Introduction
The traditional, although not official, motto of the United States is E pluribus unum—From Many, One. Suggested by the French designer Pierre Eugène du Simitière, the phrase seems to be derived from the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. In his treatise On Duties, Cicero writes that "when men have similar pursuits and inclinations, it comes about that each one is as much delighted with the other as he is with himself: the result is what Pythagoras wanted in friendship, that several be united into one."
In Simitière's original proposal for the Great Seal of the United States, the motto refers clearly to the thirteen colonies, whose initials are included in the design. Since 1776, though, it has taken on a life of its own. We no longer think of the motto as describing the amalgamation of previously sovereign entities. Instead, we believe it refers to the creation of a single people from many origins.
It is tempting to imagine that Americans have always thought this way. Yet our history is characterized by bitter debate about the proper relation between diversity and unity. We do not only disagree about how much pluribus is compatible with republican government; we also disagree about what kind of unum we should become.
Covenant. Creed. Crucible. These are recurring symbols by which Americans have tried to make sense of our differences—and our similarities. The first presents Americans as an essentially Anglo-Protestant people. Inspired by the Hebrew Bible, it places our beginnings in a special relationship between the English settlers of the Atlantic Coast and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
If the covenant emphasizes religion, the creed focuses on political philosophy. Here, America is defined by fundamental principles. Above all, it proclaims the equal individual rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence. America is defined less by who lives here than by the correspondence between its institutions and these universal ideas.
The crucible perspective accepts more conventional standards of nationality but projects them into the future. Americans might not yet be a cohesive people like the English, Germans, or French. Through an ongoing process of mixing, however, we could one day achieve a comparable level of incorporation. American life, on this account, is a simmering melting pot in which ethnic and cultural particularities are boiled down into a consistent alloy.
These images of unity recur throughout the American political tradition. In Federalist No. 2, Publius—in this case, diplomat and jurist John Jay—asserts that "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs." According to Publius, it is not enough that "we, the people" are subject to the same government. We must be an integral community knit together by faith, descent, and tradition.
Frederick Douglass did not agree. Writing after the Civil War, Douglass promoted a creedal perspective. European nations, he argued, were characterized by the homogeneity Publius described. By contrast, America's "people defy all the ethnological and logical classifications." For Douglass, the variety of the American population was not a weakness to be lamented or an obstacle to be overcome. It was an asset that would secure American greatness in the future.If Publius suggested that plurality of factions and interests had to be constrained by unity of ethnicity and culture, Douglass contended that unity of principle could accommodate a wide range of backgrounds and identities. Ralph Waldo Emerson found the meaning of America somewhere in between these poles. Like Douglass, he celebrated the multiplicity of peoples that made their homes within the United States. More like Publius, though, he dreamed that these strands would eventually be woven into a seamless national fabric comparable to those of the Old World. "In this continent," Emerson wrote, "the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans and of the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages."
Although they have found advocates at all periods of American history, these perspectives also follow a certain chronological pattern. Covenantal ideas were central to the American Revolution and early republic. Particularly in New England, they supported an understanding of Americans as the new chosen people, modern counterparts to the biblical Israelites.
But this vision was too regionally and theologically limited to bind together a nation growing in population and geographic extent. The crucible emerged as a way of justifying and explaining mass immigration and territorial expansion. It broke down, though, as Americans came to believe that certain ethnic and cultural strands were too alien to blend into the national alloy. After the Civil War, many Americans abandoned dreams of amalgamation in favor of segregation and nativism.
In the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, themes previously associated with the cause of racial equality were revived. Once feared as a threat to the union, a creed of equal rights became something like our official philosophy. Scholars found precedents for this creed in the words of great statesmen and writers. As an institutionalized consensus, however, it was a product of three world wars—two hot, one cold.
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though, consensus has seemed dangerously absent. Our newspaper headlines, television chyrons, and social media feeds express deep anxiety that the fabric of our common life is coming apart. Did we ever share a stable vision of national character and purpose? Can we recover it? Those are the animating questions of this book.
Although it is largely an essay in cultural interpretation, this book is also an intervention in a very current debate. A growing number of writers and activists make the case for a renewal of national solidarity. Mostly on the political right but also on the center-left, these figures contend that we have lost sight of the whole of the American people due to excessive concern with the interests of its parts. Whether they blame the group politics of multiculturalism or neoliberal individualism, the new nationalists argue that we should to make America one again.
The impulses behind these arguments should not be dismissed as racism, xenophobia, or ignorance. Most scholars agree that democratic societies need some degree of agreement. In his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, political scientist Samuel Huntington worried that erosion of the Anglo-Protestant "core culture" might undermine constitutional government. Other analysts, such as Francis Fukuyama, reject Huntington's emphasis on a specific ethnoreligious configuration but posit that a shared ideology is necessary to the same purpose.
