March 26, 2020 57
us are, in her view, living with a nation-
alist self-consciousness, even if it does
not become obtrusive for much of the
time—until Donald Trump declares, “I
am a nationalist,” for instance, or the
British Conservative Party sells out to
the nationalists of Nigel Farage’s Brexit
Party.
But many readers will ask whether
there are good forms of nationalism as
well as some obviously disastrous kinds.
Both Etzioni and Tamir address this
question directly. They adopt differ-
ent terminologies, but in most respects
they are singing from the same hymn
sheet. He defends “patriotism,” she
defends “nationalism,” but their com-
munitarian premises are identical, and
so are many of their conclusions. Both
focus primarily on the United States,
especially when they are lamenting
contemporary political divisions.
Etzioni takes as his epigraph a suc-
cinct account of the difference between
patriotism and nationalism offered by
no less an authority than Charles de
Gaulle: “Patriotism is when love of
your country comes first; nationalism,
when hate for people other than your
own comes first.” Etzioni does not en-
tirely accept this. He thinks there can
be “good nationalism,” which is what
patriotism is in his account. A nation,
he claims, is a community invested in
a state. The right kind of communitar-
ian sentiment and behavior amounts to
good nationalism or patriotism. The
necessary intellectual work is there-
fore a matter of specifying what those
right sentiments and behaviors are, and
who belongs to which community. Be-
fore unveiling his answer, which will
surprise nobody who has read any of
Etzioni’s work over the past two de-
cades, he writes about “the patriotic
movement” rather as if it were already
in existence and a competitor to such
movements as the Tea Party in the US.
Indeed, he provides it with a mani-
festo of sorts:
The Patriotic Movement is seeking
to promote national unity and the
common good. As patriots, we love
our country. We are not blind to its
flaws but we refuse to allow these
to define who we are, as we dedi-
cate ourselves to work for a “more
perfect union.”Among his suggestions for promoting
civic loyalty in the young are improved
civics courses in schools and a year of na-
tional service, the latter being “initially”
voluntary, but “encouraged by colleges
and employers according special rec-
ognition to those who served, akin—
but not equivalent—to the recognition
awarded to veterans.” Unkind readers
may think this falls foul of Marx’s ob-
jection to writing cookbooks for the
bakeries of utopia, but that is too harsh.
Like many commentators, Etzioni is
distressed by the degree of partisanship
that has affected not only American
political parties but American society
at large. The sort of indicator he has in
m i nd is the reluctance of many people to
make friends across the political divide,
let alone to marry someone of different
political allegiances. In his gloomier
moments, Etzioni worries that “polar-
ization cuts much deeper than political
disagreements.” Much disagreement is
readily absorbed; it is what Etzioni calls
disagreement about secondary values
rather than the primary values on which
the legitimacy of social and political
arrangements rests. Where disagree-
ments extend to the fundamentals,
democracy is in danger. The picture is
simple enough. Where disagreements
are minor, they can be resolved by ref-
erence to more basic values; where the
disagreement is about those basic val-
ues themselves, there can by definition
be no appeal to a still-deeper level.
It’s not clear which issues belong in
which category, but Etzioni’s interest
is in what he calls “shared moral un-
derstandings,” or SMUs; these change
relatively slowly, and where all is well,
they change as a result of a national
conversations. One example of what
Etzioni has in mind is the transition
from an SMU that the “separate but
equal” standard set by Plessy v. Fergu-
son was fair to a new one represented
by Brown v. Board of Education. The
change from a consensus that mar-
riage is essentially between a man and
a woman to an acceptance of gay mar-
riage is another example. Reclaiming
Patriotism is intended as a contribution
to the kind of conversation that Etzioni
has in mind.One obvious question is why the
United States, perhaps not uniquely
but certainly most unmistakably, has
become so polarized. Etzioni points
to the people he calls “globalists,” or
the globalist elite. Globalists believe
in free trade, immigration, and uni-
versal human rights. None of these is
intrinsically bad, but if they are over-
emphasized, they lead to a neglect of
people’s parochial ties, and to social
and economic policies that undermine
the communities that give people’s
lives meaning. Etzioni rehearses the
familiar communitarian insistence that
self-proclaimed citizens of the world
are citizens of nowhere, and that the
most satisfied people are those with the
strongest ties to family, friends, and a
local community. The danger of paro-
chial loyalties, of course, is that they
may be based on appalling values—
racist, homophobic, xenophobic—and
may be at odds with a devotion to the
wider community, the nation itself.
As this suggests, what Etzioni is after
is a form of patriotism that respects in-
dividual rights, without those rights act-
ing as trump cards when they come into
conflict with the public interest. Small
infringements of rights for a greater
good are acceptable, even though there
is no simple way to measure when the
infringement is small enough or the
greater good great enough. Equally,
there will be many cases of a conflict of
rights in which it is unclear whose are
to prevail. Etzioni mentions the Colo-
rado case of Masterpiece Cakeshop,
in which the bakery’s right not to be
coerced into making a cake bearing a
message in support of gay marriage was
eventually upheld. In his view, this rep-
resented a fair compromise between
the plaintiffs’ right to receive service
and the baker’s right not to have deep
moral convictions trodden on. Dissent-
ers might think that such compromises
tend to work in favor of the bigoted,
and that progress inevitably involves
deeply held beliefs being overridden,
and painfully for the losing side.
