Why America isn't an Obama Nation

Working draft, please do not cite; comments welcome.

Since the 2008 Presidential election, I have been thinking through how to write about a topic that has fascinated and troubled me. What does Barack Obama's bitterly contested election, the celebrity and positioning of his perceived opposite, Sarah Palin, and the rise of the Tea Party and all of the rest of the ugliness percolating up from the right, tell us about America and America's national identity?

All nations are constructed social-cultural-political collectivities. Origins, language, and ethnicity and race might have something to do with how the boundaries of the nation are drawn, but the accumulated work on nations and nationalism points to an inescapable truth: nations aren't kinship groups, vast families sharing common biological origins. We talk about them that way, but it is a myth. Or worse, a purposeful distortion told by malevolent, narrow-minded movements, like the Nazis or the Hutus in Rwanda or white supremacists here, who employ the idea of bloodlines and national purity to sweep away minorities, sub-groups, and opponents by mobilizing bloody popular or state-directed violence.

Nations don’t spring up from the soil, they’re manufactured – with deliberate effort, out of need and turmoil and significant events – by states, elites, marginalized ethnic groups, all kinds of people in all types of settings. In my view, the one essential step in forming a nation is the construction of a compelling story, an enveloping myth about why this group of people – as opposed to some other grouping – belongs together, and why the members of this group owe their loyalty to the collectivity.

I don't use the word myth to suggest these stories are fictional or made up. A myth is a story with deep emotional resonance, one that captures important elements of collective experience, but employs a symbolically meaningful narrative, not historical facts to tell the tale. In other words, the sense of ourselves we get from national myths isn't wrong, it is only engineered. Out of all the possible ways to think about ourselves and our connections to others, national myths give us one possible formulation. And the most powerful myths are multivocal, employing symbols that are emotionally resonant with different people for different reasons.

It is this resonance that is central. One of the oldest scholarly statements on nationalism comes from Ernest Renan. He dismissed all of the things that were imagined to be the origins of nations: languages, race, religion. He believed these collectivities were held together by something from the head and the heart:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.

Contemporary scholars who study nationalism may not refer to the spiritual aspects of the nation, that seems too airy, too Oprahesque, but they agree with Renan: something more than language and religion and culture join us together. Benedict Anderson, whose work is a key contribution to the body of academic theory on nations, refers to these unions as “imagined communities,” and that seems about right. Nations are vast hegemonic projects, convincing millions of people that they share a destiny with millions of others they have never met. What seems to matter is a political will – and the opportunity, because these reengineerings need to be tied in someway to actual relationships or observable events – to construct a story about why a particular collectivity is different from and should stand apart from other collectivities.

Where does this desire originate? Some authors believe the main motivations in many cases are material. For example, in Anderson's account, the Creole elites in the New World wanted to hold on to the wealth that was being carried away to Spain. So they created a story about how people born in the New World were different than Spaniards. This story made symbolic use of the common link by birth to the soil of the New World and to the shared struggles faced by New World settlers, struggles those residing in Spain never experienced. The fact that these stories contained truths – New World residents did experience difficulties not shared by those in their Spanish homeland – is important. Most scholars don't believe that populations are gullible enough to believe any stories arbitrarily dreamed up by self-interested elites or impassioned political agitators. There must be objective relationships – things truly shared and held in common by the population at the center of the project – and a subjective prioritization of these relationships in collective consciousness.

Even where these relationships (and shared origins and other narrative elements) objectively exist, societies may not always be willing to embrace the particular framework being marketed by movement leaders. Cuban elites, for example, were more prone to see what joined them to Spain, less willing to imagine themselves as a different people, and unwilling to buy in to stories that agitators were telling about the uniqueness of New World Cubans. The reason for this, I believe, is that white Cuban elites felt they shared more with Spaniards than with the black and mixed-race populations with whom they shared their island, and their material interests were better protected by preserving their relationship with Spain. It took several generations before Cuba built a movement to drive Spanish authorities from the island. But the result, as anyone with the most passing familiarity with Cuban history could tell you, was an anemic national project that existed under the shadow of U.S. domination. It wasn’t until Castro came along in the middle of the twentieth-century that Cubans engineered a resolute, unifying conception of their national identity.

