Mendenhall - The United States Is Not a Nation: The Problem with "National Conservatism"

[Superfluous Man]

Mendenhall - The United States Is Not a Nation: The Problem with "National Conservatism"

Earlier this month, prominent names in the conservative movement gathered in Washington, DC, for a conference on “National Conservatism.” Speakers included such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, John Bolton, Michael Anton, Rich Lowry, Yuval Levin, and Josh Hawley. Representing the academy were F.H. Buckley, Charles Kesler, Amy Wax, and Patrick Deneen. Other conservative writers and thinkers participated in panels. The two figures most associated with national conservatism — Yoram Hazony and R.R. Reno — spoke during the opening plenary.

What is this national conservatism all about?

The succinct answer is the marriage of nationalism to conservatism. The conference organizers defined nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” They presented national conservatism as “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to theories grounded in race.” Their stated aim was “to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.”

Against the State: An ...
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
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Sounds interesting. However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States.

The Difference Between a Country and a Nation

Why? Because the United States is not, and has never been, a nation. The founding generation referred to the United States as a plural noun (i.e., “these United States”) because several sovereigns fell under that designation. St. George Tucker called the United States a “federal compact” consisting of “several sovereign and independent states.” If his view seems unrecognizable today, it is because nationalism within the United States is dying or dead—and the United States killed it.

The United States of America in the singular is a country, not a nation. It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history. A country, by contrast, involves political arrangements and governmental territories and boundaries.

From its inception, the United States has been characterized by faction and sectionalism, cultural clashes, and competing narratives — between Indian tribes in what is now Florida and California, Wyoming and Maine, Georgia and Michigan; between the British and French and Spanish and Dutch; between Protestants and Catholics and English Dissenters and nonconformists and splintering denominations; between the Calvinism of Cotton Mather and the Enlightenment rationalism that influenced Franklin and Jefferson. The United States has experienced, as well, numerous separatist movements, including, most notably, the secession of the states that made up the Confederate States of America.

The United States is not a nation.

A nation consists of a homogenous culture of which its like-minded inhabitants are acutely aware. By contrast, the United States of America is, and has always been, culturally heterogeneous, consisting of a variety of cultures and traditions.

While the Puritans of New England developed witch anxieties, a planter gentry established itself in Virginia. While slavery spread through the South, American Quakers — banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony — preached abolition and pacifism in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, industry sprung up in Philadelphia and Boston. Around 60,000 loyalists left the United States at the close of the American Revolution.1 In many respects, the American Revolution was the civil war before the Civil War.

While William Gilmore Simms authored novels and disquisitions regarding Southern themes and settings, grappling with the meaning of the emergent frontier in the West, New England was characterized by Romanticism and transcendentalism, by authors like Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville, and Hawthorne. While Walt Whitman was singing America in all its multiplicities, María Ruiz de Burton was penning fiction that reflected her Mexican background and perspective. Decades later, Langston Hughes would write that he, too, sang America.

What of the Samoans in Hawaii, the Cuban refugees in Florida, the descendants of black slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, the Issei and Nesi and Sansei, the Creole in New Orleans, the Orthodox Jewish communities, the Gullah in the coastal plains and Carolina Low country, the Athabaskans of Alaska, the Amish, the Puerto Ricans, the immigrants from Columbia and Peru and Guatemala and Honduras and Panama and Nicaragua? Do they have a common heritage?

Americans United by Ideology, Not Nationhood

The notion of conservative nationalists that libertarianism has dominated the Republican Party is odd in light of that party’s marginalization of Ron Paul, the foreign wars orchestrated by Republicans, and the steady growth of the federal government under Republican leadership. Conservative nationalists project a caricature of libertarians that, back in 1979, Murray Rothbard thoroughly refuted (audio here, text here ). The libertarianism of Rothbard is compatible with nationalism, and might even be a necessary condition for nationalism. Conservative nationalists, moreover, seek to tie their program to Russell Kirk, who, in fact, warned against “the excesses of fanatical nationalism.”

