There have been many books written in recent years that seek to critique, defend, or simply understand the populist nationalism that has spread across North America, Europe, and much of the world. Here I focus on two books in that vein. Miller’s The Religion of American Greatness seeks to explain and challenge the interconnection between conservative Christianity and nationalism in the US, whereas Hazony, whose focus is broader, seeks to defend the value of populist nationalism in his The Virtue of Nationalism. While both books are engaging and form a sort of dialogue with one another, Miller’s critique of right-wing nationalism is far more compelling than Hazony’s attempts to defend it. I start with Miller before turning to Hazony.
Miller, a sort of classically liberal, old-style conservative Christian political theorist, is critical of newer versions of right-wing Christian nationalism. Miller’s basic critique is that nationalism in practice tends toward authoritarian domestic measures to enforce whatever vision of nationhood is desired and that, in practice (and theory), it is impossible to come up with any satisfactory and coherent definition of what a nation is. Right-wing nationalists usually mean by national identity some cultural, religious, and/or racial idealized vision they have of their country’s past and then want to impose it, through force, in perpetuity on everyone else in the country.
As Miller summarizes various attempts to clearly define national identity, he says “I have argued the effort is basically impossible, given cultural fuzziness, and bound to deteriorate into illiberalism.” (77). By “the effort” here Miller is specifically referring to efforts to impose a strong Christian national identity in the US. He is also critical of nationalist efforts in other countries.
Some conservative nationalists have suggested that as America becomes less culturally European and less religious it will become less democratic. Miller recognizes that “it is true that the United States is gradually becoming less culturally Western, less British, and less Christian. That says nothing at all about the prospects of democracy in America.” (86). Democracy as a self-conscious concept and practice of rule by the people (demos) was initiated in a set of pre-Christian Greek city states. There are also plenty of examples of reasonably democratic political practices in pre-Christian communities throughout human history (see, for instance, Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything) and today there are plenty of thriving representative democracies, like Japan, that are not majority Christian. (Not to mention much of Europe today, which in many countries is culturally Christian but where the majority don’t practice the religion). Miller echoes many of these points in his demonstration that democracy and individual rights are not inherently tied to Christianity.
Miller notes that “White American evangelicals are increasingly acting like an ethnoreligious sect” and this is because they “feel they are, or will soon be, a minority. (106). The nationalism they desire is one where they will give up “on the American nation if they do not get to define its meaning or enjoy a preeminent place in it…Christian nationalism insists on unifying the nation on its terms or not at all” (107). It is permeated by a sense of fear over loss of status which produces a scared, resentful politics.
Miller also quotes Francis Fukuyama from his book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, where Fukuyama says that “nationalism is based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the division and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist.” (Miller citation from p. 107). In this vein, “to the extent that Christian nationalism predominates, the Christian Right is identity politics for tribal evangelicals, a response to the decline of Anglo-Protestant power, more than a movement of ordered liberty and equal justice for all.” (164-165).
Miller is critical of attempts to develop nationalism out of shared traits. I agree. Whether one wants to defend liberal democracy from authoritarians (as Miller does) or advocate on the left for a more participatory, egalitarian democratic socialism (as I do), we do so not on the basis of shared language, religion, or race. It would require a whole separate essay on what a left patriotism would look like. But it would be neither nationalist nor imperialist, in contrast to Hazony’s claim that all political visions must fall into one of those two camps. Thus, while I see the world differently from Miller (I am not a Christian conservative), his book is insightful, advances a powerful critique of contemporary manifestations of nationalism, and deserves a wide reading.
In Miller’s insightful words, “our longing for community will never be fulfilled by a large, impersonal, pluralistic national polity.” (257). Indeed I would argue, and Miller would probably agree, that people of all stripes miss community because we lack it locally, not because we don’t have it nationally. This bridges into the critique of Hazony, who very much wants that national sense of unity and community.
Hazony begins his book by claiming that all visions of how to deal with global politics are either imperialist or nationalist. Simply put, this is far, far too simplistic. In so far as his defense of nationalism criticizes American imperialism, I am sympathetic. And in so far as he says that anti-colonial nationalist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries were positive challenges to Western imperialism, I agree. But to leap from these critiques of imperialism to suggest that all opposition to imperialism must be nationalist, and that nations are the natural and best way for humans to organize, is unjustified. To state that the two options available today are a neoliberal globalist imperialism and a reactionary state-based nationalism is to box us into the world that the Trumpian, nationalist right wants.
