The Powers of the New Nationalism

- Aaron Greenberg

"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."
- Emerson

If someone discovered a new primary color, how would we begin to describe it? Or a new letter in the alphabet? Or a new, naturally occurring element? Where, in the taxonomy of colors, letters or elements would these discoveries fall? And how would they change our understanding of colors, letters or elements?

In a rational world, people in the know would be dumfounded by this color, letter, element, unlike anything before. In this world, however, faced with such a startling new reality, those in a position to make a difference have acted like it wasn't even a discovery. They have plugged the new thing into their tired, fixed formulas. Business as usual must be preserved at all costs.

In America, in the last few months, a new status quo has begun to chip away at our very essence. That is not hyperbole; oh, that it were. In a few words, we are witnessing a conflagration, a synthesis of elements: fear, alienation, xenophobia, ignorance, selfishness.

The result? Call it New Nationalism. New, because unlike the nationalism before it, which allows my country right or wrong, New Nationalism shirks the latter: the country cannot falter, it and its leader are, like the pontiff in Catholic theology, infallible. With New Nationalism comes the disconnect between George W. Bush's America (if such a place actually exists) and Bush himself. Consider: Bush's approval ratings according to Gallup hovered around 48% at last check and during most of his term (save the five months following 9/11) those ratings have fluctuated between the high 40s and 50s. But from the rhetoric of "mandate" and "political capital" one would be lead to believe that the election was a landslide - which it was not.

Bush the un-democrat spoke reverently - and with typical hubris - about "an accountability moment" (read: November 2, after the exit polls had been rendered null and void), as though democracy itself were not a daily, unrelenting exercise in accountability. It was one of those absurd and revelatory Bush locutions, akin to his use of "fuzzy math" against Al Gore when, in fact, the fiscal shaman was W. himself. The inconsistency between the election results and approval ratings mean that a significant number of voters cast ballots for Bush but do not support him or his policies and that an even greater number do not vote at all. The 1% who chose Bush over Kerry but did not support Bush or his policies, are a troubling bunch; they lie at the heart of New Nationalism.

While for the New Nationalist, belief may trump facts, Truth is at the core of New Nationalism - but Truth need not actually be true. " Iraq is a still a "good fight" even if "our troops" torture, maim, humiliate, decimate the Iraqi population, foment terror and religious strife in a previously secular state, and when the excuses for war were transparently false and the motives of the warrior-kings dubious at best.

" Tax cuts are for "everyone" even when they only benefit a fraction of the top 1%.

" Social Security is in crisis, and the Bush superheroes exist to save it - blathering their way to blocking out the truth: their blueprint to rid the nation of Roosevelt's socialist legacy and turn America into a society of "owners."

" George W. Bush is brave, a heroic American even when his administration ignores and circumvents the founding principles of America, even when Bush himself never served in combat, even when his lies and incompetence are manifest to everyone who looks outside the American corporate media bubble.

The cult of personality is New Nationalism's most reliable tactic: make cowards look like heroes and heroes cowards. Appearing is everything: to make appear is to make true. Noam Chomsky put it well in "The Non-Election of 2004":

…the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry…[whose]…guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine the "free markets" we are taught to revere: mythical entities in which informed consumers make rational choices. In such scarcely imaginable systems, businesses would provide information about their products: cheap, easy, simple.

America's dying democracy lies deeper than fraudulent elections, an illegitimate administration and spurious wars. Democracy ends when citizens stop understanding its meaning. One of the merits (or one of the flaws) of democracy is that it allows mistakes to be made. But voting against democracy is the one mistake that democracy does not permit. Supporting candidates whose entire agenda opposes the principles of democratic society (habeas corpus, free speech, equity) does not exercise the right to vote or choose. It exercises the non-right to destroy. In a social contract society, the social contract is the only non-negotiable. America's founders had something similar in mind - Jefferson famously commented, "a little revolution now and then is a good thing." Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to rejuvenate and fortify the democracy, New Nationalism has taken it as an invitation to undo the democracy all together and to push a plutocratic ideology. How can citizens stand in such opposition to their own self-interest? Deception and fear, two tactics that lie at the heart of the Bush-Rove PR campaign. New Nationalist citizenry and its illegitimate, borderline fascist regime lives for an ideal state that resembles nothing less than Leviathan - they want to "save" government in same way American forces "liberated" Iraq and Afghanistan.

If left unchecked, the New Nationalism will mark the beginning of the end for American democracy. No longer are elected officials held up to a standard for decent behavior; they can spew shameless lies and be escape retribution by the two great American institutions of counterbalance: the electorate and the media. The people look to the media for an alternative to administration talking points; but now, and for the last decade (after Reagan did away with the FCC Fairness Doctrine and Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed the media to consolidate) administration talking points are the news. The media needn't be "state run" for the state to run them. (Or in the case of pundit Armstrong Williams who took under-the-counter bribes from the Administration to tout the "No Child Left Behind Act," the state can take an active interest in controlling the press.) Indeed the media likes to see the world through the prism of New Nationalism. Why? They're interested in ratings/profits or rocking the boat. "The War on Terror" plays out like a Schwarzenegger blockbuster. Lest we forget, the media is a business controlled by "bottom-line" ideologues more interested in corporate earnings than the media's historical role. When bean-counters rule, journalism dies.

In an article written more than a decade ago ("Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism"), philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that patriotism subverts the "universal values of justice and right" that should guide us as citizens of the world - "cosmopolitan education" she wrote, "combats this natural extension of the type of bitter, exclusionary nationalism prevalent in the United States especially." New Nationalism is the antithesis of cosmopolitanism - which instead of allowing the one, right, convenient Truth to living, allows educated choice about how to live by looking at the spectrum (geographic, ideological, ethnic) of the human experience.

Cosmopolitanism recognizes the fundamental fallacy of nationalism - "The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident" wrote Nussbaum, and the way to embrace this fact is to seek non-exclusionary morality. Again, Nussbaum, "[the] community…is, most fundamentally, the source of our moral obligations." It seems limiting then to pledge allegiance to ones familiar community simply because it is familiar. Solidarity - living among people who share your views - is important; unanimity (in a democracy at least, and among the leaders of that democracy) is dangerous.

Hostility, the type that issues from a nationalist upbringing, is one of New Nationalism's defining features. (The highly politicized tsunami-aid fiasco is a recent example of selfishness, resentfulness and cynicism typical of America's new relationship to the world. Remember Dr. Rice: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity...And I think it has paid great dividends for us.")

The myth of classlessness and reality of the "melting pot" have converged in New Nationalism, which is always looking for enemies. These enemies can now be found anywhere because they are everywhere. "They" need not be black, Latino, gay, female or Muslim. "They" are "they." The Bush machine co-opts people of color (Rice, Gonzales) as symbols and buys off the black community by funding overtly anti-gay "faith-based initiatives," the better to wage religious, not merely cultural, warfare.

Social theorist Michele Foucault wrote about the nature of power in "The Subject and Power" in a way that relates well to New Nationalism: "…The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectives him. Examples are the mad and the insane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the 'good boys.'" The shamelessness of New Nationalism, which I think has something to do with its constituents (perceived) status as "subjected" for so long and their (very real) mob mentality, allows New Nationalists to treat anyone who disagrees with their agenda as less than human. (One need look no further than Bill O'Reilly to see the meanness of the milieu).

Democracy is already at odds (at least in theory) with nationalism. Recall Foucalt: nationalism "subjectivizes" by establishing the binary of "us" and "them" and denying the context of and refusing to understand, "them." Democracy should be a committed relationship among equals, not a sham of silent oppression.

The power structure of New Nationalism is such that subjectivization takes place on an unprecedented scale and under official auspices. "You're either with us or against us," Herr Bush set the tone for the "War on Terror" in October 2001. The inaugural speech was filled with the fixation about "spreading freedom" and "ending tyranny in our world." Cheney used the opportunity at Auschwitz to underscore the medieval notion that, "…evil is real and must be called by its name, and must be confronted."

We live in the wake of two plebiscites (one in America, the other Iraq) that were passed as legitimate because they exhibited the atmospherics of democracy. But they were no such thing. They were faux democratic theater, staged to achieved distinctly un-democratic, even anti-democratic, ends.

In his classic study of communism and capitalism in the post-industrial West One Dimensional Man, Marxist Herbert Marcuse wrote presciently, "under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination." Distinctions like "us" and "them," "good" and "evil," "patriot" and "traitor" are tools of hegemony - undemocratic, un-American, but all too alive in New Nationalist ideology.

This "War on Terror" embodies New Nationalism - it invents enemies and fights the wrong fights. The "French" are enemies, as is Saddam Hussein, yet Pakistan (which is actually guilty of nuclear proliferation and which is run by a military junta) is a trusted ally. The same logic was applied to the election, where John Kerry was labeled "liberal" or in 2002 triple-amputee, Vietnam war hero former Sen. Max Cleland "unpatriotic."

The politicking of New Nationalists reaches the level of specious hysteria practiced by the Hearst Papers of the early 20th Century. In the one-party state, absolutism and absolute power are the currency in which the powerful trade ideas. Gray no longer exists. Moderation, shame, tradition, respect are newly foreign concepts. Democrats in Congress are as effectively disenfranchised as college students in Ohio. Right or wrong; patriot or traitor; Republican or Democrat; Red or Blue.

The bastardization goes beyond "the discourse" - it invades the language and subverts what it means to be truly human.

New Nationalism plays into the hands of the Bush Regime in the same way that the regime played into the hands of "terrorists" and Radical Islam. Hermann Goerring who knew a thing or two about political propaganda (he was Hitler's Karl Rove) mused:

Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

After 9/11 Rove's work was done for him. Unlike Goerring he did not need to reinvent the wheel. He just needed to shove. Lightly.

The people bought the lie better than Rove (or Goerring) could have ever dreamed. New Nationalism doesn't question. Absolutism is its lifeblood; a simple world of "good" and "evil" its engine. The one-party state its official modus operandi.

That a one-party state is enshrined amid democratic atmospherics (bogus in every sense of the word) only informs us how much of the nation has already succumbed, and how much work there is to be done.