John Judis & National Identity

Yesterday the NYT had an op-ed by John Judis that lamented what he claimed was the left's ignorance about the importance of national identity, particularly when it comes to "democracies and the modern welfare state". The NYT appears to have removed the comments from the piece, but there was one "trending" comment that remarked (and I'm paraphrasing):

"Having a national identity seems like a fine idea. Having a national identity based on skin color is abhorent."

It occured to me this morning that even though I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, and believe that Judis was walking a very fine line between the acceptable and unacceptable version of "national identity", in reality the concept of "national identity" is so poorly defined as to be almost meaningless.

I was out on a run thinking about what national identity might mean today, and it seemed easier to try to think about what it might have meant at some point in the past. We could pick a time before or after the "culture wars" started in the 1960s, because the lesson is the same either way: the USA has never had a "national identity" except around very specific national efforts.

Rewind to some time before the upheavals of the 1960s - you pick the decade. The 1950s? The 1940s? The 1930s ? It doesn't really matter: at any given point in time, finding a set of cultural, political and philosophical points that could define "being American" was essentially impossible. Jazz? Gershwin? Tin Pan Alley? Hemingway? Even the idea of movies? These and every other American cultural icon of the period were all intensely controversial and far from beloved by many, even most, Americans.

Even if we went hunting for connections through food or celebrations, we wouldn't do much better, and indeed, it seems likely that the eating habits of pre-1960s Americans varied far more across the country than they do today, after the advent of modern distribution systems and vertically integrated food industries.

And of course, none of this even touches on the fact that the "American Dream", as it was defined for the core 50 years or so of the 20th century, was as both a concept and an option completely inaccessible to vast numbers of Americans, whether because of poverty, race, gender, sexual preference or some combination of them all. Any definition of American "national identity" in the mid-20th century was almost definitionally exclusionary to some large swath of actual Americans.

If we look at the period from 1965 onward, it gets worse, not better. Finding the music, the literature, the political and moral philosophy, the sense of history, the art that defined national identity for Americans is essentially impossible. By 1968, Steve Reich had already created "It's Gonna Rain", a tape piece that at least half the country would have found abhorent if they ever heard it. Today, however, that piece has became the foundation for a musical aesthetic ("minimalism") that today is familiar to millions of now near-retirement Americans with a bent toward the activities of artists and musicians of their own generation, let alone younger Americans for whom electronic music, repetition and rhythm are the cornerstones of their own musical experience. And then there's still the Allman Brothers, who in 1965 barely existed but would have been branded no-good music by many Americans of the time and today are just "American music" as purely and as simply as it could be. And then there's Miles Davis, in yet another phase of his long musical career, who had just 5 years earlier irritated millions of jazz fans with his new "modal" music on an album called "Kind of Blue" that went on to become the best selling jazz album of all time. All of this was happening at the same time that rock was slowly morphing from party music into something more ... psychedelic, pop was gaining its "surf" variant, and country was entering its third generation with a new emphasis on music for truckers and rest of the blue collar working class. All of these musical transformations were deeply unappealing to large numbers of Americans, and many remain so today.

It hardly works any better to look at literature, or film. Similar cultural fracturing exists there to. It is any worse if my list of the 10 best films of all time is totally different from my neighbor's if the dominant lanuage in each list is also different? I find it hard to see why - what are subtitles for anyway? And given that one of my favorite films of all time is in French, a language that I essentially neither speak nor read, would it matter if I lived surrounded by a lot of Spanish (or Italian or Russian or Japanese or ...) films?

Neither does it help us to turn to such venerated shrines as the US Constitution. We don't even have a national identity based on that. A good chunk of the country believes that the Constitution creates a personal right to own and carry firearms, while another comparably good sized chunk believes that it does not. A substantial part of the country believes that FDR's expansion of the role of the federal government was counter to Constitutional intent; another substantial part of the country thinks it was entirely appropriate and if anything came too late and was too defensive of the existing power structures of the time.

The bottom line is: pick any period of American history, and you'll find substantial numbers of American not experiencing, engaging with or supporting any version of "the national identity" that you might claim exists at that time. Sure, we could all wave flags for the Apollo missions ... or could we? From an Atlantic article in 2012:

Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, a process began that has all but eradicated any reference to the substantial opposition by scientists, scholars, and regular old people to spending money on sending humans to the moon.

The Atlantic:Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program

So is there a national identity at all? About the only thing I can see as a candidate is the committment to the idea that anyone can be an American. This seems particularly ironic as a choice for "what makes us Americans", given that it's essentially saying "well, nothing really, except a committment to the idea that there's nothing really." It's almost the opposite of tautological because its even emptier (and therefore perhaps deeper?) than that term typically implies.

I think I know what Judis wanted to say: he wanted to say that people don't want to pay for social security for people who they feel are "not like them". He wanted to say that people don't want to share the machinery of democracy with people who they feel are "not like them". He wanted to say "How can you build a democracy with a modern welfare state out of a bunch of people who don't feel that they have much in common?"

But instead of getting into the question of what "doesn't feel like you" actually means, which is interesting and rich and potentially full of insight, he just hand-waved about an essentially non-existent "national identity". In the end, his op-ed is nothing more than another quiet dog whistle for those who are more explicit about their racist version of the same general conception of the world.