And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.
Republicans, however, were able to take the first sentence out of context and use it to argue to great effect that Obama was insufficiently committed to a belief in America’s unique greatness. In her book America By Heart, Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president in 2008 and a Tea Party activist avant la lettre, responded that
they [i.e., the Democrats] don’t believe we have a special message for the world or a special mission to preserve our greatness for the betterment of not just ourselves, but all of humanity. Astonishingly, President Obama even said that he believes in American exceptionalism in the same way “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Which is to say, he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism at all. He seems to think it is just a kind of irrational prejudice in favor of our way of life. To me, that is appalling.5
This background helps explain tragicomic statistics like the majority of Americans who believe that their country spends more than 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid, and that this figure should be reduced—when the true figure is less than 1 percent and the lowest in the developed world. Combined figures like this allow international critics of American hegemony to portray the United States as a purely selfish imperial power, without generosity and without real vision. This pattern is strange, and very sad, when contrasted with the tremendous generosity of many Americans when it comes to domestic and private charities, and brings out the degree to which chauvinist nationalism can undermine even the noblest of impulses.6
The Two Souls of American Nationalism
Like other nationalisms in the world, American nationalism has many different faces, and this book does not pretend to explore all of them. Rather, it concentrates on what I take to be the two most important elements in the historical culture of American nationalism, and the complex relationship between them. Erik Erikson wrote that “every national character is constructed out of polarities,” and as I shall show, this is certainly true of the United States, which embodies among other things both the most modern and the most traditionalist society in the developed world.7
The clash between them is contributing to the growing political polarization of American society. The bitter deadlock in Congress is beginning to have a disastrous effect on the effectiveness of the U.S. government and the health of the U.S. economy. This clash in turn reflects greater differences in social and cultural attitudes than at any time since the Vietnam War. White evangelical Protestants vote Republican rather than Democrat by a factor of almost two to one, with corresponding effects on the parties’ stances on abortion and other moral issues. The gap is almost as great when it comes to nationalism, with 71 percent of Republicans in 2003 describing themselves as “very patriotic” compared to 48 percent of Democrats. This reflects in part racial political allegiances, with 65 percent of whites describing themselves as “very patriotic” in that year to only 38 percent of blacks. Gaps concerning attitudes toward crime and faith in American business are even greater.8
It is, however, not the opposition, but the combination of these different strands that determines the overall nature of the American national identity and largely shapes American attitudes and policies toward the outside world. This was demonstrated by the Bush administration, which, as chapter 5 will explore, drew its rhetoric from both main strands of American nationalism simultaneously.
The first of these strands in American nationalism is examined in chapter 2. It stems from what has been called the “American Creed,” and which I also describe as the “American thesis”: the set of great democratic, legal, and individualist beliefs and principles on which the American state and Constitution are founded. These principles form the foundation of American civic nationalism, and also help bind the United States into the wider community of democratic states. They are shared with other democratic societies, but in America they have a special role in holding a disparate nation together, and as the term “creed” implies, are held with an ideological and almost religious fervor.
While Americans’ belief in democracy is in itself admirable, the extent of blind faith in the existing form of the Constitution—as reflected in the Tea Parties most especially—blinds many Americans to the extent to which aspects of a constitution drawn up in the late eighteenth century are becoming a crippling problem for the America of the twenty-first century. Even relatively small amendments to the Constitution—such as have been passed several times in American history—now seem ruled out, not only by the deadlock in Washington, but by the fetishism of the Constitution in portions of the public. This problem will be explored in chapter 2.
The second element in American nationalism forms what I have called the American nationalist “antithesis,” and stems above all from ethnoreligious roots. Aspects of this tradition have also been called “Jacksonian nationalism,” after President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), and will be explored in chapters 3 and 4.9 Because the United States is so large and complex compared with other countries, and has changed so much over time, this nationalist tradition is correspondingly complex.
Rather than the simple, monolithic identity of a Polish or Thai ethnoreligious nationalism, this tradition in the United States forms a diffuse mass of identities and impulses, including nativist sentiments on the part of America’s original white population, the particular culture of the white South, and the beliefs and agendas of ethnic lobbies. America’s highly variegated national and nationalist identity is reflected, among other places, in the diffuse makeup of the Tea Parties.
