As I see it, the argument in conservative nation is between "civic nationalism" and some sort of "ethno-nationalism," a white- or euro-nationalism. Here is the ZMan masticating over the problem.
As I understand the argument, civic nationalism defines a nation by its principles, derived from the European political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Ethno-nationalism defines the nation "by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry."
But it seems to me that both these notions of the nation are too cramped, too defensive. What we need is a nationalism that transcends the purely ideological basis of civic nationalism, which only a few people that have studied their political philosophy will ever understand, and also the ethnic basis of ethno-nationalism which assumes that everyone is a creature of their ethnic origin.
In other words, we need to create a new idea of the nation, manufacture a culture, fake up some traditions, and invite everyone in.
Just like President Trump.
Here is how I get here.
First of all, the last time we had real tribalism was in the stateless agricultural villages that started to get eliminated by big-state agriculture about 3,000 years ago. Your average village was truly a tribe of the kindred, people closely related to each other.
But with the birth of the state, notably in the great agricultural empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, the rulers obviously could not continue the old tribalism of the kindred, because the new state transcended the old kind of belonging.
So they made it up in order to bolster their right to rule. All tribalism since then has been what I call "fake tribalism," where a ruling class gets "the priests" or other cunning regime intellectuals to make up some fake tribe to which "we" all belong.
Since then there has been a continual problem around the practical size of the fake tribe. Take the UK. In our memory it has consisted of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. So-called "Great Britain" is the notion that all these sub-nations are really the one nation of the Brits. But the Irish didn't like that, mainly because they were mostly Catholics. And now the Scots are dithering about whether they want to be a separate nation. The concept of "nation" is clearly a movable feast.
Germany was for a millennium famously divided up into a patchwork of feudal states nominally joined together into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, but not really. It was the genius of Bismarck to figure out how to trick the Germans into giving up their local fake tribes, based partly on religion and partly on feudal loyalty, and join a new fake tribe, the German Reich. The way he did it was by uniting all Germans to fight a war against France. After that all Germans were "blood brothers" in the sense that they had all been blooded together in the war against France.
As political units became bigger, and transportation improvements allowed people to realize that there was a whole world out there beyond their own personal horizon, enterprising thinkers came up with new identities. You could be a loyal retainer to your feudal lord. Or you could identify with all the folks adhering to the same religion. Then some bright guy came up with the notion of "race."
You can see that race is a problematic concept, even if you are Elizabeth Warren trying to use race to get into Harvard Law School as a female person of color because your law degree was from second or third tier Rutgers. If we use the modern concept of categorization from lefty George Lakoff, "race" is several steps removed from the basic-level categorization that we humans use to understand our everyday world. (Basic level categories are things like dog, cat, house, family, chair.)
Put it this way. It is pretty obvious that our immediate family is definitely "people like us;" we can mostly trust them. People in our neighborhood are also familiar and safe. But as we start venturing further out into the world, the question of trust becomes more questionable. But if people belong to our nation, or our "race," then we can often be persuaded to trust them and stand by them when danger strikes. But what about "them," the people not of our nation or our race or our religion, or our culture?
It is inevitable that humans will divide the world into "us" and "them." The only question is: How? What kind of fake tribalism do we want to invent so that we can persuade people to imagine themselves in a nice safe community of people like them that can be trusted?
By 1800 everyone agreed that the "nation" was a good kind of tribe. It was able to unite people around a shared homeland, a shared language, a shared religion and a perception of shared heritage. But starting in 1850 the left has advanced a competing notion of tribe, initially with class. The idea was that the new industrial workers should develop an identity separate from their national homelands: "workers of the world, unite." So the workers would not just be another group within the nation that was bidding for a place at the table. Their loyalty would transcend national boundaries.
The point is that the left believes in a new kind of tribalism, one that does not center on homeland, language, religion, and heritage. So the left always finds itself in opposition to the identity of homeland, language, religion and heritage. Because Nazism.
After World War I the left invented, thanks to the Frankfurt School, new kinds of identity and tribe in addition to the classism of the workers. They decided to group people by race, by gender, and finally by sexual orientation. In other words, they decided to challenge the fake tribe of the nation with fake tribes of class, race, and sex. If you believe in a world that transcends nation, you are bound to do something like that.
But I think that the left's attempt to kill the nation state ain't gonna work. People are just not going to go for a supra-national identity, not unless they are upper-class professionals that imagine living and working anywhere in the world. If we do not have nations, then people that don't believe in supra-national identity will break up the nations into sub-national tribal entities based on other kinds of identity. I don't think that the globalist plan of a two-tier politics, with the elite as trans-national globalists and the rest as quarreling identity groups, is gonna fly. I think that once you have broken up the people in a nation state by race identity, typically with non-white races united against the white race, then you are going to end up with a civil war between the races.
And I think that the notion of civic nationalism and white nationalism are too weak and feeble to attract support from most average people.
No, the answer to our problem is to unite people by national enthusiasm, as belonging to the greatest nation ever, and to inspire them to make it greater. Let's cobble together a mess of everything -- economic, language, religion, and heritage -- and create a new American identity to which everyone can happily belong.
