“The prime problem of our nation,” explained Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 Osawatomie, Kansas, speech on economic nationalism, “is to get the right type of good citizenship.” It still is. Working people want to pledge their allegiance to a country that will reciprocate with a pledge of allegiance to them. That is the lesson of Trump. A vision of the nation matters.
While many on the cosmopolitan left find visions of national anything maudlin—if not downright politically dangerous—the nation-state has long been the main place of redress and identity for most working people. It will continue to be so into the foreseeable future. And if a progressive nationalism—both social and economic—cannot be created, then progressive victories will probably only be short-lived.
The obstacles to such a progressive nationalism begin with the unsubtle and exhausting debate between class and identity politics, a debate in which progressives seem to affirm their frustrating capacity to eat each other alive. After the Trump election, Mark Lilla threw the latest fireball at the divisiveness of identity politics—that is, the building of political positions based on racial, gender, and sexual identities. It is a “largely expressive, not persuasive” form of politics, Lilla argued; one that fixates on the narcissism of difference. It creates a circular firing squad, rather than a collective agenda.
Like many others who have made similar arguments before, Lilla faced a storm of criticism, much of which merely expressed the obvious: systemic, state-sponsored discrimination based on racial, gender, and cultural categories still thrives in this country. And we have an unholy amount of dismantling to get through before we can begin to talk about a post–identity politics agenda. Both critiques are correct in their analyses and wrong in their politics.
Those, like Lilla, who posit the New Deal and postwar era as an antediluvian time of “pre–identity politics,” when collective economic interests could reign supreme, miss some important and troubling history. The problem is, identity and class do not make up a tidy binary.
The most divisive and tribal issues in American politics today—race, immigration, sexual identity, and the culture wars—functioned completely differently in the postwar era than they did before the war or after the 1960s. The New Deal excluded protections for predominantly African American occupations, such as agriculture and service work, keeping such laborers outside of social security, collective bargaining, and fair labor standards, in order to preserve the unholy alliance with Southern Democrats that Northern progressives needed to pass their cherished reforms.