Support for Ukraine motivates momentum in the war against invading Russians

Echo opinion written by David Brooks for The New York Times and published in the Las Vegas Sun a Nevada newspaper:

In the Ukraine, the war is not only a military event, it’s an intellectual event. 

Slava Ukraini! Official salute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Ukrainians are winning the hearts and minds of their people and the western world, not only because of the superiority of their troops, but because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.

That idea is actually two jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.

Second is the idea is nationalism. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a nationalist. He is fighting not just for democracy but also for Ukraine — Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian land, the Ukrainian people and tongue. The symbol of this war is the Ukrainian flag, a nationalist symbol.

There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.

By this thinking, modern nations should try to tamp down nationalist passions and embrace the universal brotherhood of all humankind. As John Lennon famously sang, “Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too.”

Those people are not all wrong. Nationalism has a lot of blood on its hands. But it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump,  as opposed to the (IMO - enlightened) liberal nationalism of Zelenskyy. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian. The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.

Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land. These loves have to be stirred in the heart before they can be analyzed by the brain.

Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future. Individuals live and die, but the nation goes on. 

People feel their life has significance because they contribute these eternal stories. “Freedom is hollow outside of a meaning-providing system,” Yael Tamir writes in her book “Why Nationalism.”

Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together. In his book “The Great Experiment,” Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.

Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.

Over the past decades, this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites. I suspect there are many people in this country who are proud to wear the Ukrainian flag but wouldn’t be caught dead wearing an American flag because they fear it would mark them as reactionary, jingoistic, low class.

The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity. 

Second, by associating liberalism with the cosmopolitan global elite, it made liberalism seem like a system used to preserve the privileges of that elite. The populist class backlash combined with an anti-liberal backlash, imperiling democracies across the globe. Third, it opened the door for people like Trump to seize and hijack American patriotism.

Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure. It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.

American nationalism has characteristically been a liberal nationalism. From Alexander Hamilton to Walt Whitman to Theodore Roosevelt, it has often been a song in praise of a liberal revolution, a liberal constitution and a diverse, liberal society. 

On the other hand, Trumpian nationalism doesn’t flow from that traditional American nationalism, but is a repudiation of it.

Ukraine’s tenacity shows how powerful liberal nationalism can be in the face of an authoritarian threat. It shows how liberal nationalism can mobilize a society and inspire it to fantastic achievements. It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.

Yael Tamir makes the essential point: “Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. 

Who really made American great were the immigrants

An echo essay, by Ed Simon*, published in the History News Network newsletter. 

Walt Whitmam 1819-1892

*Ed Simon is the Editor-at-Large for “The Marginalia Review of Books,” a channel of the “Los Angeles Review of Books"

In 1883, Walt Whitman, America’s “Good Gray Poet,” was asked by the organizers of Santa Fe, New Mexico’s 333th anniversary celebration to read a poem in commemoration of the occasion. 

Whitman was the exemplary poet of the nation in its multitudinous diversity, and the perfect speaker to mark the establishment of the Spanish colony. 

Unfortunately, the invitation reached Whitman’s Camden, New Jersey home too late for the poet to schedule a reading for the event, but moved by the offer, he wrote a letter of thanks “To Messrs. Griffin, Martinez, Prince, and other Gentlemen at Santa Fé”which was subsequently reprinted in the New York Times.

Speaking of country which was first that of the Tanoan people, then part of Spain, then Mexico, and now the United States, Whitman understood that many of his fellow countrymen had an inordinately simplistic understanding of the nation’s historical precedents, seeing the Puritan, but not the Pueblo, the Cavalier, but not the Caballero. He writes: “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources.” With a keen awareness of the glorious complexity which synthesized his beloved country, Whitman rejected the reductionisms of Anglophilia, arguing that too often “we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only – which is a very great mistake.”

Whitman’s letter speaks with wisdom and empathy of a “composite American identity of the future.” 135 years later, and too many Americans make the same “great mistake” which Whitman warned of, as evidenced by a July 27th letter to the editor ironically published in the same newspaper which originally printed the poet’s missive.The author of that letter inaccurately claimed: “The 13 colonies were all based on a single, almost entirely British identity and history and one language.” It’s a contention that is irrefutably, completely, and utterly wrong in almost every conceivable way.

