The Third Party

These people are not conservatives

Conservatism is dead.  If you don’t believe me, listen to the man who killed it.  Here’s Donald Trump at a recent Republican event in California:

I’m a conservative, but at this point, who cares?

Let that sink in.  Since at least the time of Ronald Reagan the GOP has been the furiously self-proclaimed party of conservatism.  And in the last few years Tea Party grassroots conservatives have crusaded against their own Republican establishment for being insufficiently fanatical in ideology and tactics.  But now, when given the opportunity, those same grassroots true believers have chosen for their nominee a man who not only diverges markedly from conservative doctrine, but who explicitly dismisses conservatism as irrelevant!  What gives?

Trump’s triumph has rudely revealed that there are really two Republican Parties, both of whom think of themselves as the true conservatives and the other as traitors to the cause.  What we think of as traditional conservatism, the conservatism that has dominated the party for decades, the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan, is a program of free markets and free trade, scaling back the welfare-regulatory state, and maintaining American supremacy in the world.  Think of Reagan crushing the air-traffic controllers union or George W. Bush attempting to privatize Social Security.  The conservatives have a libertarian view of the federal government and a Social Darwinist view of capitalist success and failure.  Their core constituency is the investor class, and for decades these Reaganite conservatives have run the Republican Party, and they’ve run it for the benefit of that class, with the casual assurance that what benefits investors will eventually benefit everyone else.

But it turns out that much – perhaps even a majority – of the Republican constituency means something very different when they call themselves conservative.  For them conservatism means the blind conviction that America is the best country on Earth.  They see everyday, straight, white, Christian, American men, with their simple moral toughness, as the backbone of society and the best people in the world.  Some of those men regret the demise of the traditional American social structure, in which racial, sexual and religious minorities deferred to them, while some simply worry – not entirely without reason – that they’re now disdained and despised by American elites; and in practice the two perceptions readily blur together.  But either way, for decades the basic premise of this conservatism is that the social status of those men is unfairly under assault, and they’ve looked to the Reagan conservatives to protect and assert it. 

These white working class conservatives weren’t really interested in lowering capital gains tax rates or cutting Obamacare subsidies, though they made a good show of caring about such things.  Indeed, these conservatives actively support the welfare state; they’re all too anxious to receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits their Reaganite masters yearn to curtail.  And they particularly object to the free trade and lax immigration policies of the Reaganites, policies that send good jobs overseas and drive down wages at home.  But, for decades the conservative intelligentsia, in the think tanks and the magazines, on talk radio and Fox News, underwritten by big money, has worked to indoctrinate the grassroots in the intricacies of conservative dogma, while enforcing ideological rigidity among conservative politicians.  The populists may have been dissatisfied, but they couldn’t very well vote for liberals.

But Reaganite conservatism hasn’t kept its promises. Trump hasn’t really killed it, it was killed by its own abysmal failures, particularly the War in Iraq and the Great Recession.  It couldn’t survive its comprehensive inability to protect the interests and values of white working people.  It’s actually been dead since 2008, but tricked out to appear healthy with hefty doses of donor money, media bombast, and undying populist aversion to cultural liberalism and its racially and sexually suspicious beneficiaries.  What Trump has done is kill the illusion of conservatism.  As a man ignorant enough to overlook ideological considerations, rich enough to be indifferent to movement money, and self-assured enough (to put it mildly!) to dismiss received notions of propriety, he was perfectly constituted to override the conservative establishment and express and exploit the blunt instincts of those unhappy white populists, instincts he precisely shares.

And now that he’s exploited those instincts all the way to the nomination, they constitute the new conservatism.  The old conservatism, however, came to own the party through a very different strategy.  The Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatives had to fight for years against the moderate Eisenhower establishment Republicans who controlled the party in the post-war years, and who had made their peace with the New Deal and Cold War stalemate.  Convinced that both the welfare state and international communism could be aggressively rolled back, they worked the grassroots, the media, the think tanks, the elections, etc., as they slowly took over the party from the inside.  Their first big triumph was the nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.  In 1968, segregationist and Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace pulled white southern conservative populists out of the New Deal coalition when he ran for president as an independent, and they never went back (not at the presidential level).  Richard Nixon – who brilliantly straddled

Governor Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to 
prevent the enrollment of black students 
at the University of Alabama, 1963

the moderate vs. conservative divide – added them and their white northern collaborators to his own coalition four years later.  At the same time, northern moderate and liberal Republicans – i.e. Eisenhower, Rockefeller and Lindsay Republicans – left the GOP for the Democratic Party.  And though Goldwater badly lost his general election, Nixon’s and Reagan’s cynical and skillful campaigning brought the white populists securely into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, leaving the Reaganites in charge.

But conservatism has now split in two, or rather it has reverted to its two naturally antagonistic groupings, with each side considering itself the heirs of Reagan and seeing the other as the successors of the hated Eisenhower-ish moderate establishment.  Both groups are technically conservative, given their belief in innate natural hierarchy.  And that means that neither group is really libertarian, or classically liberal, though some conservatives perceive themselves to be; in practice they don’t defend individual freedom against social coercion.  And neither group is Burkean, or classically conservative in the aristocratic European sense, in that neither affirms pragmatism or conciliation; both groups are intensely idealistic, even utopian, consisting of righteous, low-church crusaders working to create the City of God on Earth.  And both groups hold to a Social Darwinism that sees society’s winners as virtuously deserving their winnings.  It’s just that Trumpians believe that the natural aristocracy consists of those aforementioned straight, white, Christian, American men, while the Reaganites believe it’s successful capitalists.  Trumpism is about identity, Reaganism is about money.  And the Trumpians are less principled, more expedient, more willing to play dirty to advance the interests of their tribe.  Such is the logic of tribalism.

We can agree – with Donald Trump! – to call the Reaganites the True Conservatives, since they’ve claimed the title for so long, and they probably are closer to the classically conservative Burkean ideal, with their worship of plutocrats as aristocrats born to rule at home and abroad.  A true Burkean would condemn Reaganite worship of free markets as destabilizing and intemperate.  But a true Burkean would even more forcefully reject Trumpian recklessness and thoughtlessness; as he would reject Trumpian majoritarianism, not because it fails to respect liberal individual rights, but because it fails to defer to its rightful aristocratic masters.  So even with their right-wing inegalitarianism, it’s fair to call the Trumpians Populists, since they share much substance with left-wing populists, in particular instinctual embrace of the popular and the everyday, and animosity toward the rich and powerful.

