Nation v. Republic

For he might have been a Roosian,  A French, or Turk, or Proosian,  Or perhaps Itali-an!

All.

Or perhaps Itali-an!

Boatswain.

But in spite of all temptations  To belong to other nations,  He remains an Englishman!  He remains an Englishman!

 — Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

         My headnote from W. S. Gilbert's 1878 Pinafore lyrics includes a joke that some 20^th-century Americans missed, and some 21^st-century Americans might still miss.

         About 1599, in his Henry V, Shakespeare shows a British army in France with captains who are Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and English and who talk of those designations as their nations. Things hadn't changed much that way by the Victorian era in the 19^th century, nor with the mother of a friend of mine who corrected people who thought she was English by telling them she was Welsh. Nor during the run-up to Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, when I saw a Union Jack only at a touristy place in the somewhat-United Kingdom and otherwise saw only the flags of the nations, especially, where I was, the English cross of St. George and the Scots cross of St. Andrew.

         The United Kingdom has one monarch, one flag of union, and four nations. And that's just one country we Americans refer to loosely as "England."

         "Nation" in the old sense was your tribe writ large: your ethnos, your people, and it wasn't something you chose, and it wasn't something you could change. You were born a Russian, Turk, French, or Prussian — and a Prussian damn well wasn't a Bavarian — and that was who you were.

         In that sense, Japan is a nation, and France is, sort of: France was pieced together from different independent medieval fiefs, and some Basques of France are getting restless, which gets one to the issue of Spain and the Basques and Catalans. And digging down a bit one would get to Québécois in Canada and, a bit further, such sensitive issues as Armenians in Turkey in the early 20^th century and the ethnic issues behind "ethnic cleansing" in the late 20^th century.

         In this sense of nation as "tribe writ large," the phrase "a nation of immigrants" makes sense only if you do a very fine-grain analysis of the old tribes and note that many of the big ones in historical times really weren't all that "blood and soil" pure-bred but more like confederations and semi-open communities.

         The First Peoples in the Western Hemisphere are also called "the Indian nations," and that's a plural. When the White folk arrived, they came from different cultures in Europe, and, indeed, even just what we call "the English" — "Albion's Seed" — came in different groups even more local than the current four UK nations and contributed to what Colin Woodard identifies as the "Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" (American Nations, 2011).

         How we count those (North) American "nations" or see our histories — plural — and rivalries isn't crucial; the crucial point is that the USA has not been, is not now, and for a long time won't be, if ever, "one Nation, under God" (or atheist or pagan).

         And unless we exclude a whole lot of people, we're not "a White, Christian" — as in "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — nation. (That Christian vs. Catholic line is a quotation from a student of mine: a nice guy I had a talk with on, let's say, religious nomenclature.)

         What we are, I think and hope, is what's identified in the old story of Benjamin Franklin's exiting the final session of the Constitutional Convention to be confronted by a woman who asked, in my paraphrase, «Well, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us […]?", answered with, «A republic, madam, if you can keep it.»

         We are, I think and hope, a republic, with a "mixt constitution" combining a rather monarchical President with an aristocratic Senate and a relatively democratic House of Representatives — as the Founders mostly intended, combined with a robust judiciary to check the other branches, and a professional bureaucracy to get the whole ungainly apparatus to work for what has become a large country.

         And we have citizens: people loyal to the Constitution (as much as they understand it) and to ideals in what has been called a civic religion, celebrated most especially on the Fourth of July, the anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence, one basis of American ideals.

         The Republic, of course, is kind of abstract and intellectual, but, then, you can't touch or smell or literarily feel a nation. Corporations are "fictive persons," but they exist, and money is just paper — or electrons in motion nowadays — backed up by convention and imagination and faith. The Nation also is a matter of symbols, rituals, origin myths, and stories, and in a better world than this one would be a safe and easy way to get emotional commitment to the State.

         In the world we actually have, the Nation gets emotional attachment much too easily, leading far too often to almost idolatrous attachment to symbols and a warm and fuzzy feeling of absorption into the tribe.

         Screw that. Or screw the extremes of "that": the xenophobic chauvinism summed up in Mel Brooks's joke about the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-six!" Screw unthinking infatuation with our little tribes, with us.

         What we need instead is a mature love for the homeland we were born into or have adopted, a firm patriotism for the American Republic as an ideal and a hope for human dignity. The Republic as a great experiment in self-rule, what Abraham Lincoln called "the last best hope of earth" if we can maintain our Union and expand freedom. We can strive for a nation embodied in a Republic worthy of our love and even that "last full measure of devotion" for the ideal celebrated by Lincoln: the poet of the Republic as "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" — which God forbid should ever be replaced by the low appeal of just another arrogant, self-absorbed band of nationalists deluded by the myths of blood, soil, and ethnic purity.

Defining "American"

            In a letter to the editor of The Ventura County Star for February 15, 2017, Ray Sobrino Jr. of Newbury Park, CA, ended with the admonishment to "remember we are all Americans in the end." I won't argue with the letter or even the sentiment of this clause, but I will reword it to, "we are all Americans if you pull back and take a long-distance view of ourselves" — because close up we see important differences.

            One set of differences is political, and nowadays that's pretty obvious with continuing support for Donald Trump from most of the 46.1% of voters who votedfor him and continuing opposition from many of the 48.2% who voted for Hillary Clinton — and at least some of the nearly 6% of the electorate who voted for someone else and the large number of people who just didn't vote. 

            More important, there are deep and long-stand differences you can analyze in many ways, but my current favorite is Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2014) and the idea that there is no single American nation but either none or up to eleven, depending on how you define "nation."

            Most of us on the territory of the United States are citizens of the American Republic, and we mostly agree on loyalty to the Republic. What holds us together is our agreeing to argue over what the Republic should be, who should be members, and what sort of society we should try to build.

            "We are all Americans" — and then we fight over what that should mean.

Government Dysfunction and The Federated Nations of America (28 Dec. 2013)

 Both difference and similarity are in the eye of the beholder;

it depends only on how long and how deep he cares to look. 

— Rich Erlich .ca. 1963

      In Ursula K. Le Guin's ambiguous utopia The Dispossessed (1974; ch. 6) and in her 1994 story "Solitude," we get the idea that "a planet looks smooth," to the naked eye "from orbit," and elegantly simple. The closer you get, though, the rougher the surface appears, and more complex. There's a similar idea in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), where we have various views of different levels of the ocean. Looking down from the ship's deck at the ocean surface, you might see "vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat" (ch. 58). If you contemplate the ocean from the masthead, however, and go into a Transcendental reverie and fall into the water, you'll drown (ch. 35), or if you fall in from the deck while looking down at a whale carcass, you might not have a chance to drown but get more gorily dead, torn apart by sharks (ch. 66). Or if you become a "Castaway" and look into the depths long enough and deeply enough, you might see "God's foot upon the treadle of the loom" and speak it, and be called — and be — mad (ch. 93)>. Or, in the deepest depths, you might see whales making love, or "the nursing mothers of the whales" (ch. 87).

      The point is not that planets are really smooth or rough, or that the nature of the ocean, or universe, is beautiful or malign. One crucial point for both Le Guin and Melville (among other points) isn't that any of these views are wrong but that all are incomplete.
      I've been thinking about such matters listening again to Colin Woodard's 2012 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, or at least the US, Canadian, and northern Mexican parts of North America (minus the southern tip of Florida, the figurative foreskin of North America, which is "Part of the Spanish Caribbean").

      From some place between the Moon and Mars, Earth to the naked human eye would look like one round ball, maybe a little flattened but smooth and unified and uniform. To the figurative eyes of a visitor from somewhere well beyond Mars, human culture might look like "Terran culture": a culture for all the humans on Earth. As I've joked, to a silicon-based life-form with a sensorium totally alien from ours, all us carbon-based creatures might _______ alike (where you fill in a word impossible for us to pronounce that designates a set of sense of which we cannot conceive) — and he/she/it, a truly alien Alien, might need a lot of practice to tell a human from a horse or hibiscus.

      Colin Woodard doesn't take a really close-up view of North American cultures, since really fine-grain analysis would show differences county to county in the USA — hell, differences among neighborhoods where I grew up! — nor does he back off so much that it might make sense to talk of "American Culture" or "Euro-American culture," much less "Terran."

      He is, however, working from a well-chosen distance, and one that yields results I find believable and, in a time of continuing culture conflict and governmental dysfunction, highly important and useful.