There is another way to view nationalism. Just as Durkheim saw the division of labor as an adaptive response to transformative social change, so a number of scholars see nationalism as a product of – an adaptive response to – profound and irreversible realignments. It isn't a product of human agency or design. It is a contingent outcome, dependent on or conditioned by the historical emergence of these realignments (or new technologies). Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, for example, believe nationalism is a response to modernization, mainly industrialization, and the need to create vast, homogeneous workforces (and corresponding marketplaces). A similar argument is advanced by Barry Posen. He argues that the spread of nationalism was caused by the security concerns of states in Europe. The French revolution produced the first citizen army, united under a common flag, with great unity of purpose, a product of the ideological culture of the revolution, which stressed the community of all French citizens. As this citizen army, employing new weapons that allowed individual soldiers to be more deadly, became the most effective force in Europe, it created one of those occasional strategic turning points. Other societies rushed to adopt the strategic innovation of a mass army, to reduce their vulnerability to attack by neighbors who had embraced it. These societies had to accept the reforms that made the mass army possible - communication in a common language across the full landscape of the country, widespread literacy, and a system of public schooling to facilitate the spread of literacy and patriotic education. So nations - a broad, horizontal cultural union, capturing millions of individuals within a single collectivity - emerged all across Europe, a consequence of the logic of strategic relations.

What matters here, I think, is the role of the state. States perform, from place to place, all around the globe, a primary function: they build orderliness out of the messiness of human struggle and enterprise. They reproduce the means of production, build infrastructure so industry can move resources and goods, provide schools to deliver civic and technical education, recruit and arm the military, and local police forces, to defend the nation and enforce law. And it is the state that reengineered the pulsing mass of society, when history required it, to redefine our connections to one another, to prioritize the anonymous ties of culture and language and historical fate, rather than face-to-face familiarity. We trust people we would have never trusted before, people we have never met, people whose lives don’t resemble ours, people wealthier than us, who owe their fortunes to our exploitation. And we do this because the demands of industrialization required it and the state built schools and remapped our loyalties to make it possible.

Now you might think it is evidence of my lazy intellect when I say: I think both of these views (and others I haven't touched on) are right. Elite interests did play a role in creating nations, and so did sweeping social realignments and game-changing historical events.

Some – like Michael Walzer – have argued that the United States is unique. It is a nation made up of immigrants, who arrive speaking the languages of their homelands. It is a land of many faiths. From coast to coast, over the vastness of the nation's reach, there are many cultures. This is, to various degrees, true. Yet, the idea that a nation is made up of individuals who all share a common ethnicity, or language, or religion, or culture is an old, discredited view. So our diversity doesn't make us unique. All nations begin as a collection of ill-matched bits and pieces, held together by narrative sleight-of-hand. And while an idealized view of our history and a generous assessment of our character might lead the easily persuaded to believe that we embrace linguistic and religious difference, not all of us do, as illustrated by the millions of Americans who a) demand we only teach English in our schools and b) call us a Christian nation in the face of our unmistakable and long-rooted religious diversity. And this intolerance, I think, is a glimpse into who we really are as a nation.

