Today Jonah Goldberg does a piece where he can inveigh both against the left's idea of nationalism and the Trump idea of populist nationalism. Jonah dislikes "nationalism and populism of the Left and the Right, regardless of the brand names they hide behind."
Jonah takes off against liberal Elizabeth Bruenig, who argues against nationalism thusly:
If we have to have some form of nationalism, Jonah would prefer the "benign nationalism" offered by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.
I would argue, of course, that all these folks are wet behind the ears. Here's how.
Humans are tribal social animals. The reason for this is simple. In the hunter-gatherer era, that only began to end when agriculture was invented in China and/or the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, humans were organized in small tribes that defended their patch of land from all the world. So the humans had the attitude of Seal Team Six, defending the tribe's land to the death. We may say that tribalism is deeply encoded in our DNA.
OK, so then came the agricultural era, gradually displacing hunter-gatherer tribes over the last 5,000 years. There is less need for tribalism, except in the fierce marcher lords that defended the frontiers of agricultural empire. Everyone else could just be a nice subordinate peasant. In Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays we see the last hurrah of England's marcher lords as Harry Percy, marcher lord on the border between England and Scotland, and Worcester, marcher lord on the border between England and Wales, made war against the King of England. The larger political unit of England may make a lot of sense, but your marcher lord still had a lot of tribal leader left in him, and he made a lot of trouble.
The nation state is a solution to the marcher lord problem. In England the nation state began with Henrty VIII disarming the nobles and creating a national army. So now marcher lords were no longer leaders of potential rebel armies; the king was the only guy with an army. Instead the nobles began to "improve" their lands and make more money so they could afford to cut a dash in the court of the capital city.
But if you are not going to have tribes any more, but instead a nation, how do you inspire tribal humans to feel like they belong to the nation state instead of their ancient local loyalties?
The answer is that you create a national myth. This is an ancient practice. In the olden times, described by Mircea Eliade in books like Rites and Symbols of Initiation, you had a tribal history compressed into a sacred story of the founding of the tribe, by founders that were really gods. And the sacred story was taught to the youngsters at puberty in rites of initiation.
In Britain they have a national myth about Britain being an indivisible nation going all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. In France they believe in Charlemagne as the founder. In Germany they believe in Karl der Große, which is German for Charlemagne. The Germans also had the cult of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which creates a history of the Germans as the true heirs of both the Roman Empire and Christianity, which is something of a joke since the Germans were never part of the Roman Empire. All these nationalisms are really remarkably ingenious efforts to create a tribal myth, a cult of the nation, using the concepts and tropes used back in tribal times when humans really were organized into real tribes where everyone was related by blood. In all these myths, the notion is developed that we are all descended from the same stock going back into the mists of time. Even though we aren't.
Now let us invoke the shade of Enoch Powell, the notorious British politician that first raised the spectre of immigration in his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968. He was basically saying that immigration would dissolve the notion of Britain as a nation state with its special sacred history, and that could lead to civil war. Although Powell was branded as a racist and a bigot, he was in fact a classical scholar that rose from private to brigadier in World War II working in military intelligence, and then became a Conservative member of Parliament.
Powell also said that the European Union could never work because there was no such thing as a European demos or people that thought of themselves as Europeans.
Actually Powell was not quite right on that. In Europe, the educated elite does think of itself as European. But the average German, or Frenchman, or Brit, does not. The broad mass of the average middle class still identifies with the nation, not the continent. And that is a problem for the European project; it is the reason why Brexit and Marine Le Pen and the AfD exist.
The bottom line is this. Every government, when it wants to embark on some national project, will find that it has to appeal to some sort of collective identity, some sort of notion of the tribe writ large. That is why Jonah Goldberg got to write a critique of our Progressive rulers in Liberal Fascism as semi-fascists wrapping themselves in the American flag when they wanted to unite the nation in World War I and the New Deal and then World War II.
