You Support (Civic) Nationalism More Than You Think You Do

[Anthony '58]

(06-30-2022, 11:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: OK.

1. The United States is more an empire than a nation-state. This I say not so much with respect to having a crowned empire as having no dominant group by ethnicity deciding that their group can dictate how others live -- that other groups do not have similar, parallel rights.

2. Few national borders can perfectly delineate a nation. There may be ambiguities about people living across some border. It is a commonplace idea among Russians that Ukrainians are practically identical to Russians with tiny sibolleths of pronunciation. This said, the age of empire-building by obliterating the sovereignty of people who wish to keep their independence is rightly over.

3. Because America is not a true ethnic state, it has multiple traditions based on ethnic order, all of them equally valid. We have a strange continuum between "white" and "black", and our convention is that anyone who seems to have any ancestry among native peoples of sub-Saharan Africa is black -- and no personal achievement can whitewash the "blackness" out of even Barack Obama, one of our best Presidents ever.

So what do we share? A common educational system that teaches, among other things, what it means to be an American.  Part of that is a recognition that Chinatown is as valid a part of America as is Little Italy. A Constitution protects our right to be what we are, if not to abuse others.

4. The only way in which to deter immigration is to make one's country unattractive to immigrants. For humanitarian reasons alone we must tolerate immigration of refugees who typically fail to return to where they came from. Refugees typically become model citizens because they know as people who know nothing else and especially not tyranny what "America" really means.

5. A patriot wants his country (or as I hope America remains, the "Empire of Liberty") to be a more congenial place for those who live here.  That means that prosperity is no pipe dream and that liberty remains intact. One may disagree on what is best for America, but I am satisfied that despotism, peonage,  the support of some concept of the Will of God to be imposed on all, Marxist-Leninist economics,  and some other perversities are not to be done.

1. This is disappearing rapidly, as the far right is doing all they can to make America as Christian as Saudi Arabia is Muslim, and India is Hindu.

2. The problem with Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine was caused by Khrushchev in 1954, when he arbitrarily tore Crimea, the Donbas, Luhansk, and Kharkiv from Russia and handed them over to Ukraine, in the name of "de-Stalinization" - despite the fact that Stalin was a Georgian, not a Russian.

3. Brazil does race a lot more fairly, classifying persons of mixed race (such as former MMA fighter Anderson Silva) as "brown" rather than "black."

4. Twice in the first half of the 1920s, we passed anti-immigration laws - and by 1926 the unemployment rate, which had been 12% in 1921, went all the way down to 1.9%, the lowest ever in peacetime - and everyone ran out and bought cars and radios, and had their homes wired up with electricity and telephone service for the first time.

5. If some other perversities are not to be done, a lot of Republicans, chief among them Rick Scott, have not received that memo: Their platform would take us back to the days of poorhouses (you might want to peruse the "New York City Farm Colony" entry on wikipedia), child labor, 72-hour work weeks, no minimum wage, no overtime pay, and unions becoming essentially non-existent (which the passage of a federal right-to-work law would do).