Are We a Nation? An Argument for "Trans-America"
Lind, Michael
"Are we a nation?" The question was raised, in an address of that title, by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts after the Civil War. At the end of the twentieth century, the question...
...That nation is not homogeneous...
...agree about how many American cultures there are, multiculturalists and cultural pluralists agree that the United States is not a nation-state like France or Poland or China or even Brazil, but a multinational federation, like Canada and Switzerland and the former Soviet Union andYugoslavia...
...Though they may disCopyright © 1995 by Michael Lind...
...While the multiculturalists and their cousins the cultural pluralists are wrong to think of the United States as a federation of racial cultures, the democratic universalists are mistaken in thinking that American national identity can be founded on an idea...
...The goal of liberal nationalism, as a political movement, must be to dismantle Multicultural America and replace it with a Fourth Republic of the United States—let us call it Trans-America...
...The confusion arises from the equation—as spurious in the case of Latin American mestizos as in the case of black Americans—of nonwestern with nonwhite...
...American exceptionalism, the belief inAmerican uniqueness that is so important to democratic universalism, is rejected by liberal nationalists, whose American patriotism does not depend on overblown claims about American uniqueness or superiority...
...From the forthcoming book The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, by Michael Lind, to be published this month by The Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster Inc...
...cultural nations, though they are not eternal, last a very long time...
...Liberal nationalism might be most simply defined as yesterday's "melting pot" nationalism updated to favor the cultural fusion and genetic amalgamation not just of white immigrant groups but of Americans of all races...
...should continue to be a liberal and democratic nationstate...
...Is the United States, as the multiculturalists claim, a federation of races, or is it—as the democratic universalists argue—a postnational idea-state...
...The national culture is not the high culture of the art galleries and civics classes, but rather the vernacular culture that has evolved in the United States in the past several centuries, and continues to evolve, from the unsystematic fusion of various regional and racial customs and traditions...
...The liberal nationalist rejects racial or religious tests for membership in the American nation...
...The major opposition to multiculturalism today comes from democratic universalists, who are mostly, though not exclusively, on the political right...
...It may very well be, indeed, that popular nationalism, as a sentimental attachment to people and customs and country, is much stronger in the United States than in Western Europe, where "post-patriotic" attitudes, at least among the more educated, are much more prevalent...
...there are secular racists, and there are conservative nativists who envision a multiracial but pan-Christian American national community...
...Adjectives like "aggressive" and "sinister" and "dark" are often affixed to nationalism in order to make the term seem even more frightening...
...The New Deal liberals who led the first, color-blind stage of the Civil Rights Revolution, which dismantled white supremacy, lost control during the second phase, which saw the triumph of group consciousness and racial preference programs...
...Insofar as American nationality is a matter of vernacular culture, rather than race or beliefs, a radical black lesbian atheist who grows up in Chicago is more "American" than a white English conservative who immigrates in adulthood and who, though he is an expert on the Founding Fathers, is unfamiliar with the American idiom.* For the liberal nationalist, then, the American nation is defined by language and culture, not by race or religion...
...In civil rights law, the natural corollary to the liberal nationalist conception of the American nation as a cultural and (in time) genetic melting pot is the rejection of any distinctions based on biological race...
...The antinationalists of the right tend to be nostalgic for multinational empires like the Hapsburg and British, and to associate nationalism with the overthrow of European rule over nonwhite nations, something of which a certain kind of conservative disapproves...
...Euro-America (1875-1957) and Multicultural America (1972-present...
...Both agree that the United States has never been a conventional nation-state, and differ only as to what kind of nonnational state it is or should be...
...War and Reconstruction created a Second Republic, Euro-America, which peaked in the middle of the twentieth century...
...The civic religion, to the extent that there is one, is a secular philosophy, an ideal of authenticity, that stresses conformity to particular racial or sexual or religious subcultures...
...MostAmericans, of all races, are born and acculturated into the American nation...
...Nor is multiculturalism, in the broadest sense, to be blamed entirely on the left...