America began in a creole uprising - led by settlers, indistinguishable from those who ruled them from Europe, sharing, in Anderson's words, "a common language and common descent with those against whom they fought." And the years that followed saw the nation draw the circle of citizenship very narrowly - excluding slaves and the emancipated, immigrants, Chinese laborers, and women. We continued to fight wars against the original inhabitants of the continent, so the nation could expand and claim their lands. A strong tradition emerged locating the nation's strength - and its identity - in its Anglo-Saxon heritage. This sentiment was reinforced by some views of Republicanism, which believed that successful republics needed to be, as Montesquieu had argued, carefully maintained, to preserve homogeneity and common ways of thinking, and to exclude foreign influences and ideas. This was to be done, in part, as political scientist Rogers Smith points out, through "civic education in patriotism reinforced by frequent public rites and ceremonies." But also through exclusion. Not everyone could be an American.

Here, then, is why so many Americans were disturbed when America's first black President wanted to talk to our kids in their classrooms. The work of making Americans, at least in part, takes place in our schools. To have an outsider, someone who should be excluded from this role, so utterly alien to our culture and practices, address our kids in their schools threatens the perpetuation of the nation. They'll learn the wrong things, they'll stop being Americans, and the nation will wither. During the campaign, when reflecting on what was at stake if Obama won, Sarah Palin said this:

The lessons I believe we have taught our kids would start to erode. Those lessons about work ethic, hard work being rewarded and productivity being rewarded.

Why that claim in a speech aimed at Palin's African-American opponent? Because, for the fraction of the American public Palin was speaking to, African Americans are unassimilated into “our” culture, and imagined to be lazy, living off welfare rather than working, like the rest of us do. We don't want, in Palin's phrasing, "our kids" to start living like they do.

The important thing here is this: America, like any other nation, is imagined as both a broad horizontal union, reaching out across the full dimensions of the country, and an eternal community, spanning across time, reaching back to our ancestors and forward through our children into the future. The nation's perpetuation guarantees that our (and our ancestors) sacrifices weren't in vain. But for this to be true - for America to go on and on - our children need to be catechized, become familiar with our culture, learn our narrative, become Americans. There are different ways to do this, just as there are different conceptions of our identity.

Over the centuries, by starts and stops, the circle of inclusion has been enlarged, adding additional citizens through Constitutional amendments, legislation, and court decisions. However, some shadow of the original practice of defining citizenship on the basis of ethnocultural tradition remained, and surfaced time and time again, in the Naturalization Act of 1790 (which allowed only "free whites" to become naturalized citizens), in the draft riots during the Civil War, in the rise of the Klan, in the Chinese Exclusion Act, in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and in the fight against desegregation in the South. The tension between ethnocultural Americanism and the idealistic liberalism embodied in the nation's founding documents and given shape in our historical expansion of citizenship is part of who we are. And the election of America's first African American President – a triumph of the historical process of opening up the American dream to all – also brought to the surface a narrower and more time-worn tradition and less noble sentiments, as some Americans dug in their heels to say: He is not like us and he cannot be trusted with running our national affairs.

At the center of the idea of nationalism is this: the state is entrusted with the work of defending the nation and with the responsibility of advancing its interests and preserving it in perpetuity. So to have someone not of the nation in command of the state was an alarming prospect for some. In the words of Gellner:

If the rulers of the political unit belong to a nation other than that of the majority ruled, this, for nationalists, constitutes a quite intolerable breech of political propriety.

For a portion of the country this is what was at stake. Barack Obama was offending their sensibilities by seeking the presidency. Across a vast swath of America, Obama didn't possess the qualifications to be President, because he wasn't one of us. For me, and many, many others, it was shocking to find how widespread this narrow view was. It is almost as if the long unfolding of American history – emancipation and the victory of all of those who marched for civil rights – never happened

This narrower view of who we are imagines America as a land settled, long ago, by Europeans. This group, first to risk building something in the new world, and still the majority, should, properly and without apology, be at the levers of our governmental systems, and our state, our schools, our national identity, should all reflect this majority’s culture and morality.

But this isn’t how it should be in America. Or, at least, given one tradition, one strand of our national DNA, this is unacceptable: we are a national organized around a set of inclusive principles, a community of distinct groups, retaining their customs and faiths, yet combined, part of a shared destiny.

