In defense of America

Lowry’s book is part theoretical defense of nationalism and part history of American nationalism. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Anthony Smith, Lowry dismisses a number of fashionable arguments used to discredit nationalism. Nationalism is not a recent invention (one can see the stirrings of English nationalism as early as the 8th century), nor is it inherently racist or aggressive (prejudice and violence are constants throughout human history). Perhaps more important for contemporary debates on the Right, Lowry attacks the idea that one can separate a values-based “civic nationalism” (good) from an “ethno-nationalism” (bad). Americanness (or Frenchness or Britishness) is not defined by race or blood, but neither can it be reduced to a set of abstract propositions. It is also a set of collective memories and myths, patterns of culture and history, and a relationship between the people and the land. Our patriotic songs are not just hymns to the Constitution — they also praise our landscape (“O beautiful for spacious skies”) and our ancestors (“land where my fathers died”). Nobody singing or listening to them would ever get a catch in their throat if they didn’t.

Having established that nations are not ideas but particular places and peoples, Lowry spends the middle third of the book tracing the history of America and the American people. Following the historian David Hackett-Fischer, he emphasizes the outsize role played by certain English traditions and folkways in the formation of the American national character. He notes, for instance, that a disproportionate number of the settlers who arrived in New England were educated low-church Protestants from East Anglia, nearly all of whom had supported Parliament in the English Civil War. Even the phrase “city upon a hill,” frequently taken as evidence of America’s universal mission, was a common East Anglian phrase drawn from the Gospel of Matthew. The British Protestants who originally settled the country put a distinctive stamp on its culture. We speak English, not Spanish or French, and our literature and public oratory have traditionally drawn from the King James Bible rather than the Luther Bible.

Lowry goes on to describe the development of American nationalism during the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on the effects of the Civil War and World War II in creating a more unified American identity. (The latter, especially, helped to break down interethnic divisions among whites and delegitimize discrimination against blacks — President Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948.) Mercifully, he offers a defense of America’s expansion across the North American continent, which the Left has largely succeeded in turning into a source of national shame. He acknowledges — appropriately — that we treated the Native Americans brutally and grabbed land from Mexico. But it was never plausible that a rapidly expanding industrial civilization was going to remain confined to the Atlantic coast. “We should always remember,” he writes, “the bottom line of our expansion: it was a stupendous boon to our nation, to our people, to our interests, to our wealth, and to our power.” Would anyone be better off if California was still a province of Mexico?

In the final third of his book, Lowry turns his attention to more recent history. Over the past 50 years or so, we have witnessed a “campaign of cultural vandalism” against the American nation and its history, pursued with particular ferocity by the academic avant-garde and encouraged or simply ignored by an increasingly globalized business elite. If the purpose of all of this historical revisionism and outright propaganda had been to promote a more balanced understanding of American history — one that did not gloss over the mistreatment of the Native Americans and made more room for the stories of African Americans and other minorities — that would be one thing. Instead, it has sought to tar the country as fundamentally racist and illegitimate while actively fomenting ethnic tension in pursuit of political gain. Although justified in the name of diversity, it is hard to imagine a more foolish project for a genuinely diverse country, in which promoting trust and mutual sympathy among different groups should be one of the primary duties of statesmen.

Lowry is harsh in his condemnation of our “ongoing anti-national experiment,” but he could have been even harsher. He could have pointed out that this experiment is not merely an intellectual error but an insidious form of class war, both deceitful and self-deceiving. The rhetoric of social justice, of which the rhetoric of anti-Americanism is a part, is a means of laundering social power, of transforming self-interest into moral virtue. As the French geographer Christophe Guilluy has observed, it “allows the new bourgeoisie to avoid appearing predatory” in order to “silently reinforce their social position.” And increasingly, it is being used to justify abrogating our fundamental rights as Americans as well. Just last week, a former State Department official and editor of Time magazine wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a law banning “hate speech” or “speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.”

If you’re wondering what constitutes a hateful insult, a recent incident involving Lowry might provide a clue. Two weeks ago, Sakshi Venkatraman, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at New York University (2018 tuition: $47,942), announced that she had decided to pull an ad for a talk Lowry was giving on campus to promote his book. She explained that “the word ‘nationalism,’ as it exists in today’s political lexicon, connotes xenophobia and white supremacy” and that Lowry’s ad “would have marginalized people of color on our campus and our staff.” It’s an absurd charge, but the absurdity is the point. It admits no argument and isn’t meant to.

Lowry has made a cogent case for nationalism and for the importance of “preserving the American cultural nation.” The worry is that the leaders of tomorrow might not only ignore Lowry and those like him — they might not let him make his case at all.

Park MacDougald is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner.