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Americans have historically lacked strong national cohesion, Samuel Goldman argues in After Nationalism, so lets aim for comity among diverse communities living together.

After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 208 pages, $24.95)

During World War II, three captured Germans escaped a prison camp in Tennessee and fled into the Appalachian Mountains. They found a cabin with water, but the elderly lady who lived there warned them to leave. They ignored her, so she shot and killed all three. As David Hackett Fischer recounts in Albions Seed, an angry sheriff asked her why she killed them. She bawled and said she wouldnt have done so if she had known they were Nazis. She insisted, I thought they was Yankees!

Much as Albions Seed describes diversity and divisions in America that began long before the Civil War and continued long after, Samuel Goldman in his book After Nationalism makes the historical case that Americans normally have not had a single national identity. By the time of the Revolution, for example, divisions among various groups were just as deep as todays, or deeper. Since independence, citizens have bickered over who we are the essential question of nationalism, which focuses on a people with a strong common identity yet every attempt to maintain a cohesive identity has failed. Today in this concise book, Goldman responds to commentators who believe that citizens must return to some overarching identity and purpose. He argues that this task is difficult when the conditions that allowed previous unity no longer exist. Moreover, nationalists do not reasonably explain programs that could reignite a meaningful shared identity. In contrast, he favors the opposite course accepting increased localism with smaller communities for a diverse citizenry.

While demonstrating how a cohesive identity is difficult to establish, Goldman describes three nationalisms that tried but failed to unify Americans: covenantal, crucible, and creedal. First, covenantal nationalism drew upon Calvinist theology and insisted that the American nation descended from the Puritans and the Mayflower, not Jamestown or elsewhere. Most influential in New England and nearby areas, it compared America to biblical Israel and said that the new righteous republic had a providential purpose. Despite their relatively small numbers, proponents of this Anglo-Protestant nationalism wrote profusely and long influenced academia and the WASP establishment. But it asked non-Yankees to abandon too much of their history and culture to be considered truly American, and few beyond New Englands sphere of influence believed this national story. For instance, Southerners rejected its national holiday, Thanksgiving, until the mid 20th century, when it no longer conveyed a Yankee message. By 1815, immigration from non-Anglos and non-Protestants, combined with American expansion westward, ensured that covenantal nationalism could never become the countrys dominant vision. Some on the right today argue that Americans should return to this Anglo-Protestant outlook, but Goldman offers minimum hope for their ambitions.

As Americans settled the Western frontier, crucible nationalism suggested that the endeavor would turn diverse people into a cohesive group. Unlike covenantal nationalism, which looked to an idealized past, crucible nationalism looked hopefully toward Americas future. While it was open to a Christian interpretation, the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson offered non-Christian variations. But Goldman explains how this nationalism, too, failed. The Civil War exposed Americans deep divisions, and the abandonment of Reconstruction allowed Southern whites to reestablish racist governance. Meanwhile, 12 million immigrants, many of whom retained their culture, joined the roughly 35 million already in the U.S. As diverse ethnic groups concentrated in cities and competed against one another, Americans realized that a melting pot would not turn the multitudes into a single nation.

Goldman then describes creedal nationalism, which Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln embodied, though postbellum America rejected it. In this interpretation, a diverse citizenry united around an American creed that embraced the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and other documents. Though academics discussed the notion previously, Americans did not embrace it until they waged a world war against fascism and a Cold War against communism. Rallying around liberal democracy, Americans fought totalitarianism abroad and pursued racial equality at home, and they viewed various injustices as deviations from the American ideal that reform would eliminate. But maintaining this nationalism required coercion and sustained effort, as Goldman documents, and cracks appeared by the time of the Vietnam War and the resurgence of group identities. Observers may conclude that events of the 1960s and later caused the deterioration of American unity. But the decline appears to have occurred mostly because national cohesion, abnormally high in the 1940s and 1950s, has been reverting to its historical mean.

Despite his sympathy toward nationalists, Goldman offers them little hope. The brief peak of creedal nationalism required significant maintenance during two global ideological conflicts, and Goldman doubts that Americans have the will or ability to establish similar unity again. Given the realities of U.S. history and culture, he concludes that Americans are living after nationalism. In this environment, citizens argue over their shared identity and have contradictory ideas about the nation. They fight ferociously in an intractable culture war over their history, which, according to Goldman, cannot define a homogenized American identity. Many believe that unity would reemerge if only they, or others, better understood America. But the book says that this hope is unrealistic, and that the most likely outcome is the opposite of a coherent nationalism diverse communities living together.

