Whose Elephant?: Civic Nationalism and the Left
Sleeper, Jim
THE QUESTION of the left's relationship to American patriotism brings to mind the story about a European intellectual émigré who, discovering the Bronx Zoo, wrote an essay on "The Elephant and...
...And they might discover that, as the political philosopher Michael Sandel put it, "Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread...
...Some of them drew consciously on the old Puritan/Hebraic legacies as well as on Enlightenment affirmations...
...But national identity does bear strengths that should be recognized apart from its "imagined communities" of blood, soil and imperial triumph...
...Doing so would return us to the irony I began with: Indispensable though the Enlightenment is to this country, one can't know it well without reckoning, even as an unbeliever, with the Hebrew and Protestant legacies that have shaped its politics and could temper its capitalism...
...He is working on a book about new conceptions of American national identity...
...The government claims we're criminals," he said, as I leaned in to listen, "but we say it is the government that is criminal in waging this war...
...We have always had riotous, corrupt, and imperial politics, but never so much silence, civic demoralization, and voter abstention...
...his adopted Bangladeshi daughter was always there at the podium, and that said enough...
...But there are strains of Hebrew prophecy and obligation to law in these humbler acts of witness, as well as Enlightenment wisdom about individuality and liberty, and a dose of realpolitik...
...Now that the post-9/11 world has taught us how potent cultural "differences" really are, maybe some leftists who've championed them uncritically will admit they kept quiet about their own ethnic and religious identities because they valued their Enlightenmentliberal "rights" to self-definition more than they did communal belonging...
...Quietistic, it isn't: Every so often, God looses the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword, so that even in 1963 Martin Luther King could stir millions by crying, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord...
...Nations have at least potentially the motivation to be what the Latin economist Hernando de Soto calls "the skin of the poor," vindicating the universal in a republican jurisprudence that can sometimes enforce decency, even if not fellowfeeling, on the rich...
...But not quite as some on the left have spent twenty years insisting: American liberal-democratic capitalism has proved more protean, supple, and absorptive than even its staunchest defenders predicted in reducing the racism and sexism that dominate the leftist moral imagination...
...Although the United States has often been a rolling synthesis of forces no one could control, lately it seems a riot of forces that threaten to dissolve the republic...
...Believe me," he said, "I know what it's like to wake up in the morning feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin' at a millstone...
...And as we watched, the confusion we were feeling gave way to something like awe...
...There is a necessary oscillation between the universal and the parochial...
...It was Calvinist humor, jaunty in its defiance of the powers that be on behalf of a higher power, and some of us grasped at that ray of DISSENT / Winter 2003 • 37 CIVIC NATIONALISM hope, because we were scared...
...The root of some leftists' credulity was guilt and self-loathing as Americans or as European imperialists...
...But try to explain the power of abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric, or the social gospel, populist, Progressive, suffragist, civil rights, and other social movements without acknowledging that the Hebraic covenantal and prophetic nationalist strains in Puritanism have driven American reform through Protestant inflections and Enlightenment crosscurrents...
...it's out of control...
...Lenin's and Lev Bronstein Trotsky's) triumphalist, scientific rendering of Hebraic myths and Woodrow Wilson's triumphalist, American rendering of the same myths...
...Citing compelling evidence, leftists have rebuffed national identities as shills or shells for warring capitalist elites who wield myths of blood, soil, and state to tighten their grip on the rest of us...
...More than a few of us have missed this, too, by misconstruing the religious dimensions of civic nationalism...
...Let me probe the confusion by sketching a "prophetic" instance of American patriotism I witnessed one wintry morning in 1968 while plodding across Yale's Beinecke Plaza to a class...
...Yet something in their bearing made them heroically "American," as free of anything antiAmerican as was Rosa Parks when she refused to move to the back of a bus...
...But why a nation...
...Indian "tribes," some concocted by activist-entrepreneurs and investor-friendly officials, use their sovereignty to set up casinos that, in a bitter poetic justice, hook busloads of flaccid, despairing whites on gambling as surely as whites hooked Indians on firewater...
...Such evidence was ignored when Russian nationalism infected the idea of "socialism in one country" or when third world "national liberation fronts" proclaimed themselves bearers of global justice...
...Ethnic and racial subgroups in diverse societies can't do that...
...Do they still...
...we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves equal rights" through politics, by recognizing one another as consociates who enter into a civil society and induct our young into it...
...I am not urging religious belief here but more respect for it as a civic wellspring...
...Maybe then they will pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to reform corporate practices that degrade the civic virtue they claim is a fundament of liberty...
...Instead of huddling in a few cozy neighDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 41 CIVIC NATIONALISM borhoods and posturing before undergraduates and imagined communities of magazine readers, let them work awhile for large, bureaucratic corporations (not just drop by "on assignment" for glossy magazines...
