Notions of nationalism even in a benign form have always made me uneasy. I suppose that means I am a failure as a patriot. The source of my ease may well be a combination of the ruptured seams of my own psyche and the residual reticence of growing up in Canada. Canadians tend to struggle with the questions of national identity. They often forge one based on what they believe they are not: Americans. Canada is the ultimate "middle child" sharing a border with a world power and a former colony in the British empire. Since living here, the sense that I can never be a "real" American without subscribing to nationalism, has haunted me.
I grew up socially isolated, not deprived or abused, just different. Being the child of a single parent in the early and mid seventies was not one of glamor. Groups weren't places where I felt comfortable and lacking the secret knowledge of how they were dynamically tuned I failed when I made the effort. In fact, most of my memories of " the group" aren't pleasant ones: my overweight friend in high school being called "whale", my Jewish friend called a "pushy kike", a gay friend being tormented in the halls with threats of death, my artsy friends called weirdos, while none of it was traumatizing I acquired a healthy distrust for the wiles and whims of the group as a young adult. Ironically enough, I am describing the sort of experiences that many Americans had and using them as an excuse to provide some kind of cheap psychology for my inability to truly belong to a national consensus.
Obviously, I survived all of that but I have been unable to shake my skepticism about the inner motivations of those who like to create the myths, needed for palatable nationalism. And no, a good part of the time I don't know what I am doing here either, swimming with Kossacks: but the water is pleasant, the insights plentiful and there are people who make red wine spurt mightily out of my nose with laughter, so that is reason enough.
I tend to obsess about the darker ends of nationalism when linked together with self interest and exceptionalism while recognizing that there are moments when citizens prove themselves to be extraordinary beings who can serve higher ends.
Chalmers Johnson speaks to some of my inarticulate fears whne he outlines the current contradiction the United States zealously chews upon by trying to both claim democracy and advance hegemonic interests abroad. His thesis is simple: a nation cannot be both imperial abroad and maintain democracy at home. When a nation tries to do both it will end in political and economic collapse. Clearly, Johnson is not discussing the aims of nationalism itself. Those who engage in expressions of nationalism do not necessarily culminate those ends in imperialism, but imperialism, jingoism, and demonization through xenophobia are the spiky tail of a more banging nationalism. My opinion, I might add, not his. His ideas are more fully
expressed in this book.
Johnson identifies the source of collapse as being rooted in the practices of military keynesianism, a unitary Presidency, and failure to check the two by legislative branches. Both military Keynesianism and a unitary executive enable and compliment one another. Johnson does not attack the concept of
Keynesian policy itself just what has become the perversion of during this administration and others. Military spending actually contributed to economic growth. Reagan combined tax cuts and enhanced spending that pumped up the economy. A polar cliché is that Reagan in essence "won" the cold war by out spending the Russians, while economy appeared strong it should be noted that Reagan alsoengaged in cheery class war, by symbolically breaking the air traffic controllers' union, refusing to raise minimum wage, and slashing taxes on the rich. He subverted Keynesian roots and helped to start the cherished dream of Neo-Cons to dismantle some of the assumptions and goals of New Deal politics.
According to Johnson it is difficult to accurately estimate the extent of our nation's dependence on military spending. He attributes this to questionable accounting practice and the exclusion of key departments when determining what is included in defense spending. He argues that a concentration of Presidential power and Military Keynesianism are cozy couple. I suspect he uses the term Military Keynesianism because while there is economic development associated with it, it is done at the expense of domestic aims. How often have we heard that we simply cannot afford universal health care, for example. Neo-Cons both hate the New Deal but fail to acknowledge the alternatives: home grown revolution. If anything, the New Deal was enacted to save capitalism from spontaneous popular revolt bone out of desperation.
Johnson is rather pessimistic about our ability to oppose and correct the habit of using Military Keynesianism to sustain both executive power. He argues that the American people have yet to suffer the full consequences of these policies. The Courts have been overly deferential to Presidential power. He notes that our debt and trade deficit have simply expanded because our creditorsare willing to be paid in dollars in order to keep exporting products here. The implication is that when that relationship is altered and we continue to engage in massive military spending with no accountability collapse will be inevitable. We will be far more interested in reading our Roman history. Then the American people will feel the full brunt of a perverted version of Keynesian model. He ends the article by noting the American people will then be forced to face the fallacythat the United States is somehow exceptional to other nations. Only when that happens, does he
believesee the potential for fundamental changes among them include revolution or even military rule. Chamlers is curiously neutral on the alternatives, he simply offers them. Though, he never explicitly states this one wonders if he thinks that perhaps we deserve some parental punishment.
My contention is that nationalism itself was re-branded both by the Reagan administration and this one as being explicit imperialistic in nature which why I introduced all of this with my overly anxious justification for being leery of nationalism. We must oppose yet another ism in order to formulate our own. The language of framing the intentions of terrorists and communists is remarkable similar. They invoke fear and threats. They frame democracy as something that can only be maintained by military supremacy elsewhere even as it is obvious that supremacy is rather mythical. We are told to support or troops as if they are not citizens themselves but some lofty policy extension. Since so many of us know those who are serving it is easy for us to support them because we do know tham as citizens, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters. The difference between neo-cons with imperialistic ambitions and those they have deceived and other Americans is simple: most of us express our support by wishing they could be released from this folly.
Howard Zinn suggests thatnational spirit is really only benign and harmlessly expressed in countries that do not have military ambitions or innate desires for dominance. Many ordinary Americans and Kossacks might react as if slapped to that notion. Don't we have a right to be proud of our country, does this not negate the the serious sacrifices that have been made by ordinary working Americans often when they had little choice?
Nationalism is a contradictory notion in that it unifies us, allows us to identify beyond ourselves as individuals, and sometimes subverts our ideals. It needs to be re-framed and re-claimed and frankly, impeachment is one way to do so. Impeachment is more than a tactical notion, it is a direct hit against the practice of the corrosive Military Keynesianism Chalmers Johnson speaks of, it restores accountability as more articulate diarists than I have succinctly laid out.
I have more questions that answers, more elaborate justifications than accomplishments, on which to base my fears about nationalism. The truth is that unlike many who come here seeking a better life, my own landing has all been an accident. One random decision to go back to school led to events I could have never predicted, I feel like a fraud: grateful to live among the free and still curiously apart.
I want to believe that Chalmers Johnson's analysis, which I cherry picked to highlight a few ideas, is flawed. We won't know if he is a Cassandra or an alarmist until the events he speculates on come to pass. I hope it does not take a collapse for us to have a national consensus on who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to express that.