Nationalism
This is going to be a somewhat political rant. Those of you unfamiliar with my politics should be aware that they are grossly wrongheaded and offensive, and that I am maliciously and ignorantly biased against people like you; comments to the effect of pointing that out are redundant and should be refrained from. Also, I am not an expert regarding any of the things I comment on, nor am I as pedantic as a genuine expert; there are unpicked nits aplenty, and this fact neither surprises nor bothers me.
After musing on the nation-state in comments recently, I found myself thinking about that topic. Then I stumbled on some fortuitous reading material. Reading Orwell is always a revelation for me. The old socialist bastard was so consistently clear-headed on matters of importance, and so timeless in his sentiments as to more than match any more recent commentator. A couple of months ago I read Homage to Catalonia, which was a phenomonal work -- a war story of political war, complex and humane, literary journalism at its best. Today, I found myself reading Notes on Nationalism, and it crystalized something that I have been thinking for a long time.
Orwell makes a bold move in that piece. He builds a new notion of the "nation" to which nationalism refers, defining it down to any idealized notion of an "us" and a "them" that prejudges ideas and even facts on the basis of their relation to those groups, and brings nationalism down thereby to the level of the war of ideas. This is particularly fascinating in light of its obvious connection to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War -- a literal war of ideas, in which the half-dozen different ideological groups formed what were, even in the older and more traditional sense, undeniably nations -- armed nations -- at war.
I am someone who has never been comfortable with the notion of the nation. I cannot encompass a nation with my mind. Talk of "one nation, indivisible" was always a scam. I can see the country, and I can see the government, and I can see both endeavouring to justify themselves with reference to the nation (this is indeed the definition of a nation-state -- a state that justifies its existance by reference to the shared interests of a nation), but the nation seems a blank slate onto which abstract stereotypes are painted. It would be a cold day indeed in hell before I would classify every one of my countrymen as "us" before admitting some foreigners to the picture. I daresay there is not a country in the world without some inhabitant more a member of my nation than some inhabitant of my country.
(Indeed, if I may harp on the Pledge of Allegiance for a moment -- at the time it was written, the notion of an American nation was still something of a controversial one. The socialists behind the Pledge made a shrewd move in fitting socialism's notion of government justified by the shared interests of a class with a countrywide assertion that the whole American populace has the shared interests of a single nation. This move makes socialism into a national-greatness project, and it is under this cover that it has been advanced so effectively by the modern political parties that imagine themselves to be non- or even anti-socialist.)
Orwell's move seems to me more sensible. His example nations are all political movements or parties, and indeed that is where I see most strongly the attributes he attributes to nationalism in present times. For me, it is hard to read his descriptions of the pathologies of nationalisms without seeing modern American political parties standing in.
As a matter of the first symptom, obsession, consider the rabidity with which many Democrats respond to the current President Bush -- or the equally absurd vehemence with which Republicans respond to criticism of him. These are not the measured responses of people debating the merits of a stranger; rather, they are the reflexive vehemence of people who have just been personally insulted. Party allegiance alone does not turn questions of the merits of a public official into second-person insults. Nationalism, however, can and does work precisely that alchemy.
The second symptom Orwell notes is instability -- the paradoxical transferability of nationalistic fervor from one nation to another. I have in my acquaintance an ex-Trotsyite Republican who as at one time or another over the last few years spoken strongly both for and against isolationism, free trade, Buy American!, the draft, drug prohibition, the superiority of Shi'ite to Sunni Islam, balanced budgets, and so forth. What is alarming is not the aparrent inconsistency of this, but the air of absolute consistency in his arguments -- indeed, one rapidly finds it hard to say quite where Leon Trotsky and Bob Dole parted ways.