A nation-state is a community of
communities; an obvious question is
whether a supranational community of
national communities is a feasible am-
bition. Here is where Etzioni’s taste for
compromise meets his search for “goodnationalism.” He agrees that there are
problems that require supra national
arrangements, though he is vague about
what they are, but he is skeptical about
institutions such as the European
Union that hope to encourage a pan-
European identity among their citizens
yet fail to take any steps to achieve that.
Instead, the EU tried to achieve unity
by directives from Brussels that only
got people’s backs up and inspired a
bloody-minded nationalism. He is per-
haps overly skeptical; even in Poland,
which boasts a thoroughly nationalist,
conservative government, there is 70
percent approval of the EU. Britain re-
ally is the outlier.
The one instance in which Etzioni’s
conciliatory mode of proceeding is
notably absent is his hostility to pres-
sure groups. Current laws in the US
define bribery very narrowly; unless a
quid pro quo is explicitly mentioned,
no bribery has taken place. A lobbyist
can tell a member of Congress that his
organization or industry has just made
a campaign contribution and that it is
thinking of tripling it after an upcom-
ing vote. None of this counts as bribery
under existing law, but Etzioni is surely
right that we are faced with “what is, in
effect, widespread, systematic legalized
bribery.” He is equally right that de-
mocracy, functional government, and
the pursuit of the common good re-
quire “curbing the ways private money
flows into the hands of public officials.”
Reclaiming Patriotism induces mixed
feelings, but these are largely the mixed
feelings that liberal communitarian-
ism always induces. There is a tension
intrinsic to it between individual rights
and communal values that Etzioni
skirts. Many, if not most, communi-
tarians begin from the position that
liberals—rarely defined, but assumed
to include admirers of John Rawls and
A Theory of Justice—have a mistaken
view of human nature and thus of what
matters to us. Liberals, they argue, as-
sume a degree of individualism almost
indistinguishable from selfishness, and
a degree of self-sufficiency at odds with
what we know about our dependency
on social ties. In the communitarian
view, liberalism places far too much
emphasis on individual rights, espe-
cially when such an emphasis erodes a
sense of social responsibility.Why Nationalism is, curiously, less
inhibited in its critique of (a loosely
defined) liberalism. “Curiously” be-
cause Tamir’s book wants to defend
liberal nationalism and is dedicated to
the memory of Isaiah Berlin, thought
by many of his admirers to be the
model of a liberal thinker. Berlin was
certainly a Zionist of a nonaggressive
kind, committed to the view that Jews
needed a homeland, a place they could
call their own without having to assimi-
late or make humiliating compromises
with their gentile rulers. It is clear
that he would not have called himself
a nationalist in any sense comparable
to Menachem Begin or Benjamin Ne-
tanyahu. Berlin owed allegiance to the
eighteenth-century German philoso-
pher Johann Gottfried Herder, whose
“nationalism,” such as it was, was an
insistence on the importance to each
of us of our native culture. Unlike later
nationalists, Herder had no expansive
ambitions. Each culture had its own
values and its own reasons for existing,
special to itself and not universal.Tamir’s approach is simple. The
enemy is complacent liberalism, by
which she does not mean the liberalism
espoused by John Stuart M ill or Berlin,
but the worldview of a globalist elite.
She is, unsurprisingly, an admirer of
Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the
Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
(1995), an assault on those who live in
gated communities and feel an alle-
giance only to their upper-class peers,
not to their fellow citizens. The suc-
cess of globalist liberalism has led to a
weakening of the sense of common fate
that the nation-state needs for success.
Those who are left out have not pressed
for socially inclusive policies but rather
taken refuge in a sentimental attach-
ment to an image of a lost heritage.
If gated communities are a bad thing,
gated nation-states are not. In a pas-
sionate defense of borders, Tamir in-
sists that the geographical reach of the
nation-state is not accidental. In order
to achieve the solidarity on which the
effectiveness and coherence of the
nation- state depend, there must be a
way of distinguishing who counts as
“we” and who does not. Borders, how-
ever, serve two purposes: they keep
foreigners out, but they also corral a
population. Tamir bites the bullet:While liberal conceptions of mem-
bership are grounded in volun-
tarism, national conceptions of
membership rely on history and
fate. Individuals are assumed to
be born into a nation rather than
choose to belong to it. This is not a
minor difference.What happens when two different
groups think their history and fate en-
title them to the same territory, or to
redraw boundaries in very different
ways, she does not here explore.
Liberal sensibilities are outraged that
nationalism makes our fates a matter of
the pure luck of where we happen to be
born. The liberal view may suggest that
in an ideal world, we could all settle
wherever we chose, but Tamir points
out that free movement across borders
is much less common than Europeans
accustomed to the EU’s rules about
free movement tend to think—aside
from the obvious point that uprooting
ourselves is neither financially nor psy-
chologically cost-free. Even countries
like Australia and Canada, known for
their generally liberal immigration
policies, accept immigrants according
to the likelihood of their settling in and
becoming productive members of soci-
ety. In Canada, less than a fifth of im-
migrants are refugees.
The difficulty for both Tamir and
Etzioni is that nationalism in prac-
tice, both in the United States and in
Europe, has recently tended to be xe-
nophobic, illiberal, and a version of
the “ethnonationalism” described by
Greenfeld. Since both want a liberal
nationalism, one looks for a proposal
or two for securing it that has some
chance of success. Etzioni looks for
compromise between a rights-based
individualism and a communal search
for the common good, but it’s not ob-
vious that the enthusiasts for making
America great again have any inter-
est in the rights of anyone other than
themselves; the moral conversations
on which he relies seem all too likely
to become shouting matches. It is only
fair to acknowledge that he recognizes
this, but then we are left with nothing