Editor’s Note: This article is the result of a partnership between Divergent Options and a course on nationalism at the George Washington University.
George Taboada has worked in the 19th District New Jersey State Legislative Office in the United States of America. He currently is an undergraduate student at The George Washington University. He can be reached at gleetaboada@gmail.com. Divergent Options’ content does not contain information of an official nature nor does the content represent the official position of any government, any organization, or any group.
Title: Assessment of the Inclusiveness of American Nationalism
Date Originally Written: August 9, 2019.
Date Originally Published: August 19, 2019.
Author and / or Article Point of View: The author is a grandchild of Cuban immigrants to the United States of America. He believes that progressive political action (anti-discrimination, improved access to healthcare, debt-relief, etc.) is necessary to form a truly democratic society in the USA.
Summary: The rise of far-right terrorism in the United States is bringing the question of who and what constitutes the American nation to the forefront of public consciousness. If Americans fail to write their own history as one of inclusion rather than exclusion, violence and ostracization will continue.
Text: In the wake of two mass shootings and the new surge in far-right terrorism, Americans peer further and further into the belly of the beast that is their nation. What has been statistically clear has slowly drilled itself into the center of the public consciousness: most terrorist attacks in the United States are perpetrated by domestic far right elements rather than Islamist actors. Between 2009 and 2018, 73.3% of murders related to extremist political ideologies were committed by those on the right-wing[1]. The names of innocent communities such as Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and Parkland have become synonymous with fascist violence. The United States as a whole is beginning to garner a similar dark reputation; Uruguay and Venezuela joined an already expansive list of countries that issue travel warnings to citizens visiting the US due to white supremacist and gun violence[2].
It is no coincidence that Jill Lepore published her article “A New Americanism” in the midst of a very old kind of American violence. Indeed, she writes that the conflict between egalitarian and ethnocentric forces “was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around[3].” In this, Lepore explores a framework of understanding American history that is most condensed in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Alexander describes an America where successive generations “have not ended racial caste in America… but… merely redesigned it.” The slavery, the lynching, the segregation, the poverty, and the police brutality inflicted upon African Americans are not separate systems, but rather the same perpetual phenomenon that is modified to make their suffering palatable to the white majority[4]. At the essence of both of these arguments are the questions that floats through the minds of Americans after the terror and sorrow of a brutal hate crime subsides. Who are we and how much more are we willing to tolerate fascist violence?
There are new factors in this current discourse, but it is also retreading themes of classical literature on nationalism. In fact, Jill Lepore cites Ernest Renan’s defining work, “What is a Nation?[5].” According to Renan, nationalist ideology “presupposes a past but is reiterated in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life[6].” Despite the myths of great men being the writers of history, the core dynamic of nationalism is in the hands of anyone who reads, writes, and reforms it. The discourse that defines the nation occurs not just in Congress, but in classrooms, in cafes, in homes, and in the street. Renan’s theory of nationalism is at its core democratic; in the “daily plebiscite,” the people themselves give the nation substance by supporting it and participating in its reformations.
However, republics are vulnerable to those who participate in their institutions with the intent to destroy the values that define and defend democracy. The danger of democratic backsliding is that those who are assaulting human rights do so while wrapping their language in the rhetoric used by those trying to defend it. White supremacists have a long history of doing just that. Leading Nazi figure Joseph Goebbels wrote, “We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we[7].”
This “boots for suits” tactic is not a foreign phenomenon; Lepore and Alexander have both chronicled its centrality to the American republic. The Confederate government formalized white supremacy by writing it into their constitution[8]. Alexander traces the family history of Jarvious Cotton, an American man. Time and time again, the Cottons are denied the fundamental ability to participate in Renan’s daily plebiscite: the ballot. Either through legal restrictions or through real physical violence. The slave-owner, the Klansman, and the police beat black people out of the discourse; constitutions, Jim Crow, and laws make the public feel as though that abuse is justified[9].
Beyond the question an American may ask themselves regarding who they are and how much longer they are willing to tolerate fascist violence lies another question: How much longer should we wait to end fascist ostracization? There is only one answer: immediately. But answering that question has eluded Americans of all kinds for over four centuries. The United States’ constitutive story as a nation is one that promises people freedom and viciously excludes wide swaths of humanity from those inalienable rights. To academicize the question of, “Who are we?”, the author posits, “How do we include people in a constitutive story written to specifically exclude them?”
Without a truly democratic daily plebiscite, those who are victimized by far-right violence will continue to be pushed to the margins of American society. To counter disenfranchisement, a discursive space where all are able to contribute to the building of the nation is necessary. However, open discourse about the nation’s path cannot exist as long as people who seek to raze it to the ground are afforded the same privileges as those who seek to enrich it. Without safeguards that prevent those who target the most vulnerable in society from disenfranchising them, marginalization will persist.
By including the experiences of other nations in the fight for liberation, Americans can further shatter the illusion of a racial ethnostate. Americans can find answers to their soul-searching in a wide range of countries and societies. There is already a prolific literature comparing denazification in Germany to American Reconstruction after the Civil War. From Germans, Americans can learn how to secure justice after a civilizational crime[10]. Another example is the progress of LGBTQ+ rights in Cuba. After the Revolution succeeded in 1959, Cuba was the second country in the world to establish marriage as a strictly heterosexual institution. Since the turn of the century, Cuban society has been more inclusive and more proactive towards achieving LGBTQ+ equality. Those LGBTQ+ who were once violently excluded from the foundation of the Cuban nation were able to write themselves into the Revolution and make it their own.
To conclude, if Americans fail to write their own stories, those who carry the torches of Klansmen will gladly pick up the pen.
Endnotes:
[1] Anti-Defamation League (2019). Murder and Extremism in the United State in 2018. ADL.
[2] Hu, Caitlin (2019, August 10). What they really think: America seen through the world’s travel warnings. CNN.
[3] Lepore, Jill (March/April 2019). A New Americanism. Foreign Affairs, 98.
[4] Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: New Press.
[6] Renan, Ernest (1882, March 11) What is a Nation? text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on, in Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris, Presses-Pocket, 1992. (translated by Ethan Rundell).
[7] Goebbels, Joseph (1935) Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit. Der Angriff, pp. 71-73.
[8] Lepore, Jill (March/April 2019). A New Americanism. Foreign Affairs, 98.
[9] Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: New Press.
[10] Neiman, Susan (2013, August 12). History and guilt: Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust? Aeon.
[11] De Llano, Pablo (2018, July 23). After decades of homophobia, Cuba closer to allowing same-sex marriage. El País.