The Case for Nationalism

How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free

Rich Lowry

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780062839640
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062839671
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is one of our most honored clichés that America is an idea and not a nation. This is false. America is indisputably a nation, and one that desperately needs to protect its interests, its borders, and its identity.

The Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump swept nationalism to the forefront of the political debate. This is a good thing. Nationalism is usually assumed to be a dirty word, but it is a foundation of democratic self-government and of international peace.

National Review editor Rich Lowry refutes critics on left and the right, reclaiming the term "nationalism" from those who equate it with racism, militarism and fascism. He explains how nationalism is an American tradition, a thread that runs through such diverse leaders as Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.

In The Case for Nationalism, Lowry explains how nationalism was central to the American Project. It fueled the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution. It preserved the country during the Civil War. It led to the expansion of the American nation's territory and power, and eventually to our invaluable contribution to creating an international system of self-governing nations.

It's time to recover a healthy American nationalism, and especially a cultural nationalism that insists on the assimilation of immigrants and that protects our history, civic rituals and traditions, which are under constant threat. At a time in which our nation is plagued by self-doubt and self-criticism, The Case for Nationalism offers a path for America to regain its national self-confidence and achieve continued greatness.

Chapter 1
America the Nation

Prior to the Civil War, a sea captain from Massachusetts named William Driver moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he proudly flew the Stars and Stripes from his house every holiday.1

His mother, with the help of a group of young women, sewed the flag for him in 1824, when he took command of his own ship as a twenty-one-year-old. The legend has it that Driver declared when first raising the seventeen-by-ten-foot banner up his mast, “My ship, my country, and my flag, Old Glory.”

This is probably too pat to be true. But somewhere along the line of his extensive travels and adventures, including in the Far East (he knew a little Fijian), the flag earned its famous nickname. “It has ever been my staunch companion and protection,” Driver wrote. “Savages and heathens, lowly and oppressed, hailed and welcomed it at the far end of the wide world. Then, why should it not be called Old Glory?”

We know of the affectionate nickname only because of what happened during the Civil War. Driver’s enthusiastic display of the flag drew unwelcome attention after Tennessee seceded from the Union. Local Confederates wanted to seize it, but Driver confronted the group who came knocking. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you are looking for stolen property in my house, produce your search-warrant.” He rebuffed a subsequent armed party. He then thought it prudent to hide the flag away, and it was sewn into a coverlet.

In February 1862, Union forces took Nashville. Driver sought out the local commander, General William “Bull” Nelson, at the capitol. An adjunct of Nelson, Horace Fisher, recalled later: “Capt. Driver—an honest-looking, blunt-speaking man, was evidently a character; he carried on his arm a calico-covered bedquilt; and, when satisfied that General Nelson was the officer in command, he pulled out his jack-knife and began to rip open the bedquilt without another word. We were puzzled to think what his conduct meant.” Driver produced the banner, according to Fisher’s account, “which he handed to Gen. Nelson, saying, ‘This is the flag I hope to see hoisted on that flagstaff in place of the [damned] Confederate flag set there by that [damned] rebel governor, Isham G. Harris. I have had hard work to save it; my house has been searched for it more than once.’ He spoke triumphantly, with tears in his eyes.”2

It was run up the flagpole, Fisher writes, “when all heads were uncovered and the troops presented arms.”3 Another report says the raising of the flag occasioned “frantic cheering and uproarious demonstrations by soldiers.”4 The 6th Ohio Infantry, which had led the Union troops into Nashville, began to refer to itself as “Old Glory,” and as the legend of Driver’s flag spread, so did its nickname. A monument at his gravesite is inscribed, “his ship, his country, and his flag, old glory.”

Why does our flag elicit such strong feelings, whether at epic events such as its raising on Iwo Jima or atop the pile of the World Trade Center after September 11, 2001, or more mundane incidents, say, Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday snatching the flag from protestors about to burn it in the outfield in 1976 or Weather Channel meteorologist Paul Goodloe picking up a battered flag from amid the debris of Hurricane Harvey and respectfully folding it away?

America Is a Nation, Not an Idea

The sentiment around the flag speaks to a loyalty to nation that is deep, abiding, and emotional. Critics might describe this feeling as “atavistic.” The better word is human. Americans aren’t immune to the same natural devotion to their home and country that has animated people since time immemorial, nor should anyone expect them to be.

If anything, we feel this commitment more intensely. Consider the flag. We have long been one of the most flag-soaked societies in the world: we fly our flag more than any other country; our national anthem is about the flag; and we, of course, pledge allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands.” Flag Day has been celebrated since 1877 and became an official holiday in 1916.5 We have a flag code with quasi-religious overtones. We adopted these forms of veneration before any other country.6

Nonetheless, America is a nation that has trouble accepting that fact. It is often said that America is “an idea,” or, as the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”7

This is one of our most honored national clichés. The great twentieth-century journalist Theodore H. White wrote, “Americans are not a people like the French, Germans, or Japanese, whose genes have been mixing with kindred genes for thousands of years. Americans are held together only by ideas.”8 The political commentator Cokie Roberts maintains, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation—no common ethnicity, history, religion, or even language—except the Constitution and the institutions it created.”9 South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham insisted during a heated debate over immigration, “America is an idea,” and Joe Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign by averring the same. The columnist Mike Barnicle goes so far as to say that America is “not a democracy, it’s not a republic before it is an idea.”

Almost all of this is simply wrong as a factual and historical matter. America is a nation, whose sovereignty and borders are dear to it, whose history and culture are an indispensable glue, whose interests guide her actions (or should). What makes us different from other nations isn’t the fact that we have national ideals—so do France, England, and Russia, China, Japan, and India. Nor that we consider ourselves distinctive or chosen and honor our Founders. These, too, are fairly common national characteristics.

What makes us different is that our ideas are true. That our claim to chosenness has been better demonstrated, by our essential goodness and power, than that of any other country. That our Founders aren’t mythical figures—we don’t have to strain to venerate chieftains who a couple of millennia ago fought the Romans (Hermann the Cheruscan for the Germans, Vercingetorix for the French) because we have real giants whose heroism and wisdom are extensively on the historical record.10 But of course I’d say all these things: I’m an American nationalist.

Nationalism Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word

Of course, the term is widely considered a dirty word. Nationalism has fierce critics on both the Right and the Left, making it a true trans-ideological bogeyman.

Conservatives such as Jonah Goldberg see nationalism as dangerous and at odds with both American exceptionalism and a patriotism that reflects the ideals of the American founding. Goldberg writes that nationalism is a form of tribalism that undermines important attributes of a free society, “from the rule of law to the right to dissent to the sovereignty of the individual.”11

Progressives such as Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times and the aforementioned Adam Serwer of The Atlantic write as if nationalism is indistinguishable from “white nationalism” and as such is hideously racist and exclusionary.

Libertarians such as Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor, consider nationalism a horror show. “I believe,” he writes, “that nationalism is second only to communism as the greatest evil of modern politics.” He alleges that “it is a leading cause of mass murder,” and even short of that, “many non–mass murdering nationalist regimes still use nationalism as a justification for protectionism, discrimination against minority groups, suppression of dissent, and the like.”12

The democratic socialist Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post denies our nationhood itself. “America simply isn’t a nation-state,” she asserts. “Nations are made up of people who claim to share certain unchosen characteristics: language, ethnicity, historic religion, mystical destiny. In America, not only is it the factual case that we do not share such things, but it’s rather the point of our existence as a country—or was, once. Liberal democracies prize freedom and self-determination, so it follows that Americans are made by beliefs and choices, not by blood and tongue. American nationalism can shatter lives and breed violence, but it won’t ever amount to the creation of an American nation. Such a thing does not exist.”13

Or as Max Fisher, a co-author of an explainer column at the New York Times, puts it more broadly, “If you think about it, nationality is weird. The idea that you identify with millions of strangers just based on borders. That’s because national identity is made up.”14 It is, per Fisher, “the myth that built the modern world, but it also primes us for dictatorship, racism, genocide.”

This is all misbegotten. Nationalism should rightly be infused with a country’s ideals and its sense of mission; it should be a unifying force hostile to racism and all invidious distinctions that play into sub-national loyalties and identity politics; it should be respectful of the prerogatives of other nations, even as it is jealous of its own. And the fact is that nationalism is an age-old phenomenon that is natural and incredibly widespread.

Nationalism Is Often Wrongly Defined and Understood

First...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Section I:: In Defense of the Nation
• Introduction: What Trump Realized
• Chapter 1: America the Nation
• Chapter 2: Love, Not Hate
• Chapter 3: The Smear Against Nationalism
• Section II: The Roots of the American Nation
• Chapter 4: The Exemplar of Ancient Israel
• Chapter 5: Our English Forerunner
• Chapter 6: A Nation of Settlers
• Section III: The American National Triumph
• Chapter 7: Our Nationalist Revolution
• Chapter 8: A Continental Nation
• Chapter 9: The Triumph of the Twentieth Century
• Section IV: The Threat to the Nation
• Chapter 10: The Treason of the Elites
• Chapter 11: One Nation, One People
• Chapter 12: The Importance of Cultural Nationalism
• Epilogue: The Anti-Nationalist Temptation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher