All is Narrative Including Civic Nationalism

The Zman has a post-Rittenhouse piece on Civic Nationalism, and he critiques it thus.

Civic nationalism is the argument that a country can be organized around a set of ideas, rather than people and land. The citizens, rather than connected by blood and history, are connected by ideas. 

Ideas being, e.g., the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But, of course, "people and land" and "blood and history" are just as much ideas as the idea of equality and government under law.

They are all "narratives." And the Zman understands this:

Civic nationalism, to a great degree, is a reaction to the internationalism of Western ruling elites who are post-national. The post-nationalists want to eliminate borders and the national sovereignty. In their place will be international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state. Civic nationalism is an effort to confront this old enemy of civilization with a nationalism free of past baggage.

In other words, the civic nationalists want nationalism without the Hitler baggage.

And narratives tend to be sacred narratives such as the Woke Religion narrative as described by Schellenberger and Boghossian. They have assembled a table of Woke Religion: A Taxonomy, describing -- for Racism, Climate Change, Trans, Crime, Mental Illness, Drugs, and Homelessness -- the Original Sin, Guilty Devils, Creation Story, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals, and Purifying Speech. It really is genius.

Now, my idea is that all politics is tribalism, and "fake" tribalism at that. I got this idea from reading C.R. Hallpike, who says that the original hunter-gather bands didn't have much of a tribal mentality. Tribalism, he writes, started when people started living the villages that were big enough that people didn't know all the other poeple in the village.

And, to put Nazi Carl Schmitt back in the mix, with his notion that politics is about friends vs. enemy, we can say that tribalism is about our good people vs. the enemy's bad people. 

See, once you get a society bigger than a band of kindred, where everyone is related to everyone else by blood, then people start to construct a tribal narrative that imagines everyone connected by blood. On the other hand, my Greek friend that was born into a village on a Greek hillside, talks endlessly of this cousin or that uncle or that grandparent.

So, in my view, all politics is based on a narrative of imagined kindred. It could be a clan which assumes that various groups of kindred are related by blood, and probably they are. But then we get to princely states where everyone is related by their loyalty to the prince. And then to the nation, which is a glorious story of blood and land. Or, if it is the United States it is the glory of its ideas, that all men are created equal and are delighted to live in a land ruled by laws and not by men.

Now our global overlords -- the "laptop whites" -- of which the Zman talks of the "internationalism of Western ruling elites" have a narrative of globalism, of "international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state." So, they have a narrative of internationalism, and political and administrative institutions to go with it.

I say, with my Three Peoples theory that the tribe of the "laptop whites" is the community of all educated and credentialed people all over the world; the tribe of the middle class is the nation; and the tribe of the lower class is race or ethnic origin, or class. My Three Peoples theory is one of a number of Three Layer theories.

So it doesn't matter what the narrative is. The middle class will create and recreate a narrative of nation, that the nation in which they live is the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, as middle-class people get super-educated then they tend to adhere to the "laptop white" narrative of globalism and the over/under politics of Allyism and declare war on the middle class using the lower class as their street army.

Of course, all narratives tend to be forged in the furnace of war, when the Founding leaders construct a narrative to inspire their followers with a sense of belonging to a sacred "band of brothers." So, we should expect that the leaders of the middle class in the current Cold Civil War would be constructing a new narrative of nation. Which is exactly what Donald Trump was doing in the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Whether this new national narrative succeeds depends, of course, on whether the middle class can win the Cold Civil War that the educated class of "laptop whites" is conducting against it.