Conservative nationalism is misguided, predicated on a fallacy, namely that the United States is a nation.

But the United States is not a nation.
If the people of the United States are united at all, it is by a system of government, the Constitution, republicanism, and the concepts of liberty, checks and balances, separation of powers, and rule of law. In other words, the United States is a country whose people are connected, if at all, by liberalism. The history of the United States has been the obliteration of nationalism, not the embrace of it.

National Conservatives Are Celebrating Bigness and Homogeneity Rather than True Nationhood.

Given the emphasis on sovereignty, self-governance, and self-determination that characterize nationalist movements and rhetoric, you would expect among national conservatives searing arguments for secession, perhaps for an independent Southern nation, the breaking up of California, or the independence of Texas or Vermont. Instead, the national conservatives celebrate bigness and greatness, thereby undercutting group associations and native identities based on shared cultures, customs, practices, languages, religious beliefs, and history — phenomena which exist in distinct local communities throughout the United States.

The United States of America — the country in the singular — is too big, the scope and scale of its government too large, to be the object of true nationalism. The people of the United States are not united by a common descent, ethnic solidarity, or uniform values. The United States is not a “nation of immigrants,” “one nation under God,” “the first new nation,” or an “exceptional nation.” It’s not even a nation. National conservatives overlook or ignore that reality to their peril. The national conservatism they envision for the United States can lead only to the suppression of actual nationalism.

The United States is not a nation. Trying to make it so will stamp out any remaining nationalism in the United States.

—

1.Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles (Random House, 2011), p. 6.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08...ation-the-problem-with-national-conservatism/

 

[Anti Federalist]

Which is why separation is a necessity, because we are no longer allowed to be those separate and competing cultures.

If the people of the United States are united at all, it is by a system of government, the Constitution, republicanism, and the concepts of liberty, checks and balances, separation of powers, and rule of law

This is demonstrably no longer the case.

Calvin Coolidge signed the most restrictive immigration controls ever seen, in 1924, in an effort to staunch that trend of Balkanization and dissolution.

For 60 years it worked well, and the nation changed the course of human history, from beating back fascism and Japanese imperialism, to stepping in the rebuild the world afterwards to going to moon.

In 1965 that was all thrown away.

Now we are back on the road to dissolution, which must happen at this point, since otherwise we will be at each throats before much longer.

 

[Swordsmyth]

America WAS a nation, almost all nations started out as a mixture of different peoples who eventually merged and we were on our way there.
Culture is what is important and we DID have one, the fact that there was regional variation doesn't change that, the biology will take care of itself.
The only way to become a nation is to separate from other people and limit how many outsiders can join you, that is what we must do.

 

[Superfluous Man]

For 60 years it worked well, and the nation changed the course of human history, from beating back fascism and Japanese imperialism, to stepping in the rebuild the world afterwards to going to moon.

You're using those as examples of good things?

 

[Swordsmyth]

You're using those as examples of good things?

It beats Mao's record, or Chavez's, or Trannies grooming children in libraries.
I could go on and on.
The way towards something better is NOT letting in unlimited communists and barbarians.

 

[familydog]

"The United States is not a nation."

I whole-heartily agree. In fact, it was never was a nation. Anyone that reads David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed can see that there were four distinct nations who settled the colonies. No one who studied pre-1830 Virginia and colonial/Antebellum New England would dare say they were both part of the same nation.

Benjamin Franklin recognized as much when he proposed the Albany Plan of Union in 1754. Each colony was suspicious and rivalrous towards one another, so he crafted a plan for a centralized government. The plan was soundly rejected. These are not the actions of one nation.

The American experiment is the story of a confederation that was destroyed by cultural imperialism.

 

[familydog]

In 1965 that was all thrown away.

Two specific non-Anglo immigrant groups spent decades propagandizing heritage Americans in order to make this happen. Americans in 1787 were generally suspicious of any immigrants outside of the Anglo-Saxon world. The notable exception being Germans in Pennsylvania. Were our founders right to be suspicious? I think someone could make that case.