Given these ideological incompatibilities and conservatism’s abject policy failures, it was quite likely that something like Trumpism would come along and topple Reaganism from its precarious perch at the top of the GOP.  But the Trumpian revolt, unlike the Reaganite overthrow of the moderates, has occurred in one fell swoop.  That’s because they didn’t have to conquer someone else’s party; they didn’t have to convert anyone, or bring in like-minded outsiders, or drive out ideological opponents.  The party has been theirs for the asking all along.

Of course, the Reaganites fought against the Trumpian takeover tooth and nail, caucus vote by delegate count, negative ad by convention rule.  They’ve been on top so long, and they’ve spent so much time and energy convincing themselves they’re America’s ordained saviors, they can’t let go of the political party meant to be the instrument of that salvation.  And there are still Reaganites among the grassroots; that’s who voted for Ted Cruz.  Some have accepted their new subordinate status within the exotic new right-wing order and are supporting Trump as an evil lesser than Hillary.  But some diehards are promising to sit out the general election, some are working to deny Trump the presidency, some are considering a true conservative third-party campaign, and some are so unhappy with Trump they say they’ll even vote for Hillary!  Of course, much of the Reaganite opposition to Trump has less to do with the Trumpian program and more to do with the man himself, with his flagrant irresponsibility and doltish ignorance.  Though it’s hard not to wonder if some of those never-Trump folks would so adamantly oppose an irresponsible and doltish nominee who toed the Reaganite line.  After all, most of them defended Sarah Palin.

But Trumpism – with or without the man himself – is here to stay.  Reaganism is dead.  Because of its complex of think tanks and media outlets, the Reaganites will continue to make noise and influence the discourse for some time to come.  But for a long time to come, no GOP nominee will be openly advocate free trade or looser immigration policies.  And many supposedly conservative politicians and media personalities have already happily pledged support for Trump, demonstrating that they were really populists – or shameless opportunists – all along.  Even some of the right-wing media and think-tank crowd have turned out to be populists.  Some politicians, like Paul Ryan, are trying to finesse the differences.  Rush Limbaugh has shown himself just as brilliant at straddling the present-day Reaganite-Trumpian divide as Nixon was at straddling the Eisenhower-Reaganite divide of his day.  When there are full-fledged, self-consciously right-wing populist think tanks to confront the Reaganite ones, the dying roar of Reaganism will wind down to a whisper.

In the grand history of the United States, it may turn out that the ultimate role of modern conservatism will be to give birth to a powerful and resentful white populist nationalism.  Nixon and Reagan thought they had stolen Wallace’s power, but maybe all they really did was unleash it.  It’s likely that Trump is the Goldwater of right-wing populism, not it’s Reagan, and he’ll come in for a solid defeat in November.  But a smarter, shrewder, more presentable Trump is waiting in our future.  We may be saved from that coming populist Reagan by the continuing demographic shifts transforming our society, shifts that seem likely to make white nationalism an electoral dead end (at least at the presidential level).  But can anyone – other than demagogues, fanatics, and fools – desire greater racial polarization and animosity?  A popular white nationalist movement, even one with no chance of winning the presidency, can bring nothing but division and destruction and horror.  And, for the moment, it’s a white nationalist movement with a reckless sideshow clown as its leader. We stare, more starkly than we have in a long time, into the sinister side of our collective unconscious; we walk dangerously close to the edge of the deep, dark American abyss, with little more than Hillary and her bland, neo-liberal platitudes to keep us from falling directly in. 

The Great Comeuppance

Poetic Justice with bad hair

The conservative shuffle over to populism has finally broken into a run.  Unending economic hardship and liberal cultural triumph have torn the white middle class away from their neglectful conservative masters.  While those affluent overlords were swooning over no-capital-gains-tax fantasies and drinking themselves deep of Social Darwinist ideological purity, their downscale cousins were weathering decades of lowered wages and lowered expectations.  The America those workers knew, that sustained them and valued them, has been dying, and they’ve become desperate for a solution.  Now a large section of the supposedly conservative base supports a candidate who has argued for raising taxes and lowering pay for the rich, who opposes free trade and cuts to social welfare programs, and who condemns the influence of money in politics.  Donald Trump is what happens when the interests and sensibilities of such a large constituency are consistently ignored, marginalized and disdained.   Trump is the blowback from conservative failure.

Conservatism has always had a troubled relationship with its own base.  Modern American conservatism began in the 1950’s as a small intellectual movement that coalesced around National Review magazine, which argued over such things as whether the great British conservative Edmund Burke supported tradition per se, or as a means to protect ordered liberty.  They wrote homages to the British ruling class and Generalissimo Franco’s enthusiastically Catholic fascism – hardly positions likely to garner widespread support in a country with such a small-d democratic political culture.  Their anti-welfare-state positions gave them ready-made supporters among the rich and the business community, but little more.

So they went shopping for a constituency.  Their first lucky break was McCarthyism.  The conservatives were staunch anti-communists (opposed to socialism in general and Stalinism in particular) and they were quite happy to support a demagogue who accused liberal Democrats of being Soviet spies.  But McCarthyism was about more than overblown fear of communist subversion, it was also a movement of small town working whites against supposedly unpatriotic Northeastern establishment technocrats.  It was the first stirring of right-wing populism since the decline of the Father Coughlin and the America First crowd in the early 40’s.  That is, it was a base of support conservatives could use to attack the New Deal.

But McCarthyism collapsed and the conservative movement had to keep shopping.  This time they found a more reliable constituency: segregationists.  Opponents of civil rights shared conservative hostility toward the liberal federal government, and conservative’s natural deference to traditional social hierarchy meant they had no compunction about throwing their intellectual heft behind an explicit defense of white supremacy.  In the internal Republican fights of early 1960’s they supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a thoroughgoing conservative who forged an alliance of business interests and segregationists by strongly denouncing both the New Deal and civil rights legislation.  By the time Goldwater had become the Republican nominee in 1964, the ideology of modern American conservatism had hardened into implacable resistance against the three main threats to traditional American order: international communism, the welfare state, and racial integration.  Conservatism was now an alliance of the capitalist class and white supremacists, held together by a program of resistance to the federal government.

