By Bradley J. Birzer American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Senior Contributors
Conservatism since Edmund Burke has been about the cultivation and protection of intermediary institutions, of local communities, and of families. Rarely, if ever, does the nation-state, known as The United States of America, serve to protect any of these things.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen many divisive conversations about such things as “national conservatism” and “Christian nationalism.” I will readily admit, I’m deeply concerned about this recent marriage—however tepid and lax or even slovenly and experimental—of nationalism and conservatism. Overall, nationalism has been a brutal force in the world, rarely serving the good of human welfare. While, of course, there are always exceptions. One can immediately think about the Irish resisting the English or the Polish resisting… well… everyone. Still, the exceptions, in many ways, prove the norm that nationalism is not healthy for a flourishing conservatism.
Generally, conservatism and nationalism, especially in the American conservative tradition, have been, at best, uneasy marriages and, at worst, out-and-out enemies. For example, in his Jefferson Lectures in the late 1980s, Robert Nisbet said without hesitation:
Moralists from the Right, blinded by their private picture of “world Communion,” fail to see the undying persistence in the world of the nation-state, be it capitalist or communist. Nationalism has spawned more wars than religion—and Communism is a latter-day religion—ever has or ever will. All the while Stalin was bending, rending, torturing, and terrorizing, always shaping Russia into an aggressive military nation, with Marxism-Leninism its established religion, our right-wing moralistic ideologists in this county were seeing stereotypes, pictures in their heads, of the defunct Trotskyist dream of Russia not a nation but instead a vast spiritual force leading all mankind to the Perdition [Nisbet, The Present Age, 38].
Further, he contended in his lectures, though World War One prepared the United States to become a nation, it was the New Deal that solidified it as such.
The New Deal is a great watershed not only in twentieth-century American history but in our entire national history. It is the mesmerizing idea of a national community—an idea that had been in the air since the Progressive era, featured in books by Herbert Croly, Walter Lippman, John Dewey, and others, and had come into full but brief existence in 1917 under the stimulus of war—was not at long last to be initiated in peacetime, as a measure to combat the evils of capitalism and its “economic royalists” [Nisbet, Present Age, 50-51].
As opposed to nationalism (and patriotism, properly understood), Nisbet believed, conservatism in the American tradition has always been about the preservation of private associations and local communities and norms—our little platoons and subdivisions. In this, Nisbet was closely following the ideas of Edmund Burke as well as Alexis de Tocqueville. Much of what Nisbet wrote in the 1980s also hearkens back to his earliest and most famous work, 1953’s The Quest for Community. “I believe the greatest single influence upon social organization in the modern West has been the developing concentration of function and power of the sovereign political State,” he wrote. “The real significance of the modern State is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship, and local allegiances and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of function and authority.” [Nisbet, Quest for Community, xxxiii-xxxiv]. The nation state, as of 1953, had reached into every single aspect of human life. How much more so in 2022?
Admittedly, Nisbet’s conservatism was always more than a bit shaped by his deep respect for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century anarchism. Though never a libertarian, Nisbet probably opposed the nation-state more than any other legitimate thinker of his age.
Nisbet wasn’t alone, however, in his criticisms of rampant nationalism and of the nation-state. Given his staunch Stoicism, Russell Kirk too looked more to the cosmopolis (the republic of all good women and men)—that is, the citizenry of the world. Eric Voegelin, too, lamented the gnostic elements within modern nationalism: its symbols, its parades, its jingoism. A number of prominent Christian humanists of that era, such as Christopher Dawson, feared nationalism, too.
In 1900, The Nation (somewhat ironic, given the title of the magazine) lambasted the then-current alliance of progressives and nationalists. The author of the essay begins with praise of the founding era. “In opposition to the theory of divine right, whether of kings or demagogues, the doctrine of natural rights was set up,” the editorial noted, and “humanity was exalted above human institutions, man was held superior to the state, and universal brotherhood supplanted the ideas of national power and glory.” Under such ideals, American society flourished. “To the principles and precepts of Liberalism [that is, a Jeffersonian, classical liberalism, free markets and free minds] the prodigious material progress of the age was largely due,” it continued. “Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition.”
Yet, with the rise of nationalism and progressivism, America had, The Nation wrote, taken a deadly turn. “The Declaration of Independence no longer arouses enthusiasm; it is an embarrassing instrument which requires to be explained away.” Further, the magazine noted, “The Constitution is said to be ‘outgrown.’”
The cause? Nationalism. “Nationalism in the sense of national greed has supplanted Liberalism. It is an old foe under a new name. By making the aggrandizement of a particular nation a higher end than the welfare of mankind, it has sophisticated the moral sense of Christendom…. We hear no more of natural rights, but of inferior races.” All told, the “old philosophy of divine right has once more asserted its ruinous power, and before it is again republicated there must be international struggles on a terrific scale.”
Again, it is worth noting that conservatism since Edmund Burke has been about the cultivation and protection of intermediary institutions, of local communities, and of families. Rarely, if ever, does the nation-state, known as The United States of America, serve to protect any of these things. Indeed, it has done all that it can over the last hundred years to make the lives of ordinary Americans insecure, at home and abroad. Why would we conservatives ever turn to her as our ally, let alone as our mistress and spouse?
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