Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities 9780226284934, 9780226285092, 9780226285122, 2015000668

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Political Peoplehood

Political Peoplehood The Roles of  Values, Interests, and Identities

R o g e r s M . Smit h

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, associate dean for social sciences, and chair of the Penn Pro­ gram on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism at the University of Pennsylvania. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­28493-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­28509-­2 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­28512-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226285122.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Rogers M., 1953– author. Political peoplehood : the roles of values, interests, and identities / Rogers M. Smith. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-28493-4 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-28509-2 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-28512-2 (ebook)  1. Political culture.  2. Political sociology.  3. Group identity.  4. Political psychology.  I. Title. JA75.7.S64 2015 306.2—dc23 2015000668 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

To the Mighty Violet

C o nt e nt s

Introduction / 1 Part I : Theorizing Peoplehood

ONE

/ Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics / 19

T WO

T H R EE

/ A Theory of the Politics of People Building / 37

/ Narrative Structures and the Politics of Peoplehood

(with Meral Ugur Cinar) / 67 FOUR

/ Personal Stories and Communal Stories in the Politics

of Peoplehood / 93 Part II : Exploring American Peoplehood

FIVE

/ Individual Rights in American Stories of Peoplehood / 121 SIX

/ Contesting Meaning and Membership in

American Peoplehood / 145 Pa r t I I I : M o d e r at i n g P e o p l e h o o d

SE V E N

/ From Providentialism and Exceptionalism to a

Politics of  Moderate Peoplehood / 189

E I GH T

NINE

/ The American “Promiseland” and Mexican Immigrants / 219

/ Multiple Citizenships and the Legacies of Imperialism / 247 Epilogue / 265 Acknowledgments / 269 Notes / 271 References / 281 Index / 303

Introduction

On Studying Stories of Political Peoplehood

My earliest memory takes place in a home from which my family moved when I was three years old. I see my mother putting heavy bags of groceries down on the kitchen table while scolding my brother, two years older, and me for fighting in the car and not helping bring in the bags. My next oldest memory comes from shortly after we moved from that house. Its basement had flooded and my father returned to help the new owner bail it out. I see myself crouched on the basement steps, wanting to help—­wanting, really, just to get into that mysteriously deep water—­but being told by my father to wait. I mostly complied. At this point, these “memories” are probably just memories of stories I later told about my memories, rather than direct recollections. But they remain my first stories about myself, which I now recognize as ones of familial belonging, as well as of familial obligations that I was not meeting so well. My guess is that I next formed a sense of myself as a Presbyterian Christian and an American, since the memories that follow are of Sunday School and also playing World War II soldiers, and sometimes cowboys and Indians, with my brother. I know I learned early on that Americans elected their leaders. I can remember seeing Dwight D. Eisenhower in a grainy black-­and-­ white telecast waving from a car and wondering why this bald, dull-­looking old man was our president. I lived in Springfield, Illinois, the hometown of President Abraham Lincoln, and he had looked far more interesting, tall, bearded, with a stovepipe hat. By the time I was in the second grade, during the Kennedy-­Nixon 1960 campaign, I knew that, like Lincoln and my parents, I was a Republican, and I watched and thought Nixon won the first debate. Although I therefore revealed no precocious talent for political judgments, I found it hard not to attempt them. Like many of my generation,

2 / Introduction

by my late teens I came to question the traditions of familial roles, religious belief, and 100 percent American patriotism in which I had been raised, and I was profoundly disillusioned as the Republicans turned away from Lincoln’s cause of civil rights. The questioning eventually led me to become a scholar of politics, and I found myself undertaking a path of inquiry that has led to this volume. Each chapter in it is a step along a still very incomplete intellectual journey that I hope to persuade some to join. But it is a journey filled with worrisome uncertainties, so it seems best here at the outset to map out the endeavor, to indicate why it is compelling, and to begin addressing the concerns that call it into doubt. My professional tracks on this path date back more than thirty years, when I first began studying American citizenship laws. Those studies eventually led me to explore what I came to call “political peoples” and especially the “stories of peoplehood” through which, in part, such peoples are created, maintained, challenged, and changed. Admittedly, this work has been in part a continuing effort to come to terms with those stories that shaped my own early sense of my identities and responsibilities, but I soon discovered that I could learn most by exploring the narratives of many other political peoples as well. In this work I define these “political” peoples broadly, as any and all human associations, groups, and communities that are commonly understood to assert that their members owe them a measure of allegiance against the demands of other associations, communities, and groups. It is the fact that these associations, groups, and communities are perceived to advance claims to governing authority in competition with others that makes them “political”—­ and the more demanding the claims, the more political the group.1 I have argued that a wide range of human groupings may meet this definition, from religious bodies to social movements to racial and ethnic communities to urban and regional polities to economic associations to nation-­states and many more. Depending on the breadth and depth of the allegiances that groups expect of their members, there can be weaker and stronger forms of political peoplehood. And I have contended that though political peoples are generally created and maintained in part by coercive force, they cannot be sustained without narratives that persuade a critical mass of supporters to give willing allegiance to those associations and their leaders. That is why stories of peoplehood are so foundational in politics and in human life more broadly (Smith 2003). It is because these stories are so fundamental that they can be found everywhere, almost always containing the same few basic general themes and structures, even as they also display astonishing variety, that I find exploring them endlessly fascinating.