      I grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago and went to college in Champaign County in central Illinois, except for a year in upstate, quite rural New York State. I currently live in Ventura County, California, an area between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

      Chicago is a border city according to Woodard, in "Yankeedom" but just north of "The Midlands": i.e., on the border between the now secularized successors to the New England Calvinist Puritan Yankees and what you'll recognize as "Middle America." Going to the University of Illinois, I passed from very much the Land of Lincoln and mildly Leftist Democrats through modern moderate Republicans — not the postmodern radical variety — and into "Greater Appalachia": the University of Illinois was and remains a Yankee/Midlands enclave in the Bible Belt.

      At Cornell U in Ithaca, New York, I lived in a fraternity house with a number of Jews from New York City, with "the City," as New Yorkers called it, the heart of the geographically very small nation Woodard calls "New Netherland": a diverse, tolerant, and very commercial kind of place. Ithaca, New York, is another enclave, in Yankeedom, perhaps, but bordering on The Midlands and with a lot of big-city folk at the University. All around Ithaca and Cornell, though, is an area somewhat-local boy Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, summed up with a quote from one of his grammar school friends who'd shot a squirrel: "It had fur; I had a gun; end of story." Campaign County, Illinois, is farming country; Tomkins County, New York (home of Cornell U), though, is country country: really rural and in some places proudly redneck.

      When I returned to the U of I from Cornell, driving my new (for me) highly-used used car I bought from a Cornellian from the City, I had to get those — sorry, them — New York plates off fast, and when I went for car repairs I had to drop my Chicago accent and speak the way we did "Right cheer in Champaign cahnty" (and the spellings there are phonetically correct, or at least close).

      There are indeed three main North American subcultures in Illinois (Woodard's "nations"), and three or four in New York State, and I had to learn to move among them.

      In Ventura County, CA, things are equally complex.

      In California terms, I live in "south-central-coastal California," and that thoroughly pedantic phrase is necessary. Woodard has my area as part of "El Norte," which is northern Mexico and the southern tiers of California and Arizona, and, reasonably enough, much of New Mexico and Texas — with a substantial salient into Colorado. If I get on Amtrak's Coast Starlight and head north by train to see relatives in San José and friends in the Bay area, Greater Portland, and on up to Vancouver, BC — which I've done — I've hit and traveled through "The Left Coast," which needs no explanation. If I get in the car and head east from the Pacific coast, I'm very soon in "The Far West": Barry Goldwater territory for you older readers, cowboy country for everyone.

      Woodard's count may be wrong, and some of his borders may be off, but he's working from a useful "distance" in viewing the Federated Nations of America, USA division, and our neighbors and fellow-nationals in Canada and Mexico. (Hey, I feel more at home in Toronto, Ontario, part of "The Midlands" and a Great-Lakes City like Chicago, than I do in Charleston, South Carolina, part of the Deep South). And what Woodard and his predecessors in this field have to tell us is important.

      We are not "one nation under God" to start with because we are not a nation at all — not in the way Japan or Norway are nations — and also because saying that we are or are not exceptionally chosen by God is likely to start an argument among your fellow Americans.

      The United Kingdom has managed to muddle along for a good while now confederating at least three nations, four if count Northern Ireland — though where I grew up we most certainly did not — and there's no reason to think the American Federation will break up any time soon. The unpleasantness of the 1860's is not something most Americans want to repeat, however much some Deep South folk (and others) regret the Lost of Cause in resisting "The War of Northern Aggression" and might welcome a re-match: In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (2012), Matthew White gives the death toll of the Civil War as 620,000 military and 75,000 civilians (p. [299]), so a second go-round seems like bad policy.

      Short of a break-up, the American nations necessarily will need to live together, and such "peaceful coexistence" may require a convoluted strategy of Double Think where most of the time we pretend that we don't have a confrontation of subcultures working from very different world-views, assumptions, and premises — while at other times we acknowledge that many of our practical, mundane disagreements stem from serious differences, differences with deep roots in our histories, ethnographies, ideologies, and values.

      If the English, Scots, and Welsh can go a couple centuries without murdering one another in large numbers — and if the various varieties of French have long refrained from slitting each others' throats — we, too, we various American nations, may muddle through. Meanwhile, let's get moving again on significant reductions in nuclear armaments: much of the US military is Deep South and Appalachian, and if we're moving toward Civil War II, I'd prefer they didn't have nukes.