This last week was the first time that I’ve felt curious about a presidential inauguration. Four years ago, I felt worried. Before that, I’m not sure I was sufficiently interested in politics to be all that curious about the inauguration itself. (Oddly enough, I recall talking about the horse race of the 2004 election between Kerry and Bush II, but I definitely don’t think I had the attention span to listen to or think about the inaugural address, the prayers, and so on.)
The inauguration, honestly, felt kind of silly. The central part of the process is an old guy, hand on an absurdly large book, repeating a few words from another old guy. There’s lots of music, including, in my opinion, an oddly cartoonish song for the presentation of the national colors, and many flags. But the overall ceremony was Very Serious because our nation is Very Serious, and its Laws and Constitution must be Very Respected. The rituals mean something by shaping our understanding of the nation: a nation that is orderly, that is mighty, that respects its heritage, and so on. The inauguration is a formal, legal process — remember the constitutional questions raised when the Chief Justice messed up Obama’s first oath? — but it’s more importantly a nation-building process. For such a purpose, it’s probably not surprising that his speech was filled with platitudes about America (“We look ahead in our uniquely American way — restless, bold, optimistic — and set our sights on the nation we know we can be and we must be”), calls to unity, and echoes of the past (“our ‘better angels’ have always prevailed”; “not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example”). It’s a rather anodyne kind of nation-building.
I’ve also been wondering about the prevalence of flags and the intensity of rallies among Trump supporters. It seems to me that in these rallies there is an aspect of nation-building that sets it apart — both from normal partisan politics and from inauguration-type nation-building. Maybe it’s just their enthusiasm — perhaps Trump is just good at riling up his base. But it’s hard for me to shake the image of an insurrectionist in the Capitol waving a Confederate battle flag, or to forget the video of a man beating a fallen police officer with an American flag. There seems to be a fervor to this kind of politics that feels more like nation-building than mere partisan politics.
I’ve been thinking about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and I’m going to try to use some of its insights to guide my scrambled thinking here. I want to make a basic argument: American partisan divides can be understood as a manifestation of dueling forms of nationalism. At least some of the trends Anderson identified underpinning the rise of nationalism from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries have parallels in our contemporary domestic politics. Moreover, Anderson’s observations can help us understand why American politics seems so intense, and they suggest that our politics will only get more so.
At the outset, I should note that while I was mostly motivated to think about nationalism after seeing so many flags among Trump supporters, this post is about left-liberals and whether we might think of them as a kind of nation.
Let’s start with definitions. At the core of the idea of nationalism is, of course the idea of the nation, which Anderson says is “an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” There’s four components to this definition.
The nation is imagined, because you will never meet everyone in your nation, yet you can imagine whom the nation comprises. That the nation is imagined, Anderson stresses, doesn’t mean it isn’t “real”; basically any community requires some imagination (have you met everyone in your family or your school?), so what distinguishes communities has to do with how they’re imagined.
The nation is a community in the sense that there is a level of equality there — every member of the nation has some kind of dignity as part of the nation. Anderson suggests this “deep, horizontal comradeship” is crucial for understanding nationalism, because that “fraternity . . . makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”
The nation, furthermore, is inherently limited — there are imagined members of the nation and, conversely, outsiders. A nation has a border, and that’s what makes nationalism different than, say, an evangelizing religion: “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.”
Finally, the nation is sovereign, in that it seeks autonomy and freedom to make decisions for itself. When Anderson wrote that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time,” he was taking note of how colonized peoples across the world revolted in the name of their nation; independence was a crucial element of the nationalisms that Anderson witnessed.
Nationalism, for Anderson, is a “cultural artefact” that came to dominate global politics due to a set of unique historical circumstances. I’m not going to go through his entire argument — to be honest, I don’t think I understand his entire argument — but I did want to note two interlocking threads of his thinking: first, on language; and second, on imagining time.
On language, Anderson argues that, before nationalism arose, monolinguistic, religious communities predominated across the globe. Think Christianity with the Catholic Church and the privileging of Latin in medieval Europe or Islam based in classical Arabic. In each community, there was a single language that was understood to be linked to divine truths and that bound the community in mutual recognition. A thirteenth-century denizen of Timbuktu could, on his hajj, meet a fellow pilgrim from Aceh, and, despite speaking completely different languages, mutually identify with each other through their common Arabic text. But that exclusive hold on divinity decayed over time. Latin-based worship, we know, would be mostly replaced by worship in the vernacular; bibles would be translated into French, Spanish, English, and so on. Language and religion bound people together. Conversely, the separation of language from religion enabled new, differentiated forms of organization.
Two more specific practices relate the rise of the vernacular to the creation of nations. First, beyond religious text, what Anderson calls “print capitalism” led to a proliferation of publications that, in time, would be readable by normal people across the world. Especially important for creating an imagined, bounded community, Anderson suggests, were the novel and newspaper — an idea I will return to later.
Second, in the time of colonialism and imperialism, the vernacular would be important for administrative purposes. European empires, seeking to exercise control over vast dominions, needed to build state capacity, and they adopted certain vernacular languages for administrative efficiency purposes. Anderson says that this administrative choice had huge consequences for why certain peoples began to see themselves as a nation despite, say, their ethno-religious diversity. Colonial bureaucrats were educated in the vernacular and were sent on “secular pilgrimages” across the empire, meeting with other bureaucrats from far away and seeing the scope of the administrative province. These meetings enabled the bureaucrats both to see themselves as a class of people and to recognize the uniqueness of their experiences as bureaucrats in a colony as opposed to bureaucrats coming from the metropole (i.e., the imperial capital, in Spain or France, etc.). That new nation-states across the world in the postcolonial period created borders that followed the administrative boundaries drawn by the empire, and not the boundaries of precolonial polities, suggests Anderson’s argument about the connection between colonial state-building and revolutionary nationalism.
A second factor: a changing idea of time. Anderson describes time, to the medieval European, as a kind of “simultaneity-along-time.” He points to medieval European artistic depictions of Old Testament stories, where the people are depicted in the garb of medieval Europeans rather than, say, ancient Israelites. Time is imagined as folding on itself rather than as linear: “Figuring the Virgin Mary with ‘Semitic’ features or ‘first-century’ costumes in the restoring spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the mediaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present.”
Integral to changing that idea of time, Anderson argues, were novels and newspapers. I’m not going to bother discussing the argument about novels and instead will focus on newspapers.
Newspapers, he suggests, helped construct people’s understanding of time in two ways. First is “calendrical coincidence.” Consider that the front page of the New York Times right now discusses the coronavirus in America, scenes from Wuhan, the Trump impeachment, Russian protests against the arrest of Navalny, the death of Hank Aaron, Canada’s legalization of marijuana, and the aftermaths of the Arab Spring in Egypt. While some of these events obviously are related, there’s no necessary reason to juxtapose them on the front page beyond time and editorial choice. Seeing them together leads the reader to imagine these events as connected in time — as being simultaneous. But the inevitable churn of the printing presses means the next day will bring new news, and the old newspaper will be outdated. Newspapers compel a particular notion of linear, progressive time, in contrast to the medieval notion of simultaneous time.
Second, and related, the newspaper’s temporality (like a book of “ephemeral popularity,” a “one-day best seller[,]” Anderson muses) creates an “extraordinary mass ceremony,” where the reader knows that some others are reading the newspaper simultaneously, yet the reader lacks any knowledge of who those others are. In other words, the reading of the newspaper leads the reader to imagine a community of readers — fellow speakers of the same vernacular, who share similar interests, and who partake simultaneously in this daily ritual. (I’ve been reading the London Review of Books, and I’m always amused by the last page of advertisements, where many folks have taken out ad space in search of romantic partners and Zoom dates — their “newspaper” has led them to imagine a particular kind of community comprising readers with whom they seek to connect.)
I’ve spent a long time recounting (probably very poorly) a complex historical argument, but let me try to identify some parallels with American political divides today.
Start with language. Americans for the most part obviously share a language. But it seems to me that there is a way that our vocabulary is beginning to diverge. It’s, of course, not unheard of for different regions to develop accents or slang — the “yinz” of Pittsburgh or the “y’alls” of the South. I think, though, that words that are formally descriptive and lacking in judgment have become tied to membership in political groups. I have a feeling that I can guess your politics based on whether you use, in normal conversation, any of the following words: “Latinx,” “alien,” “fake news,” “diversity,” or “BIPOC.” Certainly whether your news sources use these kinds of words is suggestive of the source’s ideological slant. But the more it becomes clear that a certain language corresponds to a certain politics, I think the easier it becomes to imagine that fellow-speakers as a kind of closed community, approaching a nation.
I noted earlier that when Anderson talked about the vernacular, he identified two specific ways in which the vernacular mattered for building a sense of nationhood — print capitalism and secular pilgrimages. I just mentioned print capitalism and the role of media outlets in facilitating certain vernaculars. On secular pilgrims, I think the pattern exists today, too.
The analogy for secular pilgrimages today, I think, is college-goers. As with the historical secular pilgrims, college-goers learn to speak a certain vernacular, and they tend toward a cohesive class of people, i.e., they run in similar circles, in similar cities, with similar interests. (David Runciman made a funny comment on a podcast, which goes something like, “The thing that’s most annoying about college-educated people is that they’re the only tribe that acts like they aren’t a tribe.”) Moreover, they become inculcated in a certain culture: a New Yorker-tote-bag carrying, kombucha-drinking, Peloton-cycling, Tinder-swiping, Instagram-posting culture. It is a culture that feels natural — doing these things, as everyone else in your imagined community does, makes you smarter, healthier, happier, and more ethical, because you’ve learned it at a mecca of objective education, one that is densely networked with other such citadels of enlightenment. The secular pilgrim has learned a way of life, and even if they don’t abide by its particular tenets (actually, I work out using the Nike Fitness Trainer app, not Peloton!), the culture has entered into their imagination as the norm of what one ought to do. (I don’t know anyone that actually does all of those things — but I would be surprised if any of my college friends didn’t recognize some part of themselves, or their friends, in that description.)
