of very dark days prior. Yet, a strong national identity is also an asset, especially to other countries, if it is guided by the principals of freedom and democracy, which is what our country is founded upon. That idea “experiment”, has stood the test of time. Yet it’s no longer taught.
To be fair, though, Jamie, when I read,
my first thought was, “I didn’t expect Jamie to say something so ‘blood-and-soil’.”
If it were only about the people, and nothing about the government, then that’s a good argument for not caring what the government does, just ensuring that the demographics of the population doesn’t change. Our Founders were exceptional people, no doubt, truly sons of England, the Mother of Parliaments, even as they decided they were sons grown up enough to leave their mother. But part of what makes Anglosphere culture exceptional, and the US particularly exceptional, is a tradition of relating to the government in a certain way. If our demographics remained the same, but we lost that tradition, we’d be toast – indeed, conservatives and libertarians have been sounding the alarm for years that we’ve gotten entirely too toasty!
Covenantal theology, as opposed to believers theology, extends the sacraments to the children of believers without a formal, adult, declaration of faith. It is wrapped up in promise to the parents who dedicate themselves to raising their children in Christian faith that they should be members of the body.
Christianity has much diversity but we are unique in having a shared culture centered on Christ.
Can you see how to apply that to Covenantal nationalism? That the adoption of the sovereign constitutional government and the passing of it to your children grafts you in to the promise of protection by the nation (as we realize it through our government’s protection).
For the record, I’m a bit more blood than this.
Not important at all to Americans. It works for some but it is too tribal in its nature so it is obsolete because American Greatness.
Thanks, Rachel, for encouraging examination of this.
I would recommend to the folks at ‘American Affairs’ that they drop ‘national’ from their efforts to describe American sovereignty.
Why don’t you just go with American and forget this ‘nationalist’ BS?
Demographics and character are not analogous.
As one studies the ‘War Between the States’, for example, the forces of the United States are invariably referenced as the ‘Union’ forces. It is rare to see the use of national in the US. Probably more use of that term in the media in these days against Trump and his supporters than ever before.
Who says I don’t see them as the same for me? Because I also think Japan has a right to put its people first. Same with Colombia, Panama, England, and France.
I believe our country’s responsibility is to us first. Out of our excess, we bless the world, but to scoff at and minimize and ignore American concerns while triumphing Libya and Syrian rebels at our soldiers’ expense seems ludicrous.
Much like a Christian’s responsibility to their family, I think it wise to consider what standard of living you desire for your family/country and be generous with the rest. If a member of your family is starving while you feed the homeless man at the grocery store, you aren’t doing it right.
OK, the only reason I suggested that is because we have the progressives trying very hard to make the use of the term ‘nationalist’ to connote very bad people. They have tried to do the same to ‘Christian’.
At some point, you just get used to it. Why abandon it and accept their frame?
Keep calling yourself what you will and let your actions speak to your character.
FWIW, for many years I’ve been using “national” in preference to “federal” to describe our top-level government. I often use it in a mildly pejorative sense.
Oh, that’s ok, but I personally think the word is a bad fit for Americans, not for other countries like Japan.
They’ve taken many words and given them new meaning – one of the tools of deception. Is this not the bigger problem?
To steal something from a much smarter man than myself, I think that Nationalist founding creed goes something like this:
So our Constitution applies to the world. Let me know when English men can bear arms and China has free speech.
Posterity – future generations or descendents.
That’s not from The Constitution.
This was in the declaration of independence. The self-evident truths apply to the whole world; the specific grievances and new arrangement applied to us in particular.
The same guy who wrote this also wrote that we are friends to liberty everywhere, but guarantors only of our own.
I think both statements do a good job of putting our particular nation in context.
If we suppose, though, that the only reason nationalism seem incompatible with the character of the US is because of progressive perversion of language, we’re missing something huge. People don’t have to be progressives, or fooled by progressives, to associate “nationalism” with baggage that is in fact not very American.
But, just think, only a ‘nationalist’ would think that we elect a POTUS by summing the popular vote across the sovereign States. And some of those ‘nationalists’ are likely ‘socialists’ as well.
