Nationalism in America

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0:00:11.4 Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:13.0 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:14.2 Aaron Ross Powell: Our guest today is Samuel Goldman, he’s an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, where he is Executive Director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and Director of the Politics & Values Program. Today, we’re discussing his book, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division. Welcome to the show.

0:00:34.1 Samuel Goldman: Thank you for having me.

0:00:36.1 Aaron Ross Powell: What do we mean by nationalism?

0:00:39.0 Samuel Goldman: So in the book, I discuss nationalism as the idea of a pre-​political community, constituted by characteristics including language, religion, sometimes some belief in common descent from which political sovereignty emanates. And the argument of the book is that although that ideal has always been a feature of American culture and politics, extending back to the very beginning of the Republic, it’s also been a problematic ideal because those criteria just haven’t been present, or if they have, only in such an attenuated way that it’s been very difficult to speak of the United States as a nation like other nations.

0:01:34.9 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, just to clarify on that, ’cause sometimes you’ll see these back and forths in this era where people are writing nationalism defenses and talking about it more and more. Traditionally speaking, nationalism is related to natio as in birth and nativism, natal, all from the same etymology. And this is not the same as the government or the state, so we could historically talk about things like the Serbian nation within the nation state or the state of Yugoslavia when it existed. Is that still what you’re talking about, that there’s a difference between sort of people and government in that sense?

0:02:12.7 Samuel Goldman: Yeah. That’s right. And one way that scholars define nationalism is the demand that the people and the state coincide, such that each distinctive people has its own state within its own borders, within which it can conduct its distinctive form of life. And certainly the United States is a nation or has national characteristics in the political sense, this is a modern state that has borders that are subject to a unified sovereignty, but it is challenging to say exactly who or what the American people are.

0:03:00.8 Aaron Ross Powell: In your book, you break this out into, I guess, three kinds of nationalism, I’m sure taxonomy is the right word as opposed to changing like schools of thought, but these are… You talk about covenant, the creed and the crucible. What’s the covenant?

0:03:18.4 Samuel Goldman: So the covenant is an idea that’s derived from the Hebrew Bible, and that was first articulated by the Puritan settlers of New England, which understood Americans as a branch of the English Protestant community, chosen by God to travel across the seas and establish a new and purified form of community, both in association with each other, a sort of vertical understanding of covenant, but also in collective responsibility to God. And as I say, this was an idea that emerged in the 17th century, long before there was any expectation of an independent American state, but through the 18th century, and in particular during the War of Independence, it was nationalized, and if not secularized, then more loosely associated with specific denominations or theological positions. And it was presented at a very early stage of America’s independent history as an answer to the question of who the American people are and what they are doing in the Western Hemisphere.

0:04:40.4 Trevor Burrus: And this is very centered in New England. It’s something I hadn’t thought of before reading your book that, my ancestors go back to Jamestown, but for whatever reason, we talk about the pilgrims and the iconography of the pilgrims, such as Plymouth Rock, 1620, all those kind of… Squanto, all those things that we learn when we make a… Or getting close to Thanksgiving, we make a turkey with our hand. Why did that story, of course, which the Puritans talked about themselves in a very Israelite kind of way, why did that story beat out the Jamestown story? ‘Cause they had a hard time too, and there could have been some iconography with that, but we know about Jamestown, but we celebrate and dress up and have pageants about the Pilgrims.

0:05:28.0 Samuel Goldman: Well, a big part of the answer is the Civil War, which discredited or at least challenged the viability of an independent southern point of origin for American History, which up to that point had been arrival. And when you see discussions of Plymouth Rock and some of the other symbols and myths of the New England experience in the first half of the 19th century, they’re recognized almost immediately as regional symbols and people in the South and also in the West say, that’s fine but this is not our story. As a result of the Civil War, and beyond that, the disproportionate influence of New England institutions, particularly in education, a version of the New England story was nationalized, as I say, partly secularized and stripped of its regional association. But even then, that’s a fairly recent development, and somebody pointed out in one of the reviews that it wasn’t until the 1940s that the State of Mississippi recognized the federal holiday of Thanksgiving. It was the last state in the nation to do so. So even within living memory, there are pockets of resistance to what was originally a regional and theologically-​specific story being taken as a broader account of national origins.

