In the old fashioned understanding of marriage, marriage was a covenant. Once married, you could not escape except sometimes in the case of extreme behavior by your spouse. You simply had to go on, loathing and hating your partner, ad infinitum. I think this provides a good analogy for understanding the Nation: you are stuck with all these people, and admit it, you despise them, you detest them, I don't care who you are. You just wish they would go away, disappear, move somewhere else! Take your yoga pants or your pick-up truck and leave!
In order to make it work, there has to be some measure of love. Perhaps not very much, but enough to cooperate enough not to attempt to kill each other off. Moreover, there is the fantasy of escape, of ditching this other person and retreating to some dessert island with someone who really understood you. This is the fantasy of the revolutionary, to exclude and negate all the stupid people, and just leave the territory to US. Unlike a real divorce, however, national separations do not usually result in a stable blended family system. After all, if you partition the country, the stupid people you hate are still there, right over your border, interfering with your sovereignty. To really to be free, you need to eliminate your enemies.
Revolution is erotic, both in its fantasy of the unitary New Order, and in its bloody campaign against the Other, whether you are butchering minority groups or capitalists. It is also--if not dysfunctional--then the extraordinary, the miraculous, the Founding. This blog is not intended to be revolutionary, although it is not afraid to stray into such topics. But I am more interested in the question of how we can get along after the honeymoon ends, because that is a more practical question, and it relates to the civic nationalism question.
Love can be both a sensation and a mode of action. Love in the second sense, love in the sense of embodied duty, is the manner of love I am interested in. In order to preserve as a Nation, we have to not only love each other, but we have to love something above each other, that is the National Order. This love is manifest in our collective submission to our common laws. This is the duty of the patriot, above and beyond waving flags, or wearing patriotic clothing accessories. In fact, you could say that the true measure of patriotism can be found in obedience to the laws. I am not, of course, ruling out the possibility of civil disobedience, those rare instances when a citizen violates the law on the basis of conscience, based on submission to a higher moral law from a higher Legislator. However, civil disobedience must be based on morality, should be conducted in an orderly fashion, and the citizen must accept their punishment by the State as just. Otherwise, you are merely a contemptible outlaw.
It is, of course, lawlessness which is characteristic of the revolutionary. The revolutionary incites lawlessness and celebrates lawlessness. After all, we have to kill off, subdue, enslave our rivals and create a new system of law and order. Of course, after the murdering and the looting is over, and the regime is in place, the revolutionary changes the narrative. Disorder is now counter-revolutionary sedition against the state, and the purges begin! In order to incite revolution, the rhetoric of the revolutionary is generally rooted in egalitarianism and division: we should all be equal, we should all get the same slice of cake, and look at how much that s.o.b. took off the dinner cart! But one can be--skeptical--of strict egalitarianism and still be unimpressed with someone pigging out. To each according to their measure leaves plenty of ambiguity to be sorted out through politics.
I do not like egalitarian rhetoric because it ignores the whole, the community, it only considers each individual, rather than the contributions of each individual to the entire collective endeavor. I do not like libertarian rhetoric either, because it also ignores the whole, the community, which consists of both shared values and a shared way of life, and which supersedes the market order. Our shared values and aspirations give rise to the sense that the social order is fair, not the fact that shovels are selling for fifteen dollars at the grocery store. After all, wages in our labor market are a reflection of trade policy, unionization levels, immigration, taxation schemes, etc. etc. These are all the partial result of decisions made by political decision-makers. Just because our decision-makers want to pursue a deep economic integration with third world countries, so our workers are increasingly getting third world wages, doesn't mean that our system is fair. Fairness is something people know in their guts, and if the order gets too skewed toward one party, political indigestion will start to flare up.
America today is in a bad marriage, and I am fine with that, I don't want a divorce. On the other hand, it is high time we started exploring if we can do things a little differently. Not exactly a revolution, but a New Deal. . .
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