But the leaders do that not because they are fascist villains, but because they have to find a way to unite the people when they want to get them to consent to some great collective project. Thus the lefty and anti-war Barack Obama discovers the virtues of Seal Team Six, the special forces warriors that winkled out Osama bin Laden.
Now, the ruling class in the US, like the ruling class in Europe, has felt itself in the last few decades rising above the surly bonds of nation into the ethereal heights of globalism. And most educated people go along with this. Thus my liberal neighborhood is plastered with #WeBelieve and Hate has No Home Here yardsigns. That takes care of the educated elite. For the lower orders, the ruling class practices identity politics, which I call neo-tribalism. In other words, the ruling class must use some way of uniting its supporters into a collective identity. If it doesn't want to invoke the notion of the nation, then it has to use something else, and that something else has turned out to be racist and sexist and gender-non-conforming identity politics, with all opponents branded as racists, sexists, and homophobes. Go figure!
The problem with the ruling class's globalism combined with race and gender identity politics is that it leaves out the ordinary broad middle class, people that are neither educated nor immigrant nor race-identifying. You can see that this could create a bit of a problem if, say, the ruling class wanted to lead the nation to war against some existential threat. What gods to you invoke? What ancestors? What national unity?
Into this hole have stepped Donald Trump and the neo-nationalists in Europe, to the consternation of the globalist educated ruling class and the identity politicians representing racial or gender subcultures. Who are these gate-crashers? Are they fascists, or ethno-nationalists, or populists, or white nationalists, or what?
The answer is: none of these. They are politicians, opportunists. They are trying to create a new approach to the virtual community of the nation. We humans do not live in small enough communities where we can be unified by appeals to actual tribal and kindred loyalties, so we have to be mobilized and unified by a fancy of belonging, to the national flag, to the idea of the nation as family, to the idea of the American people. Really, to anything that stirs the chords of memory, the instincts of the tribe, in modern people.
Donald Trump in his State of the Union Speech on January 30 was trying to birth a new form of unity, the unity of all the ordinary Americans overcoming their private challenges: the guy with a small manufacturing firm hiring and training a black welder, the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans, the families devastated by criminal immigrant gangs, the couple adopting the child of a drug addict. Do you see the genius of this? The fact is that the great majority of Americans are not educated liberals with their #WeBelieve signs advocating climate change and gay marriage. They are not tribal immigrants that have not yet assimilated into the city culture of the exchange economy. They are ordinary people that just want to wive and thrive, get a good job, find a house they can afford and raise a family. And they want to believe that their way of life is good and worthy. President Trump is trying to create a sense of community in these ordinary people, that they are the real "America" and that Trump is trying to "Make America Great Again" for people like them.
I think that the argument over nationalism, from the proposition nation to benign nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, to the awkward elite combination of globalism and identity politics misses the point.
The point is how to unite modern citified people working in the exchange economy into some fancy of a collective identity that makes them feel they belong, as hunter-gatherers once belonged to their little tribe. Our liberal friends don't like Trump's approach for obvious reasons. If the Trump approach succeeds it puts their globalist/identity politics model on the scrap heap of history.
The question is: do our liberal friends have a better idea? Watching our Democratic friends sitting on their hands as President Trump made a pedal-to-the-metal appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans, honoring their modest, but sincere, achievements, I would say that they are out of ideas, out of gas, and out of joint.
And then there is Jonah Goldberg, who is comfortably against the nationalism of both left and right, although open to some kind of benign nationalism. OK, Jonah, where is your cunning plan to find a better, nobler way to create some sort of cultural myth that people can believe in and unite around? 'Cos yer cain't beat something with nothing.