Finally, I also think Anderson’s discussion of time has a nice parallel in social media — and, for people in my cohort, especially Twitter and Instagram. (I’ll confine my comments to Twitter because I’m not on Instagram.) It is almost cliche to say that social media has enabled instant communication. But beyond the instantaneous nature of community, it has enabled truly simultaneous engagement. I remember experiencing some of the major political events of the last few years — the killing of Suleimani, the November election, the insurrection at the Capitol — “with” others. For in real time, I could see people reacting, sending out Tweets and processing the information, just as I was. The insurrection at the Capitol was perhaps the best example of this. I was literally by myself, shut away in my flat in London. Yet I could so easily feel like there was a community of like-minded people, equally horrified and equally concerned about the constitutional and moral implications of these events, all watching together, eyes glued to our television or streaming devices to get new information. Simultaneity has become so much more visceral than when information traveled by printed newspapers sent along colonial trading routes by boat. On the one hand, that means the individual has to do less work to imagine the community of fellow-watchers. On the other hand, that makes the community feel so much more real, so much more embodied — so much more natural.
When Anderson first wrote his book in 1983, he was witnessing how powerful a political force nationalism was. For the nation, millions of people were willing to lay down their lives. Why? Anderson says that nationhood approaches being natural — it is “something unchosen” and thus something fundamental. He writes of the family, which he compares to the nation: “[T]he family has traditionally been conceived as the domain of disinterested love and solidarity.” One is loyal to and defends one’s family not because it is in their self-interest to do so, but because it is what one ought to do. There is something pure, in Anderson’s eyes, about the defense of the family. So, too, he thinks, of the nation: “[T]he whole point of the nation is that it is interestless. Just for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices.”
Anderson also therefore thinks nationhood is fundamentally different than a political party or a socioeconomic class. Nationhood’s purity differentiates it from factional or ideological identifications. A faction one can leave. A faction advocates for particular interests. A faction is not natural but rather the result of organization. It is “representations of ineluctable necessity,” Anderson suggests, that make a nation different — and it is analogous claims to necessity, purity, and disinterestedness that enable other forms of organization to have similar abilities to compel sacrifice as nationhood. Anderson asks rhetorically, “If people imagined the proletariat merely as a group in hot pursuit of refrigerators, holidays, or power, how far would they, including members of the proletariat, be willing to die for it?” In that sense, my argument probably can’t be that partisanship per se is what is dividing American politics; rather, there is some underlying cultural difference that has become embedded within partisan politics, and that difference drives partisan rancor.
Let me try to sum up the argument. American politics is increasingly characterized by dueling vernaculars, where people use different languages in accordance with their political-ideological identification. Driving the development and adoption of such vernaculars is a mix of an increasingly splintered news media environment and the rise of college-educated voters as a growing proportion of the electorate. Such college-educated people, our modern day secular pilgrims, have an imagined, homogeneous culture that is linked with a particular political-ideological worldview.* And social media platforms enable such people, who are densely networked with like-minded others by virtue of their pilgrimage to college, to experience politics together — a kind of simultaneity that strengthens how viscerally one can feel the existence of their imagined community. Because these developments are deeply rooted in a cultural background, a language, and method of social networking, the imagined community of such college-educated, politically active folks will feel more ingrained over time. And as this community continues to feel ever more natural — ever more fundamental — its effects on politics will become more important. Attacks on that culture will trigger ever more visceral responses; defending those cultural mores will feel ever more obligatory. Politics, in short, will feel ever more consuming for this imagined community. Compromise with the outsiders of the imagined community will feel ever more barbaric and unacceptable.
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Rose: I went cycling with my cycling buddy yesterday, which was fun! I haven’t gotten out of the flat too much (probably a good thing, given the lockdown), so it was nice to stretch my legs. We went south of the Thames and then walked along the river. It was a gorgeous day, and I also learned the colloquial (perhaps one might say vernacular) names of some of the City of London skyscrapers: “The Gherkin,” “The Walkie-Talkie,” and “The Cheesegrater.” See if you can identify the buildings on the picture of the City skyscrapers.
Bud: I’ve been thinking about dissertation topics recently, and while writing applications for my program next year, it hit me that I should go back to some of my roots and write about voting rights. So I have a dissertation idea to study enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which seems so much more fun and fulfilling than my next best contender (a study of regulatory independence and how executive informal interpretations of law can shape formal independent regulatory agencies’ separation from the central government — bored yet?). I’ll be calling one of the folks from the Voting Section to ask him about it this week; I’m very excited.
Thorn: I’ve been sleeping very poorly recently, so I’ve been very tired this week. Alas, I hope to get on a better schedule soon.
Gratitude: This last week was my first week of classes, and I was very moved by how hard my professors are trying to make online teaching work. I kind of imagined LSE would be like the stereotypical R1 university, where professors care much more about research than teaching. And though it’s clear that most of the LSE professors are insane researchers — so many “pubs,” as they say — they also really are trying to be good teachers. I’m grateful for their dedication.
Future Topics:
* I think I will want to write about the dissertation idea once it gets more settled.