The third symptom Orwell names is indifference to reality. Need we even say more? Well, of course we must: Nearly everyone believes that it a symptom of "them", and not of "us". Nonetheless, poll after poll tells us: Democratic readers prefer to read Democratic news, Republican readers prefer to read Republican news, and when you move beyond reading to hearing and seeing the pattern only gets more extreme. The vast bulk of the party-nations populace do not care enough about reality to look outside of deliberate filters.
Now, I don't mean to imply that American politics is headed the way of revolutionary Spain. It will be a while before party militias raid our apartments, before towns stage revolutions to declare for one party or the other, before parties resort to armed bans on each other or make opposing party leaders disappear. (On the other hand, none of that sounds quite as implausible as one would like) But I do want to suggest that these nationalistic feelings make each political party much more of a nation that America is. America is increasingly a binational country, rapidly losing interest in its non-national inhabitants whose only real political relevance is their occasional (increasingly grudging) votes for one or the other of the nations.
Now, there are various spins one could put on this. Members of powerful classes (bourgeois or political; pick your dialectic) use national conflict to distract the oppressed classes (prolaterian or creative; again pick your dialectic) from the class conflict that should be their concern. Religious or media leaders cynically manipulate people into irrational affections and dislikes in order to drum up business for their respective rackets. Nationalism is a basic human urge that could not be indefinitely suppressed by the American experiment. Increasing centralized party leadership structures provide the technocratic governance, dictatorial control, and monarchic symbolism that Americans, now a century without a frontier, have come secretly to long for. Et cetera. I could spin another half dozen if you like. Frankly I'm fond of all of them -- no real phenomena are unicausal anyway.
But the spin that one cannot avoid is that the "one nation, indivisible" is more a lie today than it even has been. Politics that imagine substantial country-wide shared "national" interests are these days little more than projections of party-nationalist views onto the country as a whole. Most Republicans today honestly would not feel more kinship with a Democratic home-country than with more rightish neighbors, and most Democrats vice versa. Political affinity has replaced birth-geography as the central source of national meaning.
Under such circumstances, government must find new excuses for itself. This is a rather ungainly process, of course, and will take quite some time to resolve. But unless a revolutionary idea comes around, conflict cannot be forever avoided. As party-nationalist feelings build, the value of power-sharing will seem more and more and more remote to the nationalists. There is no power to keep the peace, and no reason either.
After musing on the nation-state in comments recently, I found myself thinking about that topic. Then I stumbled on some fortuitous reading material. Reading Orwell is always a revelation for me. The old socialist bastard was so consistently clear-headed on matters of importance, and so timeless in his sentiments as to more than match any more recent commentator. A couple of months ago I read Homage to Catalonia, which was a phenomonal work -- a war story of political war, complex and humane, literary journalism at its best. Today, I found myself reading Notes on Nationalism, and it crystalized something that I have been thinking for a long time.
Orwell makes a bold move in that piece. He builds a new notion of the "nation" to which nationalism refers, defining it down to any idealized notion of an "us" and a "them" that prejudges ideas and even facts on the basis of their relation to those groups, and brings nationalism down thereby to the level of the war of ideas. This is particularly fascinating in light of its obvious connection to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War -- a literal war of ideas, in which the half-dozen different ideological groups formed what were, even in the older and more traditional sense, undeniably nations -- armed nations -- at war.
I am someone who has never been comfortable with the notion of the nation. I cannot encompass a nation with my mind. Talk of "one nation, indivisible" was always a scam. I can see the country, and I can see the government, and I can see both endeavouring to justify themselves with reference to the nation (this is indeed the definition of a nation-state -- a state that justifies its existance by reference to the shared interests of a nation), but the nation seems a blank slate onto which abstract stereotypes are painted. It would be a cold day indeed in hell before I would classify every one of my countrymen as "us" before admitting some foreigners to the picture. I daresay there is not a country in the world without some inhabitant more a member of my nation than some inhabitant of my country.
