Jill Lepore’s new “little book” is a historian’s attempt to mobilize her knowledge to political effect. Last year Lepore published These Truths: A History of the United States, a monumental and brilliantly assembled work of political history that “is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions.” The ideological essence of that work has been distilled in This America: The Case for the Nation. In a New York Times Op-Ed that accompanied its publication, Lepore urged Democratic presidential candidates to “speak with clarity and purpose about what’s at stake: the liberal nation-state itself.” Lepore went on:
As Lepore acknowledges, the equation of “nationalism” with hate and bigotry is far from universal: in postcolonial countries, the term is benignly connected to the enlightened (if mythic) conception of nationhood as the starting point of self-determination. America was once a colonial place, too, but its sense of itself as a nation, Lepore believes, was developed ex post facto. Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution is the United States described as a nation. (Contrast this with, for example, the Republic of Ireland: the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the 1937 Constitution begin with powerful assertions of Irish nationhood.) It took a great effort of politicking to unite states that did not much identify with one another, in spite of having in common the English language, whiteness, and Christianity. The US, Lepore says, is that rare thing: a state-nation. (...)
Lepore is aware of this fact—there’s little she isn’t aware of, one senses—and makes it integral to her argument, which is that the age-old struggle between illiberal and liberal tendencies is constitutive of the nation. Nationalism is currently thriving, she believes, because the discourse of American liberalism is deficient. First, that discourse undervalues the radicality and relevance of the country’s founding ideals; second, the preoccupation with the rights of subgroups is essential, certainly, but politically inadequate; third, and here I put the matter much more crudely than Lepore would, liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes. However gauche or complicit it may seem, they must understand and unapologetically frame their values—which currently have a niche, somewhat subversive emphasis—as our core national values:
Why had Gore so quickly phoned Bush to concede an undecided election (a concession he soon retracted)? Why the curious timidity of Democrats in Florida and the unaccountable self-righteousness of their aggressive Republican counterparts? Were my eyes and ears fooling me, or was everybody somewhat scared of the Republicans? The penny finally dropped when the Republican majority in the Supreme Court incoherently decided, in Bush v. Gore, to halt the vote-counting while their candidate still held a lead. Oh, I thought to myself. It’s a deep-state thing. (...)
The term originates in Turkey. Like the United States, Turkey is a constitutional republic. Its democratic progress has been something of a bumpy ride. There have been three military coups since 1961, each more or less accepted by the Turkish people. They understood (if sometimes disputed) that the armed forces enjoyed an extralegal, almost spiritual authority to safeguard the legacy of Kemal Atatürk and, if necessary, to suspend the constitutional order when that legacy was threatened by civil unrest or dangerous political developments. The military—together with its allies in the state security and legal apparatus—came to be described as constituting, and acting on behalf of, the “deep state.”
The United States has secretive agencies that do legally dubious things, but it doesn’t have a deep state in the Turkish sense. It may be said to have a deep state in another sense, however: America. America preceded, and brought into being, the republic we now live in—the United States of America. Almost everyone still talks about America, not about the United States; about Americans, not USAers. America, in short, was not extinguished by the United States. It persists as a buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve. Primordial America (at least in the popular imagination) was where folks prayed hard, worked hard on the land, and had rightful recourse to violence. In this imaginary place, people were white, Christian, English-speaking. They had God-given dominion over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. All of this inevitably informs the way American nationals apprehend one another and their country. They feel in their bones that some people are Americans and other people are merely citizens of the United States.
Our deep state doesn’t require conspiracies or coups or even self-awareness. It is a permanent ideological feature, like gravity. It reveals itself in our politics. A common trope—“Imagine if a Democrat did that”—refers to a state of affairs in which one party is bound by norms and rules, and the other party less so. One president must constantly generate his legitimacy, even as he excellently complies with the rules; another president benefits from a legitimacy so profound that his rule-breaking has the effect of rule-making. One group is perceived to be synthetic and unpatriotic, another as authentic and patriotic. This guy is a snowflake, that guy is a victim of persecution. And so on.