Even liberals can apply.
As I understand the argument, civic nationalism defines a nation by its principles, derived from the European political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Ethno-nationalism defines the nation "by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry."
But it seems to me that both these notions of the nation are too cramped, too defensive. What we need is a nationalism that transcends the purely ideological basis of civic nationalism, which only a few people that have studied their political philosophy will ever understand, and also the ethnic basis of ethno-nationalism which assumes that everyone is a creature of their ethnic origin.
In other words, we need to create a new idea of the nation, manufacture a culture, fake up some traditions, and invite everyone in.
Just like President Trump.
Here is how I get here.
First of all, the last time we had real tribalism was in the stateless agricultural villages that started to get eliminated by big-state agriculture about 3,000 years ago. Your average village was truly a tribe of the kindred, people closely related to each other.
But with the birth of the state, notably in the great agricultural empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, the rulers obviously could not continue the old tribalism of the kindred, because the new state transcended the old kind of belonging.
So they made it up in order to bolster their right to rule. All tribalism since then has been what I call "fake tribalism," where a ruling class gets "the priests" or other cunning regime intellectuals to make up some fake tribe to which "we" all belong.
Since then there has been a continual problem around the practical size of the fake tribe. Take the UK. In our memory it has consisted of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. So-called "Great Britain" is the notion that all these sub-nations are really the one nation of the Brits. But the Irish didn't like that, mainly because they were mostly Catholics. And now the Scots are dithering about whether they want to be a separate nation. The concept of "nation" is clearly a movable feast.
Germany was for a millennium famously divided up into a patchwork of feudal states nominally joined together into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, but not really. It was the genius of Bismarck to figure out how to trick the Germans into giving up their local fake tribes, based partly on religion and partly on feudal loyalty, and join a new fake tribe, the German Reich. The way he did it was by uniting all Germans to fight a war against France. After that all Germans were "blood brothers" in the sense that they had all been blooded together in the war against France.
As political units became bigger, and transportation improvements allowed people to realize that there was a whole world out there beyond their own personal horizon, enterprising thinkers came up with new identities. You could be a loyal retainer to your feudal lord. Or you could identify with all the folks adhering to the same religion. Then some bright guy came up with the notion of "race."
You can see that race is a problematic concept, even if you are Elizabeth Warren trying to use race to get into Harvard Law School as a female person of color because your law degree was from second or third tier Rutgers. If we use the modern concept of categorization from lefty George Lakoff, "race" is several steps removed from the basic-level categorization that we humans use to understand our everyday world. (Basic level categories are things like dog, cat, house, family, chair.)
Put it this way. It is pretty obvious that our immediate family is definitely "people like us;" we can mostly trust them. People in our neighborhood are also familiar and safe. But as we start venturing further out into the world, the question of trust becomes more questionable. But if people belong to our nation, or our "race," then we can often be persuaded to trust them and stand by them when danger strikes. But what about "them," the people not of our nation or our race or our religion, or our culture?
It is inevitable that humans will divide the world into "us" and "them." The only question is: How? What kind of fake tribalism do we want to invent so that we can persuade people to imagine themselves in a nice safe community of people like them that can be trusted?
By 1800 everyone agreed that the "nation" was a good kind of tribe. It was able to unite people around a shared homeland, a shared language, a shared religion and a perception of shared heritage. But starting in 1850 the left has advanced a competing notion of tribe, initially with class. The idea was that the new industrial workers should develop an identity separate from their national homelands: "workers of the world, unite." So the workers would not just be another group within the nation that was bidding for a place at the table. Their loyalty would transcend national boundaries.
The point is that the left believes in a new kind of tribalism, one that does not center on homeland, language, religion, and heritage. So the left always finds itself in opposition to the identity of homeland, language, religion and heritage. Because Nazism.
After World War I the left invented, thanks to the Frankfurt School, new kinds of identity and tribe in addition to the classism of the workers. They decided to group people by race, by gender, and finally by sexual orientation. In other words, they decided to challenge the fake tribe of the nation with fake tribes of class, race, and sex. If you believe in a world that transcends nation, you are bound to do something like that.
But I think that the left's attempt to kill the nation state ain't gonna work. People are just not going to go for a supra-national identity, not unless they are upper-class professionals that imagine living and working anywhere in the world. If we do not have nations, then people that don't believe in supra-national identity will break up the nations into sub-national tribal entities based on other kinds of identity. I don't think that the globalist plan of a two-tier politics, with the elite as trans-national globalists and the rest as quarreling identity groups, is gonna fly. I think that once you have broken up the people in a nation state by race identity, typically with non-white races united against the white race, then you are going to end up with a civil war between the races.
And I think that the notion of civic nationalism and white nationalism are too weak and feeble to attract support from most average people.
No, the answer to our problem is to unite people by national enthusiasm, as belonging to the greatest nation ever, and to inspire them to make it greater. Let's cobble together a mess of everything -- economic, language, religion, and heritage -- and create a new American identity to which everyone can happily belong.
Even liberals can apply.
Not sure if this will help but for some reason while reading it I recalled your own speculations and thought I would pass it along -->https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/10/18/unflattening-hobbes/
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