A fter spending much of the primary campaign debating whether to dub Donald Trump a conservative, a moderate populist, a secret liberal, or a fascist, pundits have coalesced around a term for the candidate who wraps everything in the bombastic language of American greatness: Trump is a nationalist. Even the (relatively) charitable interpretation of his use of the Lindbergh slogan “America First” to describe his foreign-policy priorities — not, perhaps, a nod to anti-Semitic supporters, but just an immense display of historical illiteracy — calls to mind the 19th-century French writer Ernest Renan’s observation about nationalism: “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”
With Trump, the question in the long run is not exactly what kind of nation he’d create; rather, it’s how his rise will transform the nation and the way Americans imagine themselves to belong to it. Even when the term “nationalist” is unaccompanied by the modifiers that call up disturbing associations — “ultra,” “ethno-", “white” — it carries an obvious derogatory connotation. For certain of Trump’s fans, this is just fine: There’s nothing they’d like better than to be deemed nationalists by their enemies. A sympathetic article by Robert W. Merry in The National Interest recently declared that “any true understanding” of the coming showdown between Trump and Hillary Clinton is incomplete unless it puts front and center “the one huge political fault line that is driving America into a period of serious political tremors": Trumpian nationalism against Clintonian globalism.
How will Trump transform the nation and the way Americans imagine themselves to belong to it?
These two camps, we are told, could not be more different. Globalists, according to Merry, have captured “the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs, [and] charitable foundations.” They rank “the rights and well-being of the world’s people” over “the rights and well-being of the American populace,” “don’t care about borders,” “believe the nation-state is obsolete,” are “leading the assault” on our “national heritage,” and “exploit their position of power to ridicule and marginalize the so-called ‘Middle America’ of ordinary citizens, who also happen to be nationalists.” This litany of grievances, pulsing with a barely concealed desire for comeuppance, is what so worries Trump’s critics when they call him a nationalist. To wear that term with pride is to embrace the resentment: What right-thinking American, the Trumpian asks incredulously, wouldn’t want America to come first?
This stark dichotomy is a sign that something has been lost. Trump’s candidacy presents a genuine civic crisis for which our public vocabulary seems ill-equipped. Americans troubled by Trump need to articulate a different vision of civic belonging, a way of valuing their democracy that doesn’t collapse into chauvinism and belligerence toward foreigners and fellow citizens alike.
W hile the conversation around Trump’s candidacy has shown that it’s probably too late to revise public understanding of the term “nationalism,” the concept is more complicated than its current colloquial usage suggests. For one thing, it has defied expectations by refusing to fade from political life. In the second half of the 20th century, an influential group of scholars argued that nations were not the ancient and organic communities of their partisans’ imaginations, but were in reality a fairly recent political innovation. This wave of scholarly attention, in a steadily globalizing era, was sometimes interpreted as an example of Hegel’s owl of Minerva — as the historian Eric Hobsbawm mused in 1990, it indicated that nations and nationalism must be “past [their] peak.” Given nationalism’s role in the 20th century’s brutalities, this prediction was often advanced with an understandable hopefulness.
How did Donald Trump’s candidacy happen? What ideas has he upended? How is academe responding? What does his candidacy mean for the future of democracy? We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to weigh in.
It has not fared well. For its 20th anniversary, the journal Nations and Nationalism currently features a roundtable titled, “Why has nationalism not run its course?” One reason for its unexpected durability is that it is a protean phenomenon. Indeed, there is a rich theoretical literature on liberal nationalism that promotes the nation as a beneficial locus of solidarity and political belonging, defined in the relatively open terms of culture rather than the rigidly exclusive terms of ethnicity or descent. Even so, the word conjures so many painful memories and ugly associations that it’s an implausible candidate for popular reclamation — and the fact that “nationalism,” or at least its associated themes, will be embraced by Trump supporters over the next several months will only increase its repellent power to many people. This leaves a need for an alternative civic vocabulary, one that captures what it means to be an American and is opposed to the illiberal nationalism of Donald Trump.
Some thinkers have offered antidotes to Trump’s understanding of Americanism. As the historian Mark Mazower recently wrote in The Financial Times, the answer to Trump lies “in developing alternative visions of national well-being,” and resistance to Trump’s dangerous dichotomy requires persuading the public to see “the national and the international as necessary complements.” Offering a more robust vision, the late political scientist Samuel H. Beer advocated what he called “the national idea” in American politics — not only, he wrote, “a theory of authority but also a theory of purpose, a perspective on public policy, a guide to the ends for which power should be used. It invites us to ask ourselves what sort of a people we are, and whether we are a people, and what we wish to make of ourselves as a people.”
The aspirational thrust of Beer’s language — “what we wish to make of ourselves as a people” — calmly deflates the Trumpian boast that Americans already have a latent greatness held back only by disloyal globalist elites. It dissolves in a single elegant phrase the exaggerated wall between Americans and the government they make for themselves. Instead, Beer suggests that our political achievements can and should be genuinely common: made by us, according to our wishes, achieving our goals. His language invokes a conception of political life in which citizens deliberate among themselves and govern together instead of looking to an authoritarian strongman for salvation. Compare this vision with “Make America Great Again,” a slogan designed to reassure Trump’s voters that the authentic America they represent can reclaim its lost greatness by kicking out the leaders who have enfeebled it through political correctness, passivity toward terrorists and criminals, and a failure to assert our inherent superiority over others. Compare Trumpism’s exclusivity and complacency with the implied construction of peoplehood in Beer’s phrase — introspection about “what sort of a people we are” (even “whether we are”), and deliberation about “what we wish to make of ourselves.”
Promising to “make America great again” while denigrating the majority of Americans not only awakens the ugly forces of nativism but is plainly incompatible with an idea of America in which citizens relate to one another on equal terms. Beer’s version of national solidarity is the opposite of the mania unleashed by Trump’s campaign. In this conception, “the national idea” doesn’t imply hostility or disregard for those beyond our borders; it simply requires that other Americans be regarded as equal participants in the collective work of politics.
The achievements of earlier generations, however fitful, give some sense of what these moments of collective action look like. As the historian David Hollinger has argued, what we most need is an “analysis of what kinds of nationalism have actually existed and what kinds are now defensible in what contexts.” For Hollinger, this includes an examination of the United States itself, a project he deems “arguably the most successful nationalist undertaking in modern history” — one whose development can be seen (though it’s often not) as unfolding through Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
In imagining the future of this undertaking, we might draw on recent work that suggests subtle revisions in the way we conceive of national belonging. Increasingly, thinkers now argue that nations may be defined more by a shared relationship to a culture rather than by a uniform culture itself — indicating one reason for their continued endurance. The political theorist Bernard Yack, for instance, has recently held that “it is not the sharing of any particular practice or belief or monumentalised memory that makes a nation, but rather the sharing of a cultural inheritance, an inconsistent and contingently assembled package of cultural artifacts.” By “cultural artifacts,” he refers to ways of communicating, like “language, relics, symbols,” as well as to “stories of origins” and painful collective memories. Members of a nation may like some of their cultural artifacts and dislike others, but being members of a nation doesn’t require that they agree on those judgments — rather, it is the manner of acquiring them that connects us. Once we understand that it is “cultural heritage rather than cultural belief or practice that is the focus of national membership,” Yack argues, it becomes clear that “no particular belief or practice is entailed by national membership.” This suggests that membership in a nation may be far more compatible with increasing diversity than is commonly assumed.
Yack’s rethinking of shared national membership arguably complements the philosopher Charles Taylor’s suggestion that Canada, and perhaps other contemporary democracies, might feature not only a diversity of identities but also a “deep diversity” in how individuals understand themselves to belong. As members of a nation make use of different cultural artifacts they all inherit, so too might they relate to that community in diverse ways. In so doing, they may also identify with different “stories of peoplehood,” as the political scientist Rogers M. Smith has illustrated — narratives that shape their understanding of what their political community is and what it means to be a member of it. Taken together, these scholarly developments show not only how nationalism’s power lies partly in its plasticity but also how that plasticity might serve beneficial, non-Trumpian ends.