...Like the old internationalist left, global capitalists consider nationalism a defensive reaction to these shifts, a flush on the cheek of a dying age...
...But more Americans heard sounds of an old battle between Old World tyranny and an America they think chosen for great things...
...42 • DISSENT / Winter 2003...
...A few yards away, the names of hundreds of Yale men who had perished in wars were inscribed on marble walls near sculpted Periclean citizenwarriors under such admonitions as "Courage disdains fame and wins it...
...No doubt, "the Jewish Question," the left question, and the elephant of American patriotism remain fatefully and confusingly entwined...
...It was as if civic spirit had arisen from a long slumber and was breathing and walking again, re-moralizing the state and the law...
...Even more so are the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization...
...Even if you dismiss him and Reagan, look into what drives people as different as Joseph Lieberman, John Ashcroft, and those who are producing five thousand new owner-occupied "Nehemiah" homes in "hopeless" inner-city New York through church-based power organizations working with the Saul Alinsky-inspired Industrial Areas Foundation...
...Religious strands in American liberalism trace back beyond capitalism to the cautionary biblical stories of the golden calf and of a garden, a serpent, and a corruptible couple of humans...
...No honorable conservatism can defend that...
...They might learn how to balance conservative cultural and religious strengths with liberal opportunities...
...Institutions like these made Jimmy Stewart's Mr...
...Learn that these homes are named for the biblical leader who convinced his despondent neighbors to rebuild Jerusalem, and start to understand your country...
...James Russell Lowell captured this country's expectations of long, twilight struggles with evil: "Truth forever on the scaffold...
...Now the Yale students were resisting the government in the name of a society that they, too, were reconstituting by pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor...
...The answer that endures may be more anthropological than economic: Only nations are large and diverse enough to affirm what's universal, yet are grounded in real communities where young people are socialized into moral compacts...
...Precisely because the United States is even more diverse than any Census color-coding or Ford Foundation ethnic corralling comprehends, we should be working harder to forge a few republican/ civic bonds...
...You may loathe these activists as conservatives did those who opposed the Vietnam War...
...The United Nations is too broad for it, too much a confluence of elites and transnational abstractions...
...The two wandering "peoples" overlap politically and demographically: more leftist thought than we acknowledge is a secularized variant of the original Jewish idea of history-making through covenantal and messianic redemption—a thundering of God in the world, through human agency...
...The dignity in her protest helped redeem even a racist civil society, reconstituting it instead of trashing it as inherently damned...
...Soon enough, of course, theocratic Puritanism had to coexist with "liberal" natural-rights thinking that slowly eclipsed it— and a good thing, too...
...Neither left nor right do it credibly now, not least because leftists in flight from their own true origins can't understand the American elephant any better than did that émigré at the Bronx Zoo...
...The confessional nationalism of Polish Solidarity liberated more people than had any progressive passion for justice alone or any conservative passion for honor alone...
...The harder challenges are the atomization and degradation of public life, driven by a corporate "culture" of consumer marketing ever more relentless and intrusive...
...The political philosopher Martha Nussbaum, for instance, warns that an "emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and ultimately subversive of some of the worthy . . . moral ideas of justice and equality...
...There is a genius in this that conservatives understand but abuse and that Marxists and some liberals haven't grasped: We nonbelievers find far better protection in the interstices of a balance between the Enlightenment of Locke and the Lord of the Covenant than we would in some postmodernist free-for all, which would really be a Hobbesian freefornone...
...A politics that stirred and sustained public support would have to rescue the idea of civic nationalism, as McCain tried to, from both materialist and racialist misconstruals of patriotism...
...Their technological and economic innovations are scrambling old borders and populations, opening new "imagined communities" where ideas and experiences are exchanged at the speed of light...
...Edward Gibbons's accounts of it leap off the page...
...If I sound like an old Roman citizen echoing Cicero's lament that we are too ill to bear our sicknesses or their cures, it's because I foresee for America neither the Soviet-style totalitarianism of conservatives' nightmares nor the fascism of the left's fevered imagination, but a dissolution such as ancient Rome's...
...The transnational European Union may be able to do that, too...
...No would-be organizer should miss Michael Gecan's new book Going Public, which describes the Nehemiah project and kindred efforts in intimate, smartly conceptualized detail...
...But lamenting the rise of "Empire" and the End of Days can be perversely comforting to the insulated, speeding their abdications of public responsibility...
...Anti-capitalism isn't enough...
...No doubt, more than a few of us have missed this...
...Before sixties' nostalgia clouds the answer, let me complicate it by suggesting that constitutional patriots might include civilly disobedient but peaceful antiabortion activists who believe that life is a continuous, sacred thread, not to be broken by the state or by individuals exercising their "rights...