...produces growing numbers of Americans with ancestors in several of today's officially defined racial groups...
...A truly representative political system, purged of both racial gerrymandering and of campaign finance practices that favor corporations and the rich...
...and the Civil Rights Revolution from the 1950s to the 1970s...
...Since World War II, nationalism has been consid*The language of international law confuses matters, by referring to subjects or citizens of a state as its nationals whether the state corresponds to an actual nation or not...
...nor is that its destiny...
...During the Civil Rights era, the United States was convulsed by the most extensive domestic political violence since the end of Reconstruction...
...The Third Republic is the one in which we live...
...A people does not have to be as homogeneous as, say, the Japanese in order to constitute a nation...
...Printed by permission...
...It is realist, insofar as it sees American society as the result of power struggles and inherited cultural legacies, not just abstract philosophical debates...
...The American people, then, constitute a genuine nation, with its own nation-state, the U.S.A., and with its own genuine, if largely inarticulate, nationalism...
...By contrast, the United States, since 1789, has had only one federal constitution...
...Denying or ignoring the black and Latin American elements of American vernacular culture, multiculturalists tend to misdescribe it as "white" culture...
...In the national formula of the First Republic of the United States, Anglo-America, the national community was identified with the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Germanic element of the population...
...a new system of middle-class-friendly capitalism, in which today's growing economic inequality has been checked and reversed by selective government intervention in the marketplace...
...What if two countries are founded on the same idea—say, individual rights, or the rule of law...
...Even though it rejects the venerable traditions of white supremacy and Protestant/Christian hegemony, the liberal nationalist philosophy for which I argue has deep roots in theAmerican heritage—in the strong-state nationalism of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt...
...Not only does the transracial American majority constitute a single nation, but that majority is deeply nationalist in its sentiments...
...The world, we are told again and again, is threatened by a resurgence of nationalism (as though there had ever been an era of selfless internationalism...
...If one rejects this assumption, if one assumes that Americans of different races can, and in fact do, share, not only a common civilization but a common nationality, then the multicultural enterprise simply collapses...
...SUMMER • 1995 • 357 Are We a Nation...
...mans, Japanese....Americans are held together only by ideas...
...The United States, they say, is not a nation-state...
...Although nationalism around the world has often been liberal and democratic rather than authoritarian or totalitarian, American politicians, intellectuals, and journalists continue to indulge in the old-fashioned practice of treating nationalism as a malum in se...
...Even if they could, the United States, and all of the English-speaking countries, SUMMER • 1995 • 355 Are We a Nation...
...Multiculturalism is not the wave of the future, but an aftershock of the black-power radicalism of the sixties...
...One can despise and reject Christianity and Judaism and be not merely a fine citizen but a member in good standing of the American cultural nation...
...A genuine nation is not a mere citizenry, a mere collection of individuals who share nothing other than common rulers and common laws...
...Oldfashioned Anglo-American or even Euro-American nativism will have diminishing appeal in a country in which a growing percentage of the population is nonwhite...
...The critics of nationalism in the abstract seldom trouble themselves to ask whether it makes any sense to view things as different or incompatible as the eighteenth-century philosopher J. G. Herder's tolerant aesthetic pluralism and Hitler's murderous racist imperialism as aspects of the same phenomenon—in this case, "German nationalism...
...American intellectuals have also been deeply influenced by political philosophies hostile to nationalism...
...The racial and religious definitions of Americanness are not always joined...
...There is no American people, merely an American Idea...
...Its patron saints are not Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon Johnson, but Stokely Carmichael and Richard Nixon...
...A revolution that began as an attempt to purge law and politics of racial classifications and to enlarge the middle class to include the disadvantaged ended, ironically, with a renaissance of race-conscious government and the political triumph of economic conservatism...
...White supremacists and black nationalists to the contrary, black Americans were members of the American cultural nation for generations before they were granted U.S...
...Governments should serve nations, not nations governments...
