Like so many words, the term nationalism requires qualification. To the naive, it may signify neither more nor less than a sense of national identity, or resistance to globalization. Yet in truth one hardly need be a nationalist to appreciate America’s cultural heritage, or to reject the open borders schemes of the World Economic Forum. As Patrick Deneen observes in Regime Change: Toward A Postliberal Future, nationalism originally referred to a specific 19th-century revolutionary movement, which marginalized commitments to all associations except for the liberal nation-state.
If today surprisingly few “conservative” Americans cherish their respective roots in a particular county, state, or region, and if even fewer American liberals question the federal government’s authority to shut down churches—well, nationalism is the reason.
A certain proto-nationalism was present almost from the beginning, Deneen notes, as Alexander Hamilton “was explicit in The Federalist Papers about his hopes that people would ultimately transfer their allegiance from their localities and states to the nation.” Yet surveying the history of political and civic loyalties in America, Deneen emphasizes that
the rise of nationalism in the United States was especially pronounced during the Progressive period […] The embrace and rise of nationalism in America was not the project of ‘conservatives,’ but promoted especially by the self-described Progressive liberals. This project was particularly aimed at the weakening of more local and regional forms of identity that had been a hallmark of the American political experience, not uncoincidentally gaining prominence in the decades after the Civil War.
Until the post-Civil War ascendance of nationalism, the expression “the United States” was usually “followed by the grammatically correct plural ‘are,’ not the singular ‘is,’” Deneen notes, and the shift from the United States to an implied Unitary State marked a shift of consciousness. Where patriotism has traditionally referred to an affection for a particular people, land, and culture, nationalism is oriented toward “an increasingly abstract entity of the nation, now thought of as embodying an ‘idea’ or a providential destiny. Allegiance moved from the more concrete to the more theoretical—local to national,” concludes Deneen, even as the abstract nation also “began to occupy the devotional space once held by religion.”
Here Deneen will shock many readers by even calling into question one of the most hallowed of American nationalist rituals. In 1892, Deneen recounts, “the Christian socialist Francis Bellamy published ‘The Pledge of Allegiance,’ with the hope and aim of aligning people’s loyalties and commitments to the nation and away from the parochial identities that had previously defined the identity of the citizens of the United States, and instead inaugurated the new ‘creed’ of a new national church.”
Around the same time, another progressive named Herbert Croly had published The Promise of American Life, extolling therein the prospect of an enlightened American national consciousness to be guided by “the Religion of Humanity.” As it comes complete with its own dogmas and creed, American nationalism rivals the Church in a way that old-fashioned patriotism never could.
Thus, many “conservatives” today are merely recycling the agenda of late 19th-century and early 20th-century liberal progressives, who strove “to move the loyalties and identities of Americans from their local places and people to a more abstract devotion to the nation and its ideals.” Whatever nationalism may mean in a country such as Hungary, in the U.S.—a territory greater than the Roman Empire at its height—nationalism is predestined to produce absurd results.
The bitter punchline is that the very globalism denounced so vitriolically by American nationalists is really the fulfillment and perfection of nationalism:
Because of its abstraction, particularly its detachment from concrete identities in specific locations, the nationalist impulse ultimately required transcending the bonds of the nation. Today’s progressives regard nationalism with horror, not because they have abandoned its logic, but because they have now gravitated to its next logical form: an identification with a globalized liberal humanity. The nation itself is now seen as too particularistic, requiring the same disintegrating logic of yesterday’s nationalism.
All the preceding is based upon just a few pages from a 200+ page book, so this reviewer’s focus upon nationalism might seem odd. Surely Deneen’s call for replacing the current set of disingenuous elites with “a self-conscious aristoi” rooted in and loyal to Flyover Country warrants discussion. As does his point about the sociopolitical importance of shop class and vocational training:
Even a passing acquaintance with the work of electricians, plumbers, farmers, and carpenters could help correct the dominant ethos that all of reality is manipulable and human nature itself is malleable.
Yet this reviewer deems Regime Change important primarily as a corrective to conservative talking-heads and institutions which promote “patriotism”—that is, nationalist devotion to democratic ideology—over and against actual patriotism toward the particular places, peoples, and cultures which compose America.
How many young conservatives can robotically recite talking points from The 1776 Report, while never looking back at their family history or hometown? How many celebrate America’s economic and military triumphs to the point of flatly ignoring Catholic social teachings and just war doctrine?
If the deepest threat to man today is what Deneen calls “a social and technological project that would liberate humans from mere nature”—and it is—then we must concede that the displacement of real, organic roots by an abstract nationalism is very much a part of that project.