According to Walzer, our “political culture” – our system of laws, the assumptions behind them, our form of government – was established by the earliest settlers and, as a result, was “English and Protestant.” But other aspects of this Anglo Saxon culture were never firmly established, and subsequent groups weren’t “assimilated entirely into the dominate culture.” They resisted assimilation, preserving their separate cultures.

All these groups, living intermixed and dispersed across the broad landscape of the country, occupied a “common political space,” and shared a common concern to use politics (and the state) to advance their common safety and well-being. Thus, this mix of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups finds their collective and separate fates joined. Each group plays a role in shaping the nation’s direction and history, and hence a takes a part in our narrative. America became what Walzer calls “a nation of nationalities.” It may not always be pretty, but, Walzer (and liberals like me) believe this works. Groups, perhaps invisible, perhaps bullied into fearful silence, perhaps uninterested in previous political issues, but now awakened by an issue that has salience and meaning for them, find a voice and articulate their views. Perhaps most central to our concerns, groups can demand a new, more just arrangement for their incorporation into the political process. What follows is a period of negotiation and a new, more just incorporation into the political contract. This is how the circle of inclusion and citizenship was widened over the nation’s long history.

But this description of American identity misses one entire aspect of who we are. Waltzer talks about nations composed of “anciently established majorities.” He points to Poland as an example, where language, culture, and religion combine, and capture such a sizeable part of the population, that the character of the nation is defined by these markers of social identity, and they naturally become encoded in “the rituals and ceremonies of public life” and the “education provided in the public schools.” Walzer goes on to observe that “Immigration is a genuine problem in countries with ancient minorities.” Countries like this – nations like this – “will favor immigrants who resemble themselves and seem likely to blend into the established culture.”

What if Walzer is fundamentally wrong about the United States? And it is more like Poland, a nation dominated by an “ancient majority.” And this majority favors immigrants who resemble themselves and demand that all who seek to join the nation “blend into the established culture.” Doesn’t the articulation of difference, then, trouble this ancient majority? And won’t the “tumultuous” process of negotiation between groups rub up against the preferences and expectations of this ancient majority, who expect new groups (or even old groups who have lived quietly alongside the dominate culture) to blend in?

So the civil rights movement, as an articulation of difference, a refusal by the African American community to be absorbed into the larger society under rules they did not author and they found unjust, is a major problem for this ancient majority.

One key to understanding where we are, for me, can be found in the work of Paul Gilroy, who has written about how race and national identity were in tension during the grim years of Britain's economic decline and the cultural crisis of the nineteen-seventies. Reading through Gilroy again it all became clear to me: Sarah Palin is our moose-slaying, frontier-town Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher represented something to Brits unsettled by the country's long slide. She was stiff, resolute, traditional, a product of the generation that fought World War 2, in tin helmets. And as a woman, interestingly I think, she represented the home front, where, in that character-defining war, while German bombs rained down, brave and unyielding housewives and mothers looked skyward from their air raid shelters, emerging defiantly to sweep up the dust and the mess the invader’s bombs left behind.

Thatcher promised to clean-up the mess created by Britain’s most recent invaders. And she promised a return to the proud, proper, empire-building England of the past. With her, some Brits could be reassured that history had never delivered its cruel blows, that England was still a rich, resolute society and the master of the seas (take that Argentina!) and the horizon, for as far as anyone could see, was clear and bright and promised smooth sailing. This was all a lie, of course, but the crueler lie was the idea that England had not changed, that people of color, flowing north from the fading empire's southern stations, from the Indian subcontinent, from Africa, and from Jamaica, weren't British.

Brits huddled together on the deck of their sinking nation wanted to cast aside late-comers, to define (or perhaps redefine) themselves more narrowly. They wanted to reserve the life boats for their kind. A crisis of the type the Brits faced in the nineteen-seventies, and we face now, Gilroy argues, causes a nation to ask: "What kind of people are we?"