Hazony makes a powerful rhetorical move but we should reject his dichotomy. He criticizes an unjust, dysfunctional status quo, American-led Western imperialism, and then offers up a sort of right-wing nationalism, which would also be unjust and dysfunctional, as the only alternative. This of course ignores all the excellent ideas on the left for how to transform the American imperial order, ideas that would be neither imperialist nor nationalist.
Second, Hazony, in pitting imperialism and nationalism against one another, obscures how many unjust imperialisms have been driven by vile, racist nationalism, as with the main axis powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) in WW2. Hazony condemns those axis powers as imperialist (which is true) but in doing so tries to absolve nationalism of all the axis evils (even though the axis powers were also violently nationalist). Indeed, a more sophisticated analysis would recognize that global powers can be both nationalist and imperialist. More on this in a moment.
To be fair to Hazony, his critique of historic forms of empire is compelling. But his nationalist alternative in the early pages of the book is vague. It sounds nice but when we dive into the details later in the book it becomes much less savory. Indeed Hazony’s nationalism sounds all too similar to the reactionary nationalism the authoritarian right wants.
And yes, this is where it leads. Early in the book (pp. 30-40) Hazony suggests that a biblical heritage, or at least adherence to biblical principles, is necessary for an independent nation state to function, a point that as Miller persuasively argues, is not accurate.
Hazony must also address the Nazi question, as I alluded to above. So he says “Nazi Germany was, in fact, an imperial state in every sense, seeking to put an end to the principle of national independence and the self-determination of peoples once and for all.” (39). Yes it was. It was also nationalist, something Hazony has ruled out by definitional fiat. The Nazis rejected basically every principle of Lockean liberal universalism. They asserted the superiority of their history, culture, and racial bloodline, imposed this vision on those within the country and repressed or exterminated all who resisted or had the wrong identity within Germany, and on this basis acted as an empire to spread this racial vision across Europe. To suggest the axis powers were universalistic empires is not very accurate. They were racist, nationalist empires. By pitting empire and nationalism against one another, Hazony obscures this point and the fact that many vile worldly powers have been both.
In addition, to suggest that Nazi Germany and the EU (and Eurozone) are both “imperialist” is silly because they are so radically different. Not just that the first is a monstrous evil and the second a misguided elitist project doomed to dysfunction. But also because their motivations, goals, self-understandings, institutions, ideals, and so on are utterly different. And I say this as a critic, not a defender, of the EU and especially the Eurozone. But to call both “imperialist” is to render the word meaningless.
In later pages (pp. 40-50), Hazony’s argument becomes more problematic. First there are plenty of standard issue vague complaints about liberal intolerance and wokeness (though he avoids using the word “woke”) without any examples or clear explanation of what he is talking about. From here we then get suggestions that when the US, the preeminent imperial power in the world, refuses to sign key treaties, UN conventions, join the ICC, etc, these are not the acts of an empire that refuses to be restrained by any external power but rather brave, nationalist acts to defy some vaguely liberal, imperial UN dictates. Ditto with Israel regarding its policies in Palestine and the bombing of neighboring countries. To Hazony, these are not the acts of a regional power seeking dominance, spurred by a combination of nationalist and imperialist ideas, but rather brave nationalist actions to defend its (tribal) way of life. As mentioned in preceding paragraphs, Hazony’s pitting of nationalism and imperialism as two polar opposites leads to these misguided interpretations.
Hazony is probably right that Britain and Russia drew on nationalist pride to fight back against the Nazis but this does not mean that they weren’t also imperial (Britain) or had imperial aspirations (Russia). Being attacked spurs nationalist pride and resistance. The US experienced this after 9/11 and it was with this combination of nationalism and imperialism that the US embarked on the forever wars in response. At one point, on pages 98-99, Hazony seems to recognize this, how imperialism is often connected to and spurred by a superior belief in one’s own nation. But he doesn’t seem to realize this undermines the dichotomy his book is based on.
When it comes to how states are formed, Hazony is correct to criticize the liberal contract theory of the state—after all, it is not an accurate depiction of state formation. But of course no one really asserts this in the 21st century. But I think he is wrong to analogize the nation and the nation-state to the family, for reasons that Miller explains well. In addition, it is not clear if nations are built around mutual loyalty in the manner Hazony describes nor why, even if true in many cases historically, it would have prescriptive force today. Modern nation states are deeply complex but likely owe more to military conquest, political and economic power and rivalry, and top-down efforts to generate shared identity, than a sort of scaling up of strongly felt and endorsed ties of mutual loyalty that begin with family, then clan, then tribe, then nation. The latter story is how Hazony accounts for the development of most nations, at least the admirable ones. He does recognize that conquest and force are also contributing factors.
