Can a new "civic nationalism" save us in an increasingly uncivil world?
Not if our intellectual grifters keep trashing America's "civil religion"
Whither nationalism?
The idea of the nation-state is largely a late-modern invention. It has its origins in the bourgeois revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and frequently came to be paired with an adjacent concept known as “liberal democracy”, or simply “liberalism”.
In the twentieth century under the stress of crumbling empires, devastating wars, and economic catastrophe some nation-states, especially those in their infancy such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, morphed for a time into fascist freaks of nature, only to be defeated militarily by their more capable adversaries with longer histories of democratic rule.
By the turn of the millennium nationalism seemed to be on the decline with the end of international communism and the dominance of what came to be piously described as a new “rules-based international order”.
The 1990s were the salad days of a triumphant neoliberal order that witnessed the ascent of the influence of the United States as the supreme actor within what was referred to as the new “unipolar” world, which in turn with the end of the Cold War made the United States an unrivalled economic powerhouse with the capacity to enforce free market and free trade policies in every corner of the globe.
For a time the new American hegemony which relied both on military superiority and the “soft power” of democratic ideology, surpassed that of the British empire at the close of the nineteenth century on which “the sun never set”.
The neoliberal dream, according to noted historian Quinn Slobodian, was essentially to quash the kind of toxic nationalism that had fed both fascism and the economic debacle of the Great Depression and to create a global “superstate” that was not political, but economic.
Slobodian writes: “Scaling national government up to the planet, creating a global government, was no solution. The puzzle of the neoliberal century was to find the right institutions to sustain the often strained balance between the economic world and the political world.”
In other words, political sovereignty could no longer be defined by the coercive apparatus of state power but by the ability of unelected financial and business elites to impact government decisions through control of knowledge production and the communications industry as well as direct political contributions to office holders.
Klaus Schwab, one of the more prominent of these neoliberal internationalists, characterized this new kind of invisible and indirect type of governance as the “sovereignty of influence”.
It is safe to say that in the process neoliberal globalism gradually became the catechism of both American and European higher education, easily supplanting the preferred Marxist internationalism that prior to the collapse of Communism had bewitched a small minority of influential academics but never really seeped into the mainstream.
After 1989 the neoliberal ideology itself was able both to co-opt and to absorb the weak viral strains of Marxist “class struggle” and blend them strategically with its globalist and corporatist vision of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic post-political utopia that narrowly segmented humanity into “marginalized” and “dominant” identity groupings, which could then be manipulated through a new kind of “cognitive capitalism”, as the French theorist Bernard Stiegler elegantly called it, that intruded into the cultural and political sphere.
Identity politics was the evolutionary spawn of this project, which began back in the late Vietnam era, and came full-flower with the emergence of “woke” corporations in the previous decade.
I write about this process extensively with a careful analytic eye in my book Neoliberalism and Political Theology: From Kant to Identity Politics.
As Leila Mechoui observes in a recent essay in Compact magazine, however, progressive neoliberal internationalism with its aim of fostering “global citizens” has failed miserably an effective political Weltanschauung. Nationalism, particularly that version of it with a strong populist flavor, is now the prevailing global trend.
Nationalism arose in an age of economic expansion, improved telecommunications, and increasing social and political integration, according to Mechoui, because it offered “a sense of shared identity could extend far beyond people’s immediate surroundings.”
At the same time, it often coagulated into what has come to be known as “ethnonationalism”, or what Mechoui dubs “primordialists”, who claim that national identity goes well back before the creation of nation-states and cannot be separated from archaic tribal formations, racial and religious homogeneity, or common linguistic practices.
That tension, she suggests, has always been the tragic flaw in nationalist ventures from the beginning. With the collapse of neoliberal internationalism, which in truth only offered self-esteem for the world’s “one percent”, the nationalistic trend will inevitably become more intractable and invidious, not to mention violent, as the ghastly wars underway today in Ukraine and Middle East increasingly attest.
The United States, she asserts, with its heritage of pluralistic values and well-established tradition of “civic nationalism” is the only real hope for the future.
But America’s strength is currently its greatest weakness. Civic nationalism is a broad and slippery locution that has historically been applied largely to functional polities.
According to Anna Stilz, civic nationalism “is meant to describe a political identity built around shared citizenship in a liberal democratic state”. Such a view of civic nationalism arose in Europe during the Enlightenment of the 18th century and was the grist for the ideals of both the American and French revolutions.
However, some scholars trace it back to the Renaissance, while others have argued that you can be a “civic nationalist” without believing in liberal democracy.
American civic nationalism has always been closely bound up with what the celebrated American social theorist Robert Bellah termed “civil religion”. The notion of civil religion was first advanced by the Enlightenment political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau in his Social Contract defined civil religion “not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject”.
Bellah, who appropriated this terminology, published a groundbreaking and highly influential, if not controversial, essay in which he claimed that the American idea of democracy itself has from the get-go been both buttressed by, and suffused with, a certain common religious idealism.
It consists, Bellah wrote, in
…a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people. Like all religions, it has suffered various deformations and demonic distortions. At its best, it has neither been so general that it has lacked incisive relevance to the American scene nor so particular that it has placed American society above universal human values.
Throughout his life until his death in 2013 Bellah defended his contention that the American experiment had always been guided by an overarching religious ideal, which was seeded with “biblical archetypes”, even while it remained thoroughly secular.
As an historian and sociologist, he fiercely resisted the common contention that American civic nationalism had nothing to do with religious conviction.
In a volume he co-authored with Phillip Hammond toward the end of his life, Bellah declared:
A republic must attempt to be ethical in a positive sense and to elicit the ethical commitment of its citizens. For this reason it inevitably pushes toward the symbolization of an ultimate order of existence in which republican values and virtues make sense.
Bellah argued that the Jeffersonian phrase “separation of church and state”, which does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, has been overdetermined by secularist ideologues with little appreciation for the depth, richness, and complexity of the American legacy.
“That clause,” Bellah insisted, “has a long history of interpretation…but it certainly does not mean and has never meant the American state has no interest in or concern for religion, or churches either, for that matter, and it certainly does not mean religion and politics have nothing to do with each other.”
In his writings Bellah cited not only the language of the founders of the Republic, but also Abraham Lincoln and modern presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.
In his co-authored volume he insists that American civil religion starts with “the Declaration of Independence,” which “points to the sovereignty of God over the collective political society itself when it refers in its opening lines to ‘the laws of nature and of nature's God’ that stand above and judge the laws of men.”
He adds: “it is significant that the reference to a suprapolitical sovereignty, to a God who stands above the nation and whose ends are standards by which to judge the nation and indeed only in terms of which the nation's existence is justified, becomes a permanent feature of American political life ever after.”
In recent years, nevertheless, both civic nationalism and the civil religion that undergirds it have been under relentless attack by a small but clamorous coterie of sociologists, woke pastors, and their progressive media allies, none of whom who have any serious credentials in history or political science, who have mastered the art of gaining regular media attention by rebranding what used simply to be called the “religious right” as “Christian nationalism”.
The religious right has been around since the 1970s, and provided significant leverage in the election of both Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000, and there is little evidence it has had any more influence in the recent presidential elections than it did a quarter century ago.
However, a combination of the increasingly radicalized Democratic left in American to the personality and popularity of Donald and the solid support of evangelical Christians for his politics, which ironically does not really exceed their backing of Republican candidates for the past four decades, has nurtured a mythology among certain paranoid progressive academics that something evil and nefarious is now afoot.
To talk at minimum in the way Bellah describes civil religion as the spiritual anchor of a civic nationalism is now among these intellectual hacks considered to be a dangerous dance with the devil of “Christian nationalism”. And, besides, all those luminaries of American civic nationalism were just dead white guys anyway who embraced white supremacy, and some even owned slaves.
So what we really have left, if Mechoui is right, not a republic but a cauldron of insatiable ethnic resentments mouthing the identitarian script of “oppressed” and “ oppressors” – a new and vicious, but distinctly pluralist “primordialism” – that keeps boiling over and tears the country apart to the delight of our intersectionalist overlords ensconced in their ivory towers.
Whither nationalism? It’s not going to be pretty.