Nationalism: Many Strands, Many Misunderstandings

The focus needs to be on its nobility.

Joseph de Maistre said that he had never met a man. He knew Frenchmen, Italians, and so on, but as for “man,” he’d never met one. Similarly, I have never met a “nationalist,” so I can’t say anything about nationalism in the abstract, whether it be good or bad. I can’t say anything about Hungarian or Chinese nationalism. This article was originally published in the American Spectator print magazine. Click here for online access! But I do know American nationalism, and nationalism in this country is a noble sentiment. American nationalism is benign because

It is a liberal nationalism; It is a multicultural nationalism; and It is a fraternal nationalism.

That is the essence of American nationalism. Liberal Nationalism The core icons of American identity are the liberal ideas of our Founders. They are what make Americans out of Americans. That is why American nationalism is necessarily a liberal nationalism. In other countries, nationalism is a matter of dynastic houses and cultural icons, but America does entirely without the former and increasingly without the latter. Instead, the focal point for our nationalist and patriotic sentiments is the sense that America has a special mission to promote liberty, as promised by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. For Americans, as Americans, illiberalism is self-defeating, and if some Americans in the past have been illiberal, in time they’ve been seen to be un- American and have been rejected as a body rejects a foreign object. Some American conservatives pretend to be nationalists while rejecting the liberalism of our Founders. They tell us that the American idea is charged with secret Enlightenment codes that dissolve all they hold dear. If that’s what they think, it would seem to follow that they regret the American Revolution. Possibly they’re covert Canadians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Yet some conservatives will tell me I’ve missed something: I’ve defined American n...