Though it may seem elusive in the midst of a long, ugly campaign, the discourse that follows from this line of thought may actually be hiding in plain sight. In the land’s highest office sits a consummate adherent of the national idea, a politician plainly at home justifying his liberal and democratic aspirations in a language designed to appeal to Americans as Americans — taking the aspirations of their best selves with deep seriousness.
It is a sign of the contentious nature of defining and narrating peoplehood that President Obama’s critics have seen in him just the opposite: a leader distinguished by cosmopolitan detachment and smug indifference to what makes America America. Yet this is a figure whose preferred way of talking about torture, the exclusion of immigrants, and the mistreatment of refugees is to insist that certain mind-sets and behaviors are not “who we are.” (Conversely, Trump recently declared about waterboarding that even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”) This is a president who has taken clear delight in raising Selma and Stonewall to iconic status alongside Lexington and Independence Hall; who burst into “Amazing Grace” midway through a eulogy in an African-American church moments before calling for an “honest accounting of America’s history.” His record more than vindicates the intellectual historian James T. Kloppenberg’s prescient judgment during Obama’s first term that this president — deliberative, skeptical, sensitive to history — can be located in the distinctively American philosophical tradition of pragmatism.
Whether or not he wins the election, Trump shouldn’t win the struggle over defining our political community.
It’s easy to overlook the genuine question embedded in Beer’s formulation: “whether we are a people.” This election affords an opportunity to remember that peoples are not only found, but formed — and it’s not at all clear that democracy can persist without them. Not only do many people take comfort in the bonds of familiarity and civic friendship that link them to fellow citizens, but effective democratic practice relies on the respect, patience, solidarity, and reciprocity that such bonds generate.
No collective action can be conducted without mediation through symbols and assumptions, many of which make sense only within a shared context shaped by history. Skeptics of the national idea may bristle at the boundaries this seems to impose, but there is no effective confrontation with the injustices of American society that doesn’t approach them as contestations over history and peoplehood. Consider the particular resonance of debates over the Confederate flag in the wake of Dylann Roof’s killing of nine African-American parishioners in Charleston, S.C. Robert Greene, a history Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina, stood at the Statehouse in Columbia last July as the Confederate battle flag — raised in 1961 — was finally lowered. Reflecting on that particular symbol, in that place, at that time, amid those events, he observed: “The flag was more than a relic of history — it was also a right-wing, reactionary vision of what the American South should look like.” The democratic agitation to remove the flag showed how a mobilized public can contest and demystify these visions, and in the process reshape the contours of its identity.
We have a familiar story (perhaps a mythology) about civic nationalism: thin enough to avoid harsh exclusions, but thick enough to bind us together — or so the story goes. But if the civic nation exists, it’s under heavy strain. And a more expansive view of political belonging and democratic culture suggests that civic identification is only one way of understanding what it means to be an American. A genuinely democratic politics can refine that understanding and make its dimensions more explicit — and we have to start doing so now that an intolerant vision of belonging is on the rise. Bellicose identification with Trump’s America should not be the only alternative to disempowered alienation from a distant global elite. That’s precisely the dichotomy Trump supporters want the public to believe in.
Trump’s campaign is an attempt not only to define America in exclusive terms but also to coarsen what it means to belong to that nation: to hate, to mock, to fear outsiders; to promote one’s own interests at the expense of strangers and despise anyone not as strong; to reassure ourselves of America’s might and salivate at what it will achieve when it is no longer held back — to achieve our country through Trump, not through one another. Regardless of whether or not he wins the election, Trump shouldn’t win the struggle over defining what our political community is, and how we belong to it.
Nathan Pippenger is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing editor at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