Nonetheless, these nativist features can often be distinguished from the principles of the American Creed and of American civic nationalism; and although many of their features are specifically American—notably the role of fundamentalist Protestantism and their fanatical faith in the U.S. Constitution—they are also related to wider patterns of ethnoreligious nationalism in the world. The continuing strength of nativist sentiment in the United States was shown in the widespread belief—determinedly cultivated by portions of the Republican Party—that President Obama was not born an American citizen or in the United States. These strands in American nationalism are usually subordinate to American civic nationalism stemming from the creed, which dominates America’s official and public political culture. However, they have a natural tendency to rise to the surface in times of crisis and conflict. In the specific case of America’s attachment to Israel, ethnoreligious factors have become dominant, with extremely dangerous consequences for the war on terrorism.
The reason why “civic nationalism” rather than “patriotism” is the appropriate name for the dominant strand in American political culture was well summed up in 1983 by one of the fathers of the neoconservative school in the United States, Irving Kristol: “Patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness…The goals of American foreign policy must go well beyond a narrow, too literal definition of ‘national security.’ It is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny.”10
In drawing this distinction, Kristol echoed a classic distinction between patriotism and nationalism delineated by Kenneth Minogue, one of the great historians of nationalism. Minogue defined patriotism as essentially conservative, a desire to defend your country as it actually is, whereas nationalism is a devotion to an ideal, abstract, unrealized notion of your country, often coupled with a belief in some wider national mission to humanity. In other words, nationalism has always had a certain revolutionary edge to it. In American political culture at the start of the twenty-first century, there is certainly a very stro
ng element of patriotism, of attachment to American institutions and to America in its present form, but as Kristol’s words indicate, there is also a revolutionary element, a commitment to a messianic vision of the nation and its role in the world.11 This aspect of American civic nationalism will be examined in chapter 2.
As the American historian and social critic Richard Hofstadter (1917–1970) wrote, “the most prominent and pervasive failing [of American political culture] is a certain proneness to fits of moral crusading that would be fatal if they were not sooner or later tempered with a measure of apathy and common sense.”12 This pattern has indeed repeated itself in our time, with the aftermath of the Iraq War leading to a new sobriety in American policies and the American public mood. In the meantime, however, the Bush administration’s appeal to this crusading and messianic spirit played a major part in getting the United States into Iraq in the first place.
If Minogue’s and Kristol’s distinctions between patriotism and nationalism are valid, then it must be acknowledged that nationalism, rather than patriotism, is indeed the correct word with which to describe the characteristic national feeling of Americans. And this feature also links the American nationalism of today to the “unsatisfied,” late-coming nationalisms of Germany, Italy, and Russia, rather than the satisfied and status quo patriotism of the British.
But if one strand of American nationalism is radical because it looks forward to “the nation’s future, distinctive greatness,” another is radical because it continuously looks backwards, to a vanished and idealized national past. A growing tension in American culture is between, on the one hand, a civic nationalism that believes optimistically that America’s inevitable greatness is rooted in universal values, and on the other hand, a country that is in many ways in decline compared with other countries in the world and compared to America’s status in the past. Indeed, the change in America’s fortunes has been astonishingly swift, and deep anxiety and bewilderment at this among Americans have inevitably strengthened the desire to return to the past.
This “American antithesis” is a central feature of American radical conservatism—the world of the Republican Right, and especially the Christian Right and the Tea Parties, with their rhetoric of “taking back” America and restoring an older, purer American society. As explored in chapters 3 and 4, this long-standing tendency in American culture and politics reflects the continuing conservative religiosity of many Americans; it has also, however, always been an expression of social, economic, cultural, religious, ethnic, and racial anxieties. These have assumed a new virulence in the years following 2008, in the context of the economic recession, the rise of Chinese power, and the first black president of the United States.
In part, these anxieties stem from the progressive loss of control over society by the “original” white Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish populations, later joined by others. Connected to this are class anxieties—in the past, the hostility of the small towns and countryside toward the new immigrant-populated cities; today, the economic decline of the traditional white middle and working classes, which dates back to the 1970s but accelerated greatly after 2008.
As a result of economic, cultural, and demographic change in America, the supremely victorious nation of the modern age, large numbers of Americans feel defeated. The domestic anxieties this generates spill over into attitudes toward the outside world, with 64 percent of Americans in 2002 agreeing that “our way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence,” compared to 51 percent of British and 53 percent of French. These figures lie between those for Western Europe and those for developing world countries like India (76 percent)—which is piquant, because the “foreign influence” that Indian and other cultural nationalists in the developing world most fear is, of course, that of the United States.13
These fears help give many American nationalists their curiously embittered and defensive edge, so curiously at odds with America’s image and self-image as a land of success, openness, wealth, and generosity. Over the years, the hatred generated by this sense of defeat and alienation has been extended to both domestic and foreign enemies.