Regime Change: Toward A Postliberal Future
Patrick Deneen
Penguin Random House: Sentinel, June 2023
Hardcover, 237 pages
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Where’s my check? is often where allegiance ends up. As long as I get my check I’m not going to question how, when or if the underlying bill is ever paid.
Interesting the shortage of plumbers and electricians and you have to be a millionaire/have capital access to be a conventional farmer.
Thanks Jerry. We certainly need something beyond the “rah-rah the military” and “wave the flag at the Daytona 500” approach of FoxNews to center our political thinking around. But deep things of the heart like true loyalties develop organically over time and, put simply, I fear we do not have the time needed. The attention of hearts and minds have been captured by the 24/7 news cycle and the insidious effects of this media we write on, and I do not see any obvious path forward, only a holding action. But perhaps that is what Christian life has always been like, redeeming the time while the world continues its mad rush towards nothingness.
How many young conservatives can robotically recite talking points from The 1776 Report, while never looking back at their family history or hometown? How many celebrate America’s economic and military triumphs to the point of flatly ignoring Catholic social teachings and just war doctrine?”
*****
Yup. Family history has been a hobby ever since my late Aunt Sadie shared an ancestry tree with me. What originally seems simple often turns out to be much more complicated. Just like most historical narratives do.
I took some visiting family to a local “living history” site over their Easter vacation. A tribal chief shared his “unwoke” take on race, past historical grievances, & what responsibility we take for our own actions. Not our ancestors’. Sometimes we can forget that there are other American perspectives not related to political party or media-driven. And the folks who see the most
clearly can be on the outside looking in. I know the chief’s people have been watching from the very beginning.
What is happening in the U.S. today is that the language and usage of “true nationalism” and “authentic patriotism” has been hijacked and misappropriated by racist white supremacists to hide and launder xenophobia and ethnocentrism. These terms are now taken to mean simply as white power and privilege and the system to perpetuate them.
Barack O,
I think 100 years ago you’d be right but that’s really much more a thing of the past & specifically the eugenics era. We have a much better understanding of DNA science & more & more people identify themselves as “other” or mixed race because that’s what correctly describes most human beings.
It’s always our shared fallen nature that creates problems. Not our differences in complexion or language.
Troll. Don’t feed the troll folks!
Damn, so everything really is always the fault of socialism!
If you say so. But that’s not what the review said, is it?
Back in 1969, the anti-Marxist and anti-totalitarian “conservative” (his term: “counter-revolutionary”), Thomas Molnar, defended BOTH local particularity AND the seemingly progressive “nation.” What in the world was he thinking? Well, of particularity and the world as a whole, both, he had this to say:
“Counter-revolutionaries do not say that the nation is the last form that human communities may take as framework for their existence; the polis, the empire, the feudal system, the medieval free cities are clearly distinguishable from the modern nation or nation-state, and the future may hold in store other, as yet unknown, forms of community. But they hold that the nation is admirably adapted to the modern situation since it is at the POINT OF EQUILLIBRIUM [caps added] of the various lines of force active today, and able to resist internal and external pressures. It is both vast and resistant, says Maurras [organizer and principal philosopher of Action Française, an early 20th-century political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary]; it is the most natural form as the basis of a stable world organization, adds his disciple Salazar [contemporary Portuguese opponent to political parties, and advocate of “God, Fatherland and Family”]” (“The Counter-Revolution,” 1969, p. 95).
A decade later and still over forty years ago—and remarkably applicable to identity politics and to the current version of Synodality—he wrote:
“‘Pluralism’ is often a false label, under which it simply is not true that ‘all opinions have an equal chance of expressing themselves and being heard.’ It can fast degenerate into a vehicle for a particular ideology and can promote its cause through privileged means, until it reaches a virtual monopoly position. To put it bluntly, if, among the ‘competing opinions’ the Church’s does not enjoy certain ‘privileges,’ the result will not be a status of equality for all points of view but the privileged position of an anti-Church opinion. Communities cannot long exist without a central belief…” (“Politics and the State,” 1980, p. 131).
Think especially of the radically secularist der Synodale Weg as it oils its way into Cardinal Hollerich’s October 2023 Synod on Synodality…
“Where patriotism has traditionally referred to an affection for a particular people, land, and culture, nationalism is oriented toward “an increasingly abstract entity of the nation, now thought of as embodying an ‘idea’ or a providential destiny. Allegiance moved from the more concrete to the more theoretical—local to national,” concludes Deneen, even as the abstract nation also “began to occupy the devotional space once held by religion.”
In EWTN’s; Wolf in sheep’s clothing, one can certainly see the Liberal, Progressive, Democrats looking for anything to destroy, both secular and religious, Christendom. Saul Alinski planted the seed of anarchy, which has grown to 800 organizations in the US alone, who are out planning any and all ways to bring down America and the Catholic Church, through intentional anarchy, chaos and destruction.
One can see the Liberal, Progressive, Democrats definitely trying to build a pagan ‘New World Order’, through ‘patriotic’ self righteous ‘devotion’ to any idea that will destroy civil order in America, the Catholic Church, and the world. The goal of the Liberal, Progressive, Democrats, is to rise to world dominant power amidst all the chaos, death and destruction.
“Papal ban of Freemasonry,
Leo XIII “emphasizes that ‘the ultimate and principal aim’ of Masonry ‘was to destroy to its very foundations any civil or religious order established throughout Christendom, and bring about in its place a new order founded on laws drawn out of the entrails of naturalism’.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_ban_of_Freemasonry
EWTN, Wolf in sheep’s clothing
https://youtu.be/ZnKB9NzgD4k
There are multiple allegiances. Patriotism is a form of the virtue of piety. It seeks the good of the entire community (e.g. family, church, city, nation), even, at times, at the expense of some individuals (e.g. dulce et decorum est pro patria mori).
Nationalism is a heresy. Nations (e.g. Russia, China) can to wrong, and those who are members of the nation, must not be complicit (e.g. in agreement) with the same.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the purpose of a state is unity. My understanding is that this is a matter of the virtue of concord. I believe that it also implies or demands least an ideal of religious unity. But the state must favor, but AFAIK not directly support, the true religion as taught by the Catholic Church.
Divide and conquer is a standard tactic of those (i.e. TPTB) seeking to sow discord and strife and thereby weaken unity and action. When people are doctrinally “balkanized” either explicitly through heresy/schism or implicitly by the artificial – and purposeful – construction of “camps” such as liberal, conservative, progressive, left, right, etc, then they don’t work together to challenge TPTB.
They see “the enemy” as some other group. In reality, the real enemies are Satan, sin, and those who are “of the world.”
This doesn’t say that labels are useless, but it does avoid demonization and essentialization. Only those in Hell are beyond redemption, and it is a truth that politics can legitimately cause enemies to temporarily work together.
nationlism is not just one thing, so your comment is not helpful.
Rwanda was not a real nation, the US was, at least until the Progressive Era
It is an Orthodox Jew that best answers your worries, Yoram Hazony, in that it is only the glue of shared belief (eg all mean created equal, endowed by Creator with inalienable rights) that makes a naton out of the many who do not share a geographic or historical or even parental claim on being Americans
No group ever protected rights like a state does.
Thank you for the review. I’d be curious to see what Deneen has to offer for the creation of “a self-conscious aristoi” other than capturing institutions.
Agreed. I think you’ve hit on the giant and obvious flaw in the whole postliberal movement.
American families and Churches are in decline? We must need MORE RULES, MORE BUREAUCRACY, MORE RED TAPE! That will fix them!
I hope that this book is better than Why Liberalism Failed, which was, without a doubt, the worst book I’ve ever read. Does Deneen bother citing things this time or is he content to simply make things up and hope the reader is too uninformed to notice again (his wild claims about Descartes, Locke and Madison being perfect examples)? His recent associations certainly do not encourage confidence!
If this is the kind of content CWR is going to be sending to my inbox, I can’t really see the point in staying subscribed.
You mean a review, written by a Catholic educator, of a book written by a Catholic professor/philosopher who teaches at a Catholic university? That sort of content?
There was nothing Catholic at all about Why Liberalism Failed and I don’t see any evidence that there’s anything particularly Catholic about this book either. Deneen may be confessionally Catholic (and I don’t doubt this!), but from everything I’ve read by him, I don’t see any reason to consider him to be a distinctively Catholic intellectual at all.
Utterly agree.What he claims to be, Robert Reilly is.
Many places with no Constitution or John Locke are victims of Individualism and a gone-crazy freedom to do whatever.
THe views on the Family by the Founders were part of the culture and were not put on paper. Same with abortion and homosexuality.
But exp on Religion, biblical religion and Natural Theology.Get the 3 volumes, 8 yeers research, 2000 pages by Judge Mark T Boonstra on the religious views of all 118 Founders, called ‘In Their Own Words’ When these volumes are known, this debate should die.
Quite a few people don’t care about their hometown history because the sorts of people who do bullied them throughout high school for being “different” so they took the first bus out of town and never looked back. Those people found each other and that how we got West Hollywood and Greenwich Village.