Disagreeing vehemently with people you admire is always uncomfortable. But it also helps one to develop a better appreciation of some arguments: how come a person as smart as x believes in that?
Chris DeMuth, the former head of the American Enterprise Institute and a true scholar, took part in a “National Conservatism Conference” and the Wall Street Journal has published excerpts of his speech. I have nothing but admiration for DeMuth and his case for a “nationalist awakening” is much better than most of the competing attempts.
Chris’s article has a particularly interesting takeaway. He compares the “nationalist awakening” with “the religious Great Awakenings that swept over America in the 18th and 19th centuries.” He continues, “In the American colonies and early U.S., the new religious impulses were much more populist, participatory, and enthusiastic than what had come before, and posited a new relationship between God and his people and among his people”. He sets this comparison in a hopeful light, assuming that the new awakening will be more galvanizing and less divisive than many of us expect. Yet I think the precious point is the equivalence between nationalism and religion.
I don’t want to enter into necessarily intricate disputes, from the tension between the universalism [pretenses sounds harsh] of the Catholic church and the particularism of the princes who endorsed Protestantism onwards. But nationalism, in the era of mass democracy, was basically a cult: the cult of the (nation) state. And rulers saw such a cult as necessary in a secularised world, where kings and queens could no longer extract obedience on the basis of divine right. Now that we live in an ever more secular world, rulers perhaps find nationalism even more necessary. Sometimes, when I contemplate contemporary populism, I can’t but think about Chesterton: when men choose not to believe in God, they become capable of believing in anything.
I don’t agree with DeMuth that religion and nationalism are “institutional embodiments of human understanding and aspiration, of human excellence and folly. To oppose them is to oppose human nature”. Religion has been with us forever (though it is decaying), while nationalism is a 200 year old invention (though it seems to be on the rise).
My main criticism of Chris’s article is really this: he speaks of nationalism, but he does not define it. In his article, nationalism is basically seen as the political embodiment of people’s feeling that they have lost control of their lives because of supranational bodies. That story is persuasive, perhaps, for Brexit but not quite for Trump: has the US lost sovereignty to the benefit of any supranational body? Which one? Chris knows that and therefore writes: “It has delegated lawmaking to foreign and international bodies, and domestic bureaucracies, that have scant regard for the interests and values of many of our fellow citizens.” (italics added) But aren’t domestic bureaucracies part of a nation-state, and perhaps its very backbone? And aren’t nationalists often in the forefront of trying to strengthen domestic bureaucracies’ powers, especially if the bureaucracies have power over immigration?
To get back to the issue of a clear definition of nationalism, let me quote the very first lines of Elie Kedourie’s splendid work on the subject:
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the right organization of a society of states.
Any single word, in the above-mentioned paragraph, is important, beginning with “invented.” Chris seems to believe that nationalism is sort of a “natural” loyalty of people, which is being jeopardized by international institutions. But is it? Historically nationalism has competed, sometimes ferociously, with other loyalties, beginning with religion and the family (the two main targets of one of the favorite policies of nationalism: a national education system). I won’t argue against the idea that human beings are gregarious and need to belong to something. But that something is more often than not a club, an association, a football team, or a municipality. The nation is quite a remote object: in some countries, it represents a very strong element of identity; in some, it doesn’t. It is more often than not a (political) manufacture, not a spontaneous offspring. In this case, it typically grows by crowding out other loyalties: most notably, indeed, religion.
I think Chris’s lacking a definition of nationalism is instrumental for his speaking of the US as a nation-state. But the US is quite different from any other nation-state: it is a federal system that, though weakened through time, still sees a considerable role played by individual states. Nationalism is a “reductio ad unum” of diverse loyalties, which in the US has been a project with limited success.
DeMuth makes a point I wholeheartedly agree with, a genuinely conservative point: “One of the most arresting features of modern life in the rich democracies is the pervasive rejection of the idea of natural constraint.” I certainly agree with this. My question is: is the nation-state really a constraint, as DeMuth apparently believes? I hope the readers will allow me a rather materialistic answer, but I suggest we go and look at public spending as a percentage of GDP in nation-states, from 1900 to today. In the Western states, government spending was around 10% of GDP (5% in the US), and now is typically around 40 to 50% of GDP(a bit less in the US). How did exactly the nation-states act as a constraint? It seems to me they were precisely the conduit through which politicians and bureaucracies exercised their hubris. Whatever you think of supranational organizations as they exist today, it seems to me that their authority over individual lives is minuscule, as compared with national executive and legislative powers.