This effort at self-examination, forced on a society by failure and decline, seldom leads to any honest self-evaluation. What you get instead, is a reassuring reassessment of one's myths. In our moment of doubt we want to be reminded how magnificent our achievements were and how great our nation is. But if we are everything we imagined ourselves to be - and aren't those beliefs confirmed by our proud history? - then our failure must be explained by something else. And for England, the answer was immigration. Immigrants had contaminated England with their backwardness and criminality. Think about how disturbing it seemed. England had once ventured forth from its small island to spread commerce and civilization to the world. And as it lost its empire and returned home, all of the people England had conquered followed the Royal Navy home, ruining the island with their "bestial manners, stupidity and vices," to quote Edward Long, a colonial administrator who wrote The History of Jamaica, a noxiously racist account of the English dominion over the small sugar-growing territory that two-hundred years later had its revenge by pumping thousands of immigrants into the streets of Britian's cities.*
So in this age of decline and self-doubt, and amidst efforts to reclaim the nation's pride and dignity, nationalism and racism became intertwined. As Gilroy puts it:

To speak of the nation is to speak automatically in racially exclusive terms. Blackness and Englishness are constructed as incompatible, mutually exclusive identities. To speak of the British or English people is to speak of the white people.

If the nation was going to continue – to be perpetuated, preserving the sweat and blood and toil of the nation's past generations – then people of color had to be cast aside. Or at least written out of the story, so the narrative could offer a new chapter, telling a tale about how England had survived the invaders and, its reach reduced, more modest in ambitions, had soldiered on, carrying the flame of civilization, preserving hope for future generations. Interestingly, this is the official rhetoric of the state in the film Children of Men, set in a future where the fate of mankind seems dim, but England - brave England! - stands resolute in its defense of civilization.

This is just where America stood in November of 2008. Or so a segment of the population felt. And politicians and commentators, from Hillary Clinton to Rush Limbaugh to Sarah Palin, felt this, much more accurately than I did, and exploited it. They encouraged the sentiment, helped those who might have kept these resentments and racial attitudes hidden feel free to express them. They gave them a language for expressing their concerns. They became enablers. Every nationalist movement (and revival) has had its agitators, the field generals who carried the movement from pure intellectual work into the later stages, proselytizing and recruiting. One theorist, Miroslav Hroch, looking at the emergence of populist nationalist movements, linked these campaigns to far-reaching social crisis, characterized by three elements:

1) A social and/or political crisis of the old order, accompanied by new tensions and horizons; (2) the emergence of discontent among significant elements of the population; (3) loss of faith in traditional moral systems.

It is remarkable how well this description can be applied to our present circumstances. The key, for Hroch, is "the competence or willingness of patriots to articulate responses" in nationalist terms, as opposed to other terms. Since, in our case, this period of recruitment and popular mobilization overlapped with (and was carried along by) a campaign for the highest office in the land (and an effort to retake it), it was inevitable that the language and appeals used were defined by appeals to our patriotism, our duty, our inheritance. That’s how candidates wage campaigns in America, especially when solutions to our economic and structural problems require far-reaching realignments no one wants to talk about or confront. As we saw in past efforts of this type, this was/is a movement reaching into the past to retrieve a pre-existing identity and a narrative that carries deep resonance.

By building their claims around an ethnocultural definition of the American identity, restoring the idea that America is an Anglo-Saxon, Christian nation, the right has managed to do something that has more power and more stubborn permanence than many of us first perceived. Over the seemingly endless Clinton and Bush presidencies, many pundits have written about the divisive culture war, that divided rural America from urban, red states from blue. I think we have entered a new phase, one that can more legitimately be understood as a nationalist struggle. It is a fight over which conception of America will prevail, the narrow-based ethnocultural/republican view that we are (or should be) a fairly homogeneous culture, sharing religious, moral, linguistic, ethnocultural (and racial) ties or the inclusive liberal vision, that we are a nation of citizens, bound by our common commitment to enlightened principles, best captured in the most idealistic passages of our founding documents and, at its most ambitious, given substance by Martin Luther King when he wrote:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Anyone who lives inside the Unites States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

This was a rallying cry for a new vision of America. Found in King’s most influential secular sermon, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, it set the moral compass of the freedom marchers. It does just what the rhetoric of national movements does, by constructing a myth about a broad, horizontal community, extending across the full territory of the country, and reaching across time and forward into the future.