New nationalists have also developed powerful critiques of recent policies. Trade regimes that encourage the movement abroad of important industries, tax policies that reward financial speculation, and an arbitrary yet porous immigration system encourage the perception that an elite few benefit at the expense of many left behind. The success of anti-establishment politicians such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is a warning sign that such grievances have become critical. Nationalists might develop some of the solutions.
Yet I am skeptical that we can restore a coherent and enduring sense of shared identity and purpose. First, I do not think it is our "normal" condition. American life was no less polyglot in 1900 than it is today. At that time, Quebecois French was widely used in northern New England; a network of German-language schools, clubs, and newspapers flourished in the Midwest; and most cities contained Jewish ghettos, Chinatowns, or Little Italies, where Yiddish, Cantonese, or Neapolitan were heard more frequently than English.
The turn of the twentieth century was a historical highpoint of immigration. But our politics were no less contentious in 1815, when New England politicians met to demand constitutional revisions to limit the power of western and southern states. Nor were they more morally admirable in 1877, when the end of military reconstruction enabled the systematic exclusion of African Americans from civil, economic, and political life.
Many of these tensions were eroded, if not eliminated, around the middle of the twentieth century. We tend to forget, however, just how much coercion was involved. The melting pot or crucible has been imagined as an automatic process involving intermarriage among ethnic groups, civic education, and voluntary cultural exchange. In many cases, however, "Americanization" took the form of official suppression, from compulsory public education intended to undermine Catholic schools to laws prohibiting teaching or publishing in German. It is a small but not irrelevant irony that hot dogs, now considered the most American of foods, had to be renamed during the First World War to distance them from their origins as frankfurters or wieners.
It is theoretically possible to revive such policies—or adopt more rigorous ones common other places and eras. Military conscription, standardization of education, and religious (or secular) establishments, among other measures, have been successful in promoting national cohesion before and elsewhere. But the historical suspicion of centralized authority that is a longstanding feature of American politics and individualistic tendencies in American culture make it unlikely that they would be very popular here and now.
Nor is the implementation of strong nationalism likely to be found consistent with civil libertarian interpretations of the Constitution that have proliferated since the Second World War. Along with landmark decisions in cases like West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, which established that schoolchildren could refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, wartime propaganda effectively and perhaps irrevocably promulgated the idea that the American system of government is defined by the preservation of individual rights.
Even if coercive nationalism were politically and legally viable, moreover, mandatory solidarity does not always succeed. In many cases, it encourages resistance from those whose identities, beliefs, or institutions are threatened. The failure of European attempts to enforce religious conformity, which played an important role in encouraging the settlement of North America, are a vivid example of this dynamic. So are modern separatist movements in Scotland, Catalonia, and Flanders, among other examples.
The disproportion between historical means and desired ends explains the distinctly rhetorical quality of the present nationalist revival. For the moment, one example will have to suffice. Soon after President Trump's inauguration, conservative journalists Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry published an essay titled "For Love of Country." It contains the following passage:
The outlines of a benign nationalism are not hard to discern. It includes loyalty to one's country: a sense of belonging, allegiance, and gratitude to it. And this sense attaches to the country's people and culture, not just to its political institutions and laws. Such nationalism includes solidarity with one's countrymen, whose welfare comes before, albeit not to the complete exclusion of, that of foreigners. When this nationalism finds political expression, it supports a federal government that is jealous of its sovereignty, forthright and unapologetic about advancing its people's interests, and mindful of the need for national cohesion.
At a sufficient degree of abstraction, it is hard to disagree with this account. There is a tradition of philosophical cosmopolitanism that stretches back to ancient Greece. But many scholars and practitioners of politics agree that nations are both a necessary vehicle for participatory government and a vital source of cultural inspiration. The world without countries that John Lennon famously imagined would not only be chaotic but also very boring.
The problem lies less in the concept of nationalism than in its content. Even if we agree that allegiance and solidarity are good, we often disagree about what they mean or what measures are appropriate to secure them. In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell identified the trouble with appealing to concepts rather than specific proposals, activities, or institutions: "The concrete melts into the abstract . . . prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
The same tendency is present in the quoted passage from Ponnuru and Lowry. Rather than inviting definite responses, terms like cohesion evoke vaguely positive emotional associations. It is difficult to object to them because it is not clear what they mean.
One purpose of this book is to present some historically different ways such abstractions have been translated into details—and the tensions among them. A broader suggestion is that meaningful discussion is possible only at this level of specificity. But such discussions defy our hopes for consensus and stability. Like a world without countries, a benign, unchallenging nationalism that does not involve genuine moral and political dilemmas is an object of wishful thinking.
The revival of interest in nationalism is a response to the perception of crisis that has arisen over the last decade. Failed wars, legislative gridlock, and the rise in so-called deaths of despair encourage the belief that things simply cannot continue as they have done. As I write this, an almost biblical plague and iconoclastic movement against racism have gripped the nation. What are we to do in response to these and other challenges?