...Contemporary multiculturalists usually identify the nations or cultures of the United States with five races defined by descent: white, black or African-American, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/ Inuit...
...If subjective beliefs defined nationality, then Swedes, say, might decide they were all really Portuguese, and the actual Portuguese would have no grounds for objecting...
...To the question, Are we a nation...
...A nonwhite American is as genuine anAmerican as a white American (indeed, 358 • DISSENT Are We a Nation...
...States and constitutions come and go...
...Changes in the rules governing race and citizenship are not the only changes defining eras in American history...
...ens when multiculturalists count among the supposed victims and enemies of "Western civilization" immigrants from Spanish-speaking, Catholic LatinAmerica, whose traditions exhibit greater continuity with ancient Rome and Latin Christendom than does the culture of Protestant, English-speaking North Americans...
...Liberal nationalism is not the only way beyond the present stalemate of a discredited multicultural liberalism and plutocratic conservatism...
...The United Nations really should be called the United Regimes or the United States (the United States, conversely, might more accurately be called the United Nation of America...
...Americanness, in this view, is less akin to membership in a national community than to belief in a secular political faith—the religion of democracy...
...By their own theory, they cannot...
...and a color-blind society, in which cultural fusion is accompanied, in time, by racial amalgamation— these are the goals of American liberal nationalism at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first...
...The real threat is not the Balkanization but the Brazilianization of America, not fragmentation along racial lines but fissioning along class lines...
...It is also possible to imagine an American racial or religious nativism that is "left-wing" with respect to economics, like the populism of William Jennings Bryan...
...Italians are members of a single nation, in spite of their enormous regional variety, and the racial diversity of Brazil and Mexico does not mean that those countries lack distinctive national heritages and identities...
...The democratic universalist's characterization of the United States as a nonnational idea-state usually comes as part of a package with American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States is not only different in kind from other countries but superior in its morality and institutions...
...In this debate among nationalists, the two sides are nativists and liberal nationalists...
...No, say the multiculturalists, who are found predominantly though not exclusively on the left...
...Indeed, the transracial American nation is considerably older than the United States itself...
...To be a "genuine American," according to the popular consensus in the Second Republic, was to be of European descent and to be Christian (Protestant or Catholic) in religion (the Eisenhower-era phrase "Judeo-Christian" was, in practice, a polite euphemism for pan-Christian...
...These, then, are the two schools of thought that have almost monopolized recent discussion of American identity...
...If Multicultural America endures for another generation or two, the future for the United States is a bleak one of sinking incomes for the transracial American majority and growing resentment against the affluent and politically dominant white oligarchy...
...Far from being a challenge to the post-sixties American power structure, or an inevitable response to changing demography, the ideology of multiculturalism is, in practice, a rationalization for the racially based tokenism that has ramified throughout American society since the 1960s...
...The exceptionalist interpretation of American history holds that American politics from 1776 to the present has consisted of the gradual, painful, but progressive working out of the ideas of the Founding Fathers...
...Liberal nationalism provides not merely a different vision of the American people, but a different understanding of the American past...
...360 • DISSENT Are We a Nation...
...It is another controversy, a less familiar dispute, over how the "nation" in the American "nation-state" is to be defined...
...The very notion of a country based on an idea is absurd...
...for several generations before 1776, a distinct, unique, English*Liberal nationalism and nativism tend to be found on the "liberal" and "conservative" sides of the contemporary political spectrum...
...If a common government alone were sufficient, the Soviet and Romanov and Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires would have been nations themselves, rather than "prison-houses of the nations" (as Czarist Russia was described).' A real nation is a concrete historical community, defined primarily by a common language, common folkways, and a common vernacular culture./ Such an extrapolitical American nation exists today, and has existed in one form or another for hundreds of years...
...it is divided into subcultures, some of which, like the historic black American subculture, more or less correspond to race ("Hispanic" and "Asian and Pacific Islander," though, are bureaucratic categories that do not correspond to genuine ethnic subcultures...
...Unlike the First and Second American Republics, which were clearly nation-states, the Third Republic has the outward trappings of a multinational state...