Introduction / 3

My tools for investigating these stories have been primarily interpretive or “qualitative,” rather than quantitative. I have examined empirical questions about the political work that stories of peoplehood do in conveying senses of meaning and value, crafting coalitions, defining political goals, prescribing institutions and policies, and sustaining or failing to sustain support for political communities and their leaders, institutions, and policies in difficult times. I have also explored normative questions about how these stories should and should not be crafted in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-­first century, if they are to be both morally commendable and politically effective. More often than not, I have blended these inquiries. For many accomplished social scientists, all this is questionable—­lax in methodology, marginal in substance. Other scholars are more favorable. But the doubts are appropriate ones that I have never fully laid to rest in my own mind. This volume embodies my own current thinking, informed by others, on the questions that seem most important. Four doubts are particularly troubling. Here I list them and give preliminary answers. The chapters that follow, often first written with other concerns in mind, have been restructured and ordered to elaborate and provide evidence for these responses. Although I cannot pretend they do so definitively, when reinforced by the works of other researchers, I believe they make a credible case for the value of these explorations. The first troubling question is whether it makes sense to study such a broad and relatively unfamiliar phenomenon as “political peoples.” I do not insist that, along with nation-­states, all ethnic, religious, cultural, kinship, economic, social, ideological, and territorial associations should be regarded as “political” peoples. But I do insist that insofar as they can be reasonably understood to demand the allegiance of their members against other groups, they must be so classified. Few scholars today analyze human associations using this category of political peoples or ones similarly broad. Even the recent work that might appear most kindred, the sociologist John Lie’s Modern Peoplehood, focuses on a narrower conception of “peoplehood” (without explicitly ruling out other definitions). Although Lie sees “modern peoplehood” as a political creation, he believes it differs fundamentally from earlier forms of political community. It is “an inclusionary and involuntary group identity” whose major subcategories are what he sees as the modern ones of “race, ethnicity, and nation”—­though Lie admits that “language, religion, culture” and “history” sometimes provide bases for modern peoplehood as well, and he concedes that all these conceptions build on “precursors and continuities” (Lie 2004, 1, 21–­22, 78–­95, 111, 119–­20). Still, Lie sees “modern peoplehood” as

4 / Introduction

very much the creation of modern large territorial states, and he thinks that because those states differ from ancient empires, city-­states, and feudal orders, the sense of “peoplehood” they have created also differs, so much that he does not explore any commonalities among what I see as various older and newer forms of “political peoplehood” (Lie 2004, 42–­54, 99–­143). In contrast, I reject any sharp “ancient/modern” dichotomy as a means of classifying the range of political peoples in human experience. Although I agree that modern states have fostered senses of peoplehood that differ in some respects from many predecessors, they also vary more greatly from each other in the common bases of identity they stress than Lie acknowledges. As his evidence shows, many modern citizens have defined their peoplehood by stressing ideological agreement on political and economic principles and minimizing their involuntary character, even as they have also invoked essentialist conceptions of race, ethnicity, and historical nationality. Those three categories have also all served as the basis of subnational and transnational challenges to states, not simply as affirmations of territorial nation-­states’ legitimacy (Lie 2004, 128–­32, 145–­56). I have also suggested that though modern nationalist ideologies often emphasize “horizontal,” egalitarian, and inclusive visions of the nation, they often also include “vertical” elements of fixed hierarchies, privileging some racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender identities over others, with the latter still regarded as belonging to the nation (Smith 2003, 33–­34). Similarly, though Lie is right to say that self-­described nation-­states became hegemonic globally in the twentieth century, they never ceased to coexist with other forms of political community, and they are facing rising challenges today. These points call into question the preeminent title of “race, ethnicity, nation” to define “modern” peoplehood. They increase the likelihood that all the many forms of political peoplehood, past and present, can be seen as variations along a continuum, rather than as sharply distinct. If so, then it is plausible to seek to identify features of peoplehood that are common to the whole range of forms of political community and identity that humanity has created—­and to discern whether by grasping these common features, we can gain insights into important empirical and normative political issues, including the sources of the many variations we also see. That is the endeavor these chapters undertake. They begin by elaborating theoretical conceptions of the role of ideas, including stories of peoplehood, in politics generally, and in the politics of people building specifically. They also examine how different narrative structures and content themes shape policy making, especially in regard to issues of membership, and how, within the constraints and using the

Introduction / 5

resources their contexts provide, leaders build support by knitting their personal stories and those of their constituents together with their communal narratives of collective identity and purpose. Several chapters explore how and why notions of rights, including both economic and political rights, as well as conceptions of race, religion, gender, and immigration have played the roles they have in American political development. Others examine normative issues of the kinds of civic discourse appropriate for constructive people building; advance arguments about the obligations of the U.S. and other wealthier, more powerful nations to those their coercive policies have affected; and consider the more general question of what forms of political community—­cosmopolitan, regional, national, transnational, subnational, federated, sovereign or “semi-­sovereign”—­should be sought today. It is because exploring common features in the politics of peoplehood appears able to enrich understanding of all these topics and more that its pursuit is worthwhile. Still, because my category of political peoples is much broader than those deployed by other analysts, it is reasonable to worry that it includes groups so different that it is misleading to analyze them as versions of the same type of thing. Given what most writers choose to examine, modern scholarship in general might be seen to endorse this concern, albeit rarely self-­consciously. There are well-­established literatures on nations and nationalism, ethnic groups, racial identities, religious communities, labor movements, social movements, nongovernmental organizations, cities, territorial regions, and many more entities that I claim can be political peoples. In contrast, until recently there has been little scholarly discussion of the category of “peoplehood,” and most works analyzing peoplehood, including my own, focus primarily on nations (e.g., Canovan 2005; Näsström 2007; Ochoa Espejo 2011). Perhaps, then, there is little to be gained and much to be lost by exploring political peoplehood defined so expansively, instead of just extending the literatures that employ more conventional categories. This quest to explore political peoplehood rests on the conviction that the opposite is true—­that we miss much when we conceptualize categories like race, ethnicity, nationhood, religion, economic class, cultural group, linguistic community, regional population, social movement, and more as fundamentally distinct entities. We especially risk failure to recognize fully how and why human beings have constructed and reconstructed those groups and categories over time. That failure can lead us to lapse into treating some of them as if they are distinctively “natural” or “primordial,” or at least as more enduring, less contested and contestable than they are in fact.2

