Blood and Soil

What does it mean to be American?

I just finished reading Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake. It was the second most profound experience I’ve ever had reading a novel, the first one being The Road, which I happened to read immediately before it. (Kingsnorth’s Alexandria, the third in the trilogy that begins with The Wake, is also pretty high up there.)

The Wake takes place in eleventh century England, at the time of the Norman conquest of the hitherto Anglo-Saxon country. It’s the story of an apocalypse. Society has collapsed under the brutal violence of the invasion. Once sedentary people have been driven into the wilderness, turned into nomads. A guerrilla insurgency arises against the French. The main character, a man who was already resentful of the cultural changes brought by Christianity, is driven by the disintegration of traditional society into an obsessive and violent embrace of the old, pagan ways.

The story is about what the story is about — I wouldn’t pretend or wish it to be an allegory for anything else. But by sheer coincidence, it did bring to mind certain broad themes and discontents that are swirling around in the current right-wing American political zeitgeist: nationalism, dogmatic traditionalism, and the sense of a lost collective heritage.

I’m not steeped in “New Right” philosophy. I’ve never bothered to read Curtis Yarvin or Adrian Vermeule or Patrick Deneen. I couldn’t explain to you the differences between National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism, other than one being more religious than the other. So I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the intellectual debates within the broader MAGA universe.

But you don’t have to be James Pogue to know that for years, the right has become increasingly characterized by a deep distrust of modernity and a yearning for what one might call the authenticity of traditional folkways. In one sense, that’s nothing new — since the time of Edmund Burke, being a conservative has always meant being resistant to rapid, radical change and protective of the timeworn institutions of the past. But in its contemporary manifestation, the sentiment is deeper than the “back in my day” chauvinism that comes naturally with age and economic security. The contemporary right’s nostalgia and its rejection of the modern human condition is more spiritual than that; it’s almost mystical. It appeals to the young even more than to the old. And the impulse feels less reactionary than revolutionary — a mobilizing vision that appeals not to mere political or economic self-interest, but to a pervasive hunger for new meaning in life. Like all revolutions, it seeks to wipe away the profane, fallen world we have inherited so as to resurrect a purer one that was lost to the corruption of some earlier time. This is not the conservatism of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan, or Paul Ryan. Underpinning it is an alienation that should not be mistaken for the mere antagonism to changing norms that characterized those earlier iterations.

I saw it first with the “Alt Right,” about whom I have directed both a short and a feature documentary. By invoking that ignominious label, I don’t mean to smear MAGA or the New Right with its white nationalist associations. The American conservative movement is as riven with factionalism and ideological rivalries as the left is; I have reported closely on the sectarian divisions and infighting even within the narrow spectrum of the far right. Much of the New Right rejects racial essentialism as much as it does multiculturalism, and, likewise, in its prime, the Alt Right loudly disavowed the non-racialist right, whom it derided as “the Alt Light."

But just as leftists as disparate as communists and neoliberal technocrats are bound by a broadly shared disapproval of structural inequality and faith in enlightened social engineering, there are common variables that have catalyzed very different — and often mutually antagonistic — political movements on the right. In the case of the Alt Right, the catalyst was a sense that modern consumer capitalism had corroded the ancient social ties that bound men to men, cheapening human existence. To Richard Spencer and his ilk, racial solidarity was the most elemental form of human connection and the remedy to the anomie of modernity. This isn’t my interpretation; I’ve heard them say this explicitly — I even have video of it. Their answer to the problem was genocidal, not to mention nonsensical, as race itself is a modern construction, unknown to the primeval societies the Alt Right projected it upon. But the problem of our alienation from one another is a real one, and not just for the right. It has historically concerned many leftist movements, from revolutionary socialists to back-to-the-land hippies. And it is today informing much of the conservative reaction to the modern world.

America is not being invaded by a conquering army. Our towns and cities are not being massacred and pillaged and burned. But, like the Anglo-Saxons of eleventh century England, we are a proud society experiencing the dislocations and humiliations of national decline. That decline is reflected in our dwindling literacy rates, the erosion of our nuclear families, the offshoring of our industrial base, our growing street addiction crisis, and a dozen other indices. Our extended families are dispersed, our neighborhoods are atomized, our trust in one another has dwindled, and in place of the community that once coalesced out of our sharing of physical space and time, we have the predatory, ersatz virtuality of social media. We see our old civil society and sense of national community crumbling around us, and like Kingsnorth’s protagonist, some are reacting to it by embracing a mythical heritage that promises to bind us closer to each other by drawing a clear line between those who belong to our nation and those who lie outside of it. It’s a kind of existential nationalism.

The most obvious example of this tendency is nativism, but it’s not the only one. Another is the growing conviction within the conservative movement that America is not merely an “idea,” but, like France or Japan or Denmark, a nation with a common heritage, history, culture, and language. I’ll get into whether that conviction is right or wrong, but what’s revealing is the growing cultural hunger for it in twenty-first century America. In an earlier era, this kind of backward-looking national self-conception wasn’t very American at all. It was a relic of the Old World, at home in Europe but anachronistic in the emerging United States.