As the 1960’s progressed and liberation movements sprung up for not just blacks, but for women, Latinos, gays, etc. conservative opposition to racial equity broadened into opposition to all egalitarian social movements.   Shrewd Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan rode white middle class resentment of those movements all the way to the White House.  The segregationists became the Moral Majority, then the Conservative Coalition and, finally, the Tea Party; but they were always the same rightward-leaning portion of the white working and middle class base, afraid of social change and looking to conservative politicians to halt it.

To achieve political influence and power, conservatism turned itself from a genteel ruling class intelligentsia into a broad populist movement.  But it sold its soul to do so.  It chose expediency over intellectual integrity, and it consistently appealed to the darker impulses of its base.  As the situation called for it, it invoked the threat of Stalinist feds, shiftless Negroes, family-hating feminists, child-molesting gays, welfare bums, union thugs, etc.  It portrayed liberals as snooty, condescending, feminized aristocrats, sipping lattes, nibbling French cheese, disdaining working class values and wasting working class tax dollars on undeserving populations.  Conservatism excused, justified, and encouraged the worst American instincts, and thereby undermined its self-proclaimed project of moral renewal.  It became gutter populism.

Gutter populism in the service of cynical capitalism, that is. In policy, conservatives stuck to reducing the social safety net, de-regulating the market, and allowing the unobstructed flow of capital, goods, jobs and workers around the world.  The cliché has it that conservative politicians promised the base they would protect traditional family values while all they were really interested in was free-market economics.  That’s true of course.  Reagan made the decision early in his presidency to prioritize undoing the New Deal, not the Sexual Revolution.  But it’s not just that conservative office-holders fought half-heartedly against abortion while fighting like demons for upper-end tax cuts; it’s that they pursued economic policies – free trade, relaxed immigration, social insurance privatization, de-unionization – that working people generally oppose!  And working people haven’t been too crazy about the results of those policies: stagnating wages, the replacement of high-paying manufacturing jobs with low-paying service jobs, the immiseration of small-town and rural America.  At the end of the day, conservatives gave them nothing.

To keep working whites in their electoral coalition, conservatives had to do two contrary things: keep the populist fires of resentment and paranoia burning high, but keep them from spreading over into resentment of the rich.  They called a market-friendly healthcare plan socialism; they warned of death panels; they questioned the first black president’s religion and birthplace – all to frighten and anger the base.  They insisted the terrible liberal threat justified the most ruthless tactics – shutting down the government, undermining the government’s credit, stonewalling all compromise – and condemned as insufficiently conservative anyone who dissented.  And all the while they denounced resentment of the rich as envy, progressive taxes as class warfare, reliance on social insurance as irresponsibility, and the slightest trace of pragmatism or moderation as profoundly un-American.

Needless to say, it’s not easy to both intensify and contain populist passion.  Eventually, something had to give.  In theory, conservatives could have directed economic policy more toward middle class interests, as many reformicons have been urging.  But no, that would have undercut the central premise of American conservatism, that individual wealth results from the highest personal virtue.  And for a long time it seemed that thoroughgoing ideological conservatism was spreading and consolidating among the white middle class.  Tea Party activists sure made a good show of hating government programs.  But no, both the traditional populism of American whites and their own real and pressing material interests made genuine widespread conservatism improbable. We are led to the startling revelation that a great deal of the conservative base has never really been conservative.  In particular, they never accepted the notion that what is good for the rich is always good for the rest of us.  It turns out they hate Wall Street as much as they hate Washington and Harvard and Hollywood.  This has all been a terrible shock to the conservative chattering classes.  After spending decades indoctrinating the rubes, firing up their hatred of the liberal establishment and the cultural establishment and the Republican establishment, those rubes now direct that hatred, ironically enough, at their real enemies, those alleged conservative masters themselves!  Working whites have stopped pretending to be conservatives, they’ve stopped fooling both the conservative movement and themselves, and they’ve gone home.

To be precise, they’ve come to the realization that American elites don’t really give a damn about them.  Conservatives promised American unity, prosperity and peace, all while inviting jobs overseas, allowing banks to crash the economy, and invading a country that posed no threat to us.  They carelessly discarded American jobs, American prosperity, American lives, and – maybe worst of all – American promise.  The sold it all for a few extra points on the Dow.

But liberals haven’t done much better.  Conservatives may have had ulterior motives for accusing liberals of elitist condescension, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong.  Since the time of Jefferson and Jackson, American populism was generally a phenomenon of the left, i.e. regular people fighting against exploitation by a rich and powerful elite.  But American populism ruptured in the 60’s when the Civil Rights movement put liberals and working whites at odds.  This is the part of the story we didn’t mention above: conservatives were able to attract large number of whites in the 60’s and 70’s because liberals were so willing to let them go.  At first liberals had tried to turn economic populism for whites into economic populism for everyone.  But many whites resisted full racial equality and began voting for thoroughly conservative politicians who, as we noted, were quite happy to profit from white resentment.  Liberals abandoned the project of broadly shared prosperity and instead focused on cultural emancipation for everyone who wasn’t a straight, white male.  That emancipation was and is a tremendously worthwhile goal, but excesses in pursuit of that goal further alienated the white working class that until then had been the heart of the liberal base.  Liberals and whites walked away from each other, each convinced the other had shown itself to be unworthy of friendship.

We still live amongst the wreckage of that Great Rupture.  Race, as always in American life, has poisoned everything.  Post-60’s liberals, twisted round by white guilt, abandoned sober color-blind integration for the romance of black nationalism and multiculturalism.  They rejected the heroic and hard task of assimilating blacks into the American mainstream and settled instead for the cheap tokenism of affirmative action.  That is, they chose sanctimony over results.  And, crucially, they condemned all dissent as abject racism.  They so over-reacted to rampant racism, militarism, fundamentalism and patriarchy that they started to wonder if there was something dark lurking at the heart of American culture.  They became suspicious of patriotism and religion and the military per se, and even of the American people themselves.  They adopted a host of problematic cultural attitudes – post-patriotic, post-religious, post-color-blind, post-gender – that were unpalatable to middle America.  They still pushed for programs to help workers – universal healthcare, family leave – but they came to culturally mistrust the very people their economic policies were designed to help.  And after a while they even abandoned those policies.  Many became New Democrats like Bill Clinton, promoting privatization and free trade and curtailing government programs.  They rejected American culture from the left and pro-worker policies from the right.  They became caricature anti-populists.