While modern societies may think they can choose national cohesion, in practice most probably cannot in absence of coercion or without undesirable consequences. Events beyond their control often drive the plot. After all, creedal nationalism surged not because academics argued persuasively but because foreign actors forced America into ideological conflicts. So Goldmans recommendation of increased localism is worth considering. He admits that this vision is a gamble that could fail, but the other options have worse prospects.

Those who dislike Goldmans conclusion should nonetheless understand his skepticism and explain programs that might revive nationalism when all other attempts have failed. For instance, he says that the military draft helped to solidify creedal nationalism. Would nationalists consider a draft for the sake of national unity? Or would Americans vote out anyone who tried?

Creedal nationalism is a reasonable vision, and Goldman explains its historical context. But his skepticism about it reaffirms my preference for using patriotism instead of nationalism to describe my loyalty to America, as nation raises tricky questions about group identity. Unless referencing identity or purpose, I dont see convincing reasons to use the word nationalism when patriotism suffices. Goldman likewise calls himself a patriot, a term common in America long before nationalism, which wasnt widespread until after the Civil War. With a distinction between patriotism and nationalism today, patriots could seek their countrys peace and prosperity and care for fellow citizens without worrying much about identity. In contrast, a nationalist push to create a homogenized unity or understanding of America, whether from the left or from the right, could result in persecution, intolerance, or increased disunity. Or nationalist logic could justify dissolving the United States if Americans realize that, as Goldman argues, they cannot share a strong, meaningful identity.

In demonstrating how American national identities have morphed over generations, After Nationalism does offer the hope at least that the country can endure. Divisions have always existed whether culture wars in recent decades, differences among the colonies, or animosity between the North and the South or between the Eastern seaboard and the rural interior. Despite such difficulties, the United States and its democracy have survived, even when we have disagreed on who we were.

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Sympathy for Nationalists, but Little Hope - National Review

In his recent letter, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., itemized many concerns I share about American culture today. But what impressed me most about Cramers piece was how eagerly he missed his own point: at the heart of cancel culture is coercion, an anti-American impulse to bend others to our will. And coercion comes in all shapes and sizes, sometimes wrapping itself in bills like the senators own Fair Access to Banking Act, a shortsighted attempt to force banks to invest in oil and gas.

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We call coercion cancel culture when its a Twitter mob trying to unseat a CEO. We call it authoritarianism when its the government forcing businesses to bake a wedding cake, shut their doors for nine months, ordare I say itlend to industries they don't want to lend to. Praising freedom of speech in one breath, the senator attacks freedom of association in the next, arguing that banks are too caught up in the culture wars to know a good investment when they see one.

Its fair to point out that banks are uniquely positioned in the American economy, relying heavily on the feds promise to catch them if they fall. If you squint your eyes, you can even imagine why someone would think financial institutions should be treated like public utilities. But if the senator falls into this camp, he should use a few asterisks the next time he gushes about the beauty of supply and demand. For all his talk of creditworthiness and lawfulness being the purest standards of lending, I don't imagine he'd object to a bank refusing to lend to a (lawful) adult entertainment company or a (creditworthy) abortion clinic. Banks should be allowed to discriminate as they see fit, whether because of moral objections or because their investment has become a political football. Its our industrys job, not the governments, to tell them why they shouldnt.

But perhaps oil and gas deserves special treatment. Is it because were so critical to America's standard of living? If were criticaland we arethe pendulum will swing back to us. That's how capitalism works. Its the iterative, messy process of businesses falling down and picking themselves back up again until the consumer figures out what it wants. Capitalism will bruise our knees, but we must resist the temptation to use a government-sponsored crutch. Those crutches always come with strings attached.

Americans love our abundant energy, but not the men who provide it, Russell Gold observed in his book "The Boom." Hes right; our industry is not well-liked. Can we force the public to like us? No, but we can work harder to tell our story and communicate our value to the American public. Thats how freedom works.

Alma Cook is an R&B singer and the owner of Cook Compliance Solutions in Williston, N.D.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.