6 / Introduction

Consider, for example, the perennial question: Who is a Jew? Is a Jew a member of a religion, an ethnicity, a nation, a race, anyone with a Jewish mother? Both those who see themselves as Jews and those who do not see themselves as Jews have given shifting answers over time, and they continue to do so (Lie 2004, 26–­32). The state of Israel relies in part on the last definition, but that answer only moves the question back a generation, and some people with Jewish mothers do not think of themselves as Jewish at all. In any case, neither that response nor any other has done much to quell emotional debates within and outside Israel over who can claim Jewish identity (The Economist 2012). The different views roil the internal politics of Israel and the relationships of Israel to its neighbors and the world. So whatever else may be involved, part of the answer to “who is a Jew?” must be that a Jew is today, and has often been in the past, a member of a political people: someone who can expect to experience demands on him or her made in the name of the “Jewish people,” and someone who may also be treated with hostility by others because of his or her perceived membership in and allegiance to that people. To be sure, we do not begin to capture all that being Jewish means to many Jews and non-­Jews if we conceive of Jewish identity as simply a form of political peoplehood. But if we do not analyze the varying ways that it is and often has been a kind of political peoplehood, we miss elements of being Jewish that are vitally important. More generally and more radically, I submit that if we think of any identity or identity category as something that is in principle distinct from politics, we fail to grasp that identity fully. We also fail to appreciate what is at the heart of politics, and how profoundly politics relates to all human experiences. Politics is best conceived as contestation, and contestation not simply about distribution, “who gets what, when, and how,” but still more basically about “who governs,” understood as which human beings and institutions have both the actual power and the generally recognized legitimate authority to order the activities of at least some group or groups of human beings.3 Such power and authority are always attained and maintained in part by processes through which certain populations come to believe that they are a people who should be governed by certain sorts of human beings and institutions in certain ways. And reluctant as we may be to admit it, contests over which people and institutions should govern which populations, often overt, often indirect, are pervasive in human life. This reality means we must use broad categories encompassing the many groups in whose names we experience demands, both from those commonly thought to be in the groups and those outside them, if we are not to underestimate the manifold forms and influence of politics.

Introduction / 7

Many might protest that the view just stated overemphasizes the political dimensions of human life. It makes everything seem just part of politics! I agree that much in human life—­our families, our faiths, our creative arts, our intellectual quests, our recreations, and more—­should be seen as important in ways that cannot be grasped if we focus only on their political dimensions. Yet the inescapable reality is that politics is in fact part of everything in human life. No family, no church, no theater group, cultural association, or artisans’ guild, no scientific society, no sports league has ever been free of tensions over just who can make authoritative decisions within it and who can belong to it. And the terms and resolutions of those issues have always been shaped to some degree by what is encouraged, permitted, or prohibited in the larger political communities in which these groups reside. Consequently, the bevy of literatures on particular identities, while capturing real, significant variations, sometimes may miss the political forests we inhabit. They may not adequately recognize that though we do see ash, birch, cedar, fir, maple, oak, redwood, palm, and bamboo plants, we are nonetheless always looking at political trees, all vying with their roots, blossoms, and branches to occupy the terrains of our common lives. The current moment is one in which such recognition should come fairly readily. For even as nation-­states remain the preeminent form of political peoplehood, with power and authority to make the most sweeping demands that much of the world’s population experiences, both the power and authority of the nation-­state system, as well as of particular nation-­ states, are being visibly transformed. Many states have ceded authority to supranational bodies such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization, and many have granted greater autonomy to subunits, such as Scotland and Catalonia, while facing pressure to grant still more (Benz and Papadopoulos 1996; Greer 2007). To be sure, those pressures are generally strongly resisted: the heyday of the nation-­state has not ended, which is why most of us who study peoplehood still end up discussing nations and nationalism most extensively. But analysts of many other groups, from the European Union to early twentieth-­ century Russian Mennonite communities to southwestern Mexican Ameri­ cans to African American gay men to transnational labor, feminist, and environmental activists, have found it useful to analyze them as, at least in part, political peoples whose construction requires the narration of stories of peoplehood as defined here (e.g., Delanty 2005, 137; Rivera 2006; Neufeldt 2009; Petchauer, Yarhouse, and Gallien 2008; Williams 2009). When we consider the many types of groups that are now laying claim to the allegiance of those they deem their members, even against any and all

8 / Introduction

nation-­states, it should at a minimum be evident that all these groups are indeed political. And if scholars choose to look to see if stories of peoplehood defining and valorizing these group identities form part of the processes through which the groups are constructed, maintained, challenged, and changed, they will always find them. Even so, should they look for them? There are many features of these groups that we might explore, including their relationships to economic resources, military weaponry, established political organizations, and governing institutions. The second difficult question is why we should study the role of what I call “stories” in the political processes of constructing and transforming forms of peoplehood. The endeavor can seem all too belletristic, far too focused on what people say rather than what they do. One of the following chapters, an exploration of the kinds of national narratives told by newly founded modern nation-­states including Turkey, Austria, and Israel along with the United States, even urges political scientists to consider drawing on literary theory more fully than most have done. For some scholars, this sort of research overestimates the role of storytelling and underestimates the role of reasoned arguments concerning human interests; moral, legal, and political principles; and empirical realities in shaping political life. For others, focusing on the literary structures of narratives is naive, blind to the realities that political communities have most often been forged through violent conflict, sometimes driven by harsh economic needs, sometimes by quests for wealth and power that have employed deception and treachery along with more blunt weapons. As Thomas Hobbes concluded, “there is scarce a Commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified” (Hobbes 1968, 722). What is the point of focusing on the fables that people tell themselves to minimize this ugly reality? Surely it makes more sense to attend to their material interests, their military resources, their strategic behavior, their institutional structures, and other more concrete factors in political life? An initial answer is that many, many people, from current governmental leaders to candidates for office to dissident organizers to corporate publicists to journalists, priests, historians, poets, novelists, folk singers, barbers, cab drivers, and more, all devote much labor and care to crafting and telling stories of peoplehood, often doing so over and over—­so it is reasonable to ask why they act this way. The deeper answer is that all persons’ senses of their personhood—­of their identities, interests, values, and aspirations—­are constituted in large part by their absorption of and reflection on the stories of their peoplehood that form part of their socialization. We think and feel ourselves to be formed by religions, nations, kinship groups, ethnicities,