 

[r3volution 3.0]

However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States... It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history.

It's true that the whole US population doesn't constitute a nation in the ordinary sense of the word, but that doesn't really matter. The group in question doesn't have to be the whole population; it can be, for instance, a large minority of the white population who consider themselves "people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history." They can and have adopted nationalism with what they consider "true Americans" as the national group. And it doesn't particularly matter whether this nationalism is expressed in overtly racial terms (it usually isn't) or in terms of culture/origin (as it usually is); it's functionally the same kind of ideology as the nationalism that we see among more homogeneous populations.

The notion of conservative nationalists that libertarianism has dominated the Republican Party is odd in light of that party’s marginalization of Ron Paul, the foreign wars orchestrated by Republicans, and the steady growth of the federal government under Republican leadership.

Indeed

Conservative nationalists project a caricature of libertarians that, back in 1979, Murray Rothbard thoroughly refuted (audio here, text here ). The libertarianism of Rothbard is compatible with nationalism, and might even be a necessary condition for nationalism.

It isn't, and claims to the contrary are one the reasons for the emergence of "national conservatism" in the first place.

Libertarian apologias for nationalism have helped fill the ranks of "national conservatism" and given it legitimacy.

The United States is not a nation. Trying to make it so will stamp out any remaining nationalism in the United States.

As if that's the problem!

 

[PAF]

The United States Is Not a Nation: The Problem with "National Conservatism"




Earlier this month, prominent names in the conservative movement gathered in Washington, DC, for a conference on “National Conservatism.” Speakers included such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, John Bolton, Michael Anton, Rich Lowry, Yuval Levin, and Josh Hawley. Representing the academy were F.H. Buckley, Charles Kesler, Amy Wax, and Patrick Deneen. Other conservative writers and thinkers participated in panels. The two figures most associated with national conservatism — Yoram Hazony and R.R. Reno — spoke during the opening plenary.

What is this national conservatism all about?

The succinct answer is the marriage of nationalism to conservatism. The conference organizers defined nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations.” They presented national conservatism as “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to theories grounded in race.” Their stated aim was “to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.”

Sounds interesting. However, neither national conservatism nor nationalism — whatever the distinctions between them — can take hold in the United States.


The Difference Between a Country and a Nation


Why? Because the United States is not, and has never been, a nation. The founding generation referred to the United States as a plural noun (i.e., “these United States”) because several sovereigns fell under that designation. St. George Tucker called the United States a “federal compact” consisting of “several sovereign and independent states.” If his view seems unrecognizable today, it is because nationalism within the United States is dying or dead—and the United States killed it.

The United States of America in the singular is a country, not a nation. It contains nations within it, but does not itself constitute a nation. Nations involve solidarity among people who share a common culture, language, customs, mores, ethnicity, and history. A country, by contrast, involves political arrangements and governmental territories and boundaries.

From its inception, the United States has been characterized by faction and sectionalism, cultural clashes, and competing narratives — between Indian tribes in what is now Florida and California, Wyoming and Maine, Georgia and Michigan; between the British and French and Spanish and Dutch; between Protestants and Catholics and English Dissenters and nonconformists and splintering denominations; between the Calvinism of Cotton Mather and the Enlightenment rationalism that influenced Franklin and Jefferson. The United States has experienced, as well, numerous separatist movements, including, most notably, the secession of the states that made up the Confederate States of America.

The United States is not a nation.

A nation consists of a homogenous culture of which its like-minded inhabitants are acutely aware. By contrast, the United States of America is, and has always been, culturally heterogeneous, consisting of a variety of cultures and traditions.

While the Puritans of New England developed witch anxieties, a planter gentry established itself in Virginia. While slavery spread through the South, American Quakers — banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony — preached abolition and pacifism in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, industry sprung up in Philadelphia and Boston. Around 60,000 loyalists left the United States at the close of the American Revolution.1 In many respects, the American Revolution was the civil war before the Civil War.

While William Gilmore Simms authored novels and disquisitions regarding Southern themes and settings, grappling with the meaning of the emergent frontier in the West, New England was characterized by Romanticism and transcendentalism, by authors like Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville, and Hawthorne. While Walt Whitman was singing America in all its multiplicities, María Ruiz de Burton was penning fiction that reflected her Mexican background and perspective. Decades later, Langston Hughes would write that he, too, sang America.

What of the Samoans in Hawaii, the Cuban refugees in Florida, the descendants of black slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, the Issei and Nesi and Sansei, the Creole in New Orleans, the Orthodox Jewish communities, the Gullah in the coastal plains and Carolina Low country, the Athabaskans of Alaska, the Amish, the Puerto Ricans, the immigrants from Columbia and Peru and Guatemala and Honduras and Panama and Nicaragua? Do they have a common heritage?


Americans United by Ideology, Not Nationhood


The notion of conservative nationalists that libertarianism has dominated the Republican Party is odd in light of that party’s marginalization of Ron Paul, the foreign wars orchestrated by Republicans, and the steady growth of the federal government under Republican leadership. Conservative nationalists project a caricature of libertarians that, back in 1979, Murray Rothbard thoroughly refuted (audio here, text here ). The libertarianism of Rothbard is compatible with nationalism, and might even be a necessary condition for nationalism. Conservative nationalists, moreover, seek to tie their program to Russell Kirk, who, in fact, warned against “the excesses of fanatical nationalism.”

Conservative nationalism is misguided, predicated on a fallacy, namely that the United States is a nation.

But the United States is not a nation.

If the people of the United States are united at all, it is by a system of government, the Constitution, republicanism, and the concepts of liberty, checks and balances, separation of powers, and rule of law. In other words, the United States is a country whose people are connected, if at all, by liberalism. The history of the United States has been the obliteration of nationalism, not the embrace of it.


National Conservatives Are Celebrating Bigness and Homogeneity Rather than True Nationhood


Given the emphasis on sovereignty, self-governance, and self-determination that characterize nationalist movements and rhetoric, you would expect among national conservatives searing arguments for secession, perhaps for an independent Southern nation, the breaking up of California, or the independence of Texas or Vermont. Instead, the national conservatives celebrate bigness and greatness, thereby undercutting group associations and native identities based on shared cultures, customs, practices, languages, religious beliefs, and history — phenomena which exist in distinct local communities throughout the United States.

The United States of America — the country in the singular — is too big, the scope and scale of its government too large, to be the object of true nationalism. The people of the United States are not united by a common descent, ethnic solidarity, or uniform values. The United States is not a “nation of immigrants,” “one nation under God,” “the first new nation,” or an “exceptional nation.” It’s not even a nation. National conservatives overlook or ignore that reality to their peril. The national conservatism they envision for the United States can lead only to the suppression of actual nationalism.

The United States is not a nation. Trying to make it so will stamp out any remaining nationalism in the United States.



https://mises.org/wire/united-states-not-nation-problem-national-conservatism

 

[nobody's_hero]

In the fight between globalism and nationalism, I'll side with the nation.

In the fight between the nation and the states, I'll side with the states.

In the fight between the states and the municipalities, I'll side with the municipalities.

In the fight between the city and you, I'll side with you.

 

[Superfluous Man]

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...-Problem-with-quot-National-Conservatism-quot

 

[Superfluous Man]

In the fight between globalism and nationalism, I'll side with the nation.

In the fight between the nation and the states, I'll side with the states.

In the fight between the states and the municipalities, I'll side with the municipalities.

In the fight between the city and you, I'll side with you.

I like this way of putting it.

But I've seen you support immigration restriction policies, which flips this upside-down and makes the nation sovereign over the state, municipality, and individual. What gives?

 

[PAF]

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...-Problem-with-quot-National-Conservatism-quot

Missed it... thanks

 

[nobody's_hero]

I like this way of putting it.

But I've seen you support immigration restriction policies, which flips this upside-down and makes the nation sovereign over the state, municipality, and individual. What gives?