A rather abstract objection can be levied at that false claim, one which explains that English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish settlers were all quite different from each other in folkways, language, and religion; that colonists from the hills of Wales or the Scottish low lands had an entirely different set of preoccupations than educated settlers from London. An even more rarefied argument could be made that the word “British” isn’t particularly useful in the 17th and 18th centuries, having only gained use of the name with the Acts of Union between England and Scotland in 1707.

Prior to that, though there were instances of official use of the word “Britain,” the word was one with a mythological connotation, and its ultimate incorporation was consciously an act to forge a unified identity between groups with disparate backgrounds, ranging from the Celtic fringe of Cornwall to the stolidly Anglo-Saxon of East Anglia. If anything, the identity of being “British” was so self-consciously constructed, that there was chaffing against it on both sides of Hadrian’s former wall. A century before the ultimate Acts of Union, and Parliament bristled at King James I’s request to be made ruler of a unified statutory British crown and not just as separate sovereign of respectively both England and Scotland, with Sir Edwin Sandys remarking explicitly in 1604 that “we cannot make laws to bind Britannia.” Less time between that remark and the adoption of the name “Great Britain” than there is between that adoption and the American Revolution. If early America’s origins are “British,” that concept had a fairly short history.

But there is a far easier and more literal refutation of the claim that American origins are simply British, and that is that the the land which is currently encompassed by the United States was never just part of the English colonies, but had indeed been settled by the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Scottish (separate from the English), and potentially the Vikings. 

This, of course, is not to speak of the indigenous population going back ten millennia, at least. Historian Alan Taylor writes about how conventional misunderstandings of early American history “obscures the broad cultural and geographic range of colonial America” which included “Spanish heading north from Mexico, Russians coming eastward from Siberia…French probing the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.” Taylor summarized the state of early American studies today, where it is now common knowledge that “Colonial America was far more than a simple story of the English becoming Americans.”

Among the English themselves there were radically different cultural and religious identities, ranging from the Puritan New Englanders, Mid-Atlantic Non-Conformists, Appalachian Presbyterians, and Southern Anglicans. In the 17th century, English may have been the tongue of both the Puritan Richard Mather in Massachusetts and of the Catholic Cecil Calvert, 2nd Barron Baltimore in Maryland, but their identities were far from unified.

And for any rejoinder that we’re still discussing “British” colonies, such a myopic view as that presented by the letter writer can only be preserved if one conveniently ignores the dizzying degree of diversity assembled by both choice and force within those colonies. Historian Kevin Gannon provided such an admirable take down of the letter writer’s misinformed opinion when on Twitter he simply listed the ethnic and religious groups which defined the thirteen colonies, including the Haudenosaunee, Powhatan, Narragansett, Pequot, Cherokee, Dutch, Swedish, Moravians, Mennonites, Igbo, Yoruba, BaKongo, Mande, Wolof, Akan, Sephardim, Huguenots, Lenni Lenape, Abenaki, and Creeks, adding “We could do this for days, you know.”

The claim to a unitary British origin isn’t just profoundly ignorant, it does a disservice to what’s precisely so exceptional about America. Diversity is not just our strength, it’s been our strength since the beginning. Multiculturalism isn’t some new concept, it’s been the lived experience of America from our beginnings, and it’s been the true impetus of our actual identity. Scholar Daniel K. Richter writes that these new cultures “defied easy categorization as ‘American,’ ‘European,’ or ‘African.’ Instead, they partook of all three identities,” and invented a new identity in the process.

One can only claim that American origins are exclusively British if you ignore inconvenient facts such as that fully 20% of African slaves were Muslims, meaning that in some southern colonies Islam vied with Protestantism as the second biggest faith, or that in large swaths of colonial Pennsylvania you were more apt to hear German than English.

We hear a lot about “blood and soil” from the enemies of progress who seem newly ascendant, a lot of their braying and mythmaking pollutes our discourse once again. 

Worse, there is a lot of disturbing valorization of whiteness, a lot of rhetorical and virtual actual attacks on people of color. Important to point out what’s immoral about such views, but don’t forget to also point out what’s historically inaccurate about them.

In fact, there is no singular “blood” in our soil, for our soil has always belonged to the blood of women and men of all lands. 

As J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur – a Frenchman – remarked in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, he “could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.”

We’d do well to add to that genealogy the much longer list of nations we’ve seen reflected in our own, for as de Crèvecœur writes, “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” Forde Crèvecœur, and for us, America may have been British, but not singularly so. 

America's origins and our destiny were never only English – they’re universal. To deny that only serves to diminish the whole.