Deep Civic Nationalism
Propositionality: A Brief Overview
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The enduring source of our strength is the idea of America. We’re the most unique nation in the world.
Every other nation is based on ethnicity, geography. In America, we’re based on an idea—literally, not figuratively—an idea. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all women and men are created equal… endowed by their Creator…” etc.
Joe Biden, Sept. 15, 2022, at the United We Stand Summit
Where does civic nationalism come from?
This is a question too little discussed among nationalists. The default explanation seems to be that civic nationalism is just ethnonationalism that has lost its way. America used to have the Naturalization Act of 1790,1 then by some mechanism—usually Jews—we forgot how to be racist, and here we are today.
This is, of course, not serious analysis. Something in us was receptive to the idea of civic nationalism. But what? To answer this, we can begin with what civic nationalism is in the first place.
Andrew Joyce once said that “civic nationalism is when you care more about a product being made in China than you care about your neighbour being made in Somalia.” It wouldn’t be fair to Joyce to take this quip as his considered opinion, but it does illustrate a certain strain of thought: that civic nationalism is just the negation of ethnonationalism. But civic nationalism is much more than a negation. It is a positive affirmation—civic nationalism is basing your nationality on a belief. Does this seem obvious? The implications are far from obvious.
Nationality as a belief is a special case of what we have called, in several articles, propositional identity—identity as a belief. To hold a belief is to consider it true, and what is true is a matter of debate. If your foundational identity is something you can be argued into or out of, then you are a civic nationalist, no matter how racist or patriotic you might be. But propositional identity is not limited to nationality—it manifests in religion too. Academic Agent’s recent article Religion as a Non-Factor in the Fate of Civilizations could be read as saying, in so many words, that propositional identities are not real, consequential identities.2
Propositional identities are weak, which is why you can be argued out of them. No argument, however sound, will ever change where you were born, nor who your parents are, nor what colour of skin you have—that is a strong, permanent identity. Propositionality makes identity into a kind of profile pic, an outfit that can be changed at any time. This weakness is why viral identities such as “Buddhist” so often end up conforming to and recapitulating the folk-soul of the carrier, only distorted, e.g. “Zen Buddhist” in the case of the Japanese. This malleability is not a strength, but a weakness—if the carrier shapes the identity more than vice versa, what good is the identity? It is inconsequential; what distinguishes one people from another is to be found elsewhere. And so it is with civic nationalism—if America foundationally is “freedom”, “rights”, “individualism”, etc., then on what basis can we distinguish it from Britain, Lithuania, South Korea, or any other nation that holds these beliefs?
Propositions cannot produce any kind of coherent identity because they are truth-apt—they must either be true or false, and because truth is the same for you as it is for a Watusi tribesman, it can furnish us with no basis for distinguishing groups. Truth can brook no mistress—propositional identity forces one to choose between itself and any organic form of identity. To subordinate Buddhist to Japanese is to destroy Buddhist—Buddhism is a set of transcendent truth claims, and what even is “Japanese truth”? Are not the Noble Truths more important than to whom you were born? To subordinate Japanese to Buddhist is to destroy Japanese—anyone can, in principle, be Buddhist. There can be no “Buddhist Nationalism”, at least not in the sense of Buddhism as a basis for nationalism, because Buddhism excludes no people whatsoever.
Propositional identity is a kind of magic dirt theory. If our foundational identity is a belief, then being replaced by other peoples is, as long as they hold that belief, simply being replaced by ourselves. Holding “our values” is not enough—in fact, “values” are beside the point. Enoch Powell once remarked to Margaret Thatcher that he would fight for England even if it were communist, which left her stupefied, because she was a civic nationalist and he was not. Values-based identity, and the magic dirt theory that is its consequence, assumes a kind of radical inessentialism where men are simply empty vessels to be filled with values. Beliefs and values do not observe borders, and no borders can be based on them.
Nothing reminds us that propositional identity is weak and inconsequential quite like war. When the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out earlier this year, debate raged across the nationalist right, with white nationalists, reactionaries, Christians, populists, and post-liberals on both sides of the conflict. If you took the nationalist right as a bloc defined by belief in national self-determination, ethnic particularism, duty to country, etc., then the situation looked totally chaotic and unintelligible. But taken country by country, there was no mystery at all. Nationalists in NATO member states, especially Scandinavians and former Warsaw Pact countries who felt themselves to be in the line of fire, were vehemently pro-Ukraine; American nationalists, far from the conflict and who see Russia as a tacit ally against their own domestic enemies, were decidedly pro-Russia. These bedfellows only look odd from the standpoint of principle, but they were not governed by principle but by thrownness, by brute, immanent facticity in the world—in other words, by nationalism.3
We began with a question: where does civic nationalism come from? We can now answer it: civic nationalism comes from propositionality—the notion that propositions exhaust a given domain (ethics, religion, nationality, etc.) And this kind of identity was not born yesterday; we can see civic nationalism even in antiquity, such as when Isocrates tells us that “the name ‘Greek’ seems to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking, and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth”.4 The rise of the alt right and now the dissident right is the rebirth of something older, stronger, and deeper even than that.
The people do not grow out of the creed; the creed grows out of the people. Anything less is civic nationalism. Truth is not a basis for identity—“I agree”, whether to a principle or a contract, is a fundamentally mercantile form of life that enshrines the individual and corrodes any genuine community. Propositionality is anathema to nationalism, and this is what is driving the recent debates in our sphere.
Legislation limiting naturalization to “free white persons […] of good character.”
This is not to say that all religions are propositional.
Nationalism proper—not an ideology, but a simple tribal loyalty, writ large.
Panegyricus 50.
This is an important contribution to our understanding of civic nationalism as pseudo-nationalism. Civic nationalist identity is an example of a "weak" identity, one which does not cover the whole man. Rather, it covers only the sphere of beliefs. Anyone holding those beliefs belongs to your "nation". "As the creed, so the man." It also does not possess the exclusivity that one tends to associate with national identity. If your "national" identity is based on beliefs, and you consider these beliefs to be objectively true, why wouldn't you want to convert the entire planet to your beliefs, and thereby bring them within the bounds of your nation? Hence the evangelistic nature of civic nationalists. For example, why does a civic nationalist object to Muslims being in his country? Not because they have no business being there, and belong elsewhere, but because they don't agree with liberal values. Were they to simply become liberals, the problem of their presence would magically disappear. The focus for civic nationalists always shifts to what one believes, not who one is.
Real nationalist identity, by contrast, is a "strong" identity, which covers the whole man, from his biological ancestry to his religion. It posits that values ought not to be disconnected from birth. "As the man, so his creed." The essential historicity of the nation is captured by this conception. A nation grows over time, and so does its ideology, customs and institutions. Partial closure is required to enable the growth of a stable identity, which entails restrictions upon admittance into the nation. What is the thread that ensures the continuity of the nation through changes? It can only be ancestry. One could expect this conception to have more motivating power than the civic one. After all, when your identity is fixed, you cannot convert others into it, or leave it yourself: you only have the choice to fight for it or die out.
Mike poses the question about what made whites susceptible to civic nationalism. I would add our susceptibility to universalist religions like Christianity to his question.
I always found Kevin MacDonald’s theory of white moral communities plausible. The idea is that the harsh conditions under which whites evolved demanded cooperation that was broader than just kinship. Our ancestors were forced to create communities of trust and those who violated the creed of honesty and contribution to the group were expelled to likely death.
I’m curious what others think of this explanation for our susceptibility to creeds. Of course, explanations based on evolutionary biology are often unfalsifiable, but then any explanation of history is usually unfalsifiable.