‘A Country Is a Country’

This isn’t the 1930s or even 1968. There’s no depression: The fundamentals of the economy are sound. There’s no Vietnam war: Middle-class boys aren’t being drafted to fight in some Asian conflict nobody chose. President Obama has pretty much been relying on drones (which don’t vote) and Special Forces (who willingly volunteer) to halt the advance of the evildoers who threaten our security these days.

For those who think (correctly) that Obama is the first really progressive president since LBJ, it is confusing to see a candidate to succeed him staking out a position well to the left of him. And if there’s one political brand that’s been discredited by history, it’s socialism. It doesn’t work! That’s why, with the exception of Obamacare, the president’s progressivism has focused more on being green (or for intrusive environmentalism) and expanding personal rights—especially for women and gays, including rich women and rich gays. Obama (with that one great exception) hasn’t been pushing bigger or better government much, and his efforts, in fact, have been focused on securing the entitlements we already have. He has our backs, as he said in the 2012 campaign. But Bernie is the kind of progressive who’s all about marching forward on the class-based redistribution front. For some Democrats, he doesn’t seem to care enough about race, gender, and sexual orientation, because he’s so much about being against the rich and for the poor.

And as for Trump, he’s not a conservative at all! Conservative public intellectuals never tire of making that point. It’s not conservative to be all about identity politics. And Trump is an identity-politics candidate just as much as Hillary Clinton is. His is poorly educated white male identity politics, to a point. But more precisely, it’s American citizen identity politics. He wants to protect American citizens against competition from immigrants and China, and he wants to refocus foreign policy on our security—as opposed to humanitarian interventions conducted in a world without borders. His problem with “free trade” is that it is based on the premise that people are basically just consumers and producers, and not citizens. Our political leader must address the collateral damage free trade has on American citizens in particular, and his first principle should be what’s best for Americans. “A country is a country,” Trump correctly says.

Putting Americans first isn’t necessarily to be confused with being xenophobic or racist or tribal. And, truth to tell, Trump’s policies, at their most coherent, are more about the nation than nationalist. Nationalism, after all, is typically expansionist, militarist, and inflamed by some ideological commitment. But Trump isn’t even as nationalist as George W. Bush, who talked of the universal longing for liberty articulated in our Declaration of Independence. Trump is no Declaration man. And he certainly says little about the universal rights shared by all human beings. Most of his schemes for making America great again are rather defensive or “protectionist.” He wants to protect and revitalize the home of free and equal citizens that is our country. That doesn’t mean a retreat from the prosperity offered by the global marketplace or the security offered by a muscular military; it does mean putting America and Americans first in making great deals with other countries.

The intersection between the insurgencies of Sanders and Trump is, in fact, putting Americans first. Socialists may be, in theory, all about uniting the workers of the world, but Sanders is about American workers in particular. So both he and Trump are about an industrial policy that will enhance the number and status of men and women with real jobs. And Trump, of course, is particularly “un-conservative” in his refusal to criticize American unions and in his determination to preserve the safety nets the American worker now enjoys. One difference between the two is Bernie’s opposition to a more restrictive immigration policy; his understanding of American workers isn’t limited to American citizens. Another difference, to Trump’s credit, is that he’s in favor of promoting American economic growth, which he, in a conservative way, assumes will benefit all Americans in some way or another.

It might even be the case that Trump’s focus on citizenship is more effectively egalitarian than Bernie’s focus on workers—on the proletariat. Charles Murray explained in Coming Apart that the crisis facing our country is the disappearance of a shared middle-class way of life based on common aspirations and equal respect. Americans used to learn about being equal citizens in public schools, and the educational environment managed to be both leveling and elevated, allowing poor girls, for example, the opportunity to date and marry rich guys (and vice versa). Now the cognitive elite—which is highly privileged in terms of money but civically irresponsible (thinking, meritocratically, that its members deserve what they have)—has its own way of life and is isolated from most other Americans. Mating, as Murray and others observe, has become “assortative,” so that the rich not only get richer, but smarter. Members of this elite view the backward opinions and unproductive habits of most Americans with contempt, and they’re content to control the excesses of the many with “nudging” public policy and a welfare system that excels in fending off destitution but does less than nothing in facilitating social mobility.