All these concerns come together perfectly on immigration.  This is one issue on which conservative and liberal ideologues agree: the more immigration, the better.  Conservatives are happy to remove constraints on the labor market, and consequently drive down wages and benefits.  And their free-market dogmatism prevents them from seeing the economic injury caused by flooding the market with cheap labor.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by the lazy and irresponsible desire to avoid honest competition, and nothing matters more to a conservatives than allowing competition to prove one’s moral worth.  Meanwhile, liberals are eager to prove their humanitarian virtue by rejecting any American immigration policy that might particularly benefit Americans.  Their love for the foreign poor blinds them to the damage done to their own countrymen.  Indeed, their cosmopolitan detachment protects them from any pedestrian concerns about American workers or – grab the smelling salts! – American culture.  To them, resistance to immigration can only be motivated by racism, and nothing matters more to liberals than proving they’re not racist.  Conservatives have no consideration for American workers as workers, but liberals have no consideration for them as Americans. 

And working people of all races are starting to understand that the people running the country are not looking out for them.  Indeed, when you consider the takeover of American politics by rich donors, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that almost nothing constrains elites from pursuing policies that actively hurt working people.  And history and ideology have conspired to leave working people, and working whites particularly, with no responsible leadership.  Both conservatives and liberals pretend to be populists during election time, and liberals even make half-hearted attempts to help working people; but there is no political movement that fights for the interests of American workers as American workers.  Indeed, elites would condemn as vulgar and unrespectable any politics that was both patriotic and pro-worker.

This is where the white middle and working classes finds themselves.  Liberals have abandoned them to the gutter populism in which conservatives have so cynically invited them to indulge.  And behold the result: Donald Trump, the genuine gutter populist!  Decades of gutter populist propaganda, combined with genuine economic pain, and good old-fashioned Puritan paranoia have left working whites bitter, angry and desperate.  Many of them are still right-wing populists, fearing blacks and feminists and gays and Muslims.  That hasn’t changed just because they now perceive the damage that conservative policy has done them.  That’s why they should gravely worry us.  And following Trump won’t exactly improve that.

Looking for a real leader

But they love Donald Trump because he perfectly speaks to their fear and desperation.  He shares their deepest instincts: that it’s regular working Americans who make America prosper, that America is strong and good and our standing in the world should reflect that, that economic and political elites have been ignoring those first two points, and at their peril.  Unfortunately, he also shares their darker instincts: that America is morally superior to every other country, that regular Americans are the best people in the world, particularly straight, white, Christian, male breadwinners.  He’s been rightly called the American id, the strutting embodiment of all those impulses.  But part of the reason his shtick works so well is that he’s little more than id himself!  He lacks a coherent ideology or set of policies because all he has are those nationalist instincts and a gigantic, monumental, indestructible faith in both them and himself.  He’s not just looking out for working white people, in cultural sensibility he is them, but independent and strong enough to fight like hell.  He’s not just a genuine gutter populist, he’s a determined gutter populist.  They delight in his irrepressible contempt for decent propriety.  He’s the cocksure naughty boy, breaking all the rules, smirking as the children cheer, and sneering at the grownups who try to shame him.  He is the national will to tear everything down and dance on the rubble.

We may even see – God help us! – President Donald Trump if enough independents feel sufficiently marginalized and desperate.  But it need not have been this way.  It’s conceivable – isn’t it? – that  we could have had a constructive and enlightened populism, one that picked itself up out of the gutter and fought for the interests of all American working people.  Or does the damnable intransigence of racial hostility make that impossible?  Both conservatism and liberalism, in their current forms, have eagerly exploited and exacerbated that hostility.  Neither is capable of addressing the current crisis, which is at bottom a crisis of political imagination.  Both are too rigid, too wedded to blind and implausible ideologies, too comfortable in their institutional power, too removed from the realities of American life.  They fight their petty, scripted battles over the heights of American society, while the foundation rots beneath their feet.  They have become irrelevant.

It’s unclear where working whites will go now.  They broke with conservatism when they came to understand that the system cannot be indifferent; it can only work for them or against them.  That is, they now know – in their experience and in their bones – that their economic condition is a function of more than just their own actions.  When they make this simple fact an explicit doctrine and a rallying cry and an organizing principle then they will have become full populists.  What they will do with that populism, whether it will be a force for preserving and promoting the best of America, or whether it will degrade and destroy – we don’t know yet.  Only disaster can result if they allow leaders like Trump to drag them further into the gutter.  They have the potential to become a powerful force for unmediated white authoritarianism, and that’s an outcome too awful to contemplate.

If there is to be a constructive populist alternative, an inclusive, color-blind, mature populism, it can ultimately come only from a reconstructed liberalism.  Bernie Sanders has taken liberalism halfway there, with his stress on economic concerns over cultural ones, and his nascent and inchoate economic nationalism.  The rupture between liberalism and white working people must be reconciled, and that can only happen when liberals come to understand the centrality of our shared American identity.  And maybe a program of working class unity could reduce racial tension.  Maybe such a movement could address our actual problems and offer real solutions.  Maybe it could remind us all who we are to each other, what we owe each other, and what we can accomplish together.  Maybe it could elicit the better angels of our nature.  And maybe, finally, it could tell us how we can be healed.

Hollow Populisms

Union members and supporters protest Governor Scott Walker's assault on unions
Madison, Wisconsin, 2012

Conservative populism is inherently unstable; it must constantly struggle to keep cultural populism from bleeding over into economic issues.  That is, white working people are encouraged to resent snobbish, over-educated, cosmopolitan, elitist liberals who look down on them for their unsophisticated tastes, crude manners and backward views.  But they must never resent the rich simply for being rich; they must never consider the injustice of being forced to work for less pay in worse conditions while CEO’s and hedge-fund managers make millions.  Since in conservative mythology, capitalism always rewards the virtuous and punishes the lazy, conservative populism must be about attitudes and humiliation, never about wages and power.  It must remain purely affective, never material.  You’re only allowed to hate someone for their condescension, never for their money.  Thus is real populism neutered.

But that’s what makes the conservative split on immigration so interesting: it sneaks in some genuine economic populism through the back door.  Conservative elites – commentators, writers, the Republican establishment, the Chamber of Commerce, big money – are quite happy to let in lots of unskilled workers from other countries.  It provides cheap labor, and it indulges their stark libertarianism, the view that any interference in the market – even a national boundary – is the work of the devil.  And after Hispanics voted overwhelmingly in 2012 against Mitt Romney and his severely restrictive anti-immigration position, Republican leaders are eager to appear more accommodating toward Hispanics.  And did I mention that immigration provides lots of cheap labor?