But this is not the nation Sarah Palin or the Tea Party or their followers want to live in. And the idea that this formulation of our shared identity was authored by a civil rights leader would make it even more troubling to them. For them, the civil rights movement was a mistake, raising millions of African Americans into full citizenship, and their refusal to blend in was a troubling violation of the expectations the country’s “ancient majority” held about the process of incorporation. Worse, in the opinion of the right, sweeping in behind the civil rights movement was multiculturalism, redefining classroom curriculums and celebrating difference – in the workplace and in our expectations about the family.

Sixty-eight percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party believe Obama is immoral. Which can’t be a reflection of his life choices, which followed a path of upward mobility, ambitiously, resulting in a realization of the oldest American myth – a poor child, raised by a single mother, he really did grow up to be President. Viewed objectively, Obama was an example to be celebrated: a member of the struggling minority, who climbed to his success by absorbing all of the lessons of the American experience. No, tea partiers feelings about Obama result from their feelings about African Americans – sixty percent of Tea Party supporters think blacks are lazy and untrustworthy. It’s part of their cultural heritage, they believe, an inheritance blacks can’t easily shake. It’s this perception that Palin spoke to when she worried on the campaign trail about “our kids” being ruined and corrupted by an Obama victory.

The difficulty this movement has had, I think, is that that they have been uncertain whether they can openly phrase their identity claims in racial terms. This isn’t Bull Connor’s Birmingham. African-Americans have been part of the American narrative for a long time. Their struggles, from slavery through the era of Jim Crow segregation, and their delivery into full citizenship through the civil rights movement, have been taught in schools through much of the country. Their story has become our story. In the South, of course, the process has unfolded somewhat differently, and there is a strong counter-narrative, existing alongside the histories taught in school, told in many places. In this counter-narrative, the overturning of Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws (and even the abolition of slavery) were outrages imposed on the South by Washington.

But to win the White House, the Republican Party needed to reach out beyond the South. What we see as a result, I think, is the transformation of Obama into a Muslim, accompanied by the effort to discredit his legal standing to hold the Presidency, through questions about where he was born. The goal is to make Obama seem unamerican because he (perhaps) does not share our religion, and he (perhaps) didn't spring up from our soil. Indisputably, his father was from a distant, and for many, foreign culture. When John McCain stood up to talk about his family history of service in the U.S. Navy, he wasn't just bragging about their brave, patriotic sacrifices in the service of the country. He was pointing out that he was an American with deep roots, especially when compared with his opponent. And this was the key to his campaign’s strategy, and the rhetoric used now by the Tea Party.

While in the most backward pockets of the South it might have been possible still to sell a narrative where the only real Americans were white Americans, through the rest of the country this narrative would have fallen flat. Because in many other places across the country, even among people who have no contact with people of color, and even where people are afraid of blacks, the story of America's liberation of black Americans, and their slow incorporation into our political and economic life, is part of our narrative. As much a part of our heritage as Washington cutting down the cherry tree, or Honest Abe's love of learning, or the bravery of the Marines on Iwo Jima. So the mobilization of foot-soldiers into this nationalist movement hinged on: a) a celebration of the nation, and founding documents and political traditions that pre-existed the diverse society we have become; and b) our anti-immigrant sentiments, much had been the case, I would point out, in Great Britain.

