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Grant Smith's avatar

They must be able to speak their anti-American sentiments, this is required. It is already illegal to act on anti-American ideas within America. All we need to do is enforce the law. All of the institutions that push the anti-American agenda benefit from the fed and the petrodollar system. This system is unconstitutional (I argue). If it were to be abolished, I think everyone would be astonished as to how quickly Americans could reassert political control over the USG. The principles are the entire point of being American. Let our enemies sully themselves by calling for anti-American means to justify their anti-American ends. It also makes it very clear cut who has principles. Remember, one of the reasons the dialectic is so effective is because conservative Christians were happy to shroud the Iraq war with allusions to biblical prophecy among other anti-American endeavors in the Bush years that paint an inaccurate straw man. This strategy will work as long as American ideals are demotic within the population. I think we have that now. If we lose that though, all is lost until the whole system comes crashing down. Just my .02, appreciate you writing on this important topic!

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Phillip's avatar

You are an instinctive Aristotelian, John, in your preference for the golden mean. One can only hope that the best of the American experience can be salvaged from the ruin of the Republic. It remains to be seen if any presently conceivable form of civic nationalism of the kind you believe in remains practical. Concepts of nationality are contestable and I do not pretend that mine are better than yours, but I'll give it a go.

Nations are formed in part by shared ancestry for at least a central, defining, core of the population, but are supplemented by a shared culture or a blend of cultures that has proven itself viable over time. The measure of this viability is the ability to coexist without collective rancour or violence over several generations. Nations are sustained by a degree of shared experience, a set of conditions common to all or nearly all, by shared understandings and at least some mutual sympathy. The expectation of a shared future or a common fate is essential.

The true test of a nation is its ability to survive in the absence of a state. A nation that cannot do that for several generations is no nation, merely a rabble defined by dependency on a political class.

My scepticism about civic nationalism is based on a simple prejudice against Leviathan itself. A nation is always more important than a constitution. A nation cannot exist for the benefit of ideals. Ideals exist in order that nations thrive, that they enable the realisation of their concept of justice. To put it another way, a constitution exists for the convenience and best interests of the people, not the people for the fulfillment of a set of ideas. Civic nationalism makes a nation into a cult. True nations contain cults, may even have an established state cult of one kind or another, but are not constituted as a cult per se.

In writing thus, I am not pleading for blood and soil nationalism or for any Romantic politics. Nationalism was confected in the modern era to manage people in the era of mass politics. That era appears over for good. Perhaps tribalism, the politics of sub-national groups defined by genes and culture, may be the way forward?

The US began as an association of sovereign states. Its future may well be as a federation of nations and tribes united by the constitutional equivalent of a pact of non-belligerency.

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