0:07:13.3 Aaron Ross Powell: This might be a question that makes more sense to ask after we talked about the other three, but was there a sense like when people were embracing the covenant approach or articulating the various pieces of it or the versions of it, that they were participating in an establishing of a national character or nationalism narrative, or was this just how they… These people happen to think about themselves, and it spread organically? So, I guess, how early was America talking about America as a thing other than just a set of states and institutions?

0:07:52.3 Samuel Goldman: No, this is an intentional cultural and political project that has precedents, again, going back to the 17th century, but I think emerges in explicit form in the 1790s when it’s an attempt by prominent figures in the political and religious life of New England to stake their claim to The New Republic, to leadership of The New Republic. And as it becomes clear relatively quickly with the election of Jefferson in 1800 that they cannot dominate The New Republic politically, they become increasingly committed to a program of cultural self-​definition, which will allow them to retain their influence. And I’m probably making it sound more cynical than I really mean to. This wasn’t a plot or a sham. I think they really believed that, but what they believed is that what was highest and best in America was concentrated in New England. And to the extent that The New Republic succeeded, it would be through the diffusion of New England’s influence, through the establishment in particular of educational institutions, universities and later, the common schools movement.

0:09:19.4 Trevor Burrus: It’s interesting you bring out the common schools movement, which I was reading a different book… Another book today about the Philadelphia Bible riots of 1844, which we can get into, you mentioned briefly in your book. But one thing that struck me, reading about this Puritan story, and this has always struck me this way, but you put it out very clearly in your book, is that if you actually know what New England was like, it was kind of a theocracy, at least 17th century New England was a theocracy. And we learned about… They wanted religious freedom, but when they got here, they didn’t wanna give religious freedom to other people. You mentioned Roger Williams, he is a personal hero of mine, he actually got kicked out of the Plymouth colony, and he embodied the later American creed so much more, and that’s the interesting dichotomy there, is that we turned the pilgrims into something else, at least in the way I was educated in the 1980s, and we forgot that this basic… This covenant thing was just so rooted in religious identity in a way that seems not American today.

0:10:28.8 Samuel Goldman: Yeah, it really was a very distinctive and in some ways, very alien social form. Even if not technically a theocracy, as they understood that term, religious institutions really were the dominated ones, not only in the 17th century, but well into the 19th century. And in the book, I quote a little known novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who’s of course famous as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it’s called Old Town Folks. And it’s not much of a novel, it’s most interesting as a kind of sociology of the New England of her grandparents’ generation. And it really was a deeply religious, almost to use a word that’s become fashionable, almost integralist society in which ministers were not only agents of the state, there was an established church in most New England states, but were also seen as the leading moral and cultural influence.

0:11:38.3 Samuel Goldman: And it’s exactly that combination of political power with institutional authority, with a kind of over-​weaning moralism that made New England so unpopular in much of the rest of the country. And I think as you say, we tend to miss that in the sanitized account of New England influences. We talk about Boston, and Salem, and Plymouth, but the dominant understandings of what religious and civic freedom mean today arose from some of the Puritans’ rivals and critics, including Roger Williams, who went on to be a founder of Rhode Island, and also the Quakers of Philadelphia, who were not without sin or blemish by any means, but were much closer in their understanding of the relation between public and private power and freedom to most of us today than the classic theorists of New England.

0:12:53.2 Aaron Ross Powell: I was struck reading your description of New England by… So I’m a big HP Lovecraft fan, and Lovecraft’s love of New England, I hadn’t realized how much it just played into this particular conception of it, including you mentioned how eventually because of isolation and lack of immigration, it became much more about blood and the land and look more like an old world nation and that sort of identity than the rest of the American experiment. And that has me wondering. You mentioned Jefferson, when Jefferson did the Louisiana Purchase and we had this westward expansion that radically expanded the size of the country, what impact did that shift in American perspective have on this very localized, very isolated, very concentrated New England covenant?

0:13:53.3 Samuel Goldman: I think that the Louisiana Purchase was effectively a death blow to the covenantal understanding of nationalism, which from that point in the early 19th century went into almost un-​remitting retreat as a political enterprise. It survived in culture and especially high culture, partly because of the continuing disproportionate influence of the old New England colonial colleges, which is why you still find versions of this story taught by professors, professors at Harvard. But as a result of Jefferson’s selection and the Louisiana Purchase, it became clear that the political and economic center of gravity was inevitably going to shift, south and west. And that shift generated a rival symbol of national identity that I call The Crucible, which is just a fancy way of saying melting pot, but alliterations always sound good. So I have, as you pointed out, the covenant, the crucible and the creed.