...The United States, according to universalists, is not a nation-state at all, but an idea-state, a nationless state based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract...
...From the beginning, conservatives have been as instrumental as liberals in promoting racial preference politics, for tactical reasons...
...however, they do not counter it with an inclusive American nationalism of their own...
...The formal constitutional and political continuity that we Americans cherish disguises the fact that there have been three "republics" of the United States since the War of Independence: Anglo-America (1789-1861...
...The really interesting argument, it turns out, is not the stale debate between multiculturalists and democratic universalists about what kind of nonnational state the United States is: multi- or post...
...nationalism is loyalty to the interests of the cultural nation...
...The Nixon administration pioneered the imposition of racial quotas in the work force, in order to pit unionized white workers against black workers...
...The multiculturalists and the democratic universalists are both wrong...
...While the influence of multicultural ideology on campus may appear to give credence to conservative charges that the left is in control, it can be argued that racial preference programs in politics and the workplace actually help the right...
...American revolutions are also disruptive...
...Such mixing, rather, merely reinforces a common cultural nationality that already exists...
...it has more to do with family, neighborhood, customs, and historical memories than with constitutions or political philosophies...
...The fact that nowadays conservatives tend to espouse democratic universalism is surprising, inasmuch as this doctrine confuses the American nation with its government— a point lost on everyone on the right except for a few "paleoconservatives...
...however, the potential attractiveness of a nonracist, pan-Christian religious nativism to Americans of all races should not be underestimated...
...By the usual criteria of nationality, most of the Americans who are labeled white, black, Hispanic, and Asian—as well as American Indians and Inuit who have assimilated to the mainstream culture—are members of a single national community, the American nation...
...The national language is American English, in its various regional and subcultural dialects...
...American revolutions are violent...
...Rather, it is a nation of nations, a federation of nationalities or cultures sharing little or nothing but a common government: a miniature UN...
...The nationalist is willing to sacrifice patriotic duty to national loyalty, if necessary—as in 1776, when the American Patriots decided that the needs of the American nation had to prevail over their patriotic allegiance to the British empire...
...the Civil War and Reconstruction...
...Does that mean they are the same country...
...Another journalist, Cokie Roberts, has written, "We have nothing binding us together as a nation—no common ethnicity, history, religion, or even language—except the Constitution and the institutions it created...
...The American nation is different in detail from the Chinese and Russian and Mexican and French nations...
...It is possible, however, to be a liberal nationalist with many conservative political views ("liberal" in liberal nationalism refers to the liberal-democratic constitution of the state, not to the particular policies...
...black Americans can make a better claim for that "Americanness" than most of the descendants of European immigrants...
...The United States has been, is, and * It can be argued, to be sure, that democratic universalism on the right is a rather thinly camouflaged popular nationalism, with "democracy" and "Western civilization" really understood, by advocates and audience alike, to refer to what used to be called the American way of life, not to Norwegian parliamentary procedure or Italian literature...
...The British writer Paul Johnson even claims the future of humanity depends on the geopolitical power of the United States, "a great and mighty nation which is something more than a nation, which is an international community in itself, a prototype global community, but which at the same time is a unity, driven by agreed assumptions, accepting a common morality and moral aims, and able therefore to marshal and deploy its forces with stunning effect...
...The political creed of post-sixties America has been centralized multicultural democracy—the replacement of territorial federalism by a kind of Washingtoncentered racial federalism (exemplified by federally coerced racial gerrymandering of electoral districts...
...On the left, antinationalism has been fed by Marxism, which viewed nationalism as an ephemeral phase of political development destined to be superseded in the era of cosmopolitan socialism (ironically, Marxism has proven to be an ephemeral phase of nationalism in Russia and China...
...The antebellum elimination of most restrictions on white male suffrage and the post-Civil War nationalization of basic civil rights turned theAngloAmerican political creed of federal republicanism into a creed of federal democracy...
