I write these blog posts according to what comes into my mind on a given day, and sometimes I wander off on a tangent without bothering to lay the groundwork for it. I’ve been thinking that my last few efforts might’ve been a bit more fathomable if I’d previously defined a few terms – two in particular, that are often conflated in ordinary political discourse: ethnicity and nationality. These naturally go together – in my view, anyhow – and the globalists don’t think much of either. Still, it’s possible to have one without the other. Let me explain.
Before getting started on my delineations, I’ll take a moment to note why the exercise is important. Even in the best of times, political debate tends to be imprecise and unfair. Especially in today’s poisonous partisan atmosphere, words become verbal stones that we hurl at our enemy, rather than tools to help us think clearly. Persons of a cosmopolitan outlook, disliking both ethnic politics and the nation-state, lump them in with other, nastier entities – racism, xenophobia, despotism, genocide – and proceed to condemn the lot wholesale. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t think humanitarian motives are an excuse for sloppy thinking. Condemning things without understanding them is bigotry, even when progressives do it.
I’ll begin with ethnicity. An ethnic group is a set of people who share a common culture. Usually, they speak a distinctive language, at least a distinctive dialect, which will include turns of phrase, and ideas, not to be found in any other idiom. They’ll have a set of customs and social conventions peculiar to themselves. Generally, they deem themselves to be related by blood – physically descended from the same ancestral stock. They mostly live in a particular part of the world, which they regard as their primordial homeland, and that landscape will be intertwined with their characteristic philosophy of life. They’ve a sense of themselves as a cohesive group relative to other groups, and they share a common historical narrative (or mythology) explaining how they came to be what they are. They’re proud of their usages, which they consider to be “normal,” and they tend to be defensive if these are threatened.
In Pagan times, every ethnic group had its own religious observances and rites – its own set of Goddesses and Gods validating the traditional mores. It was considered impious for individuals to abandon the ways of their ancestors.
Nationality, however, has to do with political allegiance. A nation is a set of people who (1) comprise the entire citizen body of a particular state and (2) consider themselves to be a genuine community of interest due to this political tie. Both these factors are essential – otherwise, every random collection of people who happen to be subject to a particular regime would have to be considered a nation, even if they hate and despise their rulers and each other. In other words, a nation is a state of mind on the part of a population – a subjective sense of belonging together – backed up by a sovereign government. This togetherness can be based on whatever is thought to be important. It doesn’t absolutely have to be a distinctive ethnic identity, though it often is.
An ethnic core is especially convenient for a democracy. Autocratic states have a source of unity in the despotic ruler, but when political power is widely diffused among the people, the source of unity must also be diffused. Free peoples, it appears, act most effectively when their political loyalties are reinforced by cultural connections. It’s no accident that the more or less democratic governments that replaced the monarchies of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries were ethnically centered nation-states. Successful multi-ethnic nations exist – Switzerland, Canada – but they’re pretty rare. More often, multiple ethnicities tend to divide and derange national communities.
Which brings us to the United States.
Before Trump came along, I always considered myself an American nationalist, and I still do, in that I think the American people have common interests vis-à-vis other countries, which we could pursue through prudent policies of a nationalistic character like the BAT. But the American nation – a theoretical concept if there ever was one – is notoriously not ethnically unified, and this fact not only deprives us of a valuable social cement, but calls into question our whole national project.
A person’s ethnicity isn’t something that can be simply cast aside for purposes of convenience. Your family, your tribe, your culture, made you what you are today. You can’t reject this inheritance, because it’s part of your very being, and you don’t want to, because you’d thereby dishonor your parents, grandparents, and all of the more remote ancestors who worked, fought, and persevered, to provide for the generations to come – including you. You hope, in turn, to pass this heritage on to your descendants. If your fidelity to your ethnic brothers and sisters causes you to value their interests more than the alleged general welfare of the questionable American nation, who am I to say you’re wrong? Yet if every interest group in our society pursues only its own advantage, and never respects the contrary perspectives of other groups, we’re doomed to suffer many more years of vicious, zero-sum politics and gridlock.
Is there anything we can do about this? Frankly, maybe not. I’ll be considering that knotty question next time.
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