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Letter: Sen. Cramer's finance bill is its own form of cancel culture - INFORUM

President Joe Biden's call to expand public support of child care in his joint address to Congress puts a spotlight on an issue that has been a subject of growing bipartisan cooperation. In recent decades, Republicans have increasingly embraced the idea that government can play a greater role in providing quality child care for working families, responding to the reality that nearly two-thirds of U.S. households have no stay-at-home parent. As Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson put it in his January State of the State address, "Our children are the workforce of tomorrow if we are to truly make a difference in their lives, it starts with early childhood development." Two of the first states to adopt broad public preschool for 4-year-olds were Georgia and Oklahoma, in the 1990s, and the state with the highest-rated system, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, is Alabama.

But the country now faces a realignment of the politics of child care. Two paths await: On one, the economic and educational imperative of child care integrates itself into the American psyche, expanding gender equity and ensuring that public funding of the early years becomes just as expected as public funding of the schooling years. On the other, child care becomes another front in the culture wars, as one camp bucks against perceived government intrusion into the private realm and onetime allies retreat into their respective corners.

The threat of a breakdown became clear soon after Biden's address, when author and rumored Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance tweeted that "'universal day care' is class war against normal people" the "normal people" being those who prefer a care arrangement involving a parent. Vance was then on Tucker Carlson's show repeating these claims to a wide audience.

This is not fringe posturing. In the GOP response to Biden's address, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina warned that the president's plan would "put Washington even more in the middle of your life from the cradle to college." Scott's Senate colleague Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., was less coy when she tweeted an old article about the Soviet Union's child care system with the comment "You know who else liked universal day care." In March, Idaho rejected a $6 million federal child care grant over the objections of business groups partially because state lawmakers expressed concern over children being indoctrinated by the government.

This view is a throwback to the so-called "traditional values" loudly espoused by conservatives decades ago. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national day care system, saying that it "would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing [and] against the family-centered approach."

Since the turn of the millennium, however, two threads pulled the parties closer together on the issue. The first was acceptance of the fact that, like it or not, mothers of young children had entered the workforce in large numbers and were not going anywhere. While certain populations of American women have always worked, less than 40% of mothers with children under age 5 were in the labor force around the time of Nixon's veto; since the late 1990s, that figure has hovered around two-thirds.

The second thread was emerging brain science showing that early childhood experiences, including child care, are foundational to later academic and life outcomes. Republicans were therefore able to back increased child care funding on economic grounds: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a vocal supporter, and the Trump White House held a high-profile child care summit in December 2019.

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While Republicans face a question of whether to abandon these positions now that a Democratic president has embraced the issue, Democrats must reckon with the question of choice when it comes to stay-at-home parents.

Americans do, in fact, want a dizzying variety of care setups: secular child care centers, faith-based options, home-based day cares, public prekindergarten, minding by relatives, care from a parent. These preferences can shift with children's ages and family circumstances, and vary among demographics. While Biden's child care proposals are optional and inclusive of all types of external care, they are silent on stay-at-home parents.

The significant share of families that want a degree of parental care and the fact that many families struggle financially because they have traded child care costs for reduced income has led some on both sides of the aisle to call for a home-care allowance (on top of the recently expanded child tax credit, which is untethered to care). Paying stay-at-home parents is a concept with left-wing roots, although it has been a source of controversy in feminist circles because so much of the pressure to stay home is likely to fall on women. Nordic nations such as Finland and Sweden have used home-care payments for parents who opt out of publicly supported child care. If Democrats incorporated such an option into their plans, it would probably deflect some of their opponents' criticism.

The reality for the Republican Party, however, is that it is already badly underwater with women. The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the pain borne particularly by mothers of the lack of affordable child care. Expanded public support of child care is massively popular: An April Yahoo News/YouGov survey found 58% of Americans in favor of providing universal pre-K for all children. And 60% including 64% of women and 41% of Republicans supported increasing subsidies to reduce the cost of child care. While those numbers would surely drop under a sustained messaging assault, the support for child care appears both broad and deep.