...with equal cynicism, the Reagan and Bush administrations promoted ghettoization of black and Hispanic voters in racially gerrymandered congressional districts, SUMMER • 1995 • 361 Are We a Nation...
...It is the only path, however, that can lead to an America in which you and your descendants would want to live...
...it is the Third Republic that emerged later, from the intersection of black-power radicalism and white-backlash conservatism...
...The confusion only deep* Whether the diverse societies of the ancient Mediterranean, Latin Christendom, and modern Western Europe and its lands of settlement and colonies really can be spoken of as a single civilization or culture is open to question...
...How the cultures that compose the multinational American citizenry are to be defined is the subject of dispute among those who think of America in this way...
...At the end of the twentieth century, the question of whether America is a nation has arisen again...
...At any given time, there have been dissident views...
...Compounding the confusion, theorists of multiculturalism, like many conservatives, often identify this white middle-American culture—rather implausibly, it must be said—with "Western civilization...
...and, most important of all, in the tradition of colorblind racial integrationism descending from abolitionists like Frederick Douglass to civil rights reformers like Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Nativists tend to impose racial and/or religious tests on membership in the national community...
...In the words of the late Theodore H. White, "Americans are not people like the French, Gerwould be best understood as atypical offshoots of a continental civilization in which the cultural leaders for the longest periods were Italy and France, and which is based on a shared legacy of Roman law and Catholicism...
...According to the quasi-official ideology of the Third Republic, there is no coherent American national community, but rather five national communities, defined by race—white, black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Native American...
...most immigrants and their descendants will be assimilated into it...
...At best, a political or religious dogma is merely one—and not the most important— element of the culture that distinguishes one nationality from another...
...the American nationalist answers with a resounding and unequivocal Yes...
...In contrast, a small but eloquent band of oldfashioned cultural pluralists (in the tradition of the early-twentieth-century American thinkers Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne) tends to identify the nations of America with ethnic groups, particularly white ethnic groups: English, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and so on...
...q 362 • DISSENT...
...The Balkanization of America, in the form of civil war along racial lines, is unlikely...
...Unlike Sumner, the great champion of Union and racial integration, proponents of the leading schools of thought about American national identity today— multiculturalism and democratic universalism— tend to answer the question in the negative...
...Though they may be trained to repeat these formulas, most Americans do not really believe them...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called for Americans to reject multiculturalism and "reassert American exceptionalism...
...history—the War of Independence and its violent aftermath (including the suppression of Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion...
...The liberal nationalist argument, it must be stressed, is not that a transracial American nationality is something that will emerge in the future, from the mingling of today's conventionally defined American racial and ethnic groups...
...The communist states all professed to be founded on the ideas of Marx and Lenin—and yet Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese communists remained not only distinct from each other but often mutually hostile...
...The multiculturalists are mistaken in equating the conventionally defined American races with cultures, and identifying those cultures, in turn, with nationalities...
...The latter option— a pan-Christian but not white-supremacist American nativism—is the more or less overt goal of right-wing Christian political activists like Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition...
...A straightforward American nationalism, in one form or another, is the alternative to the fissioning that the multiculturalists celebrate as pluralism and the democratic universalists condemn as Balkanization...
...SUMMER • 1995 • 359 Are We a Nation...
...A multiculturalism of the right is conceivable, as a response by conservatives who wish to preserve cultural or racial "purity" through a policy of voluntary ethnic or racial segregation...
...Race is an arbitrary category that is bound to grow more arbitrary, as intermarriage *The linguistic and cultural definition of nationality, it should be noted, is an objective anthropological test that does not depend on subjective perceptions...
...The American cultural nation, properly defined, has included Americans of different races for centuries...
...something like this is promoted by the French right of Jean Marie Le Pen, and there are American parallels in some of the proposals of the Ku Klux Klan...
...most are nationalists, by reflex if not reflection...
...Of the two rival versions of American nationalism, nativism has the greatest antiquity, for the simple reason that most Americans, until well into the twentieth century, thought of the American people as a white Christian nation (something that is hardly surprising, insofar as mostAmericans for generations to come will be conventionally white and at least nominally Christian...