0:15:11.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, that’s where we get into this next era, pre… Mostly, pre-​war or maybe up through the end of the 19th century, but with the idea of a melting pot, where did you… You identify that the first person to use this metaphor. And one of the interesting things you point out is that you could use a lot of different metaphors, and they could say different things. You could say “melting pot,” or you could say “symphony,” or you could say… Sometimes they say, “You’re a salad bowl,” every now and then too, but what is actually happening here when people become Americans? And of course, this is tied to immigrants, but not all immigrants, or least some immigrants are not necessarily desirable.

0:15:47.9 Samuel Goldman: Right, so the crucible was in certain ways a rebuke to the covenant, which appealed to a homogeneity of origin and commitment as the basis for continuing national unity, and when people use the phrase “Our Fathers” or “Founding Fathers” in the 19th century, they weren’t usually talking about Washington and Jefferson and Madison, they were talking about the Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors. And in fact, there was a local Massachusetts holiday, known as Founder’s Day, that was celebrated into the 20th century, and the founder was… The founders were John Winthrop and his colleagues, not the framers of the Federal Constitution. But at any rate, this rival myth acknowledged the variety of origins among Americans, but suggested that over time and through shared experience, in particular the experience of westward expansion, eventually a new nation would be forged, and you often find in discussions of this idea, comparisons to the so-​called Dark Ages in Europe, where you have all of these Germanic tribes wandering around, and they do battle and intermarry. But over the centuries, the Germans, and the French, and the English, and the other great nations of Europe emerge.

0:17:20.3 Samuel Goldman: And the argument was that Americans were at an early stage of the same process. And it might be that at present, American spoke different languages and look different and came from different places, but over time, they would become more similar, and even though the metaphor of the crucible or melting pot is essentially industrial, you think of melting down these ores to create an alloy, the rhetoric associated with the idea is more often agricultural. And there’s a suggestion that by working in the soil, Americans will sort of plant themselves and they will grow up as uniform crops. And that idea was influenced by some of the environmental theories of adaptation that were popular at the time, these are precursors to Darwinian evolution, which suggests that if you plant the same crops or release the same domesticated animals in the same climate, they all become the same over time, and the idea was exactly the same thing would happen to people.

0:18:31.0 Aaron Ross Powell: How static was this theory? And what I mean by that is, we can imagine all these people are gonna come together and they’re gonna melt into this national character or a shared connection or a shared identity, and that’s this thing we call America, and as more people come in and more people melt, they’re gonna melt into that same thing, versus a process where the thing that makes us… That identifies America or is the American identity is the simply melting together as process, but therefore, just like if you’ve got a bunch of stuff you’re adding to a soup, like each new thing changes the nature of the soup, and if you keep adding new things indefinitely, the soup will change indefinitely. And so there will never be a fundamental America thing, as opposed to just an ongoing changing thing that at any given moment we call America?

0:19:25.6 Samuel Goldman: So that’s the question that leads to the erosion and arguably collapse of this idea in the later 19th century or early 20th century. Early in the 19th century, and really through the Civil War, it was assumed that these people of various origins would more or less correspond to the Anglo-​Protestant mold. And there again, the metaphor becomes important, so you melt down the various alloys… The various ores, you have this liquid alloy and then you pour it into a mold. And the thought was the mold would be Anglo-​Protestant, and then it wouldn’t matter that these immigrants and their descendants came from places like Ireland, or Germany, or elsewhere in northwestern Europe. After the Civil War, as the sources of immigration began to shift to Eastern and Southern Europe, and also as it becomes clear that immigrants are retaining more of their cultural particularities than had been expected… And one of the things I mentioned in the book that I don’t think is well remembered today is that it was widely believed, right down to the end of the 19th century, that most immigrants, including non-​Christians would become Protestants. It was taken almost for granted that they would see the error of their ways and adopt true religion as practiced in America.