The old European societies that the colonists of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries left behind were, in the main, nascent modern nation-states, but ones that were burdened with the dead weight of their feudal pasts. The social structure of the feudal system had persisted for a millennium before Europeans landed on the shores of the American continents. It didn’t just vanish when the political and economic conditions in Europe that favored its perpetuation evolved beyond them. This was especially the case in the main source of colonial settlement, England.

The feudal social order was comprised of long, vertical chains of mutual loyalty and obligation that bound the peasant, on the very bottom rung, with the king at the top of it, with many intermediate layers in between. The arrangement was unmistakably hierarchical, but it would be a mistake to regard it as purely one of domination and subjection. The lord, to be sure, exploited the peasant, both for his agricultural produce and his military service, but he also owed him physical security and was obliged to recognize his traditional rights, such as the right to use common fields and pastures. The lord, in turn, was the vassal to his own, greater lord, but his loyalty, too, came with the guarantee of certain rights and commitments owed to him by his master. These reciprocal obligations weren’t mere formalities. When duties went unfulfilled, they could result in shifts of allegiance, which could, in turn, precipitate wars or peasant uprisings. The social scaffolding was brittle. A precarious social order of changing loyalties and violent contests for power was inherently prone to balkanization and resistant to centralized authority.

The feudal ties of loyalty and obligation were the consequence, in a sense, of the absence of the centralized authority of the nation-state. They were the makeshift “order” that organically emerged from the anarchy of a vast territory governed by competing warlords. As nation-states formed in Europe for reasons I’ll leave to another essay, these feudal structures lost their political function. But that didn’t mean they evaporated. Where social revolutions failed to wipe them away, they remained stubbornly intact as a vestigial social class system. A useless aristocracy lingered within a modern, capitalist system that no longer needed it, retaining some of its hereditary rights and privileges while providing no service to anyone in return.

Migration to the American colonies offered discontented Europeans a fresh start. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy — the inheritors of the status of the peasantry — eagerly exploited it, but so did some prosperous members of the bourgeoisie, and even some members of the lesser gentry. In North America, prior to the industrial age, they found themselves on more or less equal footing — by European standards, at least — especially in the flattened social landscapes of bourgeois New England and the provincial Appalachian backcountry, but also even amidst the aristocratic pretenses of the Tidewater colonies. Foreign visitors to the colonies were taken aback by the lack of deference in social relations between what in Europe would have been members of unbridgeable social classes. Even indentured servants could eventually find their way to prosperity and respectability, if they could survive their tenures in bondage. Only African slaves were condemned to permanent subjugation, and Indians to perpetual outsider status.

Nowhere was this social leveling more apparent than on the frontier. In the eastern cities, with their luxury commodities and specialized divisions of labor, the social classes of Europe gradually re-appeared, at least superficially, and later, industrialization would create an entrenched urban proletariat and a capitalist nobility. By contrast, on the frontier, where the son of a lord and the son of a peasant were for the most part equal in their frailty before the privations of the wilderness, a prestigious family lineage may have earned a pioneer a respectful nod from a neighbor but little more. And as the frontier moved ever westward and the distant memory of one’s ancient European ancestry faded from one generation to the next, this rough sense of equality became more and more a character of the expanding American nation. The “rugged individualism” of the frontier meant this, if nothing else.

From the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, that culture of casual egalitarianism was coupled with an increasing centralization of power in the federal government. We became bound together within what was increasingly emerging as a clearly unitary nation-state. These two factors together made fertile ground for the rooting of a common identity as citizen before all other competing claims on one’s self-conception: class, ethnic origin, colonial allegiance, family title, etc. Whatever other social status we could claim for ourselves was, in the eyes of other Americans, an abstraction from another continent that we had left behind generations ago. We were Americans because we didn’t define ourselves that way.

As the U.S. evolved into a global superpower, the esteem attached to our common status as American citizens rose like the value of a Fortune 500 stock. But that era is now over, and the stock has plummeted. In the twenty-first century, it’s no longer quite so special to be an American. Mere common legal membership within a polity that was once but is no longer exceptional in the world is too weak a source for national pride. We must now invent new foundations upon which to base our nationalism, so we have turned to the old mythologies: ethnicity, heritage, historical ancestry. This is the baggage the pioneers shed from their feudal European pasts; it was their very absence that once defined us as Americans. Now they’re back again as siren songs to the American right.

The left has offered nothing but sectarian identity politics and the antiquated class consciousness of a prior industrial era to contest the return of these ancestral forms of nationalism. These tired ideologies can’t address the problem of our alienation from one another because they’re categories of division, not multiplication. Their entire purpose is to mobilize constituencies to struggle for advancement against other constituencies. These are useful tools for political warfare but they do little to address our spiritual yearning for a new basis upon which to renew our flagging social solidarity. Indeed, they only aggravate it. They are anti-nationalist identities at a moment that demands a new sense of national selfhood.

At the dawn of this new “Golden Age,” it’s unclear what, beyond physically sharing a geographical territory and existing under a common federal bureaucracy, binds us together as Americans. It’s only clear what divides us. We are becoming a country that is no longer a nation. The MAGA movement and the New Right have only wrong answers to it, but at least they’re asking the question.