...Anation may be dedicated to a proposition, but it cannot be a proposition—this is the central insight ofAmerican nationalism, the doctrine that is the major alternative to multiculturalism and democratic universalism...
...in the New Deal liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson that created and sustains a middle class that would be destroyed by unchecked capitalism...
...Exceptionalism, in other words, is both idealist and gradualist...
...It is not, however, different in kind...
...and the political creed, federal republicanism...
...since then its institutions and even its rhetoric ("multiculturalism," "affirmative action," "diversity") have been relatively stable...
...It is time for the American center-left to reclaim the color-blind idealism that should never have been ceded to the reactionary right...
...It is catastrophist, insofar as it views American history not as the smooth and logical unfolding of an argument about liberty or democracy, but as a sequence of racial, cultural, and political regimes, each assembled by the victors in a cataclysmic and violent struggle...
...There was considerable doubt as to whether Irish-American Catholics—to say nothing of Jews or black Americans— could ever be "real Americans...
...The answer is: neither...
...American vernacular culture is so powerful in its appeal that it will break down even the strongest immigrant cultures, and interracial marriage is already undermining racial categories...
...Though the word "revolution" is easily tossed about today, in fact there have been only three genuine revolutions in U.S...
...The democratic universalists answer No as well...
...The American nation is older than its government, and will almost certainly outlive the United States, which like all regimes will prove mortal...
...The liberal nationalist conception of the American past, in contrast, is realist and catastrophist...
...thereby undermining Democratic congressmen and helping the Republican party to capture the House of Representatives in 1994...
...To date, however, most multiculturalists and cultural pluralists in the United States have been on the political left...
...Like a Latin American oligarchy, the rich and well-connected members of the overclass can flourish in a decadent America with Third World levels of inequality and crime...
...The United States is not, and never has been, either a multinational democracy or a nonnational democracy...
...Without the political division of wage-earning white, black, and Hispanic Americans along racial lines—a division exacerbated, though not caused, by racial preferences and multicultural ideology— it is doubtful that the white overclass in the United States, in the last generation, would have been able to carry out its agenda of destroying unions, reducing wages, cutting worker benefits, replacing full-time workers with temps, and shifting the burdens of taxation from the rich to the middle and working classes, with so little effective popular opposition...
...Liberal nationalists share an unapologetic American nationalism with nativists—but that is about all that they share...
...The racial and gender quotas on the left, and the educational and political privileges of the wealthy oligarchy defended by the right, would be rejected in favor of a new union of cultural and economic nationalism in the interest of the transracial middle class...
...The patriotism of ordinary Americans is no different in kind from that of Italians or Indians or Russians...
...The basic elements of Multicultural America came together by the early seventies...
...they are merely the most important...
...In civil rights, liberal nationalists favor a return to the original, color-blind vision that animated the leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution like Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Hubert Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson...
...The pejorative connotations that hover around the subject of nationalism—ours and everyone else's—in conventional American public discourse do not mean that nationalism is weak or nonexistent in the American body politic...
...Each of these three republics has put the basic building blocks of the nation-state—race, culture, and citizenship—together in a different way.* At the risk of oversimplification (a risk inseparable from any attempt to discuss major issues of public importance), I argue that each of these American "republics" has had its own consensus, its own threefold national formula, describing the national community, the civic religion, and the political creed...
...Since the 1960s, this vision has been betrayed on the left by multiculturalists, with their defense of racial quotas and their conception of the United States as a federation of genetically defined nationalities...
...American nationalism is almost never represented in public discussions of American identity, which as I have noted tend to be dominated by multiculturalism and democratic universalism...
...the dominant parties have had the same names since the 1860s...
...In Trans-America, a color-blind, genderneutral regime of individual rights would be combined with government activism promoting a high degree of substantive social and economic equality...
...for democratic universalists agree with multiculturalists that the United States is not a conventional nation-state...