0:21:00.1 Samuel Goldman: That simply didn’t happen. And then there is a debate between advocates of the older understanding of the crucible as involving a simulation to an existing mold or standard. And a newer idea that suggests this is a process without a final end. And as you suggest, as you keep adding components, the mixture will constantly change. And that prospect was something of an obsession, something of a nightmare for figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who in certain moods held a sort of optimistic assimilationist vision of people of various backgrounds from all over the world coming to America, especially engaging in western expansion and becoming equal equal citizens. But he was also tormented by the possibility, and you see this in some of his letters, that if you get the mixture wrong then the whole product is innervated and [0:22:13.2] ____. And in that respect, the crucible is much more closely related to modern conceptions of race than the covenant. The covenant was an essentially theological idea, and the distinctions between member and outsider, inside and outside, revolved around religious ideas, the crucible, drawing on this sense of biological evolution and the literal mixing of blood, this is what you see people talking about, is haunted by the idea of fixed racial distinctions, that it is either impossible to blend together, or it is possible, but utterly damaging.

0:23:00.2 Samuel Goldman: And you mentioned HP Lovecraft, of whom I’m also a great fan. This was one of his nightmares too, the tainting of the blood by these alien sources. So in one of his famous stories, it turns out that the inhabitants of this New England fishing village are really fishmen from the bottom of the sea. Lovecraft went farther in his obsession than most, but he was not the only one who had this fear, and that’s one of the reasons that his fiction was so powerful.

0:23:35.6 Trevor Burrus: Now, if we go back at this point with the crucible story and the two different versions of this, you mentioned it and I mentioned it with the common school movement. Does that really start in New England? And is it attempt to work within… This might be simplistic work within the crucible paradigm, or to get back to the covenant?

0:23:55.4 Samuel Goldman: It certainly starts in New England, where the common schools movement emerges in the 1840s explicitly as a way of nationalizing a local practice. So public schools teaching a standardized curriculum and using professional teachers had been a feature of New England life going back to the 17th century. It was very, very rare in most other parts of the country, and the common schools movement attempted to nationalize this practice. Whether it was closer to the covenant or the crucible depended whom you asked. So the education reformers themselves said, “We are not advocates of regional dominance. We are not sectarian. We are trying to cultivate a broad and flexible understanding of the national community to which everyone can belong, whether your fathers are from England or Ireland, whether you’re a Protestant or Catholic, and on and on.” The problem is that not everyone believed them. And whether it was resistors to the educational enterprise in the West who saw this as a form of New England cultural imperialism, or Catholics in the cities of the East, the critics of the common schools always saw the enterprise as being fundamentally an attempt to impose a mold that they rejected.

0:25:22.3 Samuel Goldman: And I think in certain ways, you see echoes of this today in some of the debates about Critical Race Theory and public education. Advocates of these movements, always say they have the best of intentions and they’re not trying to impose anything or exclude everyone, but it doesn’t look that way when you’re on the receiving end.

0:25:43.8 Aaron Ross Powell: You mentioned race in the context of immigration and the opening to Asian immigrants and non-​European immigrants, but America, from its founding, has had a complicated history with race, and so I’m curious, I guess for both of the theories that we have talked about and for the evolution of them, what role did slavery and the fact that we were holding so many Americans in bondage and then that we fought a war to end that, that racist institution, what role did that play in these conversations and the evolution of these ideas?

0:26:18.0 Samuel Goldman: So I think the relation to race and slavery might surprise some people. The covenant, precisely because it was so closely related to religious categories, was distant from the concerns with race that we now take as being universal in the 18th and 19th, 19th centuries and advocates and adherents of these ideas were among the early critics of slavery and in fact founded some of the earliest anti-​slavery and abolitionist societies in New England states and elsewhere. But we should resist giving them too much credit for this, because on the one hand, they lived mostly in places where there were very few slaves, and that meant that practically speaking, it was relatively easy for them to take a principled moral stance, certainly easier than it was in other parts of the country. And further, I think we have a tendency today to conflate opposition to slavery with support for what we would now call a multi-​racial society. There were many critics and often devoted critics of slavery in the Early Republic, including many who also were advocates of this sort of covenantal national vision.

0:27:51.2 Samuel Goldman: There were very, very few, some but very few who imagined African-​Americans as full members of the civic community, and if they did, it was only when the numbers were so tiny that it didn’t really seem to matter one way or the other. And when some of these figures were forced to confront slavery in its broader national sense, they tended to gravitate toward colonization scapes. So the idea was it was unjust to take these people from their homes, they should, by all means, be set free, but they don’t really belong among us. It would be better to send them back to where they came from, so they can be free and live independently, just as we hope to do. On the other hand, the crucible image, as I’ve been describing, was much more expansive when it came to at least northwestern Europeans, because national ancestry didn’t matter so much, language didn’t matter quite as much, religion certainly didn’t matter so much, all of these people were welcomed into the American family.