Introduction / 9

cultures, political movements, social classes, regions, and other identities whose significance we have had narrated to us in many ways from early in life. We define our goals and decide on our actions in light of the identities we find most compelling. Since this is true of all persons, the institutions, practices, and policies that people go on to create, sustain, or modify are also constituted in part by ideas expressed in the stories of peoplehood they have embraced. It is in fact impossible to make much sense of how and why people act, or their collective institutions and practices, without understanding the themes of those stories. It is attempts to explain human actions and political life without attending to such stories that are unscientific, nonempirical, naive. But how should we attend to them? That is the third difficult question that explorers of stories of peoplehood must face. Presumably scholars should do so in the most intellectually rigorous ways possible. For many, rigor counsels against analyzing political arguments as stories that rely on emotional appeals, mythical elements, or premises about human history and human nature taken on faith. Instead, believing that most actors are basically rational or at least that more rational actions will prevail over time, we should seek to determine the rational interests and strategies that political accounts express, and assess the reasonableness of the empirical and normative premises on which they rest—­analyzing and critiquing political discourses more as logical treatises, or as rational strategic tools, than as constitutive stories. For many purposes, it is indeed wise to consider what interests and whose interests are served by stories of peoplehood, how they are served, and whether the stories embody empirical and normative claims that are rationally defensible. Those questions will be raised about virtually all the stories discussed in these pages. It is vital to recognize, however, that because the formation of senses of common identities and interests is essential to the building of human groups and the institutions and ways of life they generate, even the most determinedly rational political arguments always have the implicit, and usually the explicit, form of an emotionally compelling constitutive narrative of the past, present, and future, with some claims advanced as matters of faith. Political advocates say: here is who you are, and who you can be. Here is your past and present situation; here is what the results will be if you do or do not accept this form of political membership, these institutions and policies, these leaders. Here are the grand things that will happen if you do. Political arguments can and should be analyzed for elements other than the stories of peoplehood they implicitly or explicitly convey—­but those stories must be analyzed if we are to understand how

10 / Introduction

and why persons come to think they have the interests, values, affiliations, and obligations they seek to fulfill. For twenty-­first-­century social scientists, the question of how we should attend to stories of peoplehood has another, more technical variant. Scholars seeking to be rigorous may ask whether these studies can legitimately be wholly qualitative, without engagement in some of the forms of quantitative content analysis and other quantitative instruments that have become more prevalent in modern social science tool kits (e.g., Hopkins and King, 2010). I do not oppose such methods. To the contrary, I believe the logic of interpretation always requires us to examine texts systematically, and sometimes to produce explicit and replicable estimates of the quantitative prevalence of the ideas and themes attributed to them, if we are to defend claims for their political significance. One chapter here, focusing on the providentialist stories of American peoplehood told by President George W. Bush, draws on quantitative analyses of speeches conducted for me by research assistants, which proved to correlate closely with results later published by other scholars. I do not accept, however, that the use of content analysis software or other forms of quantification ever permits analysts to evade reliance on qualitative interpretive judgments—­or that such quantification is always necessary to reach well-­founded results in empirical inquiries, much less normative ones. As Justin Grimmer and Brandon Stewart have argued in a careful survey of automated content analysis systems, those methods must rely on “incorrect,” highly simplified models of language, and so they can only augment and amplify, they cannot “replace careful and close reading of texts” (2013, 2, 5). As they note, sometimes quantification can even obscure rather than assist the interpretive judgments that are always fundamental to the intellectual endeavors that quantification is meant to serve (4). We necessarily engage in qualitative interpretation when we decide on appropriate categories for coding texts and when we decide how particular parts of the texts should be coded, and even if we use statistically generated categories, we still do so when we decide what the results mean. Those interpretive judgments are often controversial, requiring arguments as to why they are preferable to alternatives. Sometimes our coding produces quantitative results that are incoherent in ways that tell us we should reconsider our categories. At other times, however, once we have made the case for certain interpretive categorizations through discussion of particular texts, the prevalence of the most prominent categories of ideas and themes has often been so well established that there is little value added by more precise counting. Intellectual historians, for example, have long used

Introduction / 11

political speeches, judicial opinions, literary texts, pamphlets, and more to identify frequently contested “keywords” in American politics, to use Daniel Rodgers’s term (Rodgers 1987). Quantification of the use of terms may provide confirmation or help to analyze further issues, but often it will only affirm those core claims. And sometimes the reporting of quantified results leaves opaque much of the interpretive reasoning involved in determining categories, making coding decisions, and expounding the significance of the results. Focusing on the numbers can distract attention from the interpretive judgments underlying them that are doing crucial work. Again, these circumstances do not mean that quantitative methods are inappropriate for explorations of peoplehood. But the inescapable dependence of quantitative analysis on interpretive reasoning does mean that qualitative interpretations of the sorts elaborated here should be seen as making necessary contributions to rigorous scholarship. Still, many political scientists fear that scholarship that features interpretive judgments can easily fall into mere articulation of a scholar’s normative preferences for how we should see the world, especially if the scholarship explicitly combines empirical and normative concerns, as many of the following chapters do. The fourth and perhaps hardest question is whether it is wise to study stories of peoplehood in ways that blend empirical and normative arguments. Perhaps ironically, it is in this regard that the approach of this book most closely resembles conventional behavioral social science. Traditionally people have come to normative views in many ways: through reading texts they regard as divine revelations, through acceptance of binding customary norms, through mystical experiences, through as purely abstract reasoning as human minds can achieve, or through arguments that norms are empirically discernible in nature, among others. Conventional “positivistic” conceptions of social science hold, however, that none of these means has produced results that are testable in ways that permit us to affirm that they represent discoveries of what is objectively just or unjust, morally good or evil. At most, we can ascertain empirically what normative beliefs people have; we can assess their logic and evaluate their descriptive and causal claims about the world; and we can estimate the likely consequences of acting on those beliefs. The blending of the empirical and normative that appears in some of the ensuing chapters, especially in part III, does not represent a starkly different view. It is motivated by the conviction that all the normative arguments found in our collective lives are intertwined with stories of political