The conservative base, of course, is strongly opposed to both allowing in more immigrants and allowing undocumented immigrants to stay.  Their reasons are partly cultural: they’re afraid that too many foreigners will resist assimilation and alter the national character.  And on the farther reaches the reasons become more nativist and racial: they’re convinced America is meant for white Christians.  But their objections also include perfectly defensible and plausible economic concerns: they don’t want to compete against cheap labor.  Of course, that’s the same cheap labor – I may have mentioned – that employers and investors are quite happy to have them compete against.  So the split on immigration between the conservative establishment and the conservative base is an economic split.  It’s a split defined by class.  Not class in the sense of who’s looking down his nose at who, but in the sense of who holds economic power and who is subject to it.

Into that breach has stepped Scott Walker, the conservative Republican governor of Wisconsin and credible presidential candidate.  During an interview with conservative Glenn Beck, Walker staked out what breitbart.com calls a “pro-American-worker” position:

In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying—the next president and the next congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages, because the more I’ve talked to folks, I’ve talked to [Alabama] Senator Sessions and others out there—but it is a fundamentally lost issue by many in elected positions today—is what is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages, and we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward.

Clearly, Walker is siding with the base against the establishment.  But to do so, he’s taken a populist position, an economically populist position: the rich and the powerful are making decisions that hurt everyday people, that hurt them in their pocketbooks.

Now Scott Walker, like most conservatives, is not exactly a friend of policies and institutions that promote the economic interests of working people.  Indeed, he’s loved by conservatives specifically because of the ferocious battles he fought against organized labor in Wisconsin.  And many conservative commentators consider Walker’s newfound suspicion of a completely free labor market to be a real betrayal of conservative principle (there are exceptions).  Consider Philip Klein's delightfully dogmatic reaction:

The idea that policymakers should protect current American workers from competition from immigrants who come here legally and are willing and eager to work hard is a perversion of American ideals and a recipe for decline.

But in addition to Walker’s newfound moderation regarding market purity, there is his newfound immoderation on the immigration issue itself; i.e. he’s gone quite a few steps further than most of his conservative presidential rivals by questioning not only illegal immigration, but legal immigration.  Together these deviations add up to a new, more comprehensive conservative populism.  That is, Walker is positioning himself, consciously or otherwise, to be the genuine voice of working America (white working America, at least) championing both its cultural instincts and its economic interests.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Or so it would appear.  But will Walker embrace a broader range of policies helping working people?  Will he support raising the minimum wage or progressive taxes or public works?  Will he come out fighting in favor of unions?  If he does none of those things his populism will have been detained at the border’s edge.  If it seems that the immigration controversy might be the herald of a more genuinely populist conservatism, it isn’t happening yet, and it probably won’t happen any time soon.  And that’s because conservatives – even populist ones – believe that American workers merit special consideration only for being American, not for being workers.  American workers should be protected from competition from foreigners but not from the depredations of American capitalism.  This is the full extent of conservative concern for American workers: they must remain American.

But if conservatives have no concern for American workers as workers, liberals have no concern for them as Americans.  Indeed, most liberals seem to have no more consideration for American workers than they do for workers from other countries.  It’s true that the Democratic economic agenda – minimum wage increases, Obamacare, etc. – is directed at helping working people, but when faced with the choice between American workers and immigrants, liberals choose the immigrants.  Have their national feelings attenuated that far? They’re terribly concerned about the injustice suffered by African-Americans, Hispanics, other racial minorities, women, gays, the handicapped, etc., and rightly so.  But do they have no particular consideration for their fellow Americans as Americans?

If not, if liberals have gone that far, then American liberalism is on a short one-way trip to history’s dust bin.  No one will vote for a party that doesn’t put a special priority upon the interests of its own citizens.  Indeed, no one should!  Especially if one supports the social welfare state and hopes for a more egalitarian and just society, since those are practically possible only within the confines of a well-defined polity.  It’s much easier to convince a rich New Yorker to pay taxes for doctors in Texas than for doctors in Bangladesh.  Liberalism without patriotism is liberalism standing upon thin air.

Liberals used to understand this.  Only a few years ago they were much more willing to express worry about the effect of immigration on American wages.  Now they only worry about doing even the tiniest damage to their demographically expanding non-white electoral coalition.  And by spending so much time and energy portraying any conservative resistance to immigration as based entirely upon racism, they’ve made it too politically costly to question immigration themselves.  Their populism is a victim of their own propaganda and their own hypertrophied broad-mindedness.  To love everyone is to be of no use to anyone.

And conservatives, whose national feelings could probably do with a little attenuation, are all too happy to demonstrate how this undermines liberal economic populism.  Here is the Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey H. Anderson explaining how immigration shows that liberals don’t care about workers (in a piece written before Walker staked out his anti-immigration position):

If there is anything that liberals and Big Business can seemingly agree upon, it’s that we don’t need an approach to immigration that benefits Main Street.  It remains to be seen whether anyone running for president will seize this opening and buck the liberal-corporate consensus.

But liberals seem blithely unaware how much they’re playing into that consensus.  Hillary has even come out in favor of more immigration!  And that’s in perfect keeping with her pro-business positions and the general cosmopolitan tilt of liberal elites.  And, of course, it helps Democrats cement their support among Hispanics.  But it drastically undermines liberal credibility among working Americans, the very people that liberalism used to be about.

We’re left with no real populism.  Liberal populism shrivels before our eyes.  And a hollow conservative version tries to steal its place.  But the only American populism worthy of the name is one that actively works for the material good of American workers.  Liberals may call that nativism and conservatives may call it socialism.  But in reality it’s neither, it’s justice made practical.

Obama, Putin and Exceptionalism

The original star-spangled banner from the War of 1812

[Note: This essay owes a great debt to the book, The Next American Nation, and its author, Michael Lind, whose brilliant and incisive exploration of Americanism has deeply informed and inspired the ideas expressed here.]

Americans know they’re exceptional, unique, special; they feel it in their bones.  But are they?  The question of American exceptionalism is a confused tangle, and President Obama and Russian President Putin each recently tugged on that knot while arguing about intervention in the Syrian civil war.  Both of them added to the tangle, Obama by invoking exceptionalism, Putin by condemning it.  Let’s try to untangle the threads.  What is American exceptionalism?  In what way are we exceptional?  What is the cause or basis of this putative uniqueness?  And what does it imply for American relations with the world?