...But the American nation, the progenitor of many of the global-capitalist forces that have brought the EU into being, is the crucible of the politics needed to control global capitalism, and partly for reasons that take us back to those old Hebrew myths...
...They found the United States exceptional not because it is racially superior or divinely blessed but because it enhances democratic prospects by mixing Puritan moral passion with Enlightenment principle...
...The left, Rorty argued, has forgotten how to keep American pride on the sound footing set by Eugene V. Debs, A. Philip Randolph, and others who were anything but conservatives...
...That became obvious in the 2000 presidential primaries as conservative flag-wavers scrambled to discredit an American war hero who charged that their global capitalist "iron triangle" of big money, bad lobbyists, and undemocratic legislation was debasing the country...
...Jewish and leftist strains have converged even more on American soil, where the original, Hebraic themes were sown by Puritans who literally believed themselves to be the new people of Israel, building a New Jerusalem in a New Canaan...
...Don't tell me there was no "chosen" people in the vanguard of the proletariat and no messianism in Marxism...
...F4 XPECTING FAITH without imposing doctrine is only the beginning of the American struggle...
...We are not born equal," Hannah Arendt admonished universalists...
...The degradation of upper-middle-class morals and manners, from road rage to compulsive body building, suggests a sauve qui peut, "every man for himself' stance toward a society no one trusts anymore...
...THE QUESTION of the left's relationship to American patriotism brings to mind the story about a European intellectual émigré who, discovering the Bronx Zoo, wrote an essay on "The Elephant and the Jewish Question...
...That battle probably continues even in the dim but filopietistic mind of George W Bush...
...Civic discipline like that may seem dowdy or foolish to champions of higher materialist 38 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 or salvific truths and to their writerly cheerleaders, radiant mainly with a desire to be radiant...
...The resisters were challenging us to join them in disdaining fame, but with scant prospect of even a memorial's posthumous regard...
...Smith Goes To Washington credible to a young Bill Bradley, John McCain, Mario Cuomo, or even a Rudolph Giuliani...
...In American society generally, however, the dynamic market culture isn't just more sovereign than in the past...
...They, too, now need a better American balance between ethnic roots and civic forums, between Hebraic covenants and Enlightenment freedoms...
...This is no place to reprise the rise of the Zionist territorial experiment, reborn in a Europe awash in "blood and soil" nationalism...
...But the test of constitutional patriotism is whether you can respect those who accept legal punishment to strengthen their dissent...
...McCain never mentioned race...
...Nor can it pretend to affirm American sovereignty without asserting it over tax shelters in the Cayman Islands that shift huge corporate tax burdens onto Americans who fight our wars...
...Gecan tracks the evolution and entanglements of three public cultures— market, bureaucratic, and relational or voluntary...
...Remember Ronald Reagan's invocation of the Puritan "City on a Hill" against the Soviet "evil empire...
...The problem here—but also the irony in leftist rejections of nationalism as a capitalist tool—is that truly global capitalist elites, who are yet another people without borders, don't care much about nationalism these days...
...JIM SLEEPER is a lecturer in political science at Yale University...
...The left has produced varied, sometimes brilliant diagnoses of it, but CIVIC NATIONALISM a diagnosis is not a prescription...
...And not before we've reckoned more honestly with our own roots—and America's— in a Hebraic national project, de-territorialized for two millennia, that has been such a leaven to other societies...
...Not until we stop trying to impose the left-vs.right floor plan of the nineteenth-century French Chamber of Deputies on American politics...
...In liberal-universalist terms, she's right: We can't draw territorial lines around one people and say that only here will we protect rights we claim are universal...
...and in 1968 William Sloane Coffin, Jr., could sacralize students' courage against what seemed overwhelming odds...
...Some of us learned its norms of sportsmanship, reasoned argument, and tolerance in the folkways, friendships, and rites of passage of republican (small "r") training grounds—after-hours schools, youth programs, summer camps, and other institutions set up deliberately to deepen civic attachments...
...Better to regenerate civil sociCIVIC NATIONALISM ety after recalling how it was generated in the first place...
...Even now, a tenth-generation descendant of New England Puritans • has counterposed the New Jerusalem against some of old Jerusalem's Abrahamic claimants, revivifying their Great American Satan...
...What George Orwell called the "prolecult" of mass entertainment is ever more gladiatorial, accelerating the calculations of force and fraud in daily life...
...had said twelve years before...
...This civic patriotism has freed more people in the past century than all exclusively ideological and religious crusades combined...
...Start with nationalism and its discontents...
...Let hothouse-bred mini-cons at magazines and think tanks go to work for large, bureaucratic corporate purveyors of dubious services and entertainments, our own Bermuda Triangles of public sovereignty and personal freedom...
...No wonder that one of Western history's fault lines since 1917 has been a clash of two world-historical vanguards: Marx's (and V.I...
...wrong forever on the throne/ Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown/ standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own...