As noted above, Hazony rightly shows that the individualist contract view of the state does not accurately describe the history of nation-states. But his depiction is just as far-fetched. According to Hazony, although history has had plenty of violent conquests, many nations formed through an iterative, consensual, bottom-up transfer of power from clans to tribes to nations which were then codified in state institutions. But is this any more compelling a picture of how national identities were formed, and states constituted, than a simple contract one? Both stories cast aside institutions, contingency, economics, conquest, and after-the-fact efforts to create and unify a people through a shared national identity. In his story, nation-building and state construction is still a story of contractual transfers of power via mutual consent, except that he has replaced individuals with groups.
In addition, there is a deep conservatism running throughout Hazony’s book. As a sign of his conservatism, he frequently discusses families headed by a man with wife and children to care for, simply presenting this as the natural default. It’s unclear if this is deliberate or if he so takes this patriarchal family structure for granted that he isn’t even aware he is doing it.
He also treats clans and tribes as natural, enduring features of human identity. To be blunt, it is not at all clear that most of human history is best seen in these terms (Hazony is very fast and loose with his discussion of human history). To delve into this question adequately would require engaging with a range of historical scholars, something he does not do. But even if this is an accurate depiction of many past human experiences and societies, it’s not clear that it has any descriptive power for how people experience the world today, nor why it would have any normative force for how we ought to live and organize our politics. The US, for instance, is not and never has been a collection of tribes.
Some concluding thoughts on Hazony: his critique of various historical empires is powerful and I agree with him that a world state is not desirable. Although I am something of a Euroskeptic, his suggestion that the EU and Eurozone are imperial in a manner at all akin to the profound evils of previous empires is absurd. European states choosing to enter such European arrangements may be dumb, misguided, and elitist, but this doesn’t compare to colonization and empire.
Also, while discussing the importance of national self-determination, Hazony never mentions democracy. This is an important and very telling oversight (or choice). And this is because of a key mistake Hazony makes: he assumes that the absence of foreign imperial dominance = freedom. The reality is that the absence of foreign imperial dominance is a precondition for collective freedom and self-determination. It does not equal freedom. This is why he doesn’t seem to care about the internal political situation in any country.
He is also some version of a race/ethnic/nation essentialist. We would need to drill down more into how the three terms overlap and how he uses them. But he takes it for granted the world is divided into separate peoples who exist as separate groups in a rich, enduring, metaphysical sense, these peoples are made of historic tribes, and that they can and should be the defining way in which we identify and organize the world politically. Hazony’s ideal world is the essentialist world of identity politics.
It is frankly baffling to those of us on the left that someone would see the world as fundamentally divided into enduring, primordial, ethno-nationalist peoples and to insist that the central political task is the preservation of these (seemingly homogeneous) cultures in their separate states. This leads Hazony, and those like him, to oppose past empires and the prospect of a future world state. This is the correct position but they do so for the wrong reason. Empire should be opposed because it is brutal, violent, exploitative, tyrannical, anti-democratic, and frequently racist. A world state should be opposed because it would be distant, likely oppressive, and because it would be impossible to have a single robust, responsive, and in any way participatory democracy for a planet of seven billion people. These are the reasons to oppose empire and a world state, not because they inhibit the preservation and transmission of the conservative, essentialist, ethno-nationalist identity politics Hazony defends and yearns for.
As mentioned above, because Hazony cares more for conservative cultural preservation than democracy, his vision is not actually one of collective self-determination. It is, rather, a vision in which what matters is that a conservative, hegemonic understanding of a people persists, regardless of its political system. This sees him celebrating Hungary as it becomes less democratic because he sees Orbán’s regime as acting to preserve Hungary’s right-wing, ethno-nationalist heritage. Regardless of what Hazony specifically believes, this line of thinking leads many on the right to prefer authoritarian leaders and institutions that “preserve” the “national identity” over democratic leaders and institutions that fail to do so.
He also claims, in one of the book’s more embarrassing passages, that the distaste European liberals have for the anti-immigrant (and anti-semitic, strange that he doesn’t explicitly mention this) attitudes and policies of Hungary and Poland is worse, is indeed a type of hatred, than the actual xenophobia (and anti-semitism) within Hungary and Poland. And yes, he does imply this, since he fails to say one critical word against Hungary and Poland, while implicitly holding them up as proud, admirable nations standing up to imperious European bureaucrats. Why would Hazony praise increasingly authoritarian Hungary, whose public culture is infused with anti-semitism? Because in his conception of nationalist politics, where what matters is not democracy but the preservation of a unitary, conservative tribal identity and heritage, Hungary is examplar, not increasingly authoritarian and anti-semitic cautionary tale.