Civic nationalism is an
effort to define a nation ideologically, rather than biologically and
geographically. Up until the French Revolution, a nation was primarily a
related group of people with a common language, culture and history. The French
were not defined by geography or ideology, but by blood. The lands they
occupied were French lands, because they were occupied by French people. The
people were loyal to themselves and, by extension, a king, whose duty it was to
defend the interests of his people.
The French Revolution changed
that as a nation came to be defined by geography and ideology.
The challenge with replacing private government, where a king defends his lands
and the land of his people, is in finding something to replace the basis of
loyalty. That’s where the civic religion comes into the mix. Instead
of people giving their soul to God and their sword to the king, both are
pledged to the new civic religion, where the state is the object of worship and
veneration. Citizenship becomes a sacred duty.
The Enlightenment ideas about public government were, of course,
a reaction to the defects of the aristocratic regime. A good king makes for the
best form of government, but a terrible king, who is greedy or stupid, makes
for the worst for of government. The former advances the peace and prosperity
of his people, while the latter damages it. Placing the fate of the people on
luck, hoping the next king turns out to have the right mix of qualities for the
age, seems like a rather silly way to run a society, when you think about it.
Public government addresses that by giving the people an
organized way to get rid of bad rulers and change public policy. The trouble
with public government is the same trouble we see with public property. When no
one owns something, no one has an incentive to sacrifice for it or invest in
it. The tragedy of the commons applies to all public goods, including
government. The solution is the civic religion, where the identity of the
citizen is tied to the success of the state. The state becomes the
altar of the people.
This is why, in our current age, the ruling class drones on
endlessly about democracy and the alleged threats to democracy. They don’t use
the word democracy to mean people voting on public policy. They mean it as a
synonym for the neo-liberal order and the cosmopolitan ideology that animates
it. It’s why the wrong person winning an election is a threat to democracy,
while the right person winning is a celebration of democracy. It’s also why the
coup plotters in the FBI still feel smugly justified in their actions.
Ideological nations have two
problems. One is they must endlessly whip the citizens into a fervor in
order to keep them loyal to the state. Religions have the same challenge, which
is why the preacher is always warning about some imminent threat to your soul
or reminding everyone about God’s wrath. Piety is a full-time commitment and
that applies to civic piety, as well. It’s why communist countries are drenched
in patriotic symbols, songs and public performances, designed to keep everyone
in a heightened state of ideological frenzy.
The other problem, a consequence of the demands of piety, is
they become ruthlessly intolerant of dissent. “All within the state,
nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” becomes the mantra of
every nation built on ideology. If people are allowed to question the ideology
that organizes the state, they are doubting the project itself and this must be
viewed as a threat to the state. Therefore, civic religions must always become
increasingly intolerant and narrow, in order to defend the state against
challenges.
This is why the two great industrial wars of the 20th century
were blood baths. When one tribe fights another for access to the river, they
just want access to the river. They see each other has competitors for a
resource. Compromise and mercy are possible, because their conflict is not
personal. They may work up a good hatred for the other people in order to screw
up their courage, but that’s a fanaticism of temporary necessity. Once the
material dispute is resolved, the people have no reason to hate one another.
When two people make war over religion, because they see one
another as an abomination or a direct threat to what defines them as a people,
the conflict must be a fight to the death. There can be no mercy toward that
which threatens your existence. This also means no limits. The total wars of
the 20th made perfect sense to the combatants, because they saw the other side
as devoted to evil. Incinerating a city is perfectly reasonable if you think
the people in it are evil, because they support an evil ideology.
Again, this is something we see in our own time. Social media is
full of post by Progressive fanatics, celebrating violence against people they
call Nazis. It’s not that these victims are actual Nazis, of course. It’s just
that the word now means “evil people” who the pious see as a threat to their
existence. By definition, the pious must never show mercy to evil, as to do so
means accepting that there is some virtue in the evil people that is worth
preserving. Piety demands no mercy be given to the impious.
Now, the American ruling elite, for the last 75 years or so, has
claimed that rather than being a nation defined by blood and soil, America is a
nation defined by allegiance to a set of ideals, the American creed. That way,
anyone who wanders in can be a citizen, as long as he pledges allegiance to
those ideals. This was a post hoc justification for mass immigration in the
early 20th century and a way to include the sons of recent immigrants into the
national mythology. It sacralized the immigrant as the ultimate American.
In fact, Americans are now more loyal to foreigners
than to one another. It seems that a third defect of the ideological state is
that the ideology evolves a hatred of itself. Something similar has happened in
Europe. The EU is, after all, an effort to apply the lessons of America to the
European continent. Instead of defining the people biologically and
geographically, a European will be an idea. In Europe and America, the idea of
citizenship has curdled into self-loathing. What defines the people is their
hatred of themselves.
This is not correctable. People join a
cause or a movement in order to swap their individual identity for that of the
group. In other words, people are driven to ideology out of self-loathing. A
society based on ideology must therefore reward those most riddled with doubt
and celebrate self-loathing as the highest virtue. The ideological state, regardless
of design, must always become a suicide cult. It simultaneously boils off the
skeptical and rewards the most fanatical. A society run by fanatics always ends
in a blood bath.
