American Separatism Part Two
Diagnosis of our Ills, and Towards a Proposal for a Restoration of American Patriotism, Rearticulated in the Light of 21st Century Threats to its Legitimacy
In an insightful National Affairs article I read, “How to Think About Patriotism,” Wilfred M. McClay distinguished two contrasting strains of patriotism in America. One he identifies as rooted in American aspirational ideals, liberty, equality, justice. The other he describes as a more emotional or sentimental affection for American history, national culture and traditions. McClay writes,
“Patriotism in the American context is an intricate latticework of ideals, sentiments, and overlapping loyalties. Since its founding, America has often been understood as the incarnation of an idea, an abstract aspirational claim about self-evident truths that apply to all of humanity. There is certainly some truth to this view, but to focus exclusively on it ignores the very natural and concrete aspects of American patriotism: our shared memories of our nation’s singular triumphs, sacrifices and sufferings, as well as our unique traditions, culture, and land. These two types of American patriotism are undeniably in tension, but the tension has been a healthy one throughout our history; our nation’s universal ideals have meshed with and derived strength from, Americans’ local and particular sentiments.”
In the very next small paragraph, McClay identifies a problem, a grasp of which is paramount to understanding our social divisions, the culture war, and what is driving the separatism I described in my last blog post. He says,
“Among elite opinion makers today, the universal variety is viewed as the only legitimate form of patriotism, while its more particular loyalties are dismissed as blood and soil nationalism. But there is much more to American patriotism than this, and we are in real danger of losing the shared sense of spirit and sacrifice that comes from remembering our past together.”
While McClay doesn’t venture as far as to argue this in his article, I think our whole polarized divide between far left and far right can be understood by means of looking through this prism of the different versions of patriotism he describes, which effectively emphasize two different theories of what America is about. For clarity I will restate them: you can call it the cosmopolitan aspirational ideal, which I think has been weaponized and manipulated into a crude tool for advancing social justice by the radical left, and then there is the sentimental localist particularist emotional connection to America’s rich history and traditions, a strain which to oppose the left, has been profaned, or I would argue, bastardized by the MAGA extreme right, to justify a reactionary return to traditional values—for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene proclaiming herself a “Christian nationalist” out of pure spite.
And it occurred to me, this split in American patriotism between humanistic aspirations on one hand, and traditions on the other hand—each strain I would argue corrupted and spoiled by rival factional self-interest—is most apparent in the battle over whether to rename things, and tear down statues.
For example on PBS News Hour, a couple weeks ago, they had a segment on the debate in Savannah Georgia over renaming Calhoun Square. For anyone who might not remember who John C Calhoun was, and for any of my subscribers who are not American, he was one of the most prominent and vocal advocates for slavery—or the right to own slaves specifically—in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Calhoun was also somewhat more than that. He was a passionate supporter of free trade, who despised tariffs, and a firm proponent of limited government (a little like a neoliberal). The increasingly broad federal power the north was in the process of acquiring at the time, economically at least, gave him such consternation that he wrote a couple of apparently great treatises, A Disquisition on Government and a Disquisition on the Constitution, making an intellectual defense of small government and constitutional democracy to protect the rights of demographic minorities. However, perhaps the achievement for which Calhoun is best known is the filibuster, a rule in the senate that no bill can pass without a majority of sixty votes.
The main reason for the argument in Georgia to rename Calhoun Square has to do with Calhoun’s legacy as one of the most consequential intellectual defenders of the institution of American slavery, understandably. People who are upset with his name attached to a much frequented and popular public venue are deeply chagrined, and I think the predominant resentment is: why after two centuries of comparative social progress, or why if we should even have progress, and progress is our goal—then why should we retain the name Calhoun Square? The name is a glaring symbol of America’s racist past, and it’s a monument to the confederacy. Calhoun’s name attached to a public square just perpetuates, promotes and even glorifies a terrible time in American history, because it transforms into an object of reverence one of the most consequential defenders of slavery. In addition, the square sits within the parameters of a former burial ground for deceased slaves.