The astute libertarian Tyler Cowen also observes, in Average Is Over, that the middle class is shrinking, with the top 20 percent of the country richer, smarter, and more able in every respect while the bottom half is becoming less productive. We are increasingly dominated by people either on very good terms with “genius machines” or with the high level of literacy required to market what those nerds produce. And there’s still a strong place in the service industry for those able to satisfy the preferences of the fabulously wealthy.

In this industry, and in most workplaces in general, the virtues particularly prized are being conscientious and being compliant. Cowen, with a bluntness allowed only to libertarian economists, says that women are simply much better at displaying these virtues than men. More than ever, the work of the many is scripted by the intellectual labor of the few. This means that working in the service industry is more soul-sucking than working as a welder or on the assembly line, where nobody cares what you say or think as long as you get the job done. More work than ever these days, to quote C. S. Lewis, is for “men without chests,” and so it’s no wonder that spirited men just won’t do it. Everyone knows that the seemingly most superfluous members of our society are males without a college education, men unable to be proud or productive enough to take care of their families or even themselves.

So Trump’s legendary contempt for political correctness resonates most of all as a rebellion against being scripted. Trump, the “alpha male,” speaks his mind, and in some measure he speaks for all who feel unable to do the same.

Some Republicans manage to remain complacent enough that they blame the rebellion on the political correctness of the Obama administration, where euphemisms abound and evil and evildoers aren’t branded for what they are. But the truth is that political correctness is generically administrative—infecting corporations and private organizations as much as the government. It’s a language that devalues the clash of opinions and the legislative deliberation that are features of real citizenship. It’s a language that replaces freedom of speech with a standardized and unironic discourse about the twin pillars of our global technocracy—competency and diversity—a kind of discourse that is egalitarian in principle but elitist in practice. It is language that’s become increasingly bipartisan, and its goal is to extinguish what’s left of real American partisanship as nothing but the irrational animosity of those on the wrong side of history.

And it’s not just the poorly educated who are on the wrong side of history. When Cowen says “average is over,” what he means most of all is the disappearance of white-collar, middle-class jobs. They’re being downsized for good reason. It turns out that they’re insufficiently productive to justify their generous salaries and secure perks.

One of these jobs is the college professor. He’s been proud of his dignified autonomy guaranteed by tenure, his sovereignty over how and what he teaches, and his membership in a collegial community entrusted with institutional governance. He also halfway knows that he’s not really productive enough to justify his salary. His way of life is under siege by those demanding more efficiency and productivity. In the name of reliably delivering the most skills and information at the lowest possible price, instructional autonomy is being replaced by teaching off a script based on “best practices” devised by others. All over the white-collar, college-grad world, downsizing is occurring; career employees with security, benefits, and other perks are being replaced by independent contractors delivering the same service on the screen for little more than subsistence.

Now the middle-class teacher or bureaucrat is very unlikely to be for Trump, thinking him a redneck, racist xenophobe who rouses up the poorly educated. But he (or she) is often just as likely to feel that “market forces” are eroding his dignified personal identity. That means he votes his “class” by voting for the strong leader Bernie Sanders and the remedies he proposes. The socialist Sanders, ironically, has little appeal for the so-called poorly educated. His candidacy is more about the proletarianization of the well-educated. It’s in education, after all, that the politically correct war on all speech that can’t be reduced to either competency or diversity is most advanced, and where scripting by the disruptive innovators of our cognitive elite might be most degrading.