I've never spoken out against sanctuary cities. I actually liked the approach that Trump took by sending illegal immigrants to those areas where they would be welcomed. I've said many times that this is the ONLY way people are going to see that open-borders isn't as wonderful as it's cracked up to be. There's two problems with this, though:

1) They're not actually welcomed. Sanctuary cities are the DNC's effort to garner votes but when it gets out-of-hand it turns into a NIMBY issue for them.


2) There is a push by cities/states to allow illegals to participate in national elections. Without this though, I've got no real problems with sanctuary cities. It'll be a great way to compare and contrast the ways different governments handle the immigration issue and it's the only way I'll ever get a chance to say "I told you so."

 

[Swordsmyth]

America WAS a nation and will be again.

America had a culture of liberty that united us all until we were flooded with anti-liberty immigrants.

 

[Anti Federalist]

If the people of the United States are united at all, it is by a system of government, the Constitution, republicanism, and the concepts of liberty, checks and balances, separation of powers, and rule of law. In other words, the United States is a country whose people are connected, if at all, by liberalism. The history of the United States has been the obliteration of nationalism, not the embrace of it.

And that has been utterly rejected.

So what common purpose do I have with some Ghanan invader?

And if I have no common purpose with him, and I was here first, why do I have no right to tell him to fuck off back to Ghana (Or Honduras or VietNam or whatever other shithole he came from)?

Given the emphasis on sovereignty, self-governance, and self-determination that characterize nationalist movements and rhetoric, you would expect among national conservatives searing arguments for secession, perhaps for an independent Southern nation, the breaking up of California, or the independence of Texas or Vermont. Instead, the national conservatives celebrate bigness and greatness, thereby undercutting group associations and native identities based on shared cultures, customs, practices, languages, religious beliefs, and history — phenomena which exist in distinct local communities throughout the United States.

I have consistently, vigorously, emphatically argued in favor of secession and break up of the existing states.

I have no common bond, no common interest, no common thread, no common posterity, no common ideology with a queeer gendered AntiFa protester in Portland or a VooDoo practicing Haitian in Miami.

 

[showpan]

America WAS a nation and will be again.

America had a culture of liberty that united us all until we were flooded with anti-liberty immigrants.

Really? When exactly was this culture of liberty? From day one this country was and always has been a country of "haves" and "have nots" If you are referring to the mass amounts of immigrants the "haves" invited here, well they are simply not the ones to blame. Funny how history repeats itself as the "Republicans" invited them to fight our civil war, thus the beginning of the end of states rights and this nation became a country. Nationalism is merely a tool used by propagandists.

 

[r3volution 3.0]

America WAS a nation and will be again.

America had a culture of liberty that united us all until we were flooded with anti-liberty immigrants.

Consult the dates for the bills that created the Fed, the income tax, social security, medicare, medicaid, and every war through Vietnam.

...O, wait, since all of that preceded Hispanic migration, the immigrants you mean to impugn are the Germans, Irish, and Italians...

...who now constitute the bulk of the native population.

 

[Swordsmyth]

Consult the dates for the bills that created the Fed, the income tax, social security, medicare, medicaid, and every war through Vietnam.

...O, wait, since all of that preceded Hispanic migration, the immigrants you mean to impugn are the Germans, Irish, and Italians...

...who now constitute the bulk of the native population.

Previous failures are not an excuse for continuous failure.

We will have a hard enough time restoring liberty with the current population and may even end up having to expel many of them.
Allowing in even more people who are even less liberty oriented will only make things worse.

 

[r3volution 3.0]

Previous failures are not an excuse for continuous failure.

We will have a hard enough time restoring liberty with the current population and may even end up having to expel many of them.
Allowing in even more people who are even less liberty oriented will only make things worse.

Germans, the largest European group in this country, outnumber English about 2:1.

The Irish and Italians are about the same number over again.

This "previous failure" would have most of the anti-immigrant coalition regretting their own arrival on the continent.