The nature of the debate as described on the Savannah local news website was, “some say it’s changing history, and others think it’s righting a wrong.” Right here, in the sense as McClay defined it, I think we can observe the competing visions of America driving the dynamic of recrimination between left and right across the country right now. The left would argue that to change the name of Calhoun Square would only constitute an attempt to deliver justice, complementary with America’s founding principles, the aspirational values of liberty, justice, equality, etc. The mayor of Savannah, Van Johnson, has defended the Savannah City Council’s decision to rename the square, arguing from an egalitarian standpoint, that now to rename the square would only be to recognize a different side of the narrative, and to include that other perspective. Van Johnson seemed to argue that renaming the square was somehow consistent with the justification for naming it in the first place, making a false equivalence in my view. He seemed to be saying slaveowners used to name our public venues; now it’s social justice’s turn to name things. This was justified as a principle of inclusion. Which I’m almost certain he would argue is also consonant with America’s founding propositions. So here, we should note, is one strand of patriotism, which is a variation on the aspirational claim for recognizing the equal dignity of all individuals, repeatedly staked out in our founding documents.
On the PBS segment they also showed other Georgians protesting the renaming. They showed an old guy debating with the City Council that Calhoun Square represented his family’s “heritage.” This sentiment would reflect that other strand of patriotism, rooted in attachment to, and admiration of, America’s history, culture and traditions.
I believe this split between two notions of patriotism resembles a split between two understandings of the meaning of America and what it means to be American, whose cooptation by two radical political factions both of which, whether MAGA or racial, justice advocates, are together part of the source of our divisions. And I think this is really unfortunate for two reasons, 1. because we can observe that both strains reflect a fundamental commitment to American values, which should be promising in itself rather than self-defeating; and 2. they by no means have to be opposed and turned against each other— I think a belief in our aspirational claims or the cosmopolitan ideal, and an admiration for the drama of America’s past should come together in a single refined sensibility of deep, even profound patriotism, not to be pulled apart.
I think that a love of our history, as well as a passionate commitment to our founding aspirational propositions, we should not only seek to harmonize, but it is also quite necessary that we do not disentangle them. Neither an idealistic commitment to enlightenment ideals nor a subservient reverence for tradition should take precedence at the other’s expense, let alone should either undergo the warping to which factions of late have subjected them. But a nuanced appreciation for American history, with its challenges, the pleasant and unpleasant aspects, and a moral decision to abide by our founding values through thick and thin, in the spirit of Lincoln and Washington, should come together in a complex and refined sensibility of enlightened love of one’s country.
Something that really disturbed me about this decision to rename Calhoun Square was that an advocate had said, “If we truly want to do what’s decent and orderly, I suggest we do what this council can do today to bring us closer to shutting the door on this part of history we care not to be a part of.”
As you might guess, I should mention I am emphatically against this movement to either rename things or tear down statues, not because we personally feel chagrined by them, in any event. And I think the movement to do so is a deeply pernicious effort with totalitarian implications. Not that I think the intentions are bad, and not that I think removing one statue or two is the end of the world, and not that I myself personally have any particular attachment to any statues. For better or worse I am not a sentimental person, who becomes emotionally attached to memories or symbols. I am far too rational as opposed to emotional, and my disposition is too insensitive. While I think many statues are pleasing to look at, I don’t think I have ever felt an emotional attachment to any monument of any kind, to be frank. And that has entirely to do with the way I am hardwired. Cognitively, when I think about them, I can develop attachments to things by forming intellectual aesthetic judgments, but not instinctually, because the self-conscious rationalism of my socially inhibited disposition simply far outweighs the emotional, spontaneous and intuitive. This is just the way I am.
And, in my disinterested consideration, while I actually acknowledge it has good intentions, I think this movement to change the surface of things that bother us has sinister implications, if only because I am quite sure this is how totalitarian movements in politics begin. Totalitarianism, one can argue, starts with a desire to remove everything one finds ugly in history to placate one’s totalitarian desire for perfection, or purity, by seeking to exact total control, and direct the narrative of history in a more positive (to you) direction. And I think moreover, the Marxist-Leninist dimension of these efforts on the part of the left to more or less seize the reins of history, and redirect it through our institutions (like pulling a lever to change a train on the train tracks), should be deeply concerning to any of us who would uphold the ideal of the free society, and the rule of law.
Notably attempts to seize the reins of history originated with the nineteenth century German philosopher, GWF Hegel, whose philosophy of ‘historicism’ was a precursor to modern day twentieth century totalitarian movements, such as Maoism and Leninism specifically. Hegel theorized with no empirical evidence, that the spirit or the strength of a people could be measured in proportion to the power of the nation state, and that all peoples across the world, could be reduced and circumscribed according to the relative strength of their national identity. And he suggested that incidentally a people could actually control their collective destiny only through summoning an understanding of their national origins and roots, with the purpose to enhance the power of the state, which he decided was the principle vehicle for controlling a people’s fate. This is what the progressive left I think is in the process of doing with the subject of slavery. They are saying fundamentally, broadly, Slavery is what America is. And that justifies revolutionizing our state institutions to correct history and plan the future (e.g. antiracism activist Ibram Kendi advocates an anticracism amendment to the constitution establishing a federal agency, to purge society of unconscious biases).
Similarly Karl Marx, a student of Hegel, adapted Hegel’s philosophy substituting Hegel’s doctrine of spiritual dialectics for that of his own dialectical materialism. Where in Hegel’s philosophy, the warring spirits of groups of people in history realize themselves in competing nationalisms, a scenario in which he who would control their nation controls history and vice versa—in Marx’s philosophy of dialectical materialism, the history of the human struggle is economic class warfare; therefore he who would win the historical struggle between classes could only do so by overthrowing the dominant class. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917, massacring and attempting to wipe out the imperial aristocracy, they were attempting to realize Marx’s dream to conquer history by means of eliminating the ruling class, to bring about Marx’s utopia of a classless society, where no one is made to feel inferior because of their circumstances anymore. On a similar parallel, Mao’s social movement took over China in an attempt to wipe out the dominant “bourgeois” nationalist culture, to establish his “people’s republic,” the ideological basis for which was a cult of the youth and the underprivileged peasantry.
As that woman said in the Savannah City council meeting, “…I suggest we do what we can do today to bring us closer to closing the door on this part of history we care not to be a part of—” this struck me as a highly unsettling, ridiculously conceited statement. Because: none of us get to choose to shut the door on history. And none of us can ever remove ourselves from it ever. And to rename a public park won’t do anything to remove the stain of slavery from American history. And I would argue, nor should it. Slavery is history. You can’t change that fact. And the idea that you can alter history, let alone by trying to sterilize its representation in public life, is repulsive. You don’t get the right, and no one should ever be entitled, to water history down, and make it easier to stomach. You don’t get to water down reality. And only tyrannical regimes presume to attempt to sterilize or neuter history in this sense.
Now I understand if a social justice activist for renaming things were here, he would argue I’m misunderstanding him. SJWs are not trying to water history down or sterilize the past. They’re only trying to remove triumphalist monuments that glorify the confederacy, an objectively shameful period in America’s past. An activist might argue with me, it’s the statue or Calhoun Square which are what is actually sterilizing and whitewashing history. And to get rid of the statues is only to gain and elevate a more nuanced appreciation of slavery’s heinousness.
But that is a dishonest argument to me, waged in bad faith. To rename a public square or tear down a statue, has nothing to do with broadening one’s intellectual understanding and better informing oneself of slavery’s horrors. No. The impulse to tear down or rename, stems from an entirely emotional urge to either placate or give vent to a grievance, and appease a latent political desire for total control of society and culture, in a revolutionary sense. And that makes it tantamount to trying to cleanse the history of slavery. When that woman spoke of “closing the door” on a part of history, she unmistakably communicated the hubristic notion that one could wash one’s hands of history, an idea which is ridiculous in principle. And if only because of how absurd it is, and in consideration of the millions who were murdered because of conceits like these, that makes it almost immoral to even contemplate. That history is just, or even partly, representation, that we can change history and change reality and determine the future, by changing the emotive content of appearances?
!
It begs the question: how is renaming something harmful any different or any less harmful than to name something anything in the first place? The Savannah City Council talks of renaming Calhoun Square something else. But how can we guarantee that whatever we change the name to, it’s not going to offend someone else? It’s absurd if someone thinks a statue is offensive, that they think they can replace it with a statue or a name that is inoffensive. And I think that anyone with an honest genuine commitment to portraying history more accurately should take it into consideration that any statue or name may potentially offend anybody, and that if we should alter one monument to placate a grievance, then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t destroy the next monument over another grievance. I think if one were genuinely concerned with eradicating offensive content from public life, then the more honest argument, the logic dictates, is to tear down all statues and strike the names from everything, lest anyone ever get offended, with the corollary vow never to replace them either. This is the logical conclusion of the argument, if only it were made honestly, that life and history and its symbols and representations—the residue—shouldn’t hurt anybody. It leads to no history and no life. This way leads the road to totalitarianism. Why should we even have museums, or art exhibits, or movies, or comedy, if no one should be offended ever? This was why Stalin and Hitler in turn prohibited certain art that was “degenerate” or “bourgeois.” It begins with the utopian desire to live in the closed society, starting with the timeworn hubris that with collective effort we can or should control history, for the purpose to shelter a select group from harm.