0:29:13.8 Samuel Goldman: But what then did they have in common? It wasn’t being Protestant, it wasn’t their English origin, it wasn’t shared roots in a particular region. The answer often was race, that they were white men and women. So even as the crucible is more expansive and flexible on the one hand, it’s much more exclusive on the other, and I think you see this in figures like Stephen Douglas, who was of course Lincoln’s great antagonist, who is, in certain ways very, very open to immigration and assimilation, and says, “There are people from all over the world who are coming here, and we have vast lands that we can place at their disposal.” But at the same time, he said, “The bond among them is that they are white men and that this government was founded on a white basis.” And it’s in response to that contradiction that we get what I described as the third image of the creed. And Lincoln is not the inventor of this idea, by any means, but he does become its great expositor, and after his death, its martyr.

0:30:33.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, you went right to where I was gonna go, that although of course, the lines are not clean in terms of how these transitions work, you get the crucible changing as you described, maybe to this idea that some groups should not be mixing into America as being an important part of this, but then you also have some big changes in the 20th century, so we start re-​telling our past history to ourselves and saying, “Oh, this was always about a creed that we were founded on.” And as you said, Lincoln is one of the banner carriers of that, but also we would take many of the Founding Fathers and turn them into these creedal banner carriers. So what is that creed and sort of when does it come about?

0:31:15.3 Samuel Goldman: So the creed is the idea that what we have in common is commitment to certain political or moral values that are instantiated in specific institutions. It’s not, as critics sometimes say, simply a matter of abstract philosophy as if the moment you say, “I believe in natural rights,” you are therefore, ipso facto, an American. There’s an idea that through American history and the development of American political institutions, those ideals have been realized. But the claim is that it is through participation in American institutions, and when necessary, the defense of universal moral principles that we demonstrate our membership, our commitment to the American nation.

0:32:13.3 Samuel Goldman: And as I was just saying, it’s not that Lincoln made this up, he quotes Jefferson, he alludes to many of the other framers of the constitution, and they really said the things that he is quoting. But Lincoln places that idea at the center of American identity much more dramatically and effectively than anyone before him, but also for a long time after him. And this is one of the things I try to emphasize in the book, because in standard courses on American history and textbooks, you get Lincoln and then they skip ahead between 50 and 75 years to World War I and sometimes even to World War II, and this is shown as evidence of continuity. Lincoln said these great things, the South was defeated, slavery was abolished, and then we beat the Nazis. But what I try to show in the book is that there is this long period in between, during which the creedal ideal is far from dominant, and in some cases is in direct retreat.

0:33:31.5 Samuel Goldman: And what I try to show is that rather than some necessary development from 1865-1945, it’s in the 20th century, particularly in association with the world wars that intellectuals and political figures begin to return to Lincoln and say, “Here is an alternative that’s been dormant for several decades, but is capable, both of resolving some of our internal struggles, and in particular, the struggle about African-​American civil rights, and also at the same time, providing a rallying cry for our international endeavors.” And I think it’s not accidental that Lincoln’s creedal vision emerges from a period of major war, and even some of the people he’s quoting, including Jefferson, are working in a period of military mobilization. And then it comes back at the next major moment of military mobilization. Really, I see it rather than three wars, as sort of single, almost continuous period from the late teens through the 1960s, when the United States is engaged in almost constant ideological conflict around the world. And the creed is a way of justifying that enterprise, which was, in many ways, contrary to the previous understanding of America’s international role.

0:35:08.0 Aaron Ross Powell: You said that creed, to just roughly characterize it, was the idea that there was this shared commitment of principles that have been realized through the acts of the people and their institutions in America, and that you as an outsider can come in, and if you share a commitment to those principles and agree to act in their advancement and support the institutions, then you’re one of us and this is the thing. The covenant is, we have a shared religious priors that we are… Whether we’re the chosen people, or we just happen to have a certain view on Christianity, and that that brings with it certain principles and has created worldly institutions, and if you come in and you accept these religious principles and support these religious institutions, and see their realization on Earth, then you’re part of this. So is the creed a new thing, or is it just the covenant without God?