12 / Introduction

peoplehood in that they imply that we ought to inhabit certain sorts of communities that recognize certain sorts of authorities. When we are told that we should be guided by the Torah, the Koran, or the New Testament; by the Declaration of Independence or the Communist Manifesto; by Plato’s Republic, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, or Rawls’s Theory of Justice; or by national histories and literatures, patriotic anthems, and epic poetry, we are always being told that we should live in some kinds of political communities and not others, and so that certain forms of political peoplehood are appropriate for us, and not others. To say that all normative arguments operate in human collective life as elements in political stories of peoplehood is not to say that all such arguments are fictions. In principle, some of these stories may be entirely true, some wholly false. In practice, all the stories are likely to contain some elements that are true, some elements that are false, and some elements that we may not be able to judge definitively as true or false, right or wrong—­now or perhaps ever. The stories’ presentations of normative goals and standards are likely to have this last character. This normative uncertainty is a feature of political life, indeed human life, that many find disturbing, but it cannot be escaped. Even so, we are likely to be able to understand more and make better judgments by analyzing those stories, including their normative elements, in terms of their internal logic, their descriptive and causal claims about our world, and the observable consequences when people and peoples seek to live by them. And we will see that the fact that political stories of peoplehood in practice usually have fictitious elements is far more due to their being political than their being stories. The controversial step taken here—­all the more controversial because these stories are political—­is that after identifying stories of peoplehood that exist empirically in certain contexts, particularly the modern United States, I sometimes go on to explain which ones I find most persuasive and why, and what their normative implications are for current political issues and practices. One way to challenge those arguments is simply to dispute my reasons for judging the stories to be broadly persuasive and the implications I draw from them. But a more fundamental challenge contends, in a version of the hoary “fact/value” distinction, that just because a story happens to exist in our empirical world, and some of its claims appear to be empirically true, does not mean there is any logical basis for using it to ground normative contentions. I agree that whenever we go on to make normative arguments premised on judging certain stories as most worthy of our acceptance, those arguments logically must be understood to take only conditional form; if we

Introduction / 13

deem these stories and their normative implications authoritative, then some sorts of practices, policies, and institutions should be seen as commendable, others unworthy. But how can it make sense to take such normative steps, however conditionally and corrigibly? The answer these arguments presume is that human beings simply have no way to engage in normative judgments other than to embrace stories with normative elements that they find intellectually and emotionally compelling, and then to work out their implications for the decisions they confront. Hence to say we should never seek to move from reflection on the stories we find empirically present in the world, from which we form our identities, our senses of value and purpose, and our broader conceptions of the world and how it works, to normative judgments, is to say that we should not do what we in fact do and what we inescapably have to do if we are ever to make normative judgments. It would be a peculiar empiricism that argued against the possibility or desirability of people doing what we continually observe them doing and what they must do. We certainly can and should critique the content and claims of particular stories and the normative arguments that are built upon them as faulty or, at best, less than certain. But it is quixotic to insist that studying those stories empirically is an enterprise that is in principle unrelated to making normative arguments and judgments. One of our most reliable empirical observations is that those relationships pervasively exist. As economist Arjo Klamer has written, “To say anything about the world, we must characterize it but, because we cannot literally know the nature of the natural and social worlds, we resort,” more than we are often aware, to “constitutive metaphors” and “stories.” Even economists “tell stories” through “mathematical models” that communicate “which economists are the good guys and which the bad ones,” and they may indicate “what kind of action is called for . . . in the realm of policy” (Klamer 2004, 259–­61). But as that point indicates, a second concern remains: we may taint the accuracy of our empirical characterizations of stories of peoplehood and other political phenomena if we conduct them with an eye to their normative implications, especially on topics we find personally significant. This is indeed a danger we should guard against vigorously. But how best to do so? I am skeptical that the answer is to engage in ruthless internal repression of our own normative reflections and preferences and to seek to examine political developments and issues we care about greatly as if we did not care about them at all. I doubt that we are psychologically capable of pulling it off, and I doubt that we do a service to our readers by writing as if we have pulled it off. I think it far more realistic, far more intellectually honest, and

14 / Introduction

therefore far better methodologically, more rigorous in seeking to grasp and convey what is true as fully as we can, to acknowledge that certain normative concerns and commitments lead us to regard the empirical phenomena we study as significant, and to make clear just how and why we think they are significant. We are much more likely to guard against being misled by our normative concerns and preferences, and we are much less likely to mislead readers, if we make these inescapable dimensions of our thinking apparent, instead of purporting to have somehow heroically exorcised our dangerous normative demons from our minds when we did our empirical work. When it comes to the normative dimensions of our thinking, we can hide but we cannot run. And how can it be good scientific method to try to hide what we are doing from our readers and from ourselves? These answers to the legitimate doubts about the value of studying stories of peoplehood are elaborated in the ensuing chapters, enabling readers to think further about whether they are persuasive. Some of the chapters draw on previously published papers. Some are new. All the older papers have been revised and combined to feature their answers to the questions just reviewed, to incorporate subsequent thoughts on their topics, and to reduce repetitions. Most have also been modified to include insights from other authors who have joined and strengthened the endeavor of exploring stories of peoplehood. Chapter 3, which compares the narratives of new modern nations, adapts a paper written with Meral Ugur Cinar, whose scholarship persuaded me of the value of calling on literary theory to analyze stories of peoplehood. The four chapters in part I develop a theoretical account, with examples along the way, for understanding the political roles that stories of peoplehood do in fact play in the real world of politics, supporting the claim that their study must be part of any adequate empirical understanding of politics. Chapter 1 sketches a framework for understanding how all politics works, one that highlights the place of ideas and discourses, including stories of peoplehood, in those processes. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical elaboration of the politics of peoplehood, and specifically the roles of stories of peoplehood, within this general approach to politics. Chapter 3, again, considers how this political theory might be strengthened by literary theories of narrative structures. Chapter 4 examines one dimension of how individuals’ personal stories are related to the communal stories of their political communities, arguing that the tension in democratic theory and politics over whether leaders should provide “descriptive” or “substantive” representation can be eased by certain ways of linking the personal stories of aspiring leaders and their potential constituents to each other, and to

