The Case for American Nationalism

The Case for American Nationalism

Apr 28, 2014 02:00 am | Michael Lind

Michael Lind

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HAS lost its mind. To put it more precisely, the United States has lost its collective institutional memory. America achieved its present global preeminence by means of values and strategies that Washington’s current bipartisan elite chooses to repress from memory or actively stigmatize. Foremost among the repressed memories in what Gore Vidal called the United States of Amnesia is nationalism—including self-confident, unapologetic American nationalism.
Until recently, the United States was both the modern liberal nation-state par excellence and the major champion of national self-determination around the world. The country owed its very existence to a war of national liberation from the British Empire. Subsequently, the United States preserved its existence in the Civil War by crushing the South’s attempt to secede from the American nation-state. At the same time, long before Woodrow Wilson included the principle of national self-determination in his Fourteen Points address and Franklin Roosevelt invoked it in the Atlantic Charter, Americans championed the right of ethnocultural nations to secede from multinational empires and form their own (preferably, but not necessarily, democratic) nation-states.
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