August 27, 2024
By John G. Grove
“America is not just an idea. America is a nation.” That was J.D. Vance’s big applause line at the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference last month. That theme seamlessly transferred over to his speech at the RNC after being named the Vice Presidential nominee. Josh Hawley’s NatCon speech used similar language: “Since the days of the city-state, the republican tradition has always viewed self-government as a project bound to a particular place, practiced by citizens loyal to that place and loyal to the way of life they share together.”
To any traditional conservative, there is something invigorating about hearing a politician invoke home or place as the basis of our political life. Such an invocation seemingly challenges the notion that America is defined by infinitely malleable philosophical premises. The populist nationalist rhetoric that has emerged in the United States and Europe over the past decade pits itself against universalism and globalism, which can make it seem like the “local” alternative. But the rhetoric tends to be skin-deep. Especially in America, a politics built around home cannot be nationalist.
Roger Scruton is the conservative thinker most associated with a politics of “home,” which he says starts with “the place where we are.” The sort of loyalty he describes requires a pre-political love of a territory and people who live a common life together in it. Political life—the life of the nation—can then be seen as an outgrowth of the interactions of neighbors establishing rules, norms, and obligations among themselves. Scruton, following Oakeshott, calls this a “purposeless” form of association, insofar as it has no grand goals or overarching ambitions it aims to satisfy. Rather, it simply flows from the experience of the lives of those who share a space and seek to preserve the way they live together there.
Scruton argued that most people in the West understood their nation in this sort of humane way, and not in the terms of an ideological “nationalism.” Whether or not he was right about that, one thing is sure—it does not translate very well to an American national identity—at least not directly.
Attempts to work the notion of home and place into American nationalism are nothing new. It’s right there in “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land.” But if one is thinking seriously about physical places and homes, the attempt to nationalize them (in America at least) runs into a huge problem: we don’t actually share a place. And as I have pointed out elsewhere, today’s theorists of national conservatism actually tend to avoid “place” as a guiding concept, probably for this reason.
It is difficult to pin down, of course, what exactly a shared place entails, but by its very nature, it cannot be expanded infinitely. As a pre-political commitment, it must have some limits that do not simply correspond to political borders. If the United States were to invade and annex Tunisia tomorrow, it would not immediately become my home. And if I were to call it my home, it would be abundantly clear that I was detaching the concept of home entirely from physical place. I would be basing my sense of “home” on political commitments rather than defining my political commitments on the sense of home.
The same principle applies to a country that is continental in its scope and contains nearly 350 million souls. Even if we can’t draw with red lines what the concept entails, we can at least say that it must emerge from a physical location and the people living there, both of which shape daily habits and frames of reference. It depends on people, in their routine lives, going to some of the same locations—from shops and restaurants to recreational fields and state or national parks. It entails people sharing the same physical experiences, like climate and weather, road patterns, or the gradual evolution of the human and economic environment around them. And it would entail people being aware of the same local goings-on, from public events to sports teams and school activities, or the particular kind of commerce that takes place.
All of this is, of course, perfectly mundane. Not the stuff of “high” politics or ideological movements. And it’s also clear that much of it is not “shared” between people, for instance, in Los Angeles, Fargo, or Johnson City. If we are to take seriously the idea of home as a shared life in a particular place, it cannot possibly stretch seamlessly from “sea to shining sea” and extend to people who do not actually live any part of their daily lives together. A sense of home can extend beyond the strictly local, but a pre-political commitment to place and people necessarily fades as the places and people are no longer truly one’s own.
The connection that all Americans share, therefore, has never been pre-political in this way. It can be understood in a distinctly civil (and therefore very limited) way as those who share a complex political system guided by the Constitution. But this does not create the kind of thick bonds of community, loyalty, and obligation that many want in a national narrative. For that, American narratives turn to ideological nationalism, built not on daily life, but on generalized characteristics or ideas about what normal life ought to be—if the right political forces are put in charge. Indeed, there is an irony in Vance’s opening quotation contrasting “idea” with “nation.” Ideological nationalism necessarily hinges on some sort of idea around which the “imagined communities” are built (to use Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase). It may not be a philosophic idea—which is what Vance and company almost certainly mean—but it is always some conceptual concoction, not the reality of social experience, which is too ambiguous, complex, and contradictory to form the basis of a nationwide political movement.
This sort of political nationalism seeks unity and loyalty where they do not exist on their own. To generate them, it generalizes based on our social and political experiences, stripping them of any specificity that might get in the way of unity. And since nationalism is an ideological movement, it is not “purposeless,” but aims to galvanize people for a social struggle and political action. The picture nationalists paint of their “nation,” then, also has a prescriptive element, capturing their specific goals and presenting them not merely as discrete policy choices, but as central elements of a national cause and purpose.