Looking at this deepening division in America through this lens, I am far less hopeful than I was that the ugly rhetoric of the past two or so years will just go away. Although they have no real intention of leading a nationalist revolution – they are looking for ways to return to power and preserve privilege and wealth – Republicans have opened up an old chasm in American culture. The realization that we are fighting about old differences, that this is, in truth, a struggle rooted in different conceptions of who we are, and these conceptions are as old as the country itself, tells me we should dig in for years of conflict. This won't lead where other nationalist movements have led. We won't see secession - whatever Texas Governor Rick Perry might say. None of this will result in anything other than years of bickering, political gridlock, growing distrust, and deepening division.

One truly unsettling thing about all of this: the nation's divided soul – which combined narrow, racist ethnocultural Americanism and laudable liberal inclusiveness – is being torn apart. Montesquieu was right: civic education is required to reproduce the nation. But in the U.S. the schools have taught the value of democracy, of inclusion, of multiculturalism, of the immigrant experience. And elsewhere, throughout the broad sweep of the nation, citizens are educated by the work they do within their associations, clubs, churches, parochial organizations. Within these associations they learn to cooperate, to negotiate, and to expect others to cooperate. This is what Alexis de Tocqueville saw: American democracy was deepened, enhanced, made resilient and real by our “gift” for association. What the Republican Party, and the tea partiers, and the entire establishment of the right, aims to do, in the name of the ancient American Anglo-Saxon majority, is to dismantle this sweeping system of civic education. When Sarah Palin says:

I’m tired of the divisions and the special interests that pit us against one another. It doesn’t matter whether you grew up in Skagway or San Francisco, you’re an American.

she is expressing exasperation over multiculturalism, she is saying it is the source of the nation’s decline. By dwelling on our differences, by becoming hyphenated Americans, we struggle among ourselves, negotiating compromises that degrade our original moral standards, transforming our culture rather than reproducing it. She is saying: Wake up! You’re an American. Not a Native-American, not a gay-American. And it is our love of our initial principles, given form in the Constitution, written by the Founding Fathers, and giving voice to that original Anglo-Saxon “political culture,” that makes us Americans. If you have problems with this old document, if you think the arrangements it mapped out prevent you from living the lifestyle you want, or claiming a place in society you aspire to, then go somewhere else, because there is no place here for you.

If the nation can be thought of as an organism, these two traditions, one narrow, regrettable, and ugly, the other generous, inclusive, and commendable, have been part of our DNA from the beginning. One way to imagine this is to employ an example from microbiology, admittedly a subject I know nothing about. I apologize to geneticists for what I am about to get wrong. We find a major political party, to further the aims of a small segment of the population, and to preserve wealth and privilege for the best off, reaching down to the genetic level to reengineer the processes that have governed the reproduction of this coding, tinkering to ensure that only the ugly tendencies are reproduced. Their goal is to create a populist wave, driven by ethnocultural frenzy, to sweep aside everyone who threatens wealth and privilege. Palin, I'm sure, is no student of history. But here are two essential truths: 1) Elite-led nationalist projects were always designed to create a new logic for political order, allowing the architects of the movement to push aside competing elites so they can inherit the nation's wealth. 2) Popular nationalism has always been guided by a different logic, emphasizing the vernacular over the cultured, viewing the elite as corrupt, contaminated, alienated from and disdainful of popular or folk culture. Popular nationalism seeks to sweep away elites. If I were the party strategists mapping this out, I would worry that their creation – as always happens in sci-fi films – will turn on its maker. Or, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, where popular nationalist sentiments are not created by those who employ them, but only borrowed, those doing the borrowing "become a kind of sorcerer's apprentice," and they are deluded to imagine they can entirely control the forces they unleash.

* I find it fascinating that one rhetorical device employed over and over again by the Republican Party echoes this. In our case, the stated fear is: if we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraqis and Afghans will follow us home. But in this case, with bombs strapped to their torsos.