(Indeed, if I may harp on the Pledge of Allegiance for a moment -- at the time it was written, the notion of an American nation was still something of a controversial one. The socialists behind the Pledge made a shrewd move in fitting socialism's notion of government justified by the shared interests of a class with a countrywide assertion that the whole American populace has the shared interests of a single nation. This move makes socialism into a national-greatness project, and it is under this cover that it has been advanced so effectively by the modern political parties that imagine themselves to be non- or even anti-socialist.)
Orwell's move seems to me more sensible. His example nations are all political movements or parties, and indeed that is where I see most strongly the attributes he attributes to nationalism in present times. For me, it is hard to read his descriptions of the pathologies of nationalisms without seeing modern American political parties standing in.
As a matter of the first symptom, obsession, consider the rabidity with which many Democrats respond to the current President Bush -- or the equally absurd vehemence with which Republicans respond to criticism of him. These are not the measured responses of people debating the merits of a stranger; rather, they are the reflexive vehemence of people who have just been personally insulted. Party allegiance alone does not turn questions of the merits of a public official into second-person insults. Nationalism, however, can and does work precisely that alchemy.
The second symptom Orwell notes is instability -- the paradoxical transferability of nationalistic fervor from one nation to another. I have in my acquaintance an ex-Trotsyite Republican who as at one time or another over the last few years spoken strongly both for and against isolationism, free trade, Buy American!, the draft, drug prohibition, the superiority of Shi'ite to Sunni Islam, balanced budgets, and so forth. What is alarming is not the aparrent inconsistency of this, but the air of absolute consistency in his arguments -- indeed, one rapidly finds it hard to say quite where Leon Trotsky and Bob Dole parted ways.
The third symptom Orwell names is indifference to reality. Need we even say more? Well, of course we must: Nearly everyone believes that it a symptom of "them", and not of "us". Nonetheless, poll after poll tells us: Democratic readers prefer to read Democratic news, Republican readers prefer to read Republican news, and when you move beyond reading to hearing and seeing the pattern only gets more extreme. The vast bulk of the party-nations populace do not care enough about reality to look outside of deliberate filters.
Now, I don't mean to imply that American politics is headed the way of revolutionary Spain. It will be a while before party militias raid our apartments, before towns stage revolutions to declare for one party or the other, before parties resort to armed bans on each other or make opposing party leaders disappear. (On the other hand, none of that sounds quite as implausible as one would like) But I do want to suggest that these nationalistic feelings make each political party much more of a nation that America is. America is increasingly a binational country, rapidly losing interest in its non-national inhabitants whose only real political relevance is their occasional (increasingly grudging) votes for one or the other of the nations.
Now, there are various spins one could put on this. Members of powerful classes (bourgeois or political; pick your dialectic) use national conflict to distract the oppressed classes (prolaterian or creative; again pick your dialectic) from the class conflict that should be their concern. Religious or media leaders cynically manipulate people into irrational affections and dislikes in order to drum up business for their respective rackets. Nationalism is a basic human urge that could not be indefinitely suppressed by the American experiment. Increasing centralized party leadership structures provide the technocratic governance, dictatorial control, and monarchic symbolism that Americans, now a century without a frontier, have come secretly to long for. Et cetera. I could spin another half dozen if you like. Frankly I'm fond of all of them -- no real phenomena are unicausal anyway.
But the spin that one cannot avoid is that the "one nation, indivisible" is more a lie today than it even has been. Politics that imagine substantial country-wide shared "national" interests are these days little more than projections of party-nationalist views onto the country as a whole. Most Republicans today honestly would not feel more kinship with a Democratic home-country than with more rightish neighbors, and most Democrats vice versa. Political affinity has replaced birth-geography as the central source of national meaning.
Under such circumstances, government must find new excuses for itself. This is a rather ungainly process, of course, and will take quite some time to resolve. But unless a revolutionary idea comes around, conflict cannot be forever avoided. As party-nationalist feelings build, the value of power-sharing will seem more and more and more remote to the nationalists. There is no power to keep the peace, and no reason either.