Jonah takes off against liberal Elizabeth Bruenig, who argues against nationalism thusly:
America simply isn’t a nation-state; it was neither conceived to nor can it foster the “organic” nationalism Trumpish conservatives now seem fixated on. Nations are made up of people who claim to share certain unchosen characteristics: language, ethnicity, historic religion, mystical destiny. In America, not only is it the factual case that we do not share such things, but it’s rather the point of our existence as a country — or was, once. Liberal democracies prize freedom and self-determination, so it follows that Americans are made by beliefs and choices, not by blood and tongue. American nationalism can shatter lives and breed violence, but it won’t ever amount to the creation of an American nation. Such a thing does not exist.But nationalism has been central to liberalism, according to Jonah, from the original Progressives and their "moral equivalent of war" to the nationalism of the New Deal to President Obama gushing over "Seal Team Six as a model for domestic life."
If we have to have some form of nationalism, Jonah would prefer the "benign nationalism" offered by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru.
I would argue, of course, that all these folks are wet behind the ears. Here's how.
Humans are tribal social animals. The reason for this is simple. In the hunter-gatherer era, that only began to end when agriculture was invented in China and/or the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, humans were organized in small tribes that defended their patch of land from all the world. So the humans had the attitude of Seal Team Six, defending the tribe's land to the death. We may say that tribalism is deeply encoded in our DNA.
OK, so then came the agricultural era, gradually displacing hunter-gatherer tribes over the last 5,000 years. There is less need for tribalism, except in the fierce marcher lords that defended the frontiers of agricultural empire. Everyone else could just be a nice subordinate peasant. In Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays we see the last hurrah of England's marcher lords as Harry Percy, marcher lord on the border between England and Scotland, and Worcester, marcher lord on the border between England and Wales, made war against the King of England. The larger political unit of England may make a lot of sense, but your marcher lord still had a lot of tribal leader left in him, and he made a lot of trouble.
The nation state is a solution to the marcher lord problem. In England the nation state began with Henrty VIII disarming the nobles and creating a national army. So now marcher lords were no longer leaders of potential rebel armies; the king was the only guy with an army. Instead the nobles began to "improve" their lands and make more money so they could afford to cut a dash in the court of the capital city.
But if you are not going to have tribes any more, but instead a nation, how do you inspire tribal humans to feel like they belong to the nation state instead of their ancient local loyalties?
The answer is that you create a national myth. This is an ancient practice. In the olden times, described by Mircea Eliade in books like Rites and Symbols of Initiation, you had a tribal history compressed into a sacred story of the founding of the tribe, by founders that were really gods. And the sacred story was taught to the youngsters at puberty in rites of initiation.
In Britain they have a national myth about Britain being an indivisible nation going all the way back to William the Conqueror in 1066. In France they believe in Charlemagne as the founder. In Germany they believe in Karl der Große, which is German for Charlemagne. The Germans also had the cult of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which creates a history of the Germans as the true heirs of both the Roman Empire and Christianity, which is something of a joke since the Germans were never part of the Roman Empire. All these nationalisms are really remarkably ingenious efforts to create a tribal myth, a cult of the nation, using the concepts and tropes used back in tribal times when humans really were organized into real tribes where everyone was related by blood. In all these myths, the notion is developed that we are all descended from the same stock going back into the mists of time. Even though we aren't.
Now let us invoke the shade of Enoch Powell, the notorious British politician that first raised the spectre of immigration in his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968. He was basically saying that immigration would dissolve the notion of Britain as a nation state with its special sacred history, and that could lead to civil war. Although Powell was branded as a racist and a bigot, he was in fact a classical scholar that rose from private to brigadier in World War II working in military intelligence, and then became a Conservative member of Parliament.
Powell also said that the European Union could never work because there was no such thing as a European demos or people that thought of themselves as Europeans.
Actually Powell was not quite right on that. In Europe, the educated elite does think of itself as European. But the average German, or Frenchman, or Brit, does not. The broad mass of the average middle class still identifies with the nation, not the continent. And that is a problem for the European project; it is the reason why Brexit and Marine Le Pen and the AfD exist.
