Editors' Note: The Propsect has invited several writers to respond to Mark Schmitt's cover story in our most recent issue. Our second contributor is Reihan Salam, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly, co author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream and the founder of the group blog The American Scene.
Mark Schmitt is a tremendously insightful thinker, and I found his recent essays on "Obama-ism and the future of the Democrats" and the thinness of John McCain's record as a reformer invaluable. But I'm afraid I don't fully buy Mark's latest essay on Republican identity politics. From what I can glean, he is saying the following:
Nationalism is ugly and unpalatable. What Schmitt calls "the politics of American-ness" is also known as nationalism, and he understands it as first and foremost an effort to deny the "American-ness" of vulnerable minorities, in particular minorities of conscience. There is no denying that, as Anatol Lieven among others have argued, American nationalism has at times taken on an ugly form. But the most prevalent form of American nationalism is a liberal or cultural nationalism, not a narrow ethnic nationalism.
Anti-nationalists believe, by definition, that nationalistic appeals are illegitimate, or at the very least distasteful. But anti-nationalists are few and far between in American politics. And indeed, though American nationalism has come to be associated with right-wing jingoism, there is a distinct undercurrent of nationalism in grassroots opposition to the Iraq War. It also goes without saying that nationalism is integral to the popularity of the hard-edged economic populism of Jim Webb and John Edwards, who vigorously oppose a different set of deracinated cosmopolitans, namely the transnational corporate elite.
When a party hits rock bottom, we see its true self. Now that the fig leafs of welfare, crime, and immigration have been taken off the table, and now that "global belligerence and eternal tax cuts" have lost their appeal, we see Republicans for what they are -- narrow nationalists.
But are welfare, crime, and immigration symbolic fig leafs? My sense is that the salience of these issues will likely increase. Welfare, crime, and immigration are, as we all know (or should know), deeply intertwined with inequality, poverty, and the fate of our cities. The mere fact that crime has sharply decreased since the early 1990s doesn't mean we don't have a crime problem, as Robert Gordon argued in The New Republic a few weeks back. Welfare has been "reformed," yet millions of Americans remain trapped in low-wage work. As Douglas Besharov and Harry Holzer and others have been arguing for years, more reforms are necessary, particularly reforms aimed at men and ex-offenders. As for immigration, well, it has a powerful and direct impact on wage dispersion, on human capital policies, and, of course, on our shared quality of life.
