The False Promise of Civic Nationalism
The DACA fight proves there are limits to good citizenship as a liberal alternative to Trumpism.
Over the past year journalists have debated the reasons for the Democratic Party’s huge losses in the 2016 presidential election and how the party might build winning electoral coalitions in the future. Their recommendations to party leaders fall into roughly two camps:
(1) Economic populism. Without a compelling economic message to counter his racism, Donald Trump was able to woo away enough working class whites from the Democratic Party to tip the election in his favor. To win again, Democrats must adopt a bold economic agenda that appeals to urban blacks and rural whites alike.
(2) Civic nationalism. Democrats must rediscover good citizenship, as some of their greatest presidents — FDR, JFK — helped form a national identity based around service and sacrifice for their fellow citizens. Ultimately, only an inclusive nationalism can defeat Donald Trump and the GOP’s turn toward ethnic nationalism.
Proponents of both of these recommendations cite the Democratic Party’s embrace of identity politics as the main reason the party has struggled to compete in state and local elections over the past 8 years, and why Democrats are now struggling to compete in once reliably blue states like Michigan and Wisconsin, where working class whites make up a sizable share of the voting population. These voters, critics contend, are being shut out of a party that sees minority access to elite institutions and positions of influence as their raison d’etre.
Of course, class and citizenship are group identities too, so the real problem for critics of identity politics seems to be the value the party affords to certain types of representation in the current political structure. Instead of using messaging that targets specific constituencies in the party — women, black Americans or gays — critics say Democrats should get behind a policy agenda that can be sold to the public as providing social and economic opportunity to all Americans.
Author Mark Lilla even goes so far as to argue that liberal representation politics operate as a form of hyper-individualism typically associated with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. “[W]hat has happened is the institutionalization of an ideology that fetishizes our individual and group attachments, applauds self-absorption, and casts a shadow of suspicion over any invocation of a universal democratic we,” he says in an interview with The American Conservative on his recent book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.
Yascha Mounk similarly says that the tribalism in left-wing identity politics overlooks the ways in which groups “are capable of oppressing their own members” and are therefore not a true site of belonging for all those who may identify with the group. True freedom, he believes, requires individuals to “preserve some form of political identity independent of the interests of particular cultural groups.”
While the authors correctly assess the problem with Democrats using identity-specific messaging as they attempt to build broad electoral coalitions capable of competing with the Republican Party, the alternative, an inclusive nationalism, is no less identity-driven and thus provides no good answers to the biggest question facing the U.S. (among other western democracies) in an era of anti-globalization: what is the value of non-citizens to the political community?
The Immigrant In The Room
Given that immigrants (particularly the undocumented) are the primary foils in Donald Trump’s nationalism, I was struck by the assurances that civic nationalism could provide a credible alternative to his worldview. Lilla and Mounk lament the exclusionary and individualistic tendencies of identity politics in the Democratic Party, yet they don’t seem all that concerned about the ways nationalism forges a we-feeling, or sense of shared identity, through the exclusion of non-citizens. Moreover, as the Trump administration begins cracking down on legal immigrants, including refugees and migrant workers, on the basis that they overwhelm social welfare programs intended for real Americans, civic nationalists don’t appear to have a more compelling argument for expanding citizenship’s material benefits to non-citizens beyond conventional appeals to diversity and representation — the very things they despise about liberal identity politics.
Just as the Black Lives Matter movement draws attention to all the ways in which citizenship fails to guarantee equal rights or equal treatment under the law for black people, the opposition to DACA and the DREAM Act shows how the very concept of citizenship can be weaponized to deny the humanity of non-citizens. This is one of the reasons progressive activists were divided initially over the DREAM Act when it was introduced as part of a defense spending bill in 2010. While the bill created a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S., some activists opposed military service as one of the options that could lead to citizenship, deeming it a “de facto draft”. Similarly, activists argue that the rhetoric in support of DACA throws the parents of undocumented children under the bus by making the children’s lack of agency in deciding to enter the U.S. illegally the basis for granting them a path to citizenship.
In short, Democrats took the Lilla and Mounk approach to undocumented immigration— focusing not on their plight or their humanity but on their willingness to die for a country they hoped to call their own— and still failed to rally enough bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform.
Haven’t We Seen This Before?
Lilla and Mounk’s brand of civic nationalism doesn’t just harbor all of the problems they find with identity politics. Many of the suggestions they have for Democrats were already prominently featured in Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric and White House speeches. As Michael Wear recalls in his review of Lilla’s book, “This theme of a balancing counterforce to individualism was a grounding message of Obama’s entire time in national politics — from his Joint Session speech on health reform to is farewell speech which one op-ed writer called ‘a siren to citizenship.’” In fact, President Obama’s tendency to lay responsibility for elevating struggling black communities on the communities themselves led black progressives to accuse him of being post-racial, denying the realities of structural racism in American life.
In his rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union Address back in January, Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy also channeled this theme of community responsibility to help society’s marginalized, as he saw the Trump administration “targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.” Kennedy’s speech comes closest to what a synthesis of Lilla and Mounk’s vision of civic nationalism and the identitarian left’s focus on identity-based oppression would look like — defining American national identity by a commitment to protect the unprotected — but it remains unclear to me how this would differ substantially from what Democrats have already been doing.
There’s no question that to win future presidential elections, Democrats will need to win back some of their working class white voters from the Republican Party. But the nationalist approach advanced by Lilla and Mounk ignores fundamental disagreements in the U.S. over the value of non-citizens to the political community, and fails to arm liberals with a compelling message for why struggling Americans should care about and devote government resources to non-citizens.
For many minorities in the U.S., the nation-state will never be a site of civic belonging given the circumstances of its founding and the legacies of slavery and segregation. Whatever messaging Democrats craft to appeal to a broader share of the electorate must offer more than a promise of belonging that they cannot fulfill on their own.