Putin seems to think that it’s purely a self-serving illusion, an alibi for America’s problematic unilateralism:

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

According to Putin, we operate as if military intervention is our prerogative, but that gets us in trouble.  We claim to be acting from noble motives but we end up looking like a bully.  We claim to be the world’s policeman, but we’re really the world’s vigilante, its rogue, unauthorized, dangerous vigilante: we’re George Zimmerman.  Even worse, we defend our right to intervene in the name of high ideals: we’re a sanctimonious George Zimmerman.  And Putin – despite being a puffed up autocrat who invades his small neighbors and protects murderous dictators – is courageously standing up to our bullying.  And he’s not just questioning American intentions and self-serving self-perception, but American efficacy as well.  He’s saying that our inflated sense of our own moral purity blinds us to both our moral and our practical limitations.  And really we are no better than anyone else:

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

He even invokes the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – expanding its doctrine of democratic equality from individuals to countries, as if to make the astounding claim that it’s impermissible to make moral comparisons between countries.  This is liberal reasoning run amuck, tolerance slipping into relativism.  Was Nazi Germany just as moral as Denmark, which surrendered peacefully to the Wehrmacht to avoid pointless bloodshed and refused to hand over its Jewish population?  Yes, there are big and small and rich and poor countries; but there are also countries that have done great evil and some that have done great good.  Just as there are evil men and good men.  The Declaration doesn’t endorse relativism, applied to countries or to individuals.  It merely holds that no individual has an inherent claim of authority over another.  Even a good person has no such claim over a bad person.  Is there anything in German culture which particularly lent itself to the madness of fascism and war?  Students of German culture may argue over that question, but they can’t dismiss it as fundamentally unreasonable. When Putin complains that America acts as if it’s better than everyone else, the appropriate response is to ask: Is it?

Most Americans seem to think it is.  Christian conservative Gary Bauer relates that in a 2010 poll fully 80% of Americans agreed with the statement, “Because of the United States’ history and its Constitution it has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world.”  And a solid majority believes that “God has granted America a special role in history.”  Now that’s exceptionalism!  But Bauer, shrewd rhetorician that he is, never explicitly claims that America is “the greatest country in the world”; in fact, he denies that “America is inherently superior to other countries, or that God loves Americans more.”  Every exceptionalist writer seems compelled to include this particular disclaimer – that we’re not better, just different.  It usually comes just before the passage where they explain how much better we are.  I suppose that propriety demands we not display our superiority too flagrantly, it must be finessed and moderated.  And Bauer does not disappoint, declaring that “America has a special role to play on the world stage that’s distinct from the roles of other countries,” and that special role consists of “protecting and supporting [the] God-given rights” all humans possess.  If Putin quotes the Declaration of Independence in opposition to American exceptionalism, Bauer (like most exceptionalists) cites it as the source of our distinction:

Putin . . . is right that God creates all people equal, but what makes America exceptional is that it was the first country whose founding was rooted in the recognition of this important truth.

So one country has been charged to profess and nurture God’s political truths for the whole world, but it’s no better than any other country.  Is Bauer saying that our mission is superior – indeed, paramount – but we are not?  But that dodge raises another question just as problematic: How did we become the missionaries?

To address that question we must delve further into the American unconscious, down into its darker depths.  Yes, we must listen to Rush Limbaugh, the man whose daily oozings of conservative prejudices, rages and resentments comes across like free association in search of a national psychiatrist.  Let’s play Freud to his fever dream.  He makes the obligatory unconvincing disclaimer:

It does not mean that we're better people.  And it does not mean that we're special, more qualified, smarter, any of that, than anybody else in the world.  It doesn't mean that at all.

So we’re not special, got it.  But a minute later he berates Obama for thinking, “there’s nothing special about us” (inexplicably misrepresenting Obama).  So we’re not special but only European-style socialists like Obama think we’re not special.  OK, we may be special but we’re not smarter; I know we’re not because Rush said so.  But he laments that liberalism clouds people’s minds about our exceptionalism, it “takes over, and they think we're no better than anybody else. We're no smarter.”  So we’re no smarter than anybody else but liberalism hoodwinks gullible people into believing that we’re no smarter than anybody else.  It must be hard, especially for someone utterly without intellectual integrity, to maintain consistency over the course of a three hour discharge of semi-conscious malice.  But this is why we listen to Rush: to discern conservative instincts and the trickery used to obscure them.  Does anyone – anyone? – doubt that Rush thinks Americans are special, smarter – just plain better – than everyone else in the world?

Rush’s rhetoric, like Bauer’s and most exceptionalists, grounds American distinctiveness (not superiority, no, never!) in our political founding, in the philosophy which inspires the Declaration and the Constitution:

The US is the first time in the history of the world where a government was organized with a Constitution laying out the rules, that the individual was supreme and dominant, and that is what led to the US becoming the greatest country ever because it unleashed people to be the best they could be. Nothing like it had ever happened.  That's American exceptionalism.

The history of world is dictatorship, tyranny, subjugation . . . and then along came the United States of America.

The sole reason for our exceptionalism: Limiting government and maintaining the primacy of the individual human being regardless of race, sex, creed . . . It's the primacy of the individual.

America was created to make space for individual freedom, to enable meritocracy and the wealth and power it brings.  This was God’s wish:

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are an attempt to provide a political framework to facilitate God's will that each of us are born and remain free.  Read the Founders and you can conclude nothing other than that.