...But corporate marketing is dissolving them all by shuffling the old racial and libidinal decks indiscriminately, "liberating" us only into anomic meanness: in the studios of television tell-all circuses and show trials, blacks and whites vent their despair together in perfect equality...
...And admit that the Marxist left has mostly been some other country...
...Coffin was there to bless, in an American civic idiom that few leftists or liberals comprehend, a courage that few on the right comprehend...
...So did my New England Yankee public schoolmarms, but they and their policies have passed out of the culture and even the law...
...Yet that paradox is a fact of life...
...Just as each individual, while the bearer of a universal Kantian dignity, must fulfill it within an idiosyncratic body and biography, so too must groups, without whose shared but distinctive cultural referents our individual odysseys would have no communicable meaning...
...As I passed some fellow undergraduates gathered around the university chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., a senior was speaking, barely audibly, trying to find his voice against fear...
...It should be rescued as well from the "imagined vacuities" of professedly more cosmopolitan, postnationalist critics who consider all nationalism atavistic...
...Such organizing succeeds because it relies on what the political scientist Rogers Smith calls "a story of American identity that goes beyond abstract defenses of democracy and human rights . . . . There is no realistic escape from the task of seeking to define a morally defensible conception of American peoplehood...
...what concerns me here is the influence of a de-territorialized, Jewish national mission on both the left and the American nation, which is itself also multinational and transnational...
...But a state like that would chill the civic-republican ethos that literary historian Daniel Aaron has characterized as "ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free...
...The civil rights movement would have been inconceivable without its ability to rely on some of the older society's supposedly hypocritical conventions: Rosa Parks upheld some of them as she challenged others...
...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 39 CIVIC NATIONALISM But a nation can also sustain a necessary balance of universal rights and a citizenship that vindicates them in institutions subject to democratic control...
...The general descent is accelerated by journalism's collapse into the tentacles of entertainment conglomerates that assemble any big audience for profit on any pretext: ironically, then-Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin's son was murdered by a young aficionado of the gangster rap the elder Levin was pumping into the Bronx...
...For all we knew, these guys were about to be arrested, and we felt arrested morally by their example...
...The left, a kind of borderless people with an international agenda, probably has had more to do with Jews, another borderless people, than with the elephant of American patriotism...
...Surely a disproportionate number of the left's thinkers and leaders, starting with Karl Marx, fled their ancestral Jewish burden of chosenness in history by secularizing it...
...He and two others handed Coffin draft cards, like those we all had in our wallets, refusing conscription into the Vietnam War...
...The collapse of the World Trade Center towers, although caused by external forces, seems emblematic of the implosion of other pillars of civil society 40 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 in corporate and even church governance, in standards of decency and civility in public places...
...Restoring civil society would require reconfiguring the supposed civil rights of fictive conglomerate "persons" that exercise their "free speech rights" to take over public and private life but crush citizens' rights on the turf they've usurped...
...THE "LEFT" and the "right" are no longer vessels of hope...
...More than a few leftists, too, may need Maoist-style rehabilitation in corporate workplaces...
...Its ethos of capitalist property-making has broken loose from John Locke's Hebrew/Protestant covenant, and it is running roughshod over honorable conservative notions of political sovereignty: the "culture" of corporate consumer marketing measures out individuality and freedom in the slender power it gives consumers over purchases at the mall...
...The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right," Martin Luther King, Jr...
...When Reagan assailed the "evil empire," the left heard only a rigid cold war ideology...
...But could a republic relying so heavily on civic virtue, borne by such crosscurrents, endure...
...And the left, flummoxed by its racialist fantasies as surely as conservatives are by free-market idolatry, finds itself speechless about the addictive, regressive tax of casino gambling...
...Only a nation can sustain a liberal-democratic polity that, in turn, can enforce the commitments it nourishes...
...Smith resists religious ingredients, but for the Nehemiah builders, American civic strength relies on balancing a general expectation of religious faith without any imposition of doctrine...
...We can restrain it constitutionally without censuring it as roundly as we tend to do now...
...That takes some doing, and arguably the experiment is coming undone...
...WILL AMERICAN leftists ever make headway in such efforts...
...Only a national security state or global empire could even pretend to protect such a slippery web of contracts and negative "rights...
...Liberals and some leftists cast shy, admiring glances at John McCain's insurgency, which seemed to confirm what the philosopher Richard Rorty had insisted on a few years before: national pride is as vital as individual self-respect to winning social justice...
...And the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at the "constitutional patriotism" of Americans who drew their strength to confront the state not from nationalist fantasies of racial and ethnic destiny but from a civic-nationalist commingling of religious passion and Enlightenment principle...
...It does take a village to raise a child...
...Instead of opposing every civic expectation of religious faith, they might join religious activists in wielding faith as a counterweight to corporate tyranny...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
