What, to the Nationalist, is the Statue of Liberty?
Right and Left live in different nomic countries.
1.
I live thirteen miles from the Statue of Liberty. Like most people in New York and New Jersey, I don’t go there much: I took my daughter there last summer and took my mother-in-law a few years earlier, but before that, probably the last time I was there was when I was a kid.
But the statue is a symbol, of course, and as such looms larger in our national consciousness than over New York Harbor. Until recently, I had always understood the symbol’s meaning to be universally appreciated. On the one hand, we are a nation of liberty – or more expansively, a place where everyone enjoyed rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And on the other hand, we are a unique nation of immigrants – not only immigrants, but people seeking a better life in a land of opportunity. As Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, written in 1893 and emblazoned on the statue in 1903, reads:
Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Yes, this country was founded by English colonists, on land taken from indigenous people and partly farmed by African slaves, but since then it has then populated by waves of immigration, including my Eastern European Jewish grandparents, who came here in the 1910s and 1920s, and Donald Trump’s German grandparents, who came here in 1902 and 1905. (Trump’s Scottish mother, incidentally, immigrated in 1930).
Obviously, we have long failed to live up to these ideals. For half our history, nearly 15% of the population were slaves and women couldn’t vote, and there have been waves of prejudice against Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Asian, and Latin American immigrants. But we are a country of flawed human beings, and the ideals, I thought, were clear, and shared.
Of course, I was wrong.
2.
There have always been competing versions of America. Donald Trump did not invent American nationalism. And while we may use the same words — liberty and justice for all, says the Pledge of Allegiance — they clearly mean very different things to different people.
One version of America is a country centrally about certain ideals: that all men people are created equal; that we may say and believe what we wish, free from government interference; that we all have basic rights that were either given to us by God or agreed upon by compact; that the possibility of economic self-sufficiency was available to all; and that there are no lesser or greater Americans. This was the dream that drew my Jewish immigrant grandparents here: that it was a land of opportunity and possibility, without all the limits of the Old World. You could make it here, live the American dream.
Again, these promises were often largely unkept. As Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, “what, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” But they were the ideals, and when America fell short of them, we could point to the Statue of Liberty, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and read the Bill of Rights to hold our country to account. Conservatives and liberals have always disagreed about how to balance competing ideals — freedom and fairness, civil liberties and public safety — but we mostly shared the belief that what makes America, America are our core values reflected in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and, sure, the Statue of Liberty.
But there was always another version.
In that version, being American is a national identity, and patriotism is less about upholding values than celebrating our national-cultural heritage. Where a liberal, moderate, or mainline-conservative pledges allegiance to the flag, it is to a republic that promises liberty and justice for all. But, as we saw in the last few decades of hysteria over flag-burning and kneeling in protest, the pledge and the flag have nationalist meanings as well. The pledge is a loyalty oath, and the flag stands for our nation, first and foremost. This is what nationalism means.
And that nationhood is culturally specific. It is a nation where minorities are included, but in which (as JD Vance said in his RNC acceptance speech) they must assimilate into a dominant culture that is mostly led by Christians, white people, Europeans, and (straight, conventionally masculine) men. Apple pie is more American than kimchi. Farms are more American than hipster cafes. Country music is more American than hip-hop. Christianity is more American than Islam.
3.
In the liberal view, America’s racial caste system is a profound failure of the republic to live up to its stated ideals. But in the nationalist view, it doesn’t exist, and the disparities between Black and white populations in health, income, criminality, and a dozen other measures of well-being are due to racial differences between these groups. This is science, we are told — witness the resurgence of the debunked ‘Bell Curve’ garbage made popular by Charles Murray thirty years ago. Yes, racism is bad, but it is a matter of personal prejudice, not systems baked into our society. Thus, as long as we are personally colorblind, we can ignore (and, in Trump’s America, are required to ignore) the legacy of four centuries of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining to education funding. After all, what’s past is past, and dredging it up fosters division. Unlike, you know, flying Confederate flags.