The bottom line is this. Every government, when it wants to embark on some national project, will find that it has to appeal to some sort of collective identity, some sort of notion of the tribe writ large. That is why Jonah Goldberg got to write a critique of our Progressive rulers in Liberal Fascism as semi-fascists wrapping themselves in the American flag when they wanted to unite the nation in World War I and the New Deal and then World War II.
But the leaders do that not because they are fascist villains, but because they have to find a way to unite the people when they want to get them to consent to some great collective project. Thus the lefty and anti-war Barack Obama discovers the virtues of Seal Team Six, the special forces warriors that winkled out Osama bin Laden.
Now, the ruling class in the US, like the ruling class in Europe, has felt itself in the last few decades rising above the surly bonds of nation into the ethereal heights of globalism. And most educated people go along with this. Thus my liberal neighborhood is plastered with #WeBelieve and Hate has No Home Here yardsigns. That takes care of the educated elite. For the lower orders, the ruling class practices identity politics, which I call neo-tribalism. In other words, the ruling class must use some way of uniting its supporters into a collective identity. If it doesn't want to invoke the notion of the nation, then it has to use something else, and that something else has turned out to be racist and sexist and gender-non-conforming identity politics, with all opponents branded as racists, sexists, and homophobes. Go figure!
The problem with the ruling class's globalism combined with race and gender identity politics is that it leaves out the ordinary broad middle class, people that are neither educated nor immigrant nor race-identifying. You can see that this could create a bit of a problem if, say, the ruling class wanted to lead the nation to war against some existential threat. What gods to you invoke? What ancestors? What national unity?
Into this hole have stepped Donald Trump and the neo-nationalists in Europe, to the consternation of the globalist educated ruling class and the identity politicians representing racial or gender subcultures. Who are these gate-crashers? Are they fascists, or ethno-nationalists, or populists, or white nationalists, or what?
The answer is: none of these. They are politicians, opportunists. They are trying to create a new approach to the virtual community of the nation. We humans do not live in small enough communities where we can be unified by appeals to actual tribal and kindred loyalties, so we have to be mobilized and unified by a fancy of belonging, to the national flag, to the idea of the nation as family, to the idea of the American people. Really, to anything that stirs the chords of memory, the instincts of the tribe, in modern people.
Donald Trump in his State of the Union Speech on January 30 was trying to birth a new form of unity, the unity of all the ordinary Americans overcoming their private challenges: the guy with a small manufacturing firm hiring and training a black welder, the kid planting flags on the graves of veterans, the families devastated by criminal immigrant gangs, the couple adopting the child of a drug addict. Do you see the genius of this? The fact is that the great majority of Americans are not educated liberals with their #WeBelieve signs advocating climate change and gay marriage. They are not tribal immigrants that have not yet assimilated into the city culture of the exchange economy. They are ordinary people that just want to wive and thrive, get a good job, find a house they can afford and raise a family. And they want to believe that their way of life is good and worthy. President Trump is trying to create a sense of community in these ordinary people, that they are the real "America" and that Trump is trying to "Make America Great Again" for people like them.
I think that the argument over nationalism, from the proposition nation to benign nationalism, to ethnic nationalism, to the awkward elite combination of globalism and identity politics misses the point.
The point is how to unite modern citified people working in the exchange economy into some fancy of a collective identity that makes them feel they belong, as hunter-gatherers once belonged to their little tribe. Our liberal friends don't like Trump's approach for obvious reasons. If the Trump approach succeeds it puts their globalist/identity politics model on the scrap heap of history.
The question is: do our liberal friends have a better idea? Watching our Democratic friends sitting on their hands as President Trump made a pedal-to-the-metal appeal to ordinary middle-class Americans, honoring their modest, but sincere, achievements, I would say that they are out of ideas, out of gas, and out of joint.
And then there is Jonah Goldberg, who is comfortably against the nationalism of both left and right, although open to some kind of benign nationalism. OK, Jonah, where is your cunning plan to find a better, nobler way to create some sort of cultural myth that people can believe in and unite around? 'Cos yer cain't beat something with nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment