Category: Nationalist Theory

Domestic Policy, General, Nationalist Theory, Politics

The Crisis of the American Spirit – The Rise of Identity Politics

Bob Claude |

“We have no room in any healthy American community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote, and it is contemptible demagogy to put plans into any party platform with the purpose of catching such a vote. We have no room for any people who do not act and vote simply as Americans, and nothing else. Moreover, we have as little use for people who carry religious prejudices into our politics as for those who carry prejudices of caste or nationality.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “True Americanism”, The Forum Magazine, April 1894

This is the fifth article in my series “The Crisis of the American Spirit”. Please click on the “Politics – Nationalist Theory” tab in menu above to read the previous four, filed in reverse chronological order.

When President Bill Clinton declared “The era of big government is over”, he threw the modern-day Democratic Party into one of the greatest ideological crises in it’s history. Thanks to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, it had abandoned the Jefferson-Jackson philosophy of states rights and small government in favor of Theodore Roosevelt’s call for a strong national government dedicated to effective regulation.  Now, one of its own said it had to find a new ideological anchor. It found it a new form of political division that rejected Theodore Roosevelt’s call to unity above and, instead, echoed its old platform – identity politics.  

The need to reconcile American diversity was recognized early in our nation’s history. The first major identity groups were sectional or state based.  People identified as New Yorkers or Virginians and the Constitution was crafted to recognize the validity of those identities and preserve them while trying to build a cohesive national government at the same time.  The inevitable tension between these two goals led to sectional based political clashes between West and East and eventually North and South.  Back then, the Democratic Party championed state’s rights against those who favored a strong federal government. Their approach dominated American public policy for most of the first 70 years of our history.

Meanwhile, the seeds of our current identity group politics were being sown by our failure to address the stain of black slavery.  Attempts to reconcile the moral contradiction of slavery within the state’s rights framework failed miserably.  Even the Southern slave states eventually rejected this approach and imposed their own version of a national solution for slavery in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The backlash against it led to the founding of the Republicans, which became the new party advocating a strong national government. The victory of the North in the bloody Civil War that followed enshrined the dominance of the national government. People no longer said “The United States are”. They said “ The United States is”.

Despite it’s new power, the national government was unable to prevent the re-subjugation of black Americans, mainly because it remained a federalist system dependent on at least state acquiescence to national policies.  The 1960’s civil rights movement offered a glimmer of hope for real racial socioeconomic integration. However, as I mentioned earlier in this series, the blue collar jobs that enabled the early immigrants to achieve the American Dream moved overseas and the education system was allowed to deteriorate, thus making it difficult to for blacks to compete in the new economy.

Black Americans’ isolation eventually forced them into a form of nationalism, which became their main source of identity. Meanwhile, the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of the women’s liberation, gay rights and disability rights movements. They also emphasized the importance of group identity and solidarity, each believing they were special victims suffering unique discrimination and oppression despite laws designed to prevent discrimination and integrate them into broader American society. Instead, these groups focused on their different American histories and pinned their primary loyalty to their particular group rather than their country, which they believed was an enemy.

Sadly, instead of challenging this mindset, the Republican Party of Donald Trump doubled down on it by fostering a new identity group.  The MAGA ideology claims to preserve America, but in fact teaches its adherents to think of themselves as victims and members of a white Christian subgroup who are under attack by other groups.  This kind of victimhood is fundamentally unAmerican whether it occurs on the left or right and Theodore Roosevelt would have condemned it as such.

Nevertheless, our current political class stokes these identity group divisions for their own political benefit. They do so by engaging in rhetoric that inflames a group’s grievances and feelings of victimhood without developing a sustainable solution. They then try to assemble winning coalitions by piling up monolithic voting groups like building blocks. This cynical strategy conveniently masks the fact that many of those group’s grievances stem from the same elitist exploitation and that, in the end, each group has more in common than they think.

A bridge leader like TR would have recognized the danger this kind of politics posed to American strength.  He would have reminded Americans of Lincoln’s maxim that “A house divided against itself cannot stand” and urged all groups toward tolerance of their differences.  He would have called all Americans to unify to address inequalities, while reminding blacks, gay and other minorities that their progress to this point came because they were Americans and benefited from our shared beliefs in justice and equality. 

Thankfully, voters have started to wise up to this cynical manipulation.  The overwhelming support Democrats enjoyed among blacks and working-class voters has suffered significant inroads from Republicans while higher income voters are increasingly Democratic. Despite the best efforts of the political class, Americans are starting to think for themselves and explore new, less divisive and more relevant political groupings.

Usually, such breakdowns of historic voting blocs herald a major realignment of American politics toward a more relevant ideological debate. If this new politics is to succeed, it must challenge the forces that have weakened the American community spirit and unify us to face the realistic limits of today’s multipolar world.  It starts with presenting the American people with clear and relevant choices, hopefully through a bridge leader like TR. My next series of articles will set forth why these new choices will be between the ideologies of globalism and American nationalism. 

Domestic Policy, General, Nationalist Theory, Politics

The Crisis of the American Spirit – The Death of Community Spirit

Bob Claude |

By 1950, America was astride the world in political and economic influence and unified at home behind a strong federal government that led the fight against fascism and communism. The political culture arising from World War II and the beginning of the Cold War rested on a pride in American values and a willingness to sacrifice for the country in the form of the military draft and the continuation of high wartime tax rates. This commitment to a nationalist pride and a strong federal government in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt continued past his cousin Franklin’s presidency and into the Eisenhower administration.

However, there was a dark side to this collective unity. This was the era of the organization man, who subjugated his own dreams to the goals of a faceless corporate machine. Meanwhile, a people whose presence in America predated many more recent immigrants by centuries were still mired in legal and economic second-class citizenship. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked the beginning of a long struggle to end this discrimination. Legal segregation would not end until the end of the 1960s. Economic integration proved to be much more difficult and practically required a collective societal commitment to rival that of World War II.  However, at a time when a national call to a moral equivalent of war necessary, an unrelated movement arose that sapped our ability to achieve such unity.

Ayn Rand and the Rise of Objectivism

In 1957, a Russian emigre to the United States named Ayn Rand published the book “Atlas Shrugged”, which tells the story of a brilliant engineer forced to give up his labor and genius for society and the state. In the chapter “This is John Galt”, Rand set forth the premises of her philosophy of Objectivism, which posited a radical form of libertarian individualism. To Rand, man’s highest responsibility was to think for himself and the achievement his own happiness was his highest moral purpose.  He owed no moral obligation to others or to society. and existed for his own sake. The only purpose of government was to protect these rights from infringement by physical force, the worst form of which was governmental force and regulation. In the Objectivist world, the thinker, inventor and industrialist was the highest form of being. Those who were less intelligent or simply performed labor for others were considered inferior.  With barely veiled contempt, Rand said,” The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains”.  

Objectivism stood in sharp contrast to the sense of national sacrifice and unity necessary to achieve the victory of World War II.  It heralded the rise of the celebrity athlete and CEO, whose right to market power and exorbitant compensation would now be considered almost sacred. Moreover, it supported the idea that big business and monopolies were a positive good no matter what the secondary effects on family life or socioeconomic stability were. There was no question that the deadening sameness and self-satisfaction of post-war America needed to be challenged, but not by the rejection of any obligation to the broader society.

William F. Buckley and Conservative Economics

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, a wealthy intellectual named William F. Buckley, Jr., was developing a macro version of the new libertarianism for application to broader public policy issues. While Rand and Buckley knew of each other, Rand’s strident atheism clashed with Buckley’s devout Catholicism. Buckley’s conservatism was motivated mainly by a traditionalism that, as he wrote in the premiere edition of his magazine The National Review, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.”  Like Rand, he promoted an economic libertarianism that opposed government social programs and business regulation while sharing Rand’s strong anti-Communism.  While Buckley opposed racial segregation, he was a supporter of Sen. Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, whose libertarianism was highjacked by Southern segregationists and would eventually overcome the federal nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt in the Republican Party. 

The Divisive Effects

The new libertarianism of Rand and Buckley would be used to justify extremes they would condemn, such as the hippie philosophy of “If it feels good, do it” and the opposition to desegregation based on states rights.  However, the Pandora’s box had been opened, and the damage was done to the American community spirit and its ability to rise to the heroic mood necessary to solve national challenges. Americans turned inward to their own interests – the “bowling alone” society. The integration of African -Americans slowed to a crawl as the manufacturing jobs that had propelled white immigrants to success disappeared.  It became almost impossible to focus national attention on the need to re-tool education and manufacturing to meet the European and Asian competition. Instead, a new belief in the wisdom of free trade made the resulting socioeconomic dislocation appear inevitable and even desirable. While the technology and information revolutions revived American opportunity and dominance for several decades, intellectual property proved to be hard to protect from theft by other countries.   The ultimate expression of this “get rich quick” economic libertarianism was the decision to admit China to the World Trade Organization despite its mercantilist practices.  American companies flocked there to take advantage of cheap labor, which further eviscerated American manufacturing. At the same time, it handed over much of American intellectual property to Chinese control simply for the short-term profit opportunities.