In his short book on the subject, the conservative political philosopher Ken Minogue pointed out that this prescriptive element of nationalism means that the picture nationalists develop of their “nation” is emphatically not aligned with social reality. Rather, it tends to be an “intellectualized,” “fantasy” version of the kind of homogenous society they believe could be if only their political coalition wins power against the enemies of the nation. Accordingly, he observes, nationalism is often accompanied by an intense hatred of a country’s actual people and life: the the notion of a “civil war” is baked into nationalist ideas. (A quick glance at the online discourse among nationalist conservatives in America today indicates that they certainly share this quality.)
In America, “creedal” nationalism, espoused alternately by progressives and certain strands of self-described conservatives, draws on concepts that emerged from American experience, but de-contextualizes and generalizes them. This form of national idea has been so popular because it is vague and flexible enough to cut across the plurality of different ways of life and local attachments. It can generate a degree of unity and identity; it can identify those outsiders who oppose the true nation; and it can stamp the imprimatur of national purpose on whatever specific political aims of the movement has.
National Conservatives today use different elements of American experience as the ingredients of the national stew, but they are practicing essentially the same form of politics. Appeals to place, local community, or traditional religious belief, are quickly subsumed into general and vague appeals to what is supposedly “common” and “shared.” Immediately following his references to place, for instance, Hawley shifted gears:
But the reigning political consensus shows little interest in our shared way of life. Worse than that, it denigrates the common affections and common loves that make our way of life possible. It undermines the kind of labor and economy on which our way of life depends. (Emphasis added.)
Commitment to a particular place immediately gives way to unstated “common” affections, which are, he later says, shared not by people in a particular place, but by the “great and broad middle of our society”—i.e., real Americans, who are apparently mostly the same. Appeals to rust belt cities and coal towns are less about those particular places and more about presenting a uniform vision of the ‘kind of labor and economy’ that the national idea requires, which only national policy and national power can create. It is merely another attempt to fill the void left by the diminished authority of actual, place-based community.
The role communities play in this nationalist discourse is largely that of the victim—incapable of standing athwart or adapting to the changes of modern life. Communities are therefore in need of a powerful champion who can wrestle the forces of the world into submission to the desired national vision. In this mode of politics, the nation is not an outgrowth of free people forming their own common life, but a salvific force that can create a certain kind of life for them.
Does this mean that the kind of politics rooted in a shared home is impossible in America? Not necessarily. But it would require a very different style of politics than the varieties of nationalism that are currently on offer. It would require attempts to revive the actual authority of local life—both state and local governments as well as civil society. That would mean a radical recommitment to federalism and limits on the regulatory power of the national government, such that people who actually do share a home can make real decisions together about how to live in it—from their schools and universities to public decency laws to economic development. When battling against rule by elites, a politics of home would not seek to raise up new national elites who stand for this or that iteration of the “national idea,” but would seek to disempower them with a revival of American local self-government.
And when there are debates that must be national in scope—over international trade policy or immigration, for instance—it should be in terms that focus on actual consequences (foreseen and unforeseen) and tradeoffs for American communities, rather than in clichés about a “nation of immigrants” or “American greatness.”
The left abandoned local self-government long ago in favor of progressive nationalism. For some time, conservatives at least paid lip service to it, but were also seduced by a creedal nationalism that often blunted any real commitment to it. Ascendant national conservatives, in their turn, want to use the language of home and place, but they seem to want to go in the other direction when it comes to their practice and policy commitments. Their “statement of principles” inverts America’s federal system, speaking of a “delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation,” as opposed to the American Constitution’s delegation of limited power to the central government. “Drain the swamp” often does not mean diminishing national power, but taking over the administrative state “for our own purposes,” as Vance once said. Limited government and strict constitutionalism are often dismissed as too “libertarian.” Social Security and Medicare—perhaps the most egregious examples of national politics hollowing out and replacing the responsibility and authority of home and neighbor—are now as sacred to the new Republican Party as they are to the Democrats.
America was once understood as a “community of communities,” marked as much by plurality and local self-government as by its similarities—to say nothing of a creed or a single, uniform “way of life.” And though the modern, mobile, and interconnected world puts great stress on local attachment, nothing has derailed it like nationalist mass politics, which perpetuates constant conflict over what kind of uniformity will be imposed on the whole. If conservatives—or any Americans for that matter—really want a politics focused more on “home,” they should consider returning politics to our homes.
John G. Grove is the editor of Law & Liberty.
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