The Case for a Pluralistic Notion of Nationhood
Historians often talk about the United States as the first new nation in the world to have emerged out of European colonialism. Many go on to talk about the US as new in comparison to European nations like France, Great Britain or Russia, which had a sense of peoplehood, or national identity long before the 18th century.
But in terms of modern nationhood the US is one of the oldest nations in the world. By modern I mean those nations that transformed their governments according to the values of the Enlightenment.[1] The idea that the people are sovereign was the application of Enlightenment rationality to statecraft. That meant creating states committed to popular sovereignty, the notion that the people control their governors, rather than being ruled by them. That was the way that the seminal Enlightenment principle of progress and the idea that the future could be better worked in the realm of government.
The US has been grappling with the issue of popular governance and what it means to be an American for nearly 250 years; longer than any European country except Great Britain.[2] Once the genie of popular sovereignty was let out of the bottle the issue of the people really ruling could not be kept out of the conversation. The Shay’s and Whiskey Rebellions of the 1780s and 90s were early challenges by common folk who felt they weren’t being heard by elites after the Revolutionary War. That was at a time when few White men even had the right to vote. Elites were able to stave off urges toward broader channels of formal participation by including a Bill of Rights in the constitution in 1791. Like the question of slavery and systemic racism that I write so much about, the issue of expansion of suffrage was a container that was kicked down the road at the constitutional convention.
Since the revolutionary era, a succession of identity politics movements have waged struggles to to incorporate their people into equality before the law in the heteropatriarchal capitalist system.[3] One of the bloodiest civil wars in world history was fought in the US over the issue of the enslavement of African Americans. Women, some of whom cut their teeth fighting to abolish slavery, waged an eight-decade struggle to gain the right vote. I confess that I don’t know how many decades workers organized before they won passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. But I do know that lynchings of European immigrant worker activists, less numerous than those of Blacks or Mexicans, also occurred in the late 19th century.[4]
Then there were all the identity politics movements of the 1960s, each arrayed against a different pillar of heteropatriarchy: the Civil Rights Movement against racism, the women’s movement against sexism, and the LGBTQ movement against heteronormativity.
Traditional American nationalism is synonymous with heteropatriarchy. Those founding forces have faced pressure to assimilate and incorporate succeeding generations of identity movements into the mainstream of society for nearly 250 years, while holding steadfastly to their core values. Demographic data this century has been suggesting that younger people are becoming less racist and homophobic, while the record on sexism at least to me, is more mixed. But all of those forces and growing concern around climate change have fueled very powerful “anti-systemic movements.”[5]
Traditional conservatism was exhausted with fighting off the persistent challenges from the left on policies where public opinion polling consistently shows that majorities favor leftist positions on things like gun control, abortion, the green economy, etc. In a hint that traditional conservatives will hedge on democracy, they were already making gerrymandering and voting restriction the law in most Red states. But the relatively equal partisan divide in terms of actual political outcomes remained.
Then along came the Tea Party reaction to the Great Recession and the crass extremist rhetoric of Donald Trump and the hopes for entrenching conservative policies for the foreseeable future were within reach.
As we enter a second go ‘round with Trump progressives are now depressed, demoralized and also exhausted as we wonder if fascism will be the fate facing the country.
Both sides in this bi-national country have been locked into a struggle to control the national institutions and policies according to their values. The great fear of each side is that the other may be able to put laws and policies in place that denied them the ability to live “with liberty and justice for all” according to the way that they interpret those values.
The US is a culturally pluralistic nation; another way of saying that it’s two nations, not one. Western Enlightenment models for modern nationalism all in one way or another posit that nation-building is an assimilationist project aiming to make disparate populations homogeneous, always to the advantage of the dominant group pursuing the nationalist project. Those homogenizing projects suppressed much diversity, but almost never completely erased it.[6]
After the West colonized most of the world, the colonies began to clamor for national self-determination following World War One. But the colonies were metropolitan constructs that were in most cases, ethno-linguistically pluralistic. Indian political philosopher Partha Chatterjee writes about how the newly independent countries also pursued homogenizing nation-building projects. He laments that global southern countries failed to exercise indigenous political imagination, acknowledge their diversity, and script a national narrative embracing their cultural pluralism.
In the 1990s Chatterjee foresaw the danger of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-centric Indian nationalism which claims that the 170 million Muslims in the country don’t belong. Muslims have been in India for over 500 years. They governed the country for more than 300 years. They’re not going away. A narrative that valorizes their Indianness and maps out how all the inhabitants of the sub-continent can live side by side in harmony begs to be crafted.[7]
Most countries in the world today of any size are culturally pluralistic, and possibly bi-national.[8] The US is no exception. We are presently locked into an unending struggle in which each of the two nations seeks to control national political institutions and steer the country according to its values. We gotta get off that treadmill! Because neither nation is going away. The US also needs to craft an all-inclusive national narrative.
Traditionalists, for the time being, control national political institutions. But progressives have enormous reservoirs of political strength in several of the most economically vibrant states. And traditionalist fear the power of progressives in the arts and sporting spheres nationally. Blue state governors and blue cities are already signaling that they will not assist the Trump administration in its efforts to deport undocumented immigrants.
Thus, we are again reminded that we must return to the Gramscian “war of position,” the battle in the trenches of political and other institutions in the struggle, still not lost, for “intellectual and cultural leadership in civil society.”
There is more than one way to interpret the meanings of values like liberty, equality and justice for all, especially in a nation built on a foundation of group inequality along racial and sexual lines. Progressives since the time of FDR have established our interpretation --- We are a multiracial nation, We demand equality for women and those who are not heteronormative. And “we are not going back” in a simple-minded way to the values of the wealthy capitalist who wrote the constitution[9]
We must defend our political and cultural positionality in the slim hope that we can force traditionalists to the table to attain a pragmatic middle-ground. In future posts I’ll endeavor to map some of the ways that progressives are defending the right to live according to our values in the meantime.
[1] The Enlightenment in European political history is the period between the “Glorious” English Revolution in 1688 and the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789.
[2] Most European nations only embarked on the path of popular sovereignty after the wave of revolutions across the continent in 1848.
[3] Heteropatriarchy is a hierarchical society or culture dominated by heterosexual males whose characteristic bias is unfavorable to gay people and females in general,” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/heteropatriarchy
Heteronormativity is “the attitude that heterosexuality is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heteronormative
[4] John Higham, from Strangers in the Land, Ronald Takaki From Different Shores. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987,, 78-82
[5] Immanuel Wallerstein characterizes the “new social movements’” of the 1960s as also “anti-systemic movements” in “Anti-Systemic Movements: History and Dilemmas,” from Samir Amin et. al., Transforming the Revolutionary, Monthly Review Press, 1990, 13-53.
[6] E.g., persistent Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism within Great Britian, the north-south divide in Italy or Catalan and Basque speaking populations in the south of France.
[7] Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 100-115
[8] The prime difference between sub-national populations like ethnic groups and nations is that nations in addition to being culturally different make political claims vis-Ã -vis the state. These can include revenue outputs toward cultural sustenance, cultural quota systems legally allocating political office and bureaucratic positions by cultural group (consociationalism), or outright secession.
[9] When I say simple-minded, I mean that the founders were not people who believed in racial or sexual equality, nor equity for workers on gender non-conforming people. That we cannot go back too.