Some conservatives, like Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have endorsed direct financial support for parents as an alternative to child care spending. While such payments could help with general child-rearing costs, Hawley's proposal of $12,000 annually for married couples (and $6,000 for single parents) is not enough to address many parents' struggles. Group care is necessarily expensive because the child-to-adult ratios must be low; experts calculate that the cost of quality care averages $15,000 to $30,000 annually per child, depending on age and location. The lack of money flowing into the child care sector explains parents' difficulty in finding slots, even before the pandemic, as well as the workforce's persistently low wages and high turnover. These schemes could carry political risk for conservative Republicans who oppose expanding social services by nudging parents to stay home.

For the past two decades, the child care debate has largely lingered below the surface as American politics became more polarized. While presidents mentioned the issue, it was not a centerpiece of any agenda, and the plans on offer were limited. The ground has now shifted, and how policymakers react will determine the politics of child care for the 2020s and beyond.

Elliot Haspel is the program officer for education policy and research at the Robins Foundation in Richmond. He is the author of "Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It." This piece was written for The Washington Post.

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Child care has bipartisan support. But the culture war could wreck that. - Newsday

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members, the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

You could easily write a history of the modern right thats about nothing but schools. The battles were initially about race, particularly segregation and busing. Out of those fights came the Christian right, born in reaction to the revocation of tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. As the Christian right grew, political struggles over control of schools became more explicitly religious. There were campaigns against allowing gay people to work in schools and against teaching sex education and evolution.

Now the Christian right has more or less collapsed as anything but an identity category. There are still lots of religious fundamentalists, but not, post-Donald Trump, a movement confidently asserting itself as the repository of wholesome family values. Instead, with the drive to eradicate the teaching of critical race theory, race has moved back to the center of the public-school culture wars.

I put critical race theory in quotes because the right has transformed a term that originally referred to an academic school of thought into a catchall for resentments over diversity initiatives and changing history curriculums. Since I first wrote about anti-critical race theory activism in February, its become hard to keep up with the flurry of state bills aimed at banning the teaching of what are often called divisive concepts, including the idea, as a Rhode Island bill puts it, that the United States of America is fundamentally racist or sexist. We will reject Critical Race Theory in our schools and public institutions, and we will CANCEL Cancel Culture wherever it arises! the irony-challenged Mike Pence tweeted last week.

As The Washington Posts Dave Weigel pointed out, Glenn Youngkin, a candidate in Virginias Republican primary, recently released four anti-critical race theory videos in 24 hours.

Part of the reason the right is putting so much energy into this crusade is because it cant whip up much opposition to the bulk of Joe Bidens agenda. Bidens spending plans are much more ambitious than Barack Obamas were, but theres been no new version of the Tea Party. Voters view this president as more moderate than Obama, a misconception that critical race theory scholars would have no trouble explaining. Republicans have groused about how hard Biden is to demonize. They need a more frightening, enraging villain to keep their people engaged.

Critical race theory presented as an attack on history, a program to indoctrinate children and a stealth form of Marxism fits the bill. The recent elections in Southlake, Texas, show how politically potent the backlash to critical race theory can be.

In 2018, the affluent Texas suburb was in the news for a viral video of a group of laughing white students shouting the N-word. Black residents told reporters about instances of unambiguous racism, like a sixth grader joking to a Black student, How do you get a Black out of a tree? You cut the rope. The video, reported NBC, seemed to trigger genuine soul-searching by school leaders, and they created a diversity council of parents, teachers and students to come up with a plan to make their school more inclusive. The council, in turn, created a document called the Cultural Competence Action Plan.

The reaction from conservative parents was furious. A PAC formed to fight the plan. At a contentious school board meeting, The Dallas Morning News reported, a Black student on the diversity council was booed after testifying: My life matters. Two school board members who supported the plan were indicted on charges they violated Texas Open Meetings Act, merely because they texted about the plan before a board meeting. The conservative radio host Dana Loesch, who lives in Southlake, appeared on Tucker Carlson to denounce very far-left Marxist activists trying to implement critical race theory education.

This weekend, in a Southlake election that drew three times the ordinary number of voters, opponents of the Cultural Competence Action Plan dominated, winning two school board seats, two City Council seats and the mayors office by about 40 points in each race. Their victories will likely serve as an example to conservative organizers nationwide. The Federalist, a right-wing website, heralded the election as the early stage of a new cultural Tea Party marshaled against critical race theory instead of government spending.

