By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Do you thrill to the sight of a military parade?
Planning a splendid military parade was practically the
first thing Donald Trump did upon being elected to the presidency, a $100
million exercise in political semiotics. He calls himself a “nationalist,” not
a conservative. And there’s something to that, and the parade is part of it—maybe
all of it.
At the National Review Institute’s biennial Ideas Summit
in Washington last week, National Review
editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and NRI fellow Jonah Goldberg had a spirited
discussion about nationalism’s place in U.S. politics, with Lowry advancing the
nationalist banner and Goldberg wary of it. It was intellectual nutrition:
spirited, frank, unrehearsed, and I am grateful to have been there for it, and
to be part of an institution where ideas matter.
What American nationalism
might mean as a question of public policy is unclear. Self-proclaimed
nationalists talk about acting in the national interest, but that’s no good:
Senator Sanders thinks implementing a Soviet-style health-care system would be
in the national interest; Tom Metzger has other ideas about the national
interest. People of good faith (and other kinds of people) have radically
different notions of national interest, because they have radically different
notions about community and the good life. Nationalism as a creed does not help
us to distinguish prudently between those competing conceptions. As Goldberg
argued, the character of nationalism depends greatly on the character of the
nation—and the times, too: The New Deal was the nationalist project of a
nationalist president. Mohandas K. Gandhi was speaking as a nationalist when he
conceded the excellence of British administration but insisted that any people
would naturally prefer bad government of their own than the good government of
an alien power. Joseph Stalin was a nationalist. Jack Kennedy’s motto was a
nationalist one: “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” As -isms go, nationalism is pretty
loosey-goosey.
“Make America Great” is the nationalist motto of the
moment (the “Again” is a concession to conservative nostalgia), but that gets
pretty complicated pretty quickly, inasmuch as our gentle new nationalists
despise so many of the very flourishing institutions and endeavors in which the
United States actually excels: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, the
universities, the National Institute of Science. (Yes, yes, but doesn’t
national greatness supersede your petty partisanship?) Do our nationalists
swell with pride thinking of Eugene O’Neill’s Nobel Prize . . . or Barack
Obama’s?
Abraham Lincoln’s nationalism (in matters not related to
the immediate preservation of the Union) was directed in the service of
“improvements”—canals, railroads, etc.—exemplifying a tendency that carries
through such New Deal enterprises as rural electrification. These programs are
not engaged in the creation of “public goods” formally understood, but neither
were they directed at the economic interests of a single corporation,
community, or party. A country with universal access to electricity and water, with
railroads and canals, is different in important ways from one that lacks those
things, and this difference is more significant in the long run than is the
particular mix of private enterprise and government action involved in those
projects. Our spasmodic attention to infrastructure programs is arguably the
most specifically nationalistic aspect of our current politics. And there is a
healthy current in that: Men planting trees knowing they will not live long
enough to sit in their shade.
But that is not much of a policy fight, for the most
part. Nobody is in favor of crumbling roads or collapsing bridges, and the
discrete disagreements over the particulars—this bridge, that road—are not the
source of our nation’s current political convulsion. Even the very bitter
fights over such important infrastructure projects as oil and gas pipelines are
proxies for disputes that are at least as much cultural as economic or related
to the particularities of energy production.
To the extent that 2016 vintage nationalism has produced
a policy agenda at all distinguishable from the old Republican stuff, it is
anti-capitalist and anti-liberal: in favor of trade restrictions and suspicious
of big business, especially banks, anti-immigration, anti-elitist, longstanding
tendencies to which American populists from William Jennings Bryan to George
Wallace and Ross Perot have been stubbornly attached. That these represent an
orientation toward the actual national interest is not obvious: Tariffs
function mainly as a sales tax on American consumers and as a crutch for
certain U.S.-based firms that wish to be protected from foreign competition.
There is more to a nation than its economy, but markets are national
institutions, too, and far from the least important of them. Hostility toward
these does not serve the nation, even if it serves the interests of some of the
nation’s people.
With apologies to the often misunderstood Charles Erwin
Wilson, the interest of General Motors is not synonymous with the national
interest. There is no substantive nationalist argument for privileging the
business interests of U.S.-based firms that produce steel over those of
U.S.-based firms that consume steel. Occasionally one will hear arguments that
the existence of a thriving steel industry is in sum important to the country
in a way that exceeds the value and interests of the firms that compose that
industry, but this is ultimately a very limited line of reasoning, one that
could be deployed on behalf of any industry, from frisbees to wine. (The
national-security case for traditional heavy-industry protectionism is in
practice a limitless warrant; Senator Rubio, who also was kind enough to speak
at the NRI event, has defended sugar subsidies as a matter of national
security, a deficiency that is more irksome in so admirable a senator). It is
difficult to say with a straight face that we must act to preserve the frisbee
factories as a matter of national interest—because they are our frisbee factories—and not many
nationalists, even the perfervid ones, in practice begrudge the French their
oenological excellence or the Germans their automotive genius or the Canadians
whatever it is they are good at. They do produce cabernet sauvignon in Ohio,
after all.
If our nationalists do not think very much of the parts
of America that are actually thriving—many of them the envy of the world—and do
not think very much of U.S.-led developments, such as international trade, that
have enriched the country immeasurably, then what is it they are thinking of?
I think it’s that parade.
Trump-era nationalism is about 3 percent policy and 97
percent aesthetics, rhetoric, and affectation, a kind of identity politics of
the Right. That is one of the reasons why critics such as Tucker Carlson (also
a hit at the NRI event—you should have been there!) have so much trouble
describing in meaningful terms what it is they want. They are well-versed in who is to blame, but a little vague
on what to do. This fundamentally aesthetic orientation also is one of the
reasons for the nationalist bias toward that which is easily visible and
comprehensible: steel mills, not logistics, “Made in China” labels on consumer
goods in Walmart, not integrated supply chains, software, or intellectual
capital. It helps to explain the bumptiousness, narrowness, and pettiness so
closely associated with nationalism as it is in fact currently practiced, in
situ, as opposed to in essay form—a politics not of love and community
(including community with future generations) but one of resentment and
anxiety. Not manifest destiny but the melancholy long withdrawing roar. The
associated variety of politically proprietary patriotism has its obvious
counterpart in the adolescent and often unserious anti-patriotism of the Left,
which is why we have expended so much spittle in a national confrontation over
sporting-event etiquette.
The military parade offers a display of uniformity
(literal uniforms) to a nation that has struggled with its diversity, a
dramatically visualized and sacramental unum
in the face of all that messy and incomprehensible pluribus. Flags, monuments, chants, songs, marches, ceremony—all
are efforts to wring the unum out of
the pluribus. The Left’s program, for
the moment, is to stand in the middle of all that with two raised middle
fingers while simultaneously sobbing and demanding money.
Style matters, and it may matter more than policy. Rich
Lowry points out that the American Revolution was a nationalist revolution—the
colonists could have remained largely autonomous provinces within the British
empire or gone their thirteen separate ways in independence. It is true to say that
the American Revolution was fought by nationalists, but in the sense that is
trivially true: Many of those 18th-century nationalists were skeptical of
standing armies and the prospect of a binding national constitution. The
content of their nationalism was different from ours, as it had to be—they were
in the process of building the nation, and fighting among themselves about what
to build. A move toward the actual founding political condition would not
represent a nationalistic triumph but a radically libertarian one.
(If only George Washington had had someone to lecture him
about “open borders.”)
What we can draw out of it in terms of action items on
our political agenda is not plain to see. The Constitution venerated by
conservatives had not yet been written, and Lowry’s point—that a specific and
unique Us, a nation, had come into being—is to that extent obviously true. The
American people are not a race or a nation of ancient common ancestry, but
neither are they mere adherents to a unifying national creed.
(If only they would actually adhere to that creed!)
Which returns us to the matter of style and affect. As I
have written at some length, I find the city of Washington, D.C., repugnant.
But what I find repugnant about it is what many other people find magnificent
about it: the monuments, the grand buildings, and the impossible-to-miss (often
brutal) nationalist aesthetic of the place: Paul Cret’s Federal Reserve
Building would not have been entirely out of place in the Berlin that Hitler
dreamt of nor in the new Rome that Mussolini might have built. To me, these
exercises in giganticism and severity are profoundly unrepublican and contrary
to what I imagine to be the intended mode of national life. To establish a
republic and then to build a neo-pagan temple (we call it the Capitol) in which
those who achieve political power convene to worship themselves and that power
was, to my mind, perverse. George Washington was no pharaoh, but we built a
pharaonic monument to him, and an even more absurd one to Abraham Lincoln, who
surely would have been embarrassed by his posthumous apotheosis. Needless to
say, these are not universally held views. Many people find Washington
magnificent, and its grand sights fill them with feelings of love and awe.