Introduction / 15

the leaders’ communal stories of collective peoplehood. Modern American presidential campaign biographies serve to illustrate this argument. The two chapters in part II then use this theoretical account of stories of peoplehood to illuminate a linked pair of major elements in American politics, past, present, and still emerging. Chapter 5 explores the revolutionary Americans’ adoption of universalistic individual rights rhetoric to define the aims of their new peoplehood, and the consequences this choice has for American political development. Chapter 6 examines the many, often opposing roles that racial, gendered, and religious themes have played in defining who the American people are that can claim such rights. Those topics then lead to the three chapters of part III, which develop normative views I have previously advanced about what American stories of peoplehood, and twenty-­first-­century stories of peoplehood more generally, should say, in regard to themes of providentialism and exceptionalism (chapter 7), American policies toward Mexican immigrants (chapter 8), and the immigration policies of former colonial powers more generally (chapter 9). The policies advocated in these chapters are recommendations only, since chief among them is the contention that the construction of stories of peoplehood should be a continuingly contested political process that is conducted in as inclusive and open a fashion as proves feasible, both in regard to participants and to views considered. No writer has the authority to dictate what the outcome of these processes should be, though we all have the right, and arguably the responsibility, to contribute our voices to them. These views necessarily imply that the politics of peoplehood portrayed here will never cease. This politics will continue to pose dangers and opportunities that can only be partly identified in advance. That is why the intellectual journey of exploring stories of peoplehood must also continue, and it is therefore fortunate that it is one that is exciting to undertake. Although its end will never be in sight, there is reason to hope that its far vistas will be fairer vistas. I hope that when readers reach the end of these chapters, some will feel stirred to pursue this journey further—­and all will feel better equipped to understand and to engage constructively in our inescapable politics of peoplehood, as they continue on the distinct but intertwined paths upon which we will all construct our common future.

Pa r t O n e

Theorizing Peoplehood

One

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics1

The enterprise of exploring stories of peoplehood rests on the view that interpretive studies of political ideas form a crucial part of the study of politics. Post–­World War II American behavioral social science might almost be said to have originated in dismissals of this view in favor of philosophies of science that called for more attention to what political actors did rather than what they said, and for greater emphasis on quantitative measurement rather than on qualitative interpretation (Easton 1985, 137–­41). Modern political science displays a wide variety of approaches, but some continue to think it unwise to give interpretive studies of ideas a prominent role in political science—­even scholars in the relatively new school of “historical institutionalism” in which I place my work.2 Those judgments reflect understandings of science and politics that I respectfully regard as unduly narrow in important respects. Since readers should have the chance to decide for themselves, this chapter sketches the broader conception of politics presumed by all the ensuing ones. I term that understanding the spiral of politics. Rather extravagantly, it purports to depict elements of how politics works, everywhere in the world and all through human history. But that sweeping claim is qualified by the acknowledgment that this depiction does not by itself answer any specific substantive questions about what drives political developments and what the consequences of political actions will be—­the central empirical questions in political science. It is a mere heuristic framework, aimed at helping scholars to conceive better questions to ask and to judge the methods needed to answer them. I believe it is a framework that is particularly useful for aiding scholars to see how different kinds of research can connect with and inform each other, rather than proceeding in ways that are largely oblivious to or

20 / Chapter One

even hostile to each other. But even if the framework achieves all its purposes, it leaves the most important work still to be done. Still, it can suffice for its task here: indicating why it is reasonable to think that studying ideas, including stories of peoplehood, through qualitative interpretive methods is inescapable if we are to achieve rigorous analyses of political life.

Prior Approaches The modern academy displays a rich array of analyses of narratives, stories, discourses, and ideas in many disciplines, including languages and literatures, communication and rhetoric, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science.3 Many especially find inspiration in seminal modern works on communicative action by Jürgen Habermas (1985), on discourses and power by Michel Foucault (1979), and on social structures, contexts, and language by Pierre Bourdieu (1991). But while the arguments in the pages that follow are also influenced by these major thinkers (and closest in spirit to Bourdieu), they build more immediately on the works of American political science institutionalists who, as comparative politics scholar Vivien Schmidt has noted, have often been wary of “discourse analysis,” fearing that such work is antiempirical and presents “reality as all words, whatever the deeds” (Schmidt 2008, 305). That situation has begun to change in the last decade or so, but much more so in comparative political studies than in work focused on the United States (see, e.g., Béland and Cox 2011). To convey most clearly just what the spiral of politics view, informed by these kindred works, seeks to add to the study of politics, it will help to summarize two predecessors among the leading historical institutionalist studies of American politics: the approach to politics elaborated by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek in essays and their book The Search for American Political Development (2004), and Robert Lieberman’s influential efforts to feature ideas within a historical institutionalist analytical framework (Lieberman 2002; 2011). Orren, Skowronek, and Lieberman share with historical institutionalists generally, myself included, a skepticism that politics can best be studied on the model of classical physics, as a search for law-­like regularities in political behavior that can explain political phenomena in all times and places. Most historical institutionalists believe that any such behavioral “laws” have to be formulated at so high a level of generality that they shed only faint light on specific political developments. Such scholars instead call attention to “the possibility that supposedly universal effects in fact only hold under particular circumstances,” because they expect many specific types of