The Christian Coalition took off during Bill Clintons presidency, when the religious right engaged locally because it felt shut out of national power. Clearly some conservatives think that opposition to critical race theory could be the seed of something similar. Telling parents that liberals want to make their kids hate their country and feel guilty for being white might be absurd and cynical. It also looks like it might be effective.

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Opinion | Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars - The New York Times

Recently, Gallup released polling data indicating that fewer than half of Americans are members of churches, mosques or synagogues. In 1937, 73 percent of Americans claimed some form of religious membership. Today that figure is 47 percent. This decline plays into what sociologists call the "secularization thesis," the presumption that as modernity barrels onward, religiosity slowly gives way to rationalism and technocratic ways of devising meaning.

But before secularism claims complete victory over religiosity, note that the Gallup poll reveals an almost even split between the two. Religiosity and secularism are not going anywhere, even as they interact in troubling ways via the "culture war." As the chasm that separates these worldviews seems only to widen, there is all the more reason to find ways to coexist peaceablyand a return to religious freedom will be a necessary ingredient for a more tranquil future.

Everyone, religious and non-religious alike, has an interest in defending religious liberty if we hope to have a public square that accurately reflects American demography. Even if you are not religious, consider that the First Amendment protections that all Americans enjoy emanate from a religious milieu. The Framers recognized that, before individuals are citizens of the state, they are persons attempting to make meaning and bring order to their lives. Everyone desires to live in accordance with what they believe to be true about the world.

The architect of our Constitution, James Madison, expressed this sentiment in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. "Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society," he wrote, "he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe." Madison argues that religion recognizes realities that impress truths upon individuals prior to the authority of the state. Whether someone is expressly religious or not, every conscience must reckon with what is true or false, and then seek to live accordingly. The presumption of liberty means that we grant such freedoms insofar as they pose no unmistakable threat to society.

As a conservative evangelical Christian, I have a stake in protecting the right of expression of views I disagree withas much as I would hope to persuade you to protect mine, too. I use my religious liberty to proclaim the gospel and its implications for all of lifejust as a non-Christian possesses the right to proclaim his or her worldview, persuade others of its conclusions and live according to its implications. Our rights are reciprocally bound with one another's. The political philosopher Leo Strauss captured the political tension we must all balance if we hope to maintain a habitable system in which people disagree: "the political question par excellence is how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom that is not license." That, in summary, is the delicate balancing act of liberal democracy.

If religious freedom is going to work, it will require virtues that are in short supply, such as empathy and goodwill. Religious freedom requires me to believe that, despite what I may assume, others' moral and religious arguments are being made in good faith. It forces me to reckon with our common humanity and shared desires. Religious liberty channels our better angels in that it appeals to magnanimity as a form of cultural currency and moral grammar.

To be sure, as a conservative evangelical, I hold to convictions about the exclusivity of Jesus Christ and the nature of gender and sexuality that would cause many readers to recoil. I'm not contending for religious liberty just to be left alone, but to advocate for truths that benefit the common good and human flourishing. A robust understanding of religious liberty requires a humble understanding that cultural orthodoxies will ebb and flow, because today's victors can easily fall out of fashion. The back-and-forth of cultural exchange allows freedom to prosper, better ideas to gain traction and dictatorships that rely on stifling orthodoxies to be rejected.

The decline of religious liberty is a major reason our culture wars are so brutal. By looking to the government to adjudicate our divisions, we've outsourced debate on what is true or false. We ask a central authority to declare one side the victor and the other side the loser. Government cannot be agnostic about everything, but the great thing about religious liberty is that, rather than looking to the government to decide every important question, it allows each person freedom of conscience to decide how to act. Perhaps our political culture would be healthier if questions of ultimate meaning were not on the ballot every four years or divined by Supreme Court justices, and instead, were worked out in institutions, local communities and ultimately, in individual consciences.

Secularization is ascendent today. But the branch of religious conservatism I represent is not going anywhere, and we have to find ways to live together. Deliberation and persuasion must rise to the surface of our public discourse to settle conflicts. I'm going to continue to exercise my religious liberty to point to the truths that I believe are necessary for human beings and societies to flourish. If you think I'm wrong, convince medon't banish me.

Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is author of Liberty for All: Defending Everyone's Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Could Religious Liberty Help End the Culture War? | Opinion - Newsweek