I understand that some of the people at the National Conservativism Conference (see this thoughtful speech by Yuval Levin) were actually trying to give a “limited government” interpretation of nationalism. This may well be a noble effort. But I suspect it will be an unsuccessful, if not a counterproductive, one.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Jul 29 2019 at 8:46am
DeMuth should have read Richard Hofsteadter’s masterful Pulitzer Prize winner, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life.” It chronicles the evolution of religious influence during the 19th century. We still see today the diminishment of intellectual rigor. Most of the founders were areligious, hence the protection to practice any religion (or not) that was embedded in the Constitution. In the early days, the concept of America as a Christian nation did not exist; this came a couple of decades later. Jill Lepore’s recent history of the United States covers some similar territory but her principal focus is the impact of slavery.
Mark Z
Jul 29 2019 at 3:12pm
I suspect DeMuth is more interested in the virtuosity and productivity of people in general than in the health of its intelligentsia. An analogy: Nietzsche’s view that the reformation set Europe backward ‘intellectually and culturally’ is not inconsistent with Weber’s view that it made them more productive. Though I suspect DeMuth would also disagree with Hofstadter’s definition of anti-intellectualism.
Philo
Jul 29 2019 at 1:17pm
Thanks for your thoughtful post. A couple of asides:
1) “Nationalism . . . pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own . . .” (Kedourie). What is that criterion (I suppose it is at least infected with “racism”), and what is the result of applying it to the present-day U.S.A. (i.e., is the U.S. a proper nation)?
2) Chesterton was onto something: believing in God may be absurd, but atheists and agnostics have, indeed, shown a marked tendency to believe things even more absurd. Human beings seem inclined to embrace absurd world-views, and one can very easily do worse than to embrace traditional religion.
Mark Z
Jul 29 2019 at 3:47pm
Related to the Chesterton remark: Freud – a much a critic of religion as anyone – considered the possibility that religion served as a ‘protective neurosis’ that reduced vulnerability to other potentially harmful neuroses.
But I think the case for a salutary nationalist movement is very different – and less convincing – than the case for a salutary religious movement. A religious awakening needn’t be a zero sum game; one man’s virtue doesn’t necessarily depend on another being branded a heretic. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inherently adversarial, and whatever benefits it may have come at the expense of increased chance of conflict with other nationalist states.
Weir
Jul 29 2019 at 9:07pm
“Chris seems to believe that nationalism is sort of a ‘natural’ loyalty of people, which is being jeopardized by international institutions.”
What does Chris say in the first line of his argument? “No one saw it coming–that the next big thing of the 21st century would be the nation-state, an idea from the 17th.”
He says “idea” straight off the top and “proselytize our ideas” soon after.
Back to Mingardi: “It is more often than not a (political) manufacture, not a spontaneous offspring. In this case, it typically grows by crowding out other loyalties: most notably, indeed, religion.”
What Chris calls “the old intolerant religious hatreds” are in explicit contrast, as Chris makes clear, to something “unifying and enlarging” which Chris identifies as “the American nation.”
Chris talks about “the splintering of the nation into contending racial, religious and other groups” and the government wielding the axe: “It has neglected core American principles and traditions–separation of powers, due process, the presumption of innocence, local prerogative, freedom of association–allowing them to atrophy or be subjected to political conditions.” It “has favored some at the expense of others.” It isn’t pretty.
Mingardi: “Now that we live in an ever more secular world, rulers perhaps find nationalism even more necessary.”
Only rulers? Due process is useful for all of us. Freedom of association is a precious achievement. Even those of us who have never been singled out by Michael Avenatti or Lois Lerner or Adam Schiff, those of us who have never been screamed at by Erica Thomas or called names by Ayanna Pressley, those of us who haven’t been harassed by the Colorado Human Rights Commission or doxxed by the Huffington Post, denounced, pilloried, and accused of some heinous outrage on Twitter, all of us should still be able to appreciate that people outside our little tribe, people belonging to some hated outgroup, are still people. Zealots and Puritans who see themselves as thoroughly secular are no less intolerant or hateful when they’re wielding the pitchfork and setting the pyre alight.
Chris says “the new nationalism is a revolt against the failures and weaknesses of modern nation-states.” Which is not the same as what Mingardi calls “people’s feeling that they have lost control of their lives because of supranational bodies.”
Chris again: “The contemporary peaceable nation takes what it is given–its borders and territory and resources, its citizens and tribes, its affinities and antagonisms, its history and traditions and ways of getting along–and makes the most of them.” The Ottoman empire, for one, was a lot worse than that, and so was Saddam’s Iraq. Tribalism, imperialism and nationalism in Kedourie’s Iraq were all three of them disastrous for the people living there. Which makes the American nation, in its entire history, something worth studying. It bears thinking about, and careful study. Chris, at least, is doing that.
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