Our country’s federal government is not ‘national’ so ‘nationalist’ is not a word to describe it properly without some significant and undesirable (to me) change in its form. Period.
Edit: For those who like to use it, remember who else likes it because they would like to change our government to ‘national’ and elect the POTUS by national popular vote.
Good catch.
Nationalism does work for the US if you treat America as an Anglo-Saxon nation state with those of other ethnic backgrounds being bracketed out of the essential definition. You can include others by treating them as incidental; the existence of Basques in France doesn’t stop France from being a nation. Wilson was perfectly capable of being a genuine nationalist, as were many of the America Firsters. It doesn’t require a change in the form, just a change in how you view the form.
Nation is commonly defined by people of common descent, history, culture, and language. National sovereignty in a nation, to my understanding, is usually absolute and total within the national government. Wilson, a Progressive, certainly would have liked to take us there and he got us started. The United States does not reflect any of the common definitions here and our form of government is not national. So I really do not understand what kind of forced fit you are trying to describe and there is certainly no mechanism in place to go there. Incidental??
All claims that nations are people of common descent, history, culture, and language are overbroad and underbroad. Thus, for instance, France is a nation and that nation includes the Basques, who are not of common descent, culture, or language with the French (there’s some shared history, granted). Similarly, if you take the view of America as essentially an Anglo-Saxon Christian country (broadly defined), then you have a people with a shared descent, history, culture, and language. As with France and the Basques (amongst others), there are Americans who do not share that, but you don’t have to have every citizen of a nation sharing the characteristics for the label to apply. So, Wilson sought to emphasize the British and German ethnic and cultural roots, celebrating America’s ethnic solidarity, while simultaneously working to promote and create national myths that built on an already substantial base of cultural commonality.
That all has little to do with sovereignty, in part because sovereignty and nationality aren’t as bound up as you suggest. Wilson thought that they should be more so; self determination was a key foreign policy goal for his administration, but he believed that the US already had that. He wanted the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans to have their empires broken up because they didn’t govern nations (or, rather, they did, but they didn’t govern a single nation). Late in his administration he came to understand some of the problems with defining nations (like race, it turns out that taxonomies are superficially plausible, but none of them actually work very well).
I don’t think he did, I don’t even know if I think Trump is doing it. I do know that people accused Reagan of doing it. The question is can you inadvertently dog whistle? I don’t think we can discount that possibility when discussing the issue, at least not without some sort of attempt to generate an objective test of it. Assuming such a thing is even possible considering the nature of the question.
America is different. We are Americans, not because of a shared ethnicity or previous nationality, but because of a shared culture. A culture of liberty, especially individual liberty. We embrace and welcome people from all over the world if they embrace our culture and want to be Americans. We do not welcome them if they come here refusing to learn our language and expect us to do everything in their language. We do not embrace them if they come here wanting to kill us and enforce their culture onto us at the point of a sword. We do not welcome them if they come here and try to supersede our Constitution with Sharia Law. We are a nation with borders that must, especially now, be enforced. If we have no borders then we aren’t a nation. We’re just a land mass.
I think with America you don’t even have a plurality that are Anglo-Saxon. Even in Wilson’s day. Which is why the notion of an American nationality sounds off to many today. Ask someone what their name is and I think with the exception of very English names (John Smith) no one will say American. They will say French, Romanian, Italian, etc. Wilson’s self determination was a way to defuse the tensions of the crumbling multi-ethnic Empires. The funny thing the American system provides a model for such an Empire to work, because it gives all a stake in the political system, by de-emphisizing the ethnic and national aspects of the country. America works as a multi-ethnic state because it requires people to adhere to a general universal creed, that of Enlightenment Liberalism. In this way America works more like a religion. We can spread Americanism in away that Germans could never really spread Germanism. This is why Communism was such a threat to us. Its very existence as an opposing ideology should it have spread to us would have meant the end of America.
