In Defense of a Healthy American Nationalism - Mackubin Owens

Monday, April 11, 2022

Mackubin Owens, MINDESETTER™

America’s liberal elites disdain nationalism. Many of them regard it as a dirty word, a mere sentiment associated with Trump supporters and their ilk whose deplorable slogan is “America first.” There are two main reasons for this. First, liberal elites regard themselves not as citizens of the United States but as “citizens of the world” whose highest loyalty is to a transnational corporatist globalism divorced from patriotism or national greatness. Second, they have come to accept the calumnies that have been leveled against their country for a generation or more: that it is irredeemably racist and fundamentally unjust. 

It is useful to understand what nationalism is. First of all, it is a heterogeneous concept. The term “nation” is derived from natio, a form of the Latin verb, natus est, “to be born.” Implicit in this understanding of a nation is the idea of a “people” related by race or blood. In this sense, the nation is an extension of the family, the clan, or the tribe. Thus, a nation is a natural phenomenon, based on a common conception of the “love of one’s own.”

Nationalism in the modern sense of national political autonomy and self-determination—an “imagined community”—arose in reaction to the universalist-cosmopolitanism of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. The attempt by France to impose its political, legal, and cultural hegemony over Europe created a nationalist backlash on the continent.

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The reaction was strongest in Prussia. While Johann Herder had originated the term “nationalism,” before the rise of Napoleon, the true stimulus for German nationalism was Prussia’s defeat at the hands of Bonaparte at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806. Although the European nationalism of Herder and the nineteenth-century Prussian writers was more or less benign, such “blood and soil” nationalism always has the potential to become racialist and genocidal, as Hitler proved. This explains the reluctance of some to embrace nationalism.

But American nationalism is not based on language, blood or race. On the contrary, American nationalism is civic in nature. It holds that the United States is a nation based on a set of beliefs—a creed—rather than race or blood. That creed is announced in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and that no one has the right to rule another without the latter’s consent. A better term for healthy American nationalism is patriotism.

As noted earlier, the principles underpinning America’s healthy civic nationalism—American patriotism—have been under attack for some time. But ironically, the only basis for criticizing slavery and other American sins are American principles themselves.

Before the founding of the United States, the governing principle of action in both domestic and international affairs was the one attributed by Thucydides to the Athenians in their terms for the defeated Melians: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must."

It is sometimes hard to realize how truly revolutionary America’s founding was. Before 1776, philosophers and theologians had long-debated questions of justice, but in affairs of state, both internationally and domestically, justice was rarely a consideration.

Critics of the United States point to slavery as an illustration of America’s ingrained racism and oppression of others. But by 1776, slavery had been a global reality since the beginning of time. Africans enslaved other Africans and sold millions into the Atlantic slave trade. Where was the justice of the Ashanti of West Africa in subjugating their neighbors and then selling them to European slave traders?

Certainly, the United States has not always lived up to its own principles. Slavery persisted long after the founding of the United States. Even with its abolition, racial injustice continued in the form of Jim Crow laws and other systems of oppression. But the reality is that the best hope of achieving justice, racial or otherwise, is to embrace, not reject, those principles. 

It is ironic that many of the same Americans who dismiss American patriotism have become cheerleaders for Ukrainian nationalism. Americans who would not be caught dead with an image of Old Glory on his or her Facebook page proudly display the image of the Ukrainian flag. But the attachment of American liberal elites to Ukrainian nationalism is apparently greater than that of the Ukrainians themselves. Approximately two million Ukraines left the country over the past two decades -- a net loss in population of about two million prior to the war.

Americans should embrace a healthy nationalism—patriotism—based on America’s founding principles. Such an embrace is the surest path to a just America.

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