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  21

political behavior to vary substantially in different historical political contexts (Pierson and Skocpol 2002, 699). They find support in, for example, the work of the multidisciplinary scholars who studied economic behavior in different societies by asking people to participate in various games, such as offering or accepting cash drawn from a researcher-­provided pie. The patterns of choice varied widely across the different communities, in ways the researchers concluded had to be explained by varying local customary practices and economic structures (Henrich et al. 2005). Similarly, historical institutionalists think it is essential to understand how political life is structured in different contexts in order to understand the patterns of political behavior characteristic of specific times and places in any depth. But unlike discourse analysts, Orren and Skowronek argue that to grasp how politics is structured, we should attend centrally not to ideas or discourses as much as to institutions. Ideas are not absent; these coauthors define institutions as organizations that are “carriers of ideas,” in that they have purposes, establish norms and rules, assign roles to participants, and also have recognized boundaries (Orren and Skowronek 2004, 82–­85). But Orren and Skowronek insist that institutions still “are not ideas,” and they urge scholars to focus on institutions and their interactions much more than on the ideas the institutions transmit (83). Orren and Skowronek observe that whenever we study politics, we always deal with populations that have preexisting institutions of economic production and distribution, social institutions for marriage, families, cultural life, and institutions of governance, among others. They contend that these institutions, including the ideas they “carry,” do most of the work of generating the aims, powers, and oppositions of political actors. Their examples show that Orren and Skowronek believe that political coalitions, united in their policy aims, are formed out of the sense of goals, capacities, and conflicts that existing institutional arrangements foster among various political actors and groups. Those political coalitions— such as proponents and opponents of slavery in pre–­Civil War America—­ compete to gain control of governing institutions, chiefly in the United States the three branches of the federal government, as well as the state and local governments. When coalitions acquire sufficient control over governing institutions to resolve policy issues enduringly in their favor, as when antislavery forces captured the Congress and the presidency via elections, then defeated the Southern states militarily, and then enacted the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery, Orren and Skowronek deem significant political development to have occurred (136–­43). But it is development rooted in aims resulting from preexisting institutional arrangements, in this case the

22 / Chapter One

economic and social practices and laws governing slavery, and it is development realized primarily through the actions and interactions of governing institutions. Orren and Skowronek call these frequently conflictual interactions “intercurrence,” and they contend that it is generally intercurrence that produces significant changes in governing authority (17, 113–­18). As a result, they depict the battle over slavery by focusing less directly on economic interests, ideologies, or social movements, important as those were in shaping the actors controlling governing institutions, and more immediately on the ways in which the US Congress and the presidency opposed the state institutions of the Confederacy. Those struggles over slavery then gave way, in their view, to a contest pitting Congress, in the control of radical Republicans, first against the presidency of Andrew Johnson, then for a longer time against a conservative judiciary. Congress and the courts differed on how far other laws and practices should change after slavery had been constitutionally banned. This was the battle of Reconstruction, which Orren and Skowronek believe the judiciary won, backed by a coalition opposed to change, over proponents of greater racial equality (135–­39). Note that in this analysis, there is little sustained attention to ideas. Political actors and coalitions have goals, policy preferences, and normative commitments, but these are presented as relatively straightforward expressions of institutionally grounded commitments. Persons socialized within the economic, social, and legal institutions of slaveholding generally pursued proslavery goals. Those socialized in wage labor institutions generally pursued antislavery goals. Each side made arguments for its positions, but Orren and Skowronek do not contend that understanding those arguments is vital for understanding their conflicts, or slavery and Reconstruction developments more generally. Nor do they reject such research, and Skowronek in particular has since paid more attention to ideas (e.g., Skowronek 2006). But their earlier, highly influential formulations of their framework did not urge or elaborate extensive analysis of ideas. Over time, Robert Lieberman has given ideas a more prominent place in his version of historical institutionalism than either Orren and Skowronek or he previously did (Lieberman 2002; 2011; cf. Lieberman 1998, 11). Arguing that “neither ideas nor institutions can rightly claim priority in an account that purports to explain significant change,” Lieberman has proposed an approach focused on three “clusters”: governing institutions (legislatures, executives, courts, bureaucracies); their broader organizational environment, including political parties and advocacy groups; and prevalent “ideological and cultural repertoires that organize and legitimate political discourse”

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  23

(Lieberman 2002, 703, 709). These three clusters, Lieberman contended, generate “incentives and opportunities” and define “repertoires of legitimate moves for political actors,” in ways that may produce “stability” or change-­inducing “friction” over public policies (703). Those conflicts can lead political actors to “find new ways to define and advance their aims,” and often they lead to compromises that move institutions and policies in partly novel directions (704). Lieberman has used this framework to illuminate how and why pro–­ civil rights American legislators enacted laws in the 1960s that seemed to embody color-­blind ideology, in response to “friction” between opponents and defenders of de jure segregation. But many racial egalitarians soon felt impelled by the logistics of administering those laws and by advocacy group pressures to adopt race-­conscious measures to realize their goals. This shift then prompted them to elaborate new ideational defenses of those policies (2002, 705–­8; 2011, 218–­22).4 Lieberman has also come to stress over time that political actors must build coalitions to capture governing institutions and shape policies (Lieberman 2011, 214–­15). But his approach has remained structured in terms of clusters of ideas, politically active organizations, and governmental institutions. Although this framework commendably treats ideas as political phenomena worth studying in their own right, I have worried that it can suggest that ideologies are “things that somehow exist apart from the parties, statutes, governmental agencies, and other governmental institutions” that they are acknowledged to shape (Smith 2006, 98). Consequently, contrary to Lieberman’s intent, his approach may not escape the very real danger he has perceived in much ideational research; ideas can appear to be “free-­ floating bits of knowledge and conjecture, detached from considerations of structure and power” (Lieberman 2002, 700).

The Spiral of Politics The framework employed here, elaborated in fig. 1.1, is indebted to Orren, Skowronek, and Lieberman, as well as to the extensive and varied modern literatures on ideas and discourses. Out of the conviction that the latter can strengthen the former, the spiral explicitly features the possibility that the formulation of ideas, including stories of peoplehood, can be a crucial stage in political development. Like previous historical institutionalist approaches (and as Bourdieu has particularly stressed among discourse analysts), this framework presumes that political developments always take place in prestructured environments.

