According to John Mearsheimer, liberalism has been the defining ideology of the Western political orthodoxy for at least the last eighty years. While it is true that various political ideologies are represented by different parties, both sides generally agree on the core tenets of liberalism. This can be seen clearly in the United States. The Republican Party cares deeply about individual rights, and for Republicans the purpose of the state is to ensure that these rights are not infringed upon. The Democratic Party similarly believes in individual rights, but often understands these rights more expansively. Democrats tend to believe that the state must engage in significant social engineering to secure these rights. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party represent two different kinds of liberalism, but they are liberal all the same.

Another important ideology is nationalism. Nationalism does not have the same widespread appeal and support as liberalism. This is understandable; the events of the First and Second World Wars have shown that unchecked or excessive nationalism can lead to deadly consequences. However, nationalism does have a time and a place. The advent of liberalism has surely contributed to increased quality of life and expanded human rights in many regions, yet it seems to me that the success of liberalism would not have been possible without the presence of nationalism. Neglecting the importance of nationalism appears to be a mistake among Western countries. In this essay, I will show that nationalism was crucial for the success of liberalism, and that abandoning nationalism altogether is a mistake for America.

In the modern world, the most common political institution is the state. In fact, states are the only significant political institutions that operate today. While this may not seem remarkable now, for most of human history this was not the case. The prevailing political institutions throughout much of history were, as former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson states, “diverse, dislocated, and disjointed.” The kind of centralized authority that characterizes the modern state was largely absent until around the 1500s in Europe. Before that time, typical political structures included city-states, empires, tribes, and feudal monarchies.

However, after about 1500 AD, a new political institution emerged: the state. According to John Mearsheimer, the state is “a political institution that controls a large territory with well-defined borders and has the ability to employ force to break or discipline the individuals and groups living within those borders.” He adds that “decision making is centralized in a state,” and that “the central administration controls the lawful tools of violence.” The earliest states were generally dynastic states. A state possesses sovereignty, and in dynastic states this sovereignty was, as Mearsheimer notes, “vested in the crown.” Decisions were made by and for the benefit of the monarchy and royal family.

This differs greatly from the nation-state, which began to develop around the 1700s. Around this time, nations — groups of people with shared ancestry, culture, language, and history — began desiring their own states because doing so increased their chances of survival. A nation-state might still take the form of a monarchy, but it is fundamentally different from a dynastic state because the supreme authority ultimately rests with the people. This may not always be literally true, but in a monarchical nation-state the monarch’s role is primarily to serve the people. In this way, the people of a state became the true holders of influence and power.

As nations began forming nation-states, there arose a strong incentive to homogenize culture and strengthen national identity within the nation state. This is where nationalism comes in. States understand that nationalism is crucial to survival. In the international community, disputes are inevitable, and a sense of nationalism is essential for motivating the population to willingly go to war if necessary. The state may promote nationalism by exaggerating aspects of its history or through systematic public education.

These nation-states, especially after the Second World War, adopted liberalism. However, liberalism can only operate within a sovereign nation with a particular culture. Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka writes that “the freedom which liberals demand for individuals is not primarily the freedom to go beyond one’s language and history, but rather the freedom to move around within one’s societal culture, to distance oneself from particular cultural roles, to choose which features of the culture are most worth developing and which are without value.” In other words, liberalism was never about transcending one’s own culture; it is about having the freedom to modify and enrich one’s own culture.

Some may point to the United States as evidence of a liberal country without a cohesive national identity. However, American nationalism was once a deeply powerful force. British historian David Armitage notes that the Declaration of Independence actually emphasized the idea of sovereignty more than the idea of individual rights. The founding generation argued that they had a right to break from England because they were fundamentally their own people — their own nation. The founding of the United States is therefore inseparable from American nationalism.

It may seem surprising today that the basis of America’s founding was so connected to the identity of Americans as one people. Today, it is hard to identify a single culture as distinctly American. It is important to note that “people” and “culture” do not mean a particular race or ethnicity. A multi-ethnic population can still have a cohesive culture and be one people. However, it is clear that America today lacks a coherent cultural identity. Americans are not one people anymore.

I argue that this has had, and will continue to have, negative consequences for America. One example is the recent difficulty in recruiting soldiers. Young men in the Vietnam War were famously resistant to fighting for the United States. This hesitance seems partly due to the fact that the United States no longer represented a particular people or culture. Some would argue that liberalism itself is enough to create cohesion — that liberalism is, in its own way, a culture. This is false. While the liberal tradition is an important part of American identity, the United States has (or had) a set of valuable practices, beliefs, and traditions that were independent of liberalism.

America needs to reclaim its cohesiveness and unite as one people. If it does not, it seems unlikely that the liberal tradition alone will be enough to hold the country together. Liberalism cannot replace a cohesive culture composed of common beliefs and traditions. It is no surprise that as American nationalism has declined, the country has become more divided than at almost any point in its history, aside from the Civil War — which itself can be understood as resulting from a lack of common culture. America needs to find a way to embrace nationalism, not in an excessive or reckless form, but in a healthy way that unites people and allows them to enjoy the benefits of living in a liberal society.

Much inspiration was taken from The Great Delusion by John Mearsheimer.