The Left as well as center-right elites and populists are all too quick to demonize large segments of the American population.
Can you have allegiance to the United States as a country but not support solidarity with your fellow Americans? The answer might be yes in theory, but it should be no in practice. And yet, too many on both the activist left and the activist right have adopted an idea of national loyalty that has little room for disfavored parts of the American citizenry.
In a recent column for Bloomberg, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote of a recent Bret Stephens column that
the idea that we may owe something to our fellow Americans that we do not owe to foreigners, however deplorable some of the former and laudable some of the latter may be, is notable for its absence from this article. Which is to say, the idea of national allegiance is absent from it.
Ponnuru assumes that a component of national allegiance is solidarity with struggling — even unpleasant — Americans. That sounds like common sense, but many on the left and right now act as if national allegiance allows — requires — them to show hostility to undesirable Americans. Indeed, showing partiality to noncitizens demonstrates a higher sense of national loyalty.
For many activists on the left, the drama of progress involves the defeat, humiliation, marginalization, and abuse of various categories of American citizens. Liberals like to talk about “who we are,” and these other Americans represent all that we are not. The categories differ with the circumstances (gun owners, traditionalist Catholics, white Evangelicals, fraternity members), but the common thread is the belief that liberals have a right to cut corners on civic — and constitutional — norms in order to subdue the enemies of progress.
Take the case of a usually well-meaning fellow like Bernie Sanders. Sanders praised the court decision that struck down President Trump’s plan to bar entry into the U.S. from seven predominately Muslim countries. Courts twisted themselves into pretzels to find that the First Amendment’s religious protection effectively applied to people who were not citizens and who had never even come to the U.S.
At the same time, on the nomination of Russell Vought to the Office of Management and Budget, Sanders tried to find a way around the “no religious tests” section of the Constitution by opposing him on the grounds that he didn’t like Vought’s theology — even though there was no obvious connection between Vought’s beliefs on salvation and the job to which he had been appointed.
The no-religious-tests provision of the Constitution is even older than the First Amendment. It was designed to prevent the religious proscriptions from public life that were then common in Europe. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Vought was the wrong kind of Christian. For Sanders, refugees from foreign countries are who we are, and it is fine if the Constitution were reimagined on judicial whim to give them a right to enter. Vought wasn’t “who we are,” and, as far as Sanders was concerned, that was all it took to scrap civic and constitutional norms.
For many activists on the left, the drama of progress involves the defeat, humiliation, marginalization, and abuse of various categories of American citizens.
The well-connected liberal journalist Ezra Klein wrote that he favored a law that would have lowered the standards for proving sexual assault. What was odd was that he favored the law specifically because it would make men afraid of false reports of sexual assaults.
This is strange on the surface. Liberals are usually seen as supporting the rights of the accused. At the time, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote that rules that disfavored the accused would make it easier for the police to target the poor, the non-white, and the unconnected.
Maybe that is the case in reality, but Klein gave the game away as to his intentions in his original article. He wrote about the law as necessary to change the culture of campus fraternities. If campuses were using the law to target black students, Klein would obviously be outraged. If campuses target fraternities (as long as they were predominately white fraternities), then that was just what society needed. It didn’t especially matter if the accusations were true. It only mattered that the socially appropriate targets felt the “cold spike of fear” that produces social justice.
Klein went into full movie-villain role when he wrote, “It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.”
What is interesting is that Klein takes it for granted that the execution of this law will be guided by leftist partisanship. It is like the corruption of the IRS under Obama. In theory, IRS harassment of political groups is a danger to everyone, but the bureaucratic culture of the IRS ensured that conservative groups were targeted. Then, liberals in Congress, the White House, and the media ensured that nothing too bad happened to the harassers. Klein’s support for the law takes for granted the Lois Lernerization of public authority, so that only social groups he dislikes would be injured.
This cutting of civic corners has gone all the way to the top. The Obama administration tried to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to sign a paper effectively insuring their employees for birth control. The Little Sisters found this to be a violation of their rights to conscience. To be clear, the contraception mandate was not a law. It was an administrative rule, and the Obama administration could have produced another procedure whereby the employees of the Little Sisters would have signed the opt-in, gotten the coverage, and left the Little Sisters out of it.
The Obama administration was not known for fanatically sticking to the letter of the law. Obama used executive orders of questionable legality to exempt millions of unauthorized aliens from deportation. His administration could have crafted a procedure by which the Sisters didn’t have to violate their conscience rights but the employees of the Littler Sisters got birth-control coverage. He didn’t want that. The unauthorized immigrants are who we are, and the Little Sisters are who we aren’t. That meant the Little Sisters had to be put in their place.