This too is a very old pattern in different nationalisms worldwide. Historically speaking, in Europe at least, radical conservatism and nationalism have tended to stem from classes and groups in actual or perceived decline as a result of socioeconomic change. One way of looking at American nationalism, and America’s troubled relationship with the contemporary world America dominates, is indeed to understand that many Americans are in revolt against the world that America itself has made, because—for reasons that they cannot understand and that in many ways the American Creed prevents them from understanding—they feel that this American-made world has now turned against them, their families, and America as a whole.
However, it should be noted that with the exception of the extreme fringe among the various “militia” groups, the neo-Nazis, and so on, these forces of the American antithesis are not in public revolt against the American Creed and American civic nationalism as such.14 Most radical nationalist and radical conservative movements elsewhere in the world have in the past opposed democracy and demanded authoritarian rule. In contrast, Americans from this tradition generally believe strongly in the American democratic and liberal creed. Indeed, among the Tea Parties it has become a reigning obsession. However, they also believe—consciously or unconsciously, openly or in private—that it is the product of a specific white American civilization, which is threatened by immigration, racial minorities, and foreign influence. And I am not saying that they are necessarily wrong; a discussion of this point lies outside the scope of the present book. I am only pointing out that people with this belief naturally feel embattled, embittered, and defensive as a result of many contemporary trends.15
American Protestant fundamentalist groups also do not reject the creed as such. In terms of their attitude toward culture and the intellect, however, their rejection of contemporary America is even deeper, for they reject key aspects of modernity itself. For them, modern American mass culture is a form of daily assault on their passionately held values, and their reactionary religious ideology in turn reflects the sense of social, cultural, and racial embattlement among their white middle class constituency. Even as America is marketing the “American dream” to the world, numerous Americans at home feel that they are living in an American nightmare.16
America is the home of by far the most deep, widespread, and conservative religious beliefs in the Western world, including a section possessed by wild millenarian hopes, fears, and hatreds—and these two phenomena are indeed intimately related. As a Pew Research Center Survey of 2002 demonstrated, at the start of the twenty-first century the United States as a whole in terms of religious belief is much closer to the developing world than to the industrialized countries (though, of course, a majority of these believers are not fundamentalist Protestants, but Catholics and “mainline,” more liberal Protestants). This continues a pattern evident since the early nineteenth century and remarked on by Tocqueville, when religious belief among the European populations had been shaken by several decades of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but American religious belief was fervent and nearly universal.17
As of 2002, with 59 percent of respondents declaring that “religion plays a very important role in their lives,” the United States lay between Mexico (57 percent) and Turkey (65 percent), but was very far from Canada (30 percent), Italy (27 percent), or Japan (12 percent). In terms of sheer percentage points, it was indeed closer on this scale to Pakistan (91 percent) than to France (12 percent).18 When a U.S. senator exclaimed (apocryphally) of the Europeans, “What common values? They don’t even go to church!,” he was expressing a truth, and this is as true of the U.S. political elites (though not of the cultural or economic ones) as of the population in general. Among the fundamentalist Protestant portions of the United States, there has been a strong historical connection to American nationalism, and within this
is an inclination to a “paranoid style,” originally directed against Catholics, Freemasons, and others, and perpetuated by the cold war and the Communist threat.19
In our own time, “the recent Evangelical engagement with public life reflects religious and cultural habits that Anglo-American Protestants, both liberal and Evangelical, learned when threatened by Americans of different religious and ethnic backgrounds.”20 While it is not true that most American populist movements in modern times have been dominated by evangelical elements, they have all drawn on them for much of their support, and that remains true of the Tea Parties in 2011. Some leaders of the Tea Parties, like Michelle Bachmann, are shaped above all by their religious faith. The great majority of Tea Party leaders have been influenced by this tradition to some extent, or feel obliged to pay public respect to it because of its presence among their followers.
The extreme tension between these fundamentalist religious values and the modern American mass culture that now surrounds them is an important cause of the mood of beleaguered hysteria on the American Right that so bewilders outside observers. Across large areas of America, these religious beliefs in turn form a central part of the identity of the original white American colonist population, above all in the Greater South, or what Lady Bird Johnson described simply as “us—the simple American stock.”21
The religious beliefs of large sections of this core population are under constant, daily threat from modern secular culture, above all via the mass media. And of equal importance is the decline in recent decades in the real incomes of large parts of the white American middle and working classes—a decline that has accelerated sharply with the great recession that began in 2008. This decline, and the wider economic changes that began with the oil shock of 1973, have had the side effect of helping force more and more women to go to work, thereby undermining traditional family structures even among those groups that are most devoted to them.
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