I do not wish to be awed, neither by my government nor by
my nation. (“I mean to live my life an obedient man,” William F. Buckley Jr.
wrote, “but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never
to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting
booth.”) But there is a market for awe. To be awed is to be carried beyond
one’s self, to be given a glimpse of something great.
Is the nation great? The Capitol dome is a great dome,
but I know who’s in there.
But then there’s the flag, and the Washington monument,
and the troops, who in addition to fighting the nation’s wars bear the burden
of being the vessels of so many of our greatest national anxieties. A friend
who is a lifelong military man says that he wishes sincerely that people would
stop thanking him for his service as though doing so were a kind of mandatory
social convention somewhere between “Welcome to Starbucks!” and “Have a nice
day!”
Donald Trump could think of nothing more important and
worthy than a great military parade. I myself would very much prefer that we
never had another.
I am grateful to the men and women of our military for
their service, but armies are only expedients, necessary evils. They should be
kept out of sight for the same reason I keep the guns out of sight in my home.
A military parade does not display greatness—it
displays power. And that may be where
I most part company with our new nationalists. To my eye, there is more
American greatness in a New England town hall than in all of Washington, and
more American greatness in an Oregon apple orchard or a Rotary meeting than
there is in all the tanks and rockets that ever have been. (If that sounds
unpatriotic to you, then take it up with General
Eisenhower.) The Washington aesthetic and the Trump mode are rooted in a
different kind of attitude, a masterful one with a taste for domination. That
is in fact what some nationalists seem to mean by “American greatness”: the
power and the will to dominate. Hence the bizarre pettiness in foreign policy
and the nickel-and-dime approach to trade, the superstitious conflation of
political power and virility, the preoccupation with status and appearances
(the ability to “project power” is a telling phrase), the neurotic fear that
someone, somewhere, is getting over on us, nationally.
I’d wager that the people who feel the way I do about
military parades generally have my views on trade and those who have Trump’s
view on trade share his enthusiasm for military parades. These essentially are
matters of inclination, not calculation. You can talk to an American political
partisan in 2019 and get a pretty good idea of how he’d have felt about the
First Bank of the United States or the Indian Removal Act. You can get a sense
of what people think the country is for,
even if they cannot quite explain it. What to do with all that power?
There is a legend about a saint who allowed himself to be
cheated when gambling. He was more than willing to part with the money, and
considered that for the recipient it was less undignified than begging. There
is greatness in that, for those with eyes to see—and power, too. I do not think
Donald Trump has eyes like that, though it would be entirely fair to protest
that one does not want or need saintliness in a politician. I myself take a
generally instrumental view of politicians. But there is no refuge in
pragmatism: Politicians may be instruments, but instruments used to what end?
Power—for what purpose?
Lowry connects the American founding to the biblical
account of the founding of the unified kingdom of Israel. The united monarchy
seems to be more of a literary convention than a historical reality, but of
course that story resonated with the founders: a city on a hill, a light unto
the nations, a chosen people, a covenant. (Forget for the moment that the
Israelites longed for a king, while the Americans longed to be rid of one.)
There is more to the story than the people of Israel taking and holding their
own territory as a people and a polity under a strong national leader, and the
founders knew that, too, understanding its prefiguration of a subsequent Figure
and a kingdom of an entirely different kind. If we Americans were to suddenly
begin to take seriously the notion that “greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends,” would President Trump—standing,
perhaps, in front of an array of soldiers—complain that we once again had
become “the suckers of the world”? And what would our gentle new nationalists
say? Something more than “Harrumph!” or “What’s in it for us?” or “That’s all
good and fine in theory, but we’re practical men”?
Even idealists must balance the books. What I take for
pettiness could be taken by others as husbandry, carefulness in the small
things. But that would be the virtue of a modest government and a modest
people, not one simultaneously high on rage and hungry for greatness. Yes, it
is good that the nation is powerful. It is more powerful that the nation is
good—which it often is. (Saepe fidelis,
if not quite semper.) And if “good
for me” is not a synonym for “good,” then neither is “good for us.” The us-ness
of the nationalistic “us” does not change that moral calculus, does not make
virtue out of vice, even in a working politician, whether he calls himself a
pragmatist, a nationalist, or a populist.
Trump once explained his politics this way: “My whole
life, I take and take—greedy. Now, I will be greedy for the United States, and
I will take for the United States. I am going to be so greedy.” On relations
with the world: “First of all, I want to take everything back from the world
that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much.” These sentences were met with
applause, and that applause is closer to a working definition of American
nationalism as it actually exists out there in the great American wild circa
2016 than anything else I have heard.