This is not a book of policy analysis—a genre to which academic humanists are ill-suited to contribute. In the final chapter, however, I suggest a general strategy for moving forward. Rather than trying to restore an elusive consensus, I propose that we strengthen institutions of contestation. Our problem, in other words, is not that we have forgotten how much Americans have in common, but that we have undermined or abandoned structures and organizations that express and embody disagreement. Political parties, labor unions, and religious communities must be allowed to pursue their clashing views of public policy, economic issues, and the meaning of life. It is through their conflict that we will discover the terms on which we can live together.
An argument for disharmony and conflict may seem counterintuitive. If our problems include polarization, exploitation, and intolerance, shouldn't we seek more unum, less pluribus?
Not if uniformity in political agendas, economic assumptions, and moral perspectives is a cause of those problems rather than their solution. To the extent that nationalism involves centralization and homogenization, it can exacerbate the problems it purports to solve. The erosion of institutions of disagreement doesn't make those disagreements go away. Rather, it removes the opportunity to channel those disagreements into compromises, while giving the losers a refuge from outcomes they cannot fully endorse. In this sense, organizational and communal autonomy are safety valves that help relieve the pressure of dispute on deeply controversial issues.
Moreover, smaller groups based on shared commitments are better suited to providing direction and order to the lives of specific persons. The scale of some modern states—certainly the United States—is simply too vast to permit the formulation and pursuit coherent purposes. As Catholic theologian Michael Novak once observed, that venerable phrase "the common good" conceals such a baffling variety of conflicting goals that it usually defies attempts at direct pursuit. It is better to approach national politics as a tentative exercise in negotiation and compromise rather than as the formation of a community unified by faith, descent, or ideology.
This pluralist perspective will not satisfy everyone. In particular, it may disappoint readers who believe that we possess a placid reservoir of national identity and purpose, waiting to be defended from its cultured despisers. The purpose of the historical analysis is to show that this is not the case. The covenant, crucible, and creed are all part of America, but none exhausts its past or prospects. On that, perhaps, we can learn to agree.
Like every work, this book is shaped by the personal commitments of its author. Because these commitments influence my choice of material and approach to analyzing it, two central ones should be explained.
First, I write as a scholar. This does not mean I claim omniscience or perfect neutrality, which belong to no human being. It means only that I have pursued and expressed the truth as best as I have been able to understand it. That includes cases in which my conclusions seem uncomfortable or inconvenient, even for my own presuppositions.
This conception of scholarship is the basis of my suspicion of myth. For millennia, theorists have argued that the survival of political communities depends on the promulgation of certain symbols, stories, or narratives that are useful, even though—or because—they are false. The most famous example is the so-called noble lie in Plato's Republic.
Under the influence of both Biblical theology and Enlightenment rationalism, Americans have often rejected this instrumental approach to epistemology. Especially in the last half century, however, the erosion of those influences has encouraged a reevaluation of myth. This reevaluation is not limited to philosophical pragmatists or so-called postmodernists. A number of mainstream academics, dismayed by the erosion of the midcentury consensus, have argued that historians and other disciplinary experts should assume responsibility for shoring up the narratives of belonging. I discuss this trend in Chapter 4.
It is certainly true that societies generate shared myths, some of which I discuss in this book. It may also be true that they require them, although that is a hard proposition to test empirically. My assumption, however, is that is not the task—or usually within the ability—of scholars to provide or sustain such narratives of belonging. In addition to considerations of intellectual probity, we are simply not very good at it. The language of myth comes naturally to poets, but college professors are rarely fluent. As a result, our carefully hedged professions of faith in ostensibly salutary opinions are not very convincing. By contrast, works of art like Hamilton, which could never survive peer review, can delight and inspire large audience.
At the same time, I write as a patriot. In other words, I believe that this country is, if imperfect, worthy of loyalty, celebration, and, when necessary, defense. I also believe that citizens of the United States have obligations to each other that we do not share with members of other political communities.
I see no contradiction between these beliefs and the criticisms of nationalism that I develop in this book. It is worth noting that the term patriotism predates nationalism in the American lexicon. In fact, the latter was not popularized until after the Civil War enforced the priority of national unity over the plurality of states.
The distinction between patriotism and nationalism is often polemical. Patriotism is thought to stand for a virtuous disposition, while nationalism designates nasty chauvinism and bigotry. This contrast often has a self-congratulatory aspect. Americans and our allies and admirers are patriots, while our rivals and critics are nationalists.
The frustrating reality is that our history contains examples of both admirable and deplorable attachment, whether described as patriotism, nationalism, or some other name. If there is a difference, it lies in whether one treats "we, the people" as generated and sustained by our interactions under specific institutions in a particular place, or bases the legitimacy of our institutions on an independent and previously existing communities. It is a genuine insight of nationalist theorists that different peoples have different origins, histories, and needs. I leave to others, therefore, the question of whether there are nations for which the latter model is more accurate. At least for us, though, the former is closer to the truth.
Notes
Introduction