And then there’s religion. In the liberal view, the ideal America is one where there is a wall of separation (to quote Thomas Jefferson) between church and state. Obviously, Christianity plays a central role in our culture; Christmas is a federal holiday, ‘In God We Trust’ is on our coins, and Christian morality has been encoded in law for centuries. But when I look at the Statue of Liberty, I see the lines from Justice Kennedy’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
To me, this is the best of America. Our secular nation does not enshrine religious doctrines (such as whether or not an embryo counts as a human being) in its laws. We are pluralistic, and stronger as a result of it.
But this is not how nationalist conservatives see it. In fact, that quote from Casey has become a central rallying cry for the Christian Nationalists, Catholic Integrationists, and Post-Liberals who are now shaping policy in the White House. For example, in his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher condemns it for celebrating “the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.” Notice how Dreher here conflates political autonomy with amoral anomie; either the state imposes morality, or we’re all doomed to narcissistic amorality. Never mind religious progressives, ethical atheists, and people who find meaning in their relationships, love, eros, spirituality, work, activism, or art. If the state does not impose conservative Christian (mostly Catholic) morality, life has no meaning for anyone.
The thinkers and leaders of these intellectual movements (quite different from one another, but, for the moment at least, sharing power) are not household names to most people: Dreher, Patrick Dineen, Yoram Hazony, Sohrab Ahmari, Rick Lowry, Curtis Yarvin, Adrian Vermuele, David Barton, Leonard Leo. But they are well-known to today’s far-right conservatives who believe that our country was (or ought to have been) founded on Christian morality, and has strayed dangerously from the path. And all this trickles down to Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and a host of other figures who have profited handsomely off of it.
As a result, these figures have said for years, radical (re-)action is needed. The ‘Cathedral’ of universities, media, and the deep state must be destroyed and replaced. Christian morality must be encoded into law. The foundations of America must be rebuilt to save us from chaos or immorality or even Satan himself. For these people, Kennedy’s eloquent articulation of American pluralism is shameful. And they, obviously, are in power.
4.
Progressives, meanwhile, are stumbling over themselves trying to figure out how to describe what the Trump regime is doing right now. Is it fascism, authoritarianism, populism, nationalism? Is it ‘flooding the zone with shit’? Is there a method to the madness? Is it about corruption, greed, racism, narcissism? Is it simply all of the above?
It obviously is all of the above, but it’s also less complicated than it appears. It’s American nationalism, which has always been with us, and which has always reacted to change with verbal or physical violence, from the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s to the John Birch Society of the 1950s, from McCarthyism to Anti-Antisemitism, from Father Coughlin to Tucker Carlson. Nothing is new under the nationalist sun.
American Nationalism celebrates liberty, but only for good Americans who use their liberties in a patriotic way. Those deemed to be anti-American are to have those liberties taken away, and over the last two centuries they have included communists, socialists, Catholic immigrants, Jews, intellectuals, coastal elites, leftist, liberals, Black Panthers, DEI-promoters, Abolitionists, “Antisemites”, coastal elites, globalists, journalists, hippies, and of course immigrants of all stripes, whether legally here or not. At present, some of these groups are now favored (some Jews, some Blacks, most Catholics) and others disfavored. But that status is dependent upon the extent they “hard weld” themselves to the Christian Nationalist patriotic train, as Steve Bannon warned American Jews last fall.
And as for immigration? Here, the water has been so muddied by decades of propaganda that it’s impossible to see clearly. Yes, illegal immigrants have broken the law. But let’s remember that the law, itself, is broken — most recently by Donald Trump himself, who stopped bipartisan immigration reform last year. My grandparents and Trump’s grandparents didn’t face the obstacles blocking today’s migrants. Whatever the right immigration policies should be, they are obviously not what we have now.
Moreover, immigrants are routinely, wildly lied about in right-wing propaganda . Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. They are not stealing jobs; they’re often doing jobs that no one else wants to do, as we’re now seeing in California’s agricultural sector. They’re not rapists and murderers; overwhelmingly they’re people just like my grandparents, seeking a better life and fleeing violence. So outrageous and preposterous are these lies (told about immigrants as a group and about individuals like Kilmar Albrego Garcia) that one is forced to ask what is really going on — what this is really all about. Likewise with the reckless, illegal, unconstitutional, cruel, and dehumanizing ways in which “mass deportations” are being carried out. Whatever enforcement of immigration laws is appropriate, this is clearly not it. Not only is the immigration crackdown is not about the rule of law; on the contrary, it now poses one of the greatest threats the rule of law in America has faced in a century.
As I’ve written about before, the dehumanization is the point. Like the crackdown on civil liberties and civil society, the immigration crackdown is part of the essence of nationalism, which pits the nation against malevolent foreigners, especially foreigners within. Liberals and mainline conservatives interpret the Statue of Liberty as reflecting one of America’s core values: that we are a nation of immigrants — subject to laws, yes, but people from all over the world who create America’s melting pot (or gorgeous mosaic, for multiculturalists) together. Nationalists see it as a symbol of America, which is threatened by barely-human “terrorists” or “criminals” or “rapists” or Haitians who eat the pets of Springfield.
For a time, American Nationalism could be relatively domesticated by the mainstream Republican Party. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush waved the flag and enraged liberals with their jingoism, but they never turned to the John Birch Right, and never said something like “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Richard Nixon captured the white-dominated South in the wake of the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights, but he didn’t promise “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” like George Wallace did, and when Wallace garnered only 46 electoral votes in 1968 to Nixon’s 301, the triumph of more moderate conservatism seemed complete. And so it was, for nearly half a century.
No longer. America First, once a slogan of Nazi sympathizers, is now the maxim of the White House. Higher education, media, and the civil service are being attacked, just as Christian Nationalists promised. The nationalistic version of America is not new, but it is newly dominant in all three branches of the federal government. And we have seen massive attacks on both liberty and immigration — the two values for which the Statue of Liberty stands for. Or is meant to stand for. Or I thought is meant to stand for.
5.
In law school this semester, I’ve been teaching about post-liberalism as a form of antinomianism, which is the view that it is religiously or morally required to break the law if one has direct access to God, morality, mysticism, or messianism. A central figure in the class has been Robert Cover, the late law professor, philosopher, and activist who, despite impeccable left-wing credentials, critiqued the Supreme Court’s imposition of secular values on the racist, right-wing Bob Jones University back in 1983. In his pioneering essay responding to the Bob Jones case, “Nomos and Narrative,” Cover demonstrated how law creates worlds, and how we live in social worlds shaped by legal and ethical principles. When the Court forbade Bob Jones University from enacting race-based admissions, housing, and dating policies, it was destroying the nomos – the legal world – of the university. This wasn’t necessarily the wrong result, Cover wrote, but the Court pretended it was just going about its ordinary business, when instead it was destroying a world.
Bob Jones—the university itself, and the decade-long governmental campaign against it – has remained a symbol for the Right all these years. It, and other “segregation academies,” were founded as a white-Protestant response to the civil rights movement and Brown — Bob Jones himself preached a highly-circulated sermon defending segregation on scriptural grounds. And to this day, it is a must-visit stop during Republican presidential primaries.
In other words, Cover was right. Bob Jones University is and was a symbol of a different American nomos from the one I inhabit. American Nationalists and American small-l liberals (which includes liberals, centrists, and the neo-conservative Right) inhabit the same geographical area, but in our minds, we live in different countries. We look at the Statue of Liberty and see different things. I see pluralism, diversity, civil liberties, and multiculturalism. They see American particularism, Christianity, patriotism, and nationalism. And so of course we see one another as opposed to what makes America great.
I recognize that the democratic-republican, classically liberal version of America is not in power today. It is not the regime under which I actually live. But I still look at the Statue of Liberty, and still read the words inscribed on her base. And even if it is only a dream, I still defiantly believe that it represents my country.
Thanks everyone for your support. This is the first of what will be a series of posts on post- and anti-liberalism, taking what I hope is my distinctive approach to the intersection of mind and world, spirituality and politics. I’m eager to hear how it lands for you.
Here’s more of me in the world:
I was on the debut episode of Arc Magazine’s new podcast talking about all the usual subjects, and some unusual ones with
.Next week I’ll be in Indianapolis talking about religion and psychedelics on May 13. Not flying out of Newark.
I had an essay on queer theology published in a cool new anthology.
And, in the meantime, I’m grading a whole lot of papers and exams, plus celebrating a non-milestone birthday. See you next week.
Thank you for your intelligent explanation. Good to learn all the variety of labels. It’s quite deep and your article merits reading several times.