What a fascinating mix of truth and fantasy!  For one thing, it’s a sick joke to think that from the beginning America has respected “the primacy of the individual human being regardless of race, sex, creed.”  For another thing, the Constitution is not primarily about individual freedom.  It’s about mediating the popular will through limited and competing institutions.  It’s about making the state representative enough to achieve democratic accountability without making it strong enough to enable tyranny.  The American Revolution was not fought primarily to assert individual rights but to assert the right of collective national self-determination.  And the Constitution actually constricts individual rights in some ways.  It endorses slavery, for instance, by prohibiting any law against the slave trade before the year 1808.  If the Founders were so intent on implementing the Almighty’s political program for protecting “the primacy of the individual” then why didn’t the original Constitution even mention individual rights?  Why was it necessary to add the Bill of Rights through the amendment process, almost as an afterthought?  Anti-Federalist demand for a Bill of Rights to protect individual rights does indeed demonstrate that the political folk culture of the period held those rights to be quite important, though it also shows those rights to be a matter of some contention.  But doesn’t it also hint that there was more to the American founding than the ahistorical channeling of God’s politics?  The Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights didn’t create American politics, they expressed them.  And those politics are obviously borrowed from the politics of the mother country, England.  Pre-revolutionary Americans spoke the English language, followed English religion and adhered to English culture; why wouldn’t they practice English politics as well?  The English Parliament had effectively achieved primacy over the monarchy by 1689; the English had their own Bill of Rights that same year, a full 100 years before the American version!  In summary: the American nation existed long before the Constitution; that Constitution wasn’t primarily based upon individual rights; and the bedrock of our politics isn’t even particularly American, but English.  The unique American founding based upon individual rights is a complete myth.

Alexis Tocqueville, the French observer of America in the 1830’s, whom conservatives love to quote, gives a much more penetrating account of American democracy than those same conservatives.  Tocqueville perceived that the animating force in American politics was the desire for equality and the hatred of unwarranted power.  To Tocqueville, American democracy was English society stripped of its aristocracy, leaving the people roughly equal in wealth and power.  English tradition and common law gave them local self-government and due process rights.  Calvinism made their sexual and civic morals purer.  A large, rich and lightly populated continent gave them the raw material for economic growth.  But Tocqueville did not succumb to the myth of individual primacy:

I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they seek it, they love it, and they will see themselves parted from it only with sorrow.  But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom, and if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.  They will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.

So Tocqueville believed that American democracy was primarily about equality, its bedrock was non-libertarian populism in the form of local majoritarianism.  But, more to the point, he believed it arose from the lucky accidents incurred while transposing English society to the New World.  For our purposes the upshot is: America existed as an independent offshoot of English culture decades before the Revolutionary era created the independent American polity.  We were a nation with our own culture long before we had our own government.  If there is any truth to American exceptionalism it can only be found within our actual cultural substance, not in declarations or constitutions, even those manifesting the noblest elements of that culture.

Even more confusion arises from the peculiar use conservatives make of liberal arguments about American exceptionalism.  Yes, liberal arguments.  The notions of individual rights, government based upon rational principle, popularly accountable government, equality before the law, etc. are classical liberal notions, expressed best by the English liberal philosopher John Locke.  And the mutually exclusive notion that states and governments arise over time from tradition and local authority are conservative notions, expressed best by the pre-eminent British conservative thinker, Edmund Burke.  The overpowering semantic confusion of American politics – American “conservatives” mouthing liberal slogans in support of Puritan moralism reworked as crusading plutocracy; and American “liberals” employing liberal platitudes to justify reworking the state, that conservative institution, for egalitarian populist ends – obscures every other topic of our collective discourse; why should it not obscure this one as well? We can see why it’s so hard for Americans, particularly conservative Americans, to have a clear understanding of the American place in the world when their perception is so clouded by falsity, myth and self-satisfaction.

Please, let’s accept the genuinely conservative notion of American nationhood, that we arose over time from transplanted and slightly modified English culture (and that culture has been modified greatly over time by infusions from the rest of the world).  We did not spring fully grown like Athena from the head of James Madison.  It’s taken all that earnest deconstruction just to get to the proper question: What is exceptional about actual American culture?  It’s not so easy to find writers who even address this question; as we’ve seen, most conservatives confuse the nature of the American nation with its political Constitution, thoughtlessly parroting liberal cant about universal rights and the primacy of the individual. 

More thoughtful writers, such as Josh Good of the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank not normally credited for thoughtful analysis), look for the characteristic aspects of American culture itself.  In his review of Charles Murray’s book on exceptionalism, Good lists four “distinct American qualities: industriousness, egalitarianism, religiosity, and community life.”  Good and Murray credit Calvinism and its salvation-inspired work ethic for our tremendous economic vitality and success: “Our Protestant work ethic, reinforced by three Great Awakenings, fused American religious life with an entrepreneurial, hard-working impulse, creating a civic culture unlike any the world had previously seen.”  It seems clear that this is the central cultural factor in American economic success.  Indeed, the Puritans laid the groundwork for all of American culture, with their moral purity, local political control, communal benevolence, sexual constriction, blunt racism, and raging sanctimony.  But there’s one more element of the Puritan sensibility we should note: belief in its own mission to save the world.  Tim Rutten reminds us of the influence of St. Augustine’s notion of “a shining city on the hill” and “Puritans’ belief in the New World as a ‘new Jerusalem’” with a mission to be “a Godly light to the nations.”  From the very beginning, long before the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, before George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and even John Locke, before recognition of freedom of speech and religion, long before the rise of our impoverished modern individualism, America had its special mission.  And that mission was to properly save the world for Christ.

We do have an unusual culture, somehow both modern and unenlightened, capitalist and communal, prudent and utopian, democratic and religious, parochial and generous.  The Puritans came here as England was transitioning from feudalism to liberal democracy; the Puritans themselves represented that transition in their half-conservative, half-democratic values.  They carried that moment in English history to the New World and it has persisted to this day, including our sense of mission.  Let’s be honest.  Almost every American deeply believes that America has some special insight into politics and economics; and we as individuals might not be better (though we probably are), but our way of life certainly is; and the rest of the world would be much happier if they would only be like us!  America represents the teleology of social evolution, the end of history.  This is the psychological and political residue of Puritan Messianism, buttressed by the remarkable political, economic and military success our Calvinist, half-liberal, half-medieval nation has enjoyed.

It’s hard to argue with success.  But success does not substitute for virtue.  And it doesn’t shield us from honest criticism.  Our national culture is far from perfect and our success is not entirely earned.  If Communism had succeeded in conquering the world – which it almost did – would that have meant Communism was superior?  And our success is partially due to our rich natural resources and our long-time isolation from the world.  And much of the rest of the world is quite happy being different from us.  Do the French or the Japanese or the Saudis want to be more like America?  While some societies might benefit from becoming more like us, we might benefit by becoming more like some of them.  And we might start with becoming a little less smug.  It may seem silly to so earnestly address this childish American snobbery, but it is an overpowering and largely unacknowledged force in our national life, and frequently a destructive one.  Some honest national soul-searching might do us some good.

