Daniel Larison vs A Proposition Nation and a Nation of Migrants

I'm predicting that America will no longer be one nation but more like the Roman Empire--a conglomerate of races and cultures held together by a regime. The country I grew up in was culturally united, even if it was racially divided. We spoke the same language, had the same faith, laughed at the same comedians. We were one nationality. We're ceasing to be that when you have hundreds of thousands of people who want to retain their own culture, their own language, their own loyalty. What do we have in common that makes us fellow Americans? Is it simply citizenship? Or is it blood, soil, history and heroes?[emphasis added] - Pat Buchanan

Recent arguments over mass immigration and the signing of an Australian values statement brought to my mind certain statements by one of my favourite internet writers, Daniel Larison of Eunomia.

This is an excerpt from Mr Larison's attack on the idea of a Proposition nation:

Mr. Forsyth objects to Mr. Buchanan’s call for American identity to be rooted in “blood, soil, history and heroes.” I confess to being perplexed as to why this call should actually be controversial. Yes, I know why many people think it is controversial, but their position makes no sense. No real national identity of any kind, and certainly none that ever lasted, has ever endured without being olidly based in these things. Indeed, what else could our national identity plausibly be rooted in? Most Americans today do not hold to the political philosophy of the founders in their attitudes towards consolidated government and their preference for the rule of law over the rule of men. This is unfortunate, but it will happen in the course of time that peoples adopt different and even diametrically opposed political creeds. ....

As for myself, I have strong reservations about the “values” expressed in the Declaration, at least if we are to take the platitudes expressed therein as claims of truth about the real world; I respect and honour the Constitution, but recognise the serious consolidationist flaws in it; I cannot in good conscience accept anything in the Gettysburg Address, mendacious piece of revisionist propaganda that it was, nor can I accept the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act or the enthusiasm for egalitarianism that inspired it. According to Mr. Forsyth, I am not an American, though some part of my people have been here since 1634 and most of my family has been here since the early 1700s. I obviously cannot and will not accept such a definition of my nation that would put me–and a considerable number of my countrymen–outside its boundaries. I cannot countenance a definition of national identity that makes one’s loyalty to a political position the basis for belonging to the nation. I want no part of any “ideological,” “credal” or “proposition” nation–you cannot love a proposition.

There is nothing more artificial, more insubstantial and more dangerous than categorising a nation according to ideology–this is to make honest disagreement over political principles a betrayal of the nation itself. It is to make dissent into a kind of treason; it is to make fidelity to older traditions that contradict the reigning ideology a mark of disloyalty to the nation. Fundamentally it is also to confuse ideas for concrete realities and to give them the loyalty we owe to real things. It is to ignore the concrete realities of kin and place and our memory of our kin and place down through the centuries for the sake of abstractions. This sort of thinking may very well make it easier for people to enter the country, but it makes it impossible to say any longer what kind of country it is, where it came from or who we are as a people.

This is Daniel Larison on the phrase "A nation of immigrants":

The phrase “nation of immigrants” is surely one of the strangest phrases, and also one of the most ingenious rhetorical dodges, ever invented. A nation is, literally from the Latin natio, a tribe or a people, and natio is the same word for birth, which implies that this is a tribe or people bound, as tribes normally are, by kinship. Now it is possible for someone from outside a tribe to be adopted into it, but it is a contradiction in terms to speak of a “nation of immigrants,” unless one is describing an entire people that picked up and went to another country, since these immigrants have typically been overwhelmingly unrelated by kinship or, in many cases, even by ethnicity to the people that was already here. To be a ”nation of immigrants,” being an immigrant would have to be the defining feature of everyone in the nation. Whatever may have been true about great-granddad is not true of you, which means that you and most everyone around you are not part of any “nation of immigrants,” but of an American nation. The ancient Israelites were perhaps such a “nation of immigrants,” but there are few other obvious examples....

But the reason why it is ingenious is that it forcibly identifies everyone in the debate–or at least everyone who concedes the use of the phrase–with the current immigrants. If we are a nation of immigrants, this means that we are all immigrants, which ultimately means that we have no more right to this place than the new immigrants do, which is a manifest lie. We do have more right to it, and will have at least until such time as we have been driven off the land, and perhaps our better claim will not cease even then.

Most peoples throughout history have created myths of heroic ancestors who first settled in a land and gave their name to it; most peoples will construct elaborate mythologies to establish their timeless claims to a piece of land. With this preposterous rhetoric of being a “nation of immigrants” (who is responsible for this travesty of language?), Americans are among the few nations in the world who pride themselves on not being from the land that they live in and making no attempt to pretend otherwise. That may have seemed clever when it allowed Americans to mock the Old World’s decrepitude and the New World’s possibilities, but now this attitude seems like a recipe for the eventual displacement of the nation and its recreation as something all together different. Oh, granted, our grandchildren probably won’t see the final effects of that displacement, but if current trends continue they will see a large part of it. It seems to me that no one can really look on with equanimity at the prospect of the gradual displacement of the peoples who fashioned this country–he is either dispirited at the prospect, or enthusiastic and chooses his policy options accordingly.

This is another quote that from Daniel Larison on the necessity of a common national identity for a democracy something known to Australia's forefathers, but ignored by the present New Class elite:

Democracies that pride themselves on their ethnic and racial diversity and actually allow ethnicity and race to become politicised and a marker of political identity will sooner or later go the way of a Bolivia or an Ivory Coast as tribal and racial consciousness becomes the banner for mass mobilisation and/or supremacism combined with violence. For a democratic system to succeed at all, these identities should not be suppressed (they will not disappear, but simply take on more radical and destructive forms) but be superseded by some common national identity that incorporates all members of the political community. However, I cannot stress enough that this common national identity must be based in the history, the people and the land of the nation to which all newcomers are joining themselves; if the overarching national identity is ideological in nature, it will not last much more than two generations without suffering significant internal strife.

All of this is why either the thorough political assimilation of immigrants or the reduction of levels of immigration is essential to future stability of the American political system. The alternatives are a breakdown in political consensus, a loss of shared identity and the rise of a more aggressive tribal politics....

The Ivory Coast in particular was once something close to a model African democratic success story: it was democratically governed, relatively prosperous for West Africa, multiethnic and generally peaceful, but also a magnet for foreign labour from the surrounding nations because of its relative prosperity. Pressures began to build to define Ivoirite, i.e., Ivorianness, vis-a-vis neighbouring countries, which aggravated ethnic resentments, which was followed by President Gbagbo’s writing about the superiority of his tribe and stoking anti-foreign and specifically anti-Fasoan hatred among his kinsmen. Northern Ivorians took this ill, which created the conditions for the attempted coup that sparked the war.

The “return of the tribes” happened all right, and Mr. Brooks’ precious democracy did not smooth out the rough edges of Ivorian politics, but instead provoked an attempted coup against Gbagbo and made Ivorian political conflict–which had already been increasingly organised along tribal and ethnic lines–into an ethnic war aggravated by the Muslim-Christian division of the country. “Melting pots,” even if they have actually succeeded in assimilating new populations, can themselves melt down and break, and the more large numbers of unassimilated people–people who may not want to assimilate–that a country takes in puts that much more stress on the capacity of any country to absorb and incorporate the newcomers. If assimilation is simply assumed rather than actively pursued as policy and as a social rule, it will not work nearly as well, leaving whole swathes of the country increasingly isolated from the rest.