Now that I’ve sufficiently made the moral case against this forced sterilization of public life, on a lighter note, I would like to enumerate more on just how absurd this renaming of things is, on a merely practical level, and thereby further illustrate how it attempts to achieve an unrealizable ideal. Consulting my collection of George F. Will columns, The Unruly Torrent, American Happiness and its Discontents, this occasion reminded me of the great piece of his from 2015, “Sanitizing Names is Steady Work.” In making his case against renaming the Washington Redskins, Will goes off on a great Swiftian diatribe. He writes, “The niceness police at the US Patent and Trademark Office, have won court approval of their decision that the team’s name may disparage Native Americans. We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub any remembrances of unpleasant things, such as the name of Oklahoma, which is a combination of two Choctaw words meaning, red and people.”
Will says (of the newspaper he writes for), The {Washington} Post should join this campaign for sanitization, this purging the present. The newspaper bears the name of the nation’s capital, which is named for a slave owner who also was—trigger warning—a tobacco farmer. Washington needs a new name. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, DC. She had nothing to do with her husband’s World War II internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.”
And he says, “conservatives do not have feelings, but they are truculent so perhaps a better idea comes from Joseph Knippenberg, who is an American rarity, a professor with good sense and a sense of humor. He suggests that in order to spare everyone discomfort, cities, buildings and other things should be given names that are inoffensive because they have no meaning whatsoever. Give things perfectly vacuous names, like those belonging to car models—Acura, Elantra, Sentra.”
That is indeed where the logic of sterilizing or political correctness inevitably leads. But one might reasonably argue, even those names above could be considered problematic. Because even when we invent an entirely new innocuous name for something, it will acquire history in some or other way, and then it will become offensive to someone surely. The fact is, history is offensive. This is why it’s complete madness to think you should, or that you could, remove yourself from history, and its most unpleasant and hurtful features in any way.
Quite naturally left wing attempts, though, to try and accomplish this impossible, insane task, are highly offensive to some people. In the PBS segment when they showed the old Georgian arguing that Calhoun Square was part of his family “heritage,” I felt like I understood what he was saying. He had a sentimental local attachment to the square; but because its contrary to their purposes to which they ascribe a higher moral value, the left thinks it’s justified to steamroll over him and every old guy like him, probably dismissing his complaint as racist or something. Although at least in my perception, he didn’t seem like a racist. And although people on the left might disagree, I do think it’s possible and that it is perfectly fair for someone with southern ancestry to feel an attachment to their ancestors, notwithstanding if one’s ancestors were slaveowners. And it certainly does not make one a slaveowner by extension, to feel affection for one’s family and their traditions in this sense. If not, that is as if to try and say it’s improper to love someone or something, unless that person or thing is morally perfect and flawless. And I think it goes without saying, that is ridiculous.
So back to the central argument of my last blog post, that the left’s excesses are a major underrated contributor to the radicalization of the right. When the left indulges absurd and dangerous attempts in themselves, to try and sterilize the past by removing its painful representations, for example, you run the risk of provoking Faulkerian characters like that old guy, and you risk these people becoming chagrined by your antidemocratic activity. And even if you don’t sympathize with them, and even if you have no southern ancestors we run a great risk as a nation and a democracy when we fail to appreciate how such people feel, and if we fail to acknowledge their equal dignity.
By failing to acknowledge the limits of their progressive idealism, progressives run the risk of compromising and discrediting their own movement as it lapses into a drift into totalitarianism, while endangering the country in another sense by inadvertently inflaming the traditionalism of a certain kind of patriotism with roots in local attachments. And darkly, such progressivism makes calls of threats to democracy hypocritical. If the left should really care about democracy, and if they want to be honest, then they must acknowledge that social justice is incompatible with and anathema to American democracy. Because the very principle of social justice for historically marginalized groups is a gross violation of the constitutional protection of equal rights for all individual humans.
When free individuals are divided into more or less deserving plastic social groups, privileged and oppressed, prisoners of historical circumstance—then we abandon the principle of equality before the law. And when the most important guardrail of democracy, the principle of equality before the law, goes, then the rest of our rights and liberties go too.
Anyone who would seek to broker a peace, (as we neoliberal globalists should)—between the partisan madmen and madwomen in the culture war—should seek to do so with a refined appreciation of, and a commitment to, our founding universal propositions, balanced with an enlightened assessment and acknowledgment of our trials and triumphs throughout our history, leavened with humility regarding the wealth of subjective interpretation such assessment should yield.
—Jay