Consider how easily exceptionalism can take an ugly turn.  When Pat Buchanan, a forthright version of Rush Limbaugh, spoke to the Christian Coalition in September 1993 he proclaimed, “Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.”  Now that’s exceptionalism!  Pat voices the patriotism whose name Rush dare not speak; he both acknowledges the existence of pre-Constitutional American national culture and zealously trumpets its shining superiority.  We are free and successful because we live out God’s politics and economics and that’s only because we worship God correctly.  Everyone else has been cast into the outer darkness.  The extent to which other Americans agree with Buchanan is the extent to which exceptionalism hurts both us and the world.  Where Buchanan goes wrong is to confuse those successful American values with their historical origins.  One can whole-heartedly believe in the values of hard work and democracy without being a doctrinal Calvinist; most Americans do just that.  This is the classic reactionary error: the incapacity to judge what’s good and bad in one’s tradition.  Just because the Puritans bequeathed us much of our culture doesn’t mean we must accept their entire world-view.  We can step off the Mayflower.

Many liberals, of course, make the opposite error, the relativist error: Judgments can hurt people, so let’s not make any.  We must not compare nations, cultures, etc., lest some nations feel justified in exploiting others.  After all, it was the European sense of racial and cultural superiority that led to the horrors of imperialism and colonialism.  Putin, himself a purveyor of Russian exceptionalism, invokes that relativism hypocritically, but many American liberals do so quite earnestly.  They are so horrified by the great evil that’s been done in the name of American moral purity – slavery, white supremacy, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, worker exploitation, environmental degradation, militarism, expansionist war – that they overlook the good – the ending of slavery, the (still incomplete) emancipation of women and minorities, the expansion of democratic rights, protection of the poor and the sick (still incomplete), the defeat of fascism and communism.  Puritan values – for instance, progress and community – have informed the good in America, not just the domineering and the destructive.

Indeed, the genuinely liberal version of American exceptionalism – that America can help to spread universal human rights and values – is simply the modern-day version of the Puritan mission – as Rush’s dishonest appropriation of it so well shows!  We are still saving the world, with the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other.  We can never really step off the Mayflower.  Even a modern liberal like Barack Obama, influenced by subjectivism and post-nationalism, accepts this version of exceptionalism:

I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Why, he sounds just like Rush!  Although, like a good and thoughtful liberal, he inserts all the requisite caveats:

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

So why does Rush – like so many conservatives – claim that Obama doesn’t understand or accept American exceptionalism?  Because Obama really believes the liberal formulation that they only parrot.  If American culture is not superior then we are just a country like any other, and our actions should be subject to the same judgments and constraints rightly laid upon other countries.  And Rush would never relinquish America’s special standing above the rules:

What makes us exceptional is what we used to have in situations like this, that was a moral authority.  We had the moral authority because of what we stood for, and we stood for . . . the absolute primacy of the individual.

Rush pretends it’s our goals that make us noble, but really he believes that we can’t help but stand for noble goals, that our cultural superiority endows all we do with shiny goodness.  Rush believes we have authority because we fight for individual rights; that is our nature. Obama believes we have authority when we fight for individual rights; that is our calling.  Obama may have succumbed to Puritan missionary zeal, too, but his exceptionalism is the adult version of Rush’s childish self-indulgence. 

But it’s also an airy, post-nationalist version.  Obama’s primary allegiance is to the universal liberal values that America sometimes supports.  He can’t fully embrace allegiance to an American culture that, because he’s a liberal, he’s not sure even exists!  This is what makes Obama’s patriotism seem like such weak tea to Rush (a weak tea Rush himself pretends to swallow).  There is one truth about America that Rush gets right: it is an actual nation with a remarkably successful and admirable culture.  But Rush takes it a few steps too far.  He holds it self-evident that we are endowed by our culture with certain inalienable privileges, and that among these are arrogance, intervention and the flouting of international norms.  Rush’s primary allegiance is to his rigid Calvinist vision of God’s metaphysical, moral and political truths, not so much to the nation that embodies them less and less.  To Rush, the real America is those truths, and liberals foolishly or deceitfully are making America into some watered-down European-style imitation of her real self, an imitation whose moral emptiness  keeps her from commanding and saving the world as God meant her to do.

But there is a coherent alternative to Obama’s uprooted universalism and Rush’s ignorant nativism. It consists of five doctrines: America is a nation prior to and distinct from its government; the unusual culture of the nation has been integral to its impressive economic and political success; one need not adhere to the rigid Calvinist doctrines that founded that culture to be a full member of that nation; that nation has brought both great harm and great benefit to the world; even culturally powerful nations are not justified in flouting international norms and laws.  Though, of course, some times they are justified.  Maybe targeted bombing of the military installations of a horrible, mass-murdering, thug dictator like Bashar al-Assad is such an occasion.  As Obama has said, it would honor our noblest political impulses to use our terrible power for genuinely humanitarian ends.  There are, of course, compelling arguments for not getting involved.  The point is that our analysis of American exceptionalism (hopefully) allows us to address the issue of something like Syrian intervention less distracted by distorting and self-serving mythology.

We can live better without that mythology, both the conservative and liberal versions. But it doesn’t seem possible that conservatives might give up their myths.  They identify America with their narrow Puritan ideology, which they’re certain can do no wrong and which they defend with liberal, universalist rhetoric; they seem too entangled in falsity to extricate themselves.  As demography, individualism and progress slowly move America away from them, they alienate themselves more and more from the actual living American culture, captives of the mythic idolized America they worship.  Liberals can see more clearly America’s moral strengths and weaknesses; they are more capable of extricating themselves from its mythology.  But most importantly, liberals must come home.  They must understand they are children of that culture too, and they owe it a deeper commitment.  It is, after all, who they are.  Rush doesn’t own America and Obama can’t disown it.  We must cultivate a more mature patriotism.  We must love America for what it is, neither denying its faults nor rejecting it for those faults.  We must hope that its better angels defeat its bitter demons.  We must commit ourselves to the real American faith: that the struggles of American history lead toward something greater, more profound, more free, more just.  We fought, we died, we marched, we sang, we were beaten, we raged, we organized, we worked, we came together, we dreamed of a better life and a better world.  Being American is a heavy responsibility.  It demands that we enlist in that struggle and strive for those dreams.  It demands both commitment and candor, both rootedness and growth, both loyalty and humility.  And it insists that before we can redeem the world we must redeem ourselves.