24 / Chapter One

STAGE 5: MODIFICATION OF CONTEXTS STAGE 6: FORMATION of NEW IDEAS

STAGE 4: CAPTURE of GOVERNING INSTITUTIONS & POLICIES STAGE 3: COALITION FORMATION and COMPETITION

STAGE 2: N of FORMATION IDEAS, INTERESTS and GOALS

STAGE 1: CONTEXTS of Human Institutions, Practices, Ideas, Natural Orders

1.1 The spiral of politics

In the spiral, these environments are depicted as composed of intersecting and often mutually constitutive contexts generating and shaping human political life. These include contexts comprised of human institutions, understood as formal governmental and nongovernmental organizations; practices, understood as customary forms of behavior; and ideas of many sorts, including empirical beliefs and normative values. Such human contexts can be categorized as economic, technological, social and ethnocultural, political and geopolitical, biophysical and psychological, and more. Other contexts include our broader physical environment, which contains forces that shape human practices and can bring about change via natural disasters and other events. These contexts are diagrammed as Stage 1 for heuristic purposes, though most persist, often with alterations, throughout the spiral the diagram portrays. In Stage 2, the stage that is most pertinent for the concerns of this book, the framework highlights the fact that political actors shaped by these contexts inherit, modify, and elaborate ideas to guide political conduct. These ideas include notions of their own and other human identities; conceptions of interests, including but not limited to economic interests; ideologies and

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  25

philosophies of how the world works and should work; and hopes, fears, affections, aversions, and aspirations. In principle, the spiral of politics framework is agnostic about whether actors’ political ideas are dictated by one or more of these prior contexts in deterministic fashion. But featuring this stage does signal a responsibility for scholars to consider the possibility that sometimes, political actors may do more than merely pursue the ideas and values in which they were socialized. They may engage in what behavioral analysts of public opinion and elections, including Philip Converse and Hans Noel, have called “creative synthesis” (Converse 1964, 211; Noel 2012, 157–­58). They may display significant agency in the imaginative ways they reformulate inherited conceptions and elaborate fresh ones into ideational accounts that could not be predicted by grasping any or all of their preexisting contexts, and their new ideas may prove politically consequential. Although far from a champion of qualitative work, the rational choice scholar William Riker acknowledged this possibility in one respect: he called the task of crafting strategically effective discourses an “art” that he termed “heresthetics” (Riker 1986). Many others, myself included, have suggested that not just strategies for achieving ends, but also ends themselves, may be significantly reconceptualized as actors respond creatively to the problems they face (e.g., Smith 1992, 5, 16–­ 30; Carstensen 2011, 156–­62). The central claim I make on behalf of stories of peoplehood is that in order to define their ends and to achieve their ends, political actors do forge such reformulated ideas of political groups, communities, and identities, and their new stories conveying those ideas are often politically consequential. This claim applies to all political actors and all groups that are acting politically, asserting their authority against that of rival government agencies and other associations. The predominance of nation-­states in the modern world does mean that stories of political peoplehood are often advanced either as patriotic narratives of such nation-­states or as accounts of self-­ perceived minority nations within them who aspire to greater autonomy or independence. When not focused on rival narratives valorizing existing nation-­states, much research on stories of peoplehood concerns resistant groups such as Scottish nationalists (e.g., Leith and Soule 2011, 104–­5), Palestinians (Matar 2011, 1, 17), and Catalonians (Miley 2007, 3, 23–­25). Even so, scholars have shown that identity narratives have, for example, helped to motivate and legitimate violence by local “sons of the soil” indigenous groups, the Dayaks and Malays, against Madurese migrants in the West Kalimantan province of Indonesia—­in ways that often substantially

26 / Chapter One

ignore the Indonesian state (Kivimaki 2012, 286–­89). Reina Neufeldt has argued that Russian Mennonites who experienced severe material losses and demoralization during World War I used stories of their distinctive peoplehood to reinvigorate themselves, in ways that were primarily concerned with their internal needs rather than with their relationship to the new Soviet state, though the stories shaped that relationship as well (Neufeldt 2009). US military scholars are increasingly arguing that it is necessary to understand the politics of stories of peoplehood in order to address the challenges posed by a range of nonstate religious and ethnic groups resisting American power in various parts of the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan (e.g., Kraushaar 2014, 14–­17).5 Few of these groups conceive of themselves as nations, but they are clearly political peoples as defined here. Many writers are also exploring whether there can be a supranational European narrative of peoplehood sufficient to sustain the European Union (e.g., Caporaso 2005, 68–­73). And Duncan Bell has argued that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racial conceptions already bound together “Anglo-­ Saxon” states into a transnational “isopolity” that represented a strong form of political peoplehood, above and beyond the nation-­states that comprised it (Bell 2014, 423–­24). Consequently, the formulation of stories of peoplehood should not be conceived simply as an activity of political actors struggling to govern existing nation-­states or to establish new ones. Nor should the politics of peoplehood be seen as confined to elite actors. Ayman Agbaria argues that a number of Arab civil society groups in Israel have lobbied for an Arab Pedagogical Council as an effort to combat Israeli national narratives hostile to their identities and interests (Agbaria 2013, 2–­4). Paul Bjerk has contended that the songs of a Tanzanian Lutheran youth choir reveal an effort to transform Christian theology into support for Tanzanian nationalism, portrayed as an effort to build a new Eden (Bjerk 2005). Kimberly K. Smith has shown how self-­authored slave narratives became key assets in abolitionist struggles that contributed to the redefinition of the American community (K. K. Smith 1999, 165–­98). It is, then, vital to recognize that many groups besides those self-­conceived as nations can be found acting in this second, ideational stage of the spiral of politics. Even so, the significance of this stage in the larger spiral can probably be most readily suggested through examples of contests for national power. Consider further American struggles over slavery. Among the preexisting contexts that shaped America in the 1850s were