0:36:12.9 Samuel Goldman: Well, I don’t think it’s entirely new, and some of the critics of the book suggested there’s more of overlap between these symbols than I let on, and I think there’s an element of truth to that. That said, the covenant without God, or at least without a specific biblical denominational God, is a really big difference with really big consequences. And one of those consequences, which was explicitly cited as an advantage of the creed in the 20th century, is that it’s compatible with religious pluralism. So for most of the 19th century, arguably into the early part of the 20th century, this was widely seen as a Protestant country, which didn’t mean that there weren’t many people who lived here who weren’t Protestants, but they were regarded not only as demographic minorities, but as cultural minorities. And the ideal of the creed is one of the ways that Americans were able to reconcile with the reality of religious pluralism. So it’s not entirely secular by any means, but in the 1940s and 1950s as this creedal rhetoric is being revived, and in certain ways, institutionalized, you also see as a part of that effort, a formal affirmation of religious pluralism and the idea that there are Protestants, there are Catholics, there are Jews, and all of that is good.

0:37:55.0 Samuel Goldman: We are all one nation under God, in the phrase that was added to the Pledge of Allegiance by President Eisenhower, and of course evoking or quoting Lincoln. But as Eisenhower famously went on to say, “It doesn’t matter what that God is,” and that acceptance of shall we say, theological flexibility is a really big shift that I think should not be underestimated.

0:38:24.9 Aaron Ross Powell: Was this then trading, I guess, one form of pluralism against another then, and that the creed enabled us to have religious pluralism, which we hadn’t had before, but this was also the time… The dominance of the creed and the rise of it came at a time when we had… The government was really cracking down on, I guess, ideological pluralism. So you had the crackdowns on the Haymarket Affair, or the Palmer Raids or the Red Scare, where it was like, you can believe anything you want about God, but you need to be committed to a particular form of American ideology.

0:39:05.1 Samuel Goldman: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that foreign observers of American life, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville and beyond, have often noted, and it’s not a flattering observation. One of the things they say, and 20th century observers like the British Catholic writer, Chesterton, said a version of the same thing, is that in nations that have more stable criteria of membership, there’s actually a lot more disagreement. Because, you can be French and be a Communist or a royalist or a papal supremacist, but you’re still French. And there is a way of finding commonality despite the fact of different political and moral opinions. But these observers say that doesn’t really happen in America, because people are so actually different in their origins, in their culture, and in their habits that all they have in common is politics. And that means that the stakes of political disagreement become much, much higher. And this is the source, both of a certain amount of tragedy, but also comedy. In the 1940s and 1950s, many Europeans, including some staunch anti-​communists were literally unable to understand the obsession with infiltration and subversion that gripped much of the American public, because they saw it, I think, correctly, as a kind of substitute for religious or cultural unity that made disagreement seemed like a threat to the continued existence of the American nation in a way that it just didn’t seem to be elsewhere.

0:41:11.2 Trevor Burrus: Now, as we move closer to modern times, insofar as you could say, well, we had this height of the creed era, maybe the Eisenhower administration you kind of allude to, and then we have Vietnam, and then a lot of things somewhat due to academia and some other forces in the country start breaking those apart. And a lot of that centers around universities and education. You mentioned Critical Race Theory, but before Critical Race Theory there was, say, Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. So how does it start fracturing moving into modern times?

0:41:44.1 Samuel Goldman: Well, I think that the creed, at least in the version that was popularized in the middle of the 20th century, was deeply committed to a kind of optimistic technocratic project, in which the application of American principles by trained professionals would remove backwardness and generate consensus and relative harmony. And that was believed at home, and that was one attitude toward the problem of race and civil rights, the ones sort of characteristic of white liberals. But the same attitude was applied internationally to Vietnam so people sometimes say, wasn’t there a contradiction between the civil rights movements at home and the Vietnam war abroad? What I suggest in the book, and this is not an idea that’s unique to me, is that really they were very closely related and expressed the same disposition. And what turned out in both cases is that it didn’t quite work. The race problem in America turned out to be much more recalcitrant and intractable than optimistic liberals believed. And it was much more difficult and arguably impossible to establish stable pro-​American governments elsewhere in the world, at least without the application of a level of force that was very difficult to justify. And what that means is that by the mid and later ’60s, the sense that the creed is the answer to all the big questions has disappeared. The ideas aren’t gone, but they’re no longer backed by the same optimism that seemed possible 10 or 20 years before.