In the end, the exaltation of individual rights and denigration of community made it more difficult to rally the nation to sacrifice even in the face of threats like the COVID pandemic. American society atomized into internally isolated individuals encouraged to compete for personal advantage rather than cooperate to overcome adversity.  The resulting division made it difficult to confront the rising nationalist unity in Russia, China and much of the Global South.  Then, instead of defending American nationalist unity and community spirit, progressives chose to make the division worse by encouraging a series of distinct group unities transcending borders, and then pitting them against their fellow Americans.

Next – The Rise of Identity Politics

Domestic Policy, General, Nationalist Theory, Politics

The Crisis of the American Spirit – The Awareness of Different Histories

Bob Claude |

In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary every-day life which counts most; nor yet that seasons come when ordinary qualities count for but little in the face of great contending forces of good and evil, the outcome of whose strife determines whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the morning or in the gloom of spiritual death.

Theodore Roosevelt, Speech to the 1912 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

During the 1980s, a Texas history professor working in the UK encountered an African-American serviceman on the street seeking directions to a local English pub.  He walked him to the local watering hole and ended up talking with him for quite a while before they parted ways. He later realized that such camaraderie would have been much less likely if the same circumstances occurred back in the States. Nevertheless, he began to wonder what made these two Americans feel comfortable with each other despite their different ethnicity and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Thus begins the book “Americans” by Professor Edward Countryman, which explores what truly makes the American experience exceptional. He first recognized that different American races and genders have had different histories within the broader sweep of the nation’s past.  At the same time, they also shared common challenges and responded to them in uniquely American ways.

For most of our history, these differences and even the basics of our history, were relatively unimportant to the average American.  When Henry Ford said, “History is bunk”, he expressed, however crudely, the attitude of most Americans that believed our history was in the future, not the past.  We were still such a young country and so focusing on our past appeared useless. This attitude formed the basis of the concept of the American Dream and allowed the nation to absorb a variety of nationalities, though at the cost of ignoring the fate of African-Americans, Native Americans and women in that same history.

It all changed in the middle of the twentieth century, when the civil rights and feminist movements forced these different American histories to the attention of the rest of nation. Suddenly, America had a history relevant to today’s issues and thus worth studying and debating in the public realm. Sadly, the debate has focused on those differences and deepened the divide among Americans.

It did not have to be this way.  Prof. Countryman’s book recognized and recounted those differences but spends most of its energy finding the unique experiences and attributes that make those groups American. It begins with the most basic experience – survival. While colonial records are incomplete, those we have suggest that whites, African Americans and Native Americans died at roughly the same rate in early American history. They may have died from different diseases, but they all had the experience of trying to cheat death in a new and hostile environment. He moves on to cover how African American freedmen acquired the same entrepreneurial spirit as whites.  He recounts the history of Cherokee resistance to the forced relocation of the Trail of Tears by remembering they used a uniquely American tool as part of their resistance; namely, they filed a lawsuit, Cherokee Nation vs. State of Georgia.  While they lost at the Supreme Court, the resort to the courts to invoke a right potentially found in the Constitution was a response that could only occur in the America of that time.

Instead of highlighting the common experiences of Americans, our media and government leaders have concentrated on the differences our history created and thus courted the same civil divisions that have led other nations down the path of ethnic and sectarian civil war.  This has led to a war of histories as approaches like critical race theory clash with expurgated narratives that ignore the fact of those differences.   A true American bridge leader like Theodore Roosevelt who appreciated the importance of history and was well versed in it would recognize the dangers posed by this debate and forcefully and eloquently called Americans to see their common values and experiences as the solution, not the problem, to resolving past and current injustices.  

Sadly, our current political culture stokes division rather than national unity. The reason lies in two ideologies that rose to dominate our national political culture during the tumult of the middle to late twentieth century.

Next – The Decline of Community Spirit