Consider here the ill-considered and often ridiculous polemics against liberal education associated with Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, and John Kasich. And let me add that it’s easy to see that when Sanders talks about free higher education for everyone, he clearly has in mind the excellent liberal education that was available at the City College of New York when he was young. It may be incoherent for the socialist to think of education as for the humanistic elevation of souls, and not just for productivity. But Bernie’s vision, at least, has room for encouraging our kids to become both welders and philosophers, according to their talents and inclinations.

Every effort to theorize Trumpism, of course, abstracts from the fact that the actual Trump is the buffoon who got himself taken seriously. I would never vote for Trump, thinking him the most ill-prepared, the most unstable, the most shameless presidential candidate ever. Still, it’s urgent that Republicans learn from him. And they have! To sum up what Republicans, including many libertarians, have learned: The Republican party has to purge itself of its recently acquired flirtation with (Ayn) Randism, and it has to separate itself from those individualists who think that citizenship is just another name for “rent seeking.” Republicans have to become more civic and more republican (with a small “r”). They have to remember all that is implied in the fact that “a country is a country.” A shared political life is an irreducible part of who we are as free and relational beings.

What’s wrong with Trumpism, even in its most idealized form? It’s easier to begin with what’s wrong with Sanders. Instead of inspiring civic solidarity or duty-laden activism, he promises, as a strong leader, to envelop Americans in myriad programs that will guarantee their security and prosperity. One reason that Bernie is the overwhelming favorite of the young is that he seems to offer them maximum conceivable personal autonomy with an unprecedented amount of government-mandated security. They will be able to live as they please, without being obsessed with the future, which will be funded by taxing the heck out of the rich.

Trump has a similar shortcoming: Instead of asking more of all American citizens—calling upon them to connect once again the privileges with the responsibilities of being an American—he promises to be the leader on whom they can rely to get better deals. Because Trump seems to be more a “strong man” than a statesman, he doesn’t really include the deliberation and the activity of citizens in his vision of renewed American greatness. He doesn’t follow Kennedy in urging Americans to ask, at least once in a while, what you can do for your country, not to mention what you can do to elevate the lives of your fellow citizens. He seems to promise to do all the elevating himself. And that’s not so democratic or so republican, after all.

Trump’s vision of citizenship is also too much like tribalism. Orestes Brownson, as Richard Reinsch observes, is the American thinker who most forcefully articulated the truth that what separates a republic from a tribe is a genuine devotion to the common good. A republic is more than a form of collective selfishness. This means, for example, that the deals Americans make have to take into account, in the appropriate measure, the rights all human beings share in common. Citizens deliberate about the irreducible tension between one’s own good—and one’s country’s good—and the responsibilities we have to all our fellow creatures. A country that is really a country doesn’t devolve into either a form of apolitical humanitarianism—as in Obama, citizen of the world—or a security-obsessed division of the world into nothing more than friends and enemies. That’s the tension embedded, as Brownson, Lincoln, Chesterton, and many others have reminded us, in our Declaration of Independence.

Trumpism, to become better than Trump himself will ever know, needs to be informed by the best reflections on the nation and on citizenship. Roger Scruton, for example, tells us that the loyal citizen of a particular nation finds the proper mean between xenophobia and what Scruton calls oikophobia—or an implacable hostility to attachment to a particular place as home. Our competency and diversity enthusiasts in both parties and in our government bureaucracies, corporations, foundations, and educational institutions are way too oikophobic—too much about undermining the dignified conditions of life for most people.

But citizenship properly understood also counters xenophobia. It’s as citizens that we learn to respect and trust strangers, and to resist always preferring those we know to all our fellow citizens. One of the strongest arguments for the persistence of countries or nations, of course, is that it turns out that only countries or nations effectively secure rights. Immigrants, after all, leave their native homes in search for a place that reliably protects the rule of law—the indispensable condition for building a prosperous and dignified life for oneself and one’s own. The rule of law—or constitutionalism broadly understood—is a theme conspicuous by its absence in the populism of Trump and Sanders, but it’s the true foundation of the American romance of the free and equal citizen.

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana professor in the department of government and international studies at Berry College.