0:43:46.5 Samuel Goldman: And I think you’re right, Trevor, to point out precedence to so-​called Critical Race Theory, because none of this stuff is new, almost all of it emerges in one form or another between the mid-​60s and the early 1970s. And in some ways, I often feel we are sort of stuck. We all know that mid-​century creedal liberalism isn’t going to do the job anymore. And there are very specific reasons that that’s true, some people emphasize one, others, another, but we also can’t quite figure out how to get past it. And many of our present debates about textbooks and school curriculums seem to me fundamentally expressions of this dilemma. We keep reaching for the same answers on which we’ve been relying for decades, really a lifetime at this point. And yet, we are disappointed every time that they don’t produce the results that we expect that were, if not perfect, between 1945… 1941 and 1965, at least real enough, but we are unable to recapture that moment.

0:45:09.6 Aaron Ross Powell: To some extent, this all ends up sounding like the victory of the Postmodernists, in the sense that if their point is that everything is competing narratives and power is about controlling narratives, that’s what… Everything you’ve discussed is that. And if that’s what we’re locked in, and you quote Davis and Hunter in the book saying that, “The culture war that we’re… Seems to be the hot thing right now, is competition to define social reality,” which sounds quite right to me. What lessons then do we draw from all of this for moving forward? Could it be that the right answer is just for everyone to set down their guns, say, “We’re all just people living on a piece of land, we’ve got some political institutions, but we’re all members of families and different churches and have different interests and why do we need some sort of unifying story or narrative or character at all?” Could we just… Is that the way out?

0:46:08.6 Samuel Goldman: Well, I don’t think it’s a way out entirely, because… In virtue of living in the same place and living and working with each other, we want answers. And I don’t think the question can be set aside entirely. But I do think recognition and institutional protection for more robust forms of pluralism are, if not the answer, at least part of the strategy. And to the extent that all of our moral and cultural and political debates revolve around control of the White House every four years, we are just going to make ourselves angrier and angrier because even winning at national elections is just not going to have the effect that we want. So the challenge, I think, is to figure out how to revive other forms of community and association that are much more effective in meeting those demands. And one of the ways that I distinguish myself from some Postmodernists or left Pluralists is that I think what we need is institutional and communal pluralism, which is not necessarily the same as maximum individual freedom and choice. And in order to play this role, private associations, and even to some extent public entities, need to be able to exclude and coerce and do things that we don’t like. Because that’s the price of having the same freedom in our own towns, regions, communities and so on.

0:48:13.6 Trevor Burrus: One of the things that struck me in your book is in my public policy debates that I engage in, at Cato, for example, firearms policy, gun policy, you get a lot of these, “Well, Norway solved it,” or, “Denmark solved it,” like comparisons to another country. And it kinda drives me crazy ’cause I’m like, “Do you know how many different ways… How many ways Denmark is different than America?” And you kind of tell the story that this is not even a problem of degree. Governing 330 million people who came here from so many different backgrounds, with different religious backgrounds and all this different stuff, some of whom were forced to come here, is just not even in the same category as governing, I don’t know, 10 million Dutch or Danish people. That’s a guess, I think it’s about 10 million. It’s just not even the same category. So this entire unique… Maybe not totally unique to America, but at least in some other large countries like Brazil or maybe India having similar problems, but this totally unique problem of sort of harnessing the advantages of pluralism, advantages of immigration, advantages of having different communities while still trying to live together is sort of the story you’re trying to explain. That this is a… At least America has these unique problems and characteristics that we need to address or think about when we think about how we’re gonna govern ourselves.

0:49:37.3 Samuel Goldman: No, I think that’s absolutely right, and I don’t talk about it much in the book, but I’ve written about it in some other places. Like you, I roll my eyes when people say, “What about Denmark? What about Norway?” Or on the right increasingly, “What about Hungary?” It’s just not apples to apples. And if you take America’s natural peers to be countries with large, various populations, often a quasi-​Imperial history like Brazil, like Russia, like India, then the nature of the problem, and their possible solutions just look very different. And I would also say that compared to what I think of as our real peers, we’re really not doing that badly. So part of the argument of the book is a case against panic. I think that whether you compare this country to more similar international peers or to our own history, we are not doing so badly as we like to think. And in many ways, the America of today looks not so very different to the America of 1900, which was not a perfect time by any means. It’s easy to look back and see flaws, but it was also not the sort of nightmarish hellscape that you would expect if you read descriptions of our present condition, whether from the right or the left.

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0:51:41.0 Aaron Ross Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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