The end point of this attack on the civic status of dissenters was reached in Hillary Clinton’s famous deplorables speech. She said:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. . . . Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
She was speaking of about one-quarter of the electorate. She graciously added that about another quarter of the electorate were the dupes of the deplorable.
But that was not really the end of it. In the last several years there has been a spate of riots and violent protests against conservatives speaking in universities and other spaces where leftist activists think they can act with impunity. Conventional Democratic politicians have denounced such actions, but, if we take Clinton at her word, the rioters have the better of the argument.
If the deplorables are as bad as she says (and they are pretty much any bad thing she can think of), and if they are irredeemable, then what is the upside of letting them speak? By Clinton’s own words, American politics consists of the deplorable riling up the gullible to hurt the vulnerable. In these circumstances, a right to free speech for the retrograde is just as outdated and perverse as . . . the right to bear arms.
Conservatives shouldn’t get too smug about all this. Many on the elite right have their own target groups among American citizens. One remembers Mitt Romney talking about 47 percent of his countrymen:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. . . . And so my job is not to worry about those people — I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
We have recently been reminded of Bret Stephens’s contempt for native-born wage-earners and how he thinks of “the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers” and that “Americans who don’t get it should get out.”
Obama didn’t live up to the vision he articulated at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was too obsessed with expelling his political opponents from ‘who we are’ as a country.
It should be noted that neither Romney nor Stephens would consider for a moment that they had less national allegiance than anybody else. I would suspect that John McCain, Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and many affluent, right-leaning people in business and the salaried professions share some version of the above beliefs — and John McCain isn’t losing a national-allegiance contest to anybody.
What all of the above have in common is an oligarchical view of citizenship. They seem to think of themselves as the managers and shareholders of America with the wage-earning citizens as the help rather than as civic equals.
When you think in this way, there is a conflict between allegiance to America and allegiance to your fellow citizens. Our center-right elites look around and see many zero marginal-product citizens. They have kids out of wedlock. They are often unemployed. They do drugs. Some, Stephens might generously assume, are good people. If a manager eliminates half (or all) of his troubled wage-earning workforce and replaces them with cheaper, more-virtuous substitutes, then the manager is showing perfect allegiance to the company.
As it happens, our meritocratic nationalist elites can’t lay off wage earners from the job of being Americans (alas), but they can limit the cost of these takers to the producers and job creators who make America work. Our center-right elites can also dilute and displace our disappointing work force by importing better, more-appreciative citizens.
The problem is that our center-right activists are not the owners and managers of the country. Many of them seem too used to dealing with wage-earners from a position of authority. If a member of your crew is too mouthy, you fire him. If the waiter takes too long, you complain to the manager. Our meritocratic, center-right elites seem to find it irritating that this social and economic authority doesn’t fully translate into civic life. Stephens in his column seethes with frustration that his vote carries no more weight than that of some loser from Wheeling or Flint. And what is worse, these losers keep out worthier aspirant Americans from across the globe.
Stephens and other elites might defend themselves by arguing that they are the ones with the more expansive and generous understanding of America. They are the ones who look past the interests of our flawed, accidental citizens to the better Americans of the whole wide world.
What they don’t yet see is that it is all the same. Whether they are impugning the civic worth of native-born wage-earners or extolling the glories of expanding citizenship, it is all the same view-from-oligarchy. They are — or think they are — the ones assigning or denying civic value to their fellow citizens. The beginning of wisdom is recognizing that they are not the owners and managers of America. Whatever their bank accounts, or their educations, or their job histories, they are in a democracy in which each of their fellow wage-earning citizens is just as important as they are.
The flaws of elite, meritocratic conservatism doesn’t mean that any of the currently existing forms of populist conservatism are workable. Sarah Palin’s “real America” rhetoric was identity politics for rural people. Civic equality means that Americans who live in cities are just as American as anybody else. Trump’s “make America great again” raises obvious questions about the civic status of African Americans who were barred from voting back when America was allegedly great. It also raises questions about the civic status of those Americans who are part of (or descended from) the post-1965 wave of immigration. (That huge category of Americans includes this author, and some of President Trump’s own immediate family.) American civic equality and a healthy national allegiance need to find a place for all these people.
I think back to Barack Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention. I especially think of this passage:
Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states — red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
There is a lot of political calculation in those words, but Obama’s description of America is more generous and — what is more important — truer than the descriptions of America in either Clinton’s deplorables speech or Romney’s 47 percent gaffe.
Obama didn’t live up to that vision. He and his allies were too obsessed with expelling their political opponents from “who we are” as a country. That is on him. The question is whether we conservatives can come up with an equally compelling and inclusive understanding of America, or whether we will continue to splinter among competing understandings of American citizenship that each, in its own way, excludes many (and possibly most) actual Americans.
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