...Such a grim future cannot be averted by trivial reforms, like the pseudo-populist gimmicks of the plutocratic right (tax cuts, term limits) or the technocratic panaceas of the neoliberals (worker retraining, reinventing government...
...Few Americans are consistent liberals or conservatives...
...citizenship...
...Since 1789, the French have had five republics (along with several monarchies, one directory, a consulate, and a couple of empires...
...speaking North American nationality, including slaves born and raised on American soil, had begun to diverge from other parts of the Englishspeaking world.' Even if the federal government were abolished tomorrow, the American cultural nation would endure...
...tFor the nationalist, as for some opponents of nationalism, there is a difference between patriotism and nationalism...
...Outside of a small educated elite, hardly any Americans think of their country as a miniature UN or as an abstract idea-state...
...Multicultural America is not the Third Republic that color-blind liberals intended in the early sixties...
...356 • DISSENT Are We a Nation...
...Someone who believes ardently in the founding idea (variously defined as human equality or natural rights or civil liberty or democracy or constitutional government) is a genuine American, even if he shares little or nothing of the prevalent culture, mores and historical memories of the American cultural majority...
...The high level of legal immigration from Latin American and Asia means that the category of Americans eligible for racial preference programs and subsidies at the expense of whiteAmericans, whether native or naturalized, grows by almost a million every year...
...American nationalism, however, is the political doctrine that dares not speak its name...
...To be American, in the nativist view, is to be white and/or Christian or a member of the "Judeo-Christian tradition" (a euphemism that really means Christian...
...The philosopher Michael Walzer has summarized this view, common to multiculturalists and cultural pluralists: "It isn't inconceivable that America will one day become an American nation-state, the many giving way to the one, but that is not what it is now...
...Universalists reject the multicultural celebration of racial-cultural identities, fearing it will encourage the "Balkanization" of America...
...ered by many to have been discredited by its association with German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese militarism (which were of course three quite different phenomena...
...but in every era, a particular national formula has tended to prevail...
...Renewing the American nation-state will require a real, not merely metaphorical, revolution in politics and society, a revolution as sweeping—though, we hope, not as violent— as the Civil Rights Revolution...
...even the boundaries of the states, unlike political jurisdictions in other democracies, are fixed in America...
...Multicultural America is built on the repudiation of white supremacy (common to the first two American republics) in favor, not of color-blind liberalism, but of an elaborate system of racial preferences for citizens who are officially designated as nonwhite by government bureaucracies...
...One should cherish one's nation, as one should cherish one's family, not because it is the best in the world, but because, with all of its flaws, it is one's own...
...These racial preferences in education, hiring, contracting, and political redistricting are available not only to descendants of the victims of American white supremacy, but also to recent immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Indian subcontinent...
...The Civil *I do not deny that American history can be divided into periods on the basis of different criteria—for example, political party systems, or profound changes in the distribution of power between the state and federal governments (like the New Deal...
...even in the 1950s, however, the United States remained a highly decentralized federal state...
...They have tended to share an antipathy to the mainstream culture of the American majority...
...Patriotism is allegiance to a particular government or constitution...
...Indeed, nationalism in one form or another is probably the conception of American identity with the greatest influence among Americans as a whole, particularly among the majority who do not have college educations...
...More Americans died in the Civil War than in all of America's foreign wars combined...
...The Euro-American national formula, redefined to accommodate the European immigrants of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, was somewhat more inclusive than the Anglo-American...
...Multicultural America was born in the turmoil of the Civil Rights Revolution between the 1950s and the 1970s...
...the civic religion, Protestant Christianity...
...Tokenism provides a suitably "progressive" camouflage for a system of divide-and-rule politics in which the homogeneousAmerican social and economic elite—the white overclass—benefits from racial divisions among the American majority...
...Brazilianization is symbolized by the increasing withdrawal of the white American overclass into its own barricaded nation-within-a-nation, a world of private neighborhoods, private schools, private police, private health care, and even private roads, walled off from the spreading squalor beyond...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