The unspoken ratio decidendi of Bush v. Gore is that, when it comes to the crunch, America trumps the United States and its papery constitutional affirmations. Democrats get this as much as Republicans do. Consciously or unconsciously, they know the score. They experience this knowledge mostly as fear.
This has implications for Lepore’s argument. She believes that, as a practical matter, liberal political messaging should vigorously equate our founding ideals with our sense of nationality. If anyone has done that, it is Obama. In 2009 (during a trip to Turkey, as it happens), he declared:
The cornerstone assertion of the Declaration of Independence is that government exists in order to secure the equal, inalienable rights of persons. This is the formal raison d’être and official ideology of the United States. It follows that those who fully embrace those rights—liberals—have political and patriotic legitimacy, and those who reject them lack legitimacy. Psychically, liberals often don’t seem to believe this. A deference to “Americans” inheres in their worldview, even if the Americans in question aspire to subvert our democracy. The “heartland” and “Middle America” (concepts that bring to mind the idea of la France profonde) still form a crucial part of the liberal political vocabulary, which continues to attach an emphatically American identity to the country’s white provincial population. If, as Lepore urges, we must think hard, even dangerously, about the nation and its history, the distinction between America and the United States should probably be reckoned with.
by Joseph O’Neill, NYRB | Read more:
The hard work isn’t condemning nationalism; it’s making the case for the liberal nation-state.Whether it is electorally efficient, in the short term, to revamp our use of the word “nation” is of course debatable. But the argument, as I understand it, is that icebergs of nationalism have been an ever-present, indeed defining feature of American history; and that to avoid them we must resolutely navigate by our best national ideals—“a revolutionary, generous, and deeply moral commitment to human equality and dignity.” (...)
This is an argument of political necessity and moral urgency. So far, Democrats haven’t made it. Instead, in much the same way that they gave up the word “liberalism” in the 1980s, they’ve gotten skittish about the word “nation,” as if fearing that to use it means descending into nationalism.
As Lepore acknowledges, the equation of “nationalism” with hate and bigotry is far from universal: in postcolonial countries, the term is benignly connected to the enlightened (if mythic) conception of nationhood as the starting point of self-determination. America was once a colonial place, too, but its sense of itself as a nation, Lepore believes, was developed ex post facto. Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution is the United States described as a nation. (Contrast this with, for example, the Republic of Ireland: the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the 1937 Constitution begin with powerful assertions of Irish nationhood.) It took a great effort of politicking to unite states that did not much identify with one another, in spite of having in common the English language, whiteness, and Christianity. The US, Lepore says, is that rare thing: a state-nation. (...)Lepore is aware of this fact—there’s little she isn’t aware of, one senses—and makes it integral to her argument, which is that the age-old struggle between illiberal and liberal tendencies is constitutive of the nation. Nationalism is currently thriving, she believes, because the discourse of American liberalism is deficient. First, that discourse undervalues the radicality and relevance of the country’s founding ideals; second, the preoccupation with the rights of subgroups is essential, certainly, but politically inadequate; third, and here I put the matter much more crudely than Lepore would, liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes. However gauche or complicit it may seem, they must understand and unapologetically frame their values—which currently have a niche, somewhat subversive emphasis—as our core national values:
This America is a community of belonging and commitment, held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements. A nation founded on universal ideas will never stop fighting over the meaning of its past and the direction of the future…. The nation, as ever, is the fight.When I moved to the United States in 1998, the nation was fighting with itself. My introduction to the country was framed by the televised impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. It was all very gripping—a kind of crash course in politics and government. Then came the 2000 election. What struck me, in the chaos that followed, was that the Republican Party enjoyed a mystifying presumption of legitimacy. Bush had prematurely positioned himself as the president-elect, and the media had largely deferred to him in this. It made no sense. Gore had won the popular vote by more than half a million; there were strong reasons to believe that the Democratic tally in Florida had been erroneously reduced by a faulty ballot design; black Floridians had experienced outrageous voting problems; and, astonishingly, the Republicans were actually trying to prevent an accurate count of the vote.
Why had Gore so quickly phoned Bush to concede an undecided election (a concession he soon retracted)? Why the curious timidity of Democrats in Florida and the unaccountable self-righteousness of their aggressive Republican counterparts? Were my eyes and ears fooling me, or was everybody somewhat scared of the Republicans? The penny finally dropped when the Republican majority in the Supreme Court incoherently decided, in Bush v. Gore, to halt the vote-counting while their candidate still held a lead. Oh, I thought to myself. It’s a deep-state thing. (...)
The term originates in Turkey. Like the United States, Turkey is a constitutional republic. Its democratic progress has been something of a bumpy ride. There have been three military coups since 1961, each more or less accepted by the Turkish people. They understood (if sometimes disputed) that the armed forces enjoyed an extralegal, almost spiritual authority to safeguard the legacy of Kemal Atatürk and, if necessary, to suspend the constitutional order when that legacy was threatened by civil unrest or dangerous political developments. The military—together with its allies in the state security and legal apparatus—came to be described as constituting, and acting on behalf of, the “deep state.”
The United States has secretive agencies that do legally dubious things, but it doesn’t have a deep state in the Turkish sense. It may be said to have a deep state in another sense, however: America. America preceded, and brought into being, the republic we now live in—the United States of America. Almost everyone still talks about America, not about the United States; about Americans, not USAers. America, in short, was not extinguished by the United States. It persists as a buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve. Primordial America (at least in the popular imagination) was where folks prayed hard, worked hard on the land, and had rightful recourse to violence. In this imaginary place, people were white, Christian, English-speaking. They had God-given dominion over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. All of this inevitably informs the way American nationals apprehend one another and their country. They feel in their bones that some people are Americans and other people are merely citizens of the United States.
Our deep state doesn’t require conspiracies or coups or even self-awareness. It is a permanent ideological feature, like gravity. It reveals itself in our politics. A common trope—“Imagine if a Democrat did that”—refers to a state of affairs in which one party is bound by norms and rules, and the other party less so. One president must constantly generate his legitimacy, even as he excellently complies with the rules; another president benefits from a legitimacy so profound that his rule-breaking has the effect of rule-making. One group is perceived to be synthetic and unpatriotic, another as authentic and patriotic. This guy is a snowflake, that guy is a victim of persecution. And so on.
The unspoken ratio decidendi of Bush v. Gore is that, when it comes to the crunch, America trumps the United States and its papery constitutional affirmations. Democrats get this as much as Republicans do. Consciously or unconsciously, they know the score. They experience this knowledge mostly as fear.
This has implications for Lepore’s argument. She believes that, as a practical matter, liberal political messaging should vigorously equate our founding ideals with our sense of nationality. If anyone has done that, it is Obama. In 2009 (during a trip to Turkey, as it happens), he declared:
One of the great strengths of the United States is—although, as I mentioned, we have a very large Christian population—we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.This hasn’t quite panned out—neither the thesis, nor the political messaging. The problem isn’t rhetorical. It’s structural.
The cornerstone assertion of the Declaration of Independence is that government exists in order to secure the equal, inalienable rights of persons. This is the formal raison d’être and official ideology of the United States. It follows that those who fully embrace those rights—liberals—have political and patriotic legitimacy, and those who reject them lack legitimacy. Psychically, liberals often don’t seem to believe this. A deference to “Americans” inheres in their worldview, even if the Americans in question aspire to subvert our democracy. The “heartland” and “Middle America” (concepts that bring to mind the idea of la France profonde) still form a crucial part of the liberal political vocabulary, which continues to attach an emphatically American identity to the country’s white provincial population. If, as Lepore urges, we must think hard, even dangerously, about the nation and its history, the distinction between America and the United States should probably be reckoned with.
Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
