Back in the spring of this year, I had the pleasure of reading Harvard historian Jill Lepore's highly ambitious, yet riveting single-volume of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). In These Truths, Lepore takes a critical look at the American project and asks if it has lived up to its "truths," or the tenets of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" of a country's citizens before the law, and their accession to a governmental authority to protect those rights, respectively (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Of course, the government didn't initially look out for all of its citizens, namely Native Americans, African-Americans, women, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ community. Essentially, American history has been the story of America's gradual rectifying of past injustice (mind you, not exactly a linear process), with much work remaining today to ensure the continuance of such rights and protections for as many as possible.
Coinciding with this ongoing reckoning, starting in the 1960s, intellectuals and scholars soured by the many examples of American hypocrisy in protecting the rights of certain classes of citizens over others, and in regards to the scourge of twisted nationalism that produced Nazism and countless other atrocities, increasingly trended towards discarding the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state altogether. In her follow-up to These Truths, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), Lepore warns against this wholesale ignoring of nationalism, arguing that within this scholarly vacuum, reactionary forces can (and will) fill that void with a dangerous redefinition of nationalism that threatens the very liberal-democratic foundations of the country.
How did we get to this point?
Part civics primer as well as a call to action, This America first takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the idea of a nation-state as we understand it in modern times, a collective of individuals bound together by common laws into a "political community," became cemented through its inseparability with nationalism, one's sense of pride in their country and people (Lepore, 2019, p. 26). Laws and a government aren't enough to bind together diverse groups of people. You need a national origin story, you need national histories. In the case of the USA, that came to be a story about a nation that fought a bloody revolution to secure for itself the universal values of equality, liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical regime, and then went on to continue that fight on behalf of the rest of humanity through its foreign policy of spreading the blessings of democracy (with, to put it mildly, mixed results).
However, there is a duality that remains within American nationalism, a dark side, one that is "less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority" (Lepore, 2019, p. 23). To best fight these ever-present demons, most recently manifested in Trumpism's animosity towards immigrants and globalists, Lepore argues that since nation-states remain a central organizing principle of geopolitics today, the state's liberal democratic institutions remain the best tool for protecting its citizens' rights, and in concert with the nation's intellectuals, can be a powerful advocate of a more positive vision of Americanism.
What is this more positive vision of American nationalism? One that recommits to the liberal project of the expansion of "equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness," within the national consciousness and governmental institutions alike, a nationalism that must reckon with its past while boldly striding forward into a future requiring innovative solutions to the big issues of our day, such as environmental degradation, climate change, mass migration, and income inequality (Lepore, 2019, p. 137). As long as the metaphorical better angel is able to hold greater sway within American social life and politics can the evils of nationalism be kept at bay, and the body politic retain its relative stability.
In her conclusion, Lepore calls for no less than a vigorous re-commitment to the embattled liberal American project. While no doubt a massive undertaking on both the part of citizens and the government in an era where liberalism's center-of-the-road approach has been maligned from all sides as enabling the status quo, Lepore says that it will be worth it. That through the fruits of our labors, our nation can achieve more of what W.E.B. DuBois called "great and beautiful things" and continue to bend the proverbial arc of history closer to justice for all, away from the "hideous mistakes" and the "frightful wrongs" of the past (Lepore, 2019, p. 137).
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lepore, Jill. (2019). This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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