I agree. The Basque don’t make a good example since one of the precepts of the United States is that we assimilate our different peoples, at least to the extent that there is expectation they honor and support the Constitution since it is ubiquitous in our governance and a base for our culture. Wilson thought he was an advocate of self-determination huh? Was that at an individual level or at a global level? I wouldn’t trust anything that man said or did. I don’t see how anything of a nationalistic nature can be overlaid on the US without essentially a destruction of what the Union has stood for since its founding, without the corruption. So it’s much simpler to call America a country and forget about nation since the meaning is unclear and I don’t see any use for nationalism either. And we don’t have anything going on in the US that is national except a few organization have used it in their name. We do have functional government entities that use it, the National Guard, but those exists at the State level.
Oh, and BTW, your description of how this country could be made a nation just by viewing it from its Anglo-Saxon origins is beyond my comprehension. I can’t believe you actually wrote that down.
Are you excluding Germans from “Anglo-Saxon”? Wilson did not. In 1980, to pick a random date for which the census file came up for me, 26.34% of Americans identified as English, 26.14% as German, 21.33% as Irish, 5.34% as Scottish, 3.35% as Dutch, and so on. Of those, about half the English and a third of the Germans reported single ancestry and I’m sure there’s some crossover between the mixed groups, but it still seems likely to clear 50%, despite having a substantially lower portion of the population being non-Hispanic whites than in Wilson’s day.
It is hard to say overstate much Wilson objected to this; “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready” and all that. That said, if you ask most Americans what their nationality is, they’ll tell you they’re American (in part because Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge, each of whom had strong feelings on the subject, were pretty successful). It won’t be a hard question.
Wilson’s beliefs on race and self determination were not pragmatic beliefs. They were a fundamental part of his political theory. Racial purity was a very big deal to him, on a wide variety of grounds.
Although during Wilson’s time it was heavily associated with white ethnic minorities, leading to some pretty regrettable race relations, culminating in the 1924 Act excluding those minorities (or, if you prefer, culminating in the denial of entry for large numbers of Jews at a time when their entrance would have been profoundly helpful to them). Anarchism, likewise, but Wilson was able to mostly stamp that movement out, whereas Communism received more foreign support.
I don’t know why you would feel that way. Wilson had a lot of repugnant views, but he was generally pretty honest about them. As I noted to Valiuth, it may be easiest to understand his view of the nation state in the context of his views on racial purity and eugenics in the US, but he was most explicit about it in a foreign policy context; he didn’t believe in breaking up the US or abandoning the American empire. It’s absolutely true that he believed that everyone should assimilate, but he also thought that some people weren’t as likely as others to do so. Whether it’s his enthusiasm for the Klan (the title of Birth Of A Nation seems relevant here) or for the Alien Anarchists Exclusion Act and the Palmer Raids, Wilson’s administration was strongly characterized by concerns about national origins.
It’s true that the Klan, and Wilson, explicitly rejected a fair amount of the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Wilson remains the only President to have so clearly repudiated the moral authority of the Constitution. That said, nationalism has always been a thread in American political thought.
I don’t see much use for it either, but that isn’t the same thing as it not being an important part of American political thought throughout history. You’ll find a lot of it in the Know Nothings/ American Party as an explicitly American thing; before that you’ll find the ethnic stuff mostly being about Englishmen, with the primary “other” that nationalism was defined in opposition to being Catholicism, a concern that formed a part of the motivation for rebellion (there was considerable concern that George III was going to subject Americans to bishops).
Pretty much all Federal institutions are national. Whether they use it in their name or not (the military, for instance, has not generally been had an institution of the “National Army”, although it did under Wilson), their functions work that way. It’s simply not the case that institutions with national in their name tend to be state governmental. The NIH, National Archives, and such are all Federal, while the National Guard is a hybrid entity; it’s State Defense Forces, not the National Guard, that are purely state military entities.
Have you read a lot of Teddy Roosevelt or Wilson’s thought on this stuff? How about the Klan and Lindburgh’s guys? You might find it worth putting some effort into bringing it within your comprehension if you find you want to understand early Twentieth century American politics. If you don’t, then that’s probably not going to harm you any though.