Prometheus 6

Jonah Goldberg wrote this really interesting article I meant to get back to before now. It's about white America's struggle with dual consciousness and its racial identity...though Mr. Goldberg doesn't frame it that way.

The unspeakable American culture
Journalism's elite don't dare speak of the patriotism that holds this country together.

...I've come around to the view that the culture war can best be understood as a conflict between two different kinds of patriotism. On the one hand, there are people who believe being an American is all about dissent and change, that the American idea is inseparable from "progress." America is certainly an idea, but it is not merely an idea. It is also a nation with a culture as real as France's or Mexico's. That's where the other patriots come in; they think patriotism is about preserving Americanness.

To him, it's the culture war.

The discussion sounds a lot like the definition of blackness wars we keep fighting (there's a patriotism vs. nationalism thing later that will remind you of the Black vs. black thing). And it's going to go on for a long time. Traditionally, white identity was defined by exclusion (the one-drop rule). They are now trying to assert a positive identity that takes in all the social and cultural spaces and artifacts they contain via the negate definition...minus responsibility for race and racism.

Tricky...

I'm not putting that all on Mr. Goldberg. I'm naming an emergent pattern of activity.

Yet the strangest and most ironic aspect of our national culture is that we have an aversion to talking about a national culture. Samuel Huntington, one of the country's premier social scientists, has become something of a pariah for constantly reminding people (in books such as "The Clash of Civilizations" and "Who Are We?") that the United States is a nation, not just a government and a bunch of interest groups.

There's a reason for that. It actually runs counter to the myth of the rugged individual. Also, characteristics were assigned to in-groups in order to identify who would be excluded. If you get specific about our national culture you'll find it as fragmented as the Black constituencies have ever been (more so, if you do it honestly and include Black folks), white folks would start finding reasons to feel excluded. Yet the national culture is even more collective than the Black constituencies' normative culture. The American belief in the individualism is itself a collective one.

As I said, it's going to take a while for them to work things out. Part of their problem is they think they are a nation-state when they are, in fact, a state-nation. Several, politically united state-nations in fact.

This is what I mean.

Most nation-states are formalizations of the culture of the nation it names. They grew, accrued. The United States began as joint military-economic venture. Its rules were, and are, those of a joint military-economic venture, and the nations that are trying to be a nation are developing under those constraints. That's why the United States is nowhere near as socialistic as Europe. As nation-states, the nations of Europe “gut-checks” its decisions against the well being of the nation; as a state-nation, the United States of America “gut-checks” its decisions against the well being of the state.

There are people whose interests are identical with the interests of the state. Your typical nationalist is not among that crowd...yet they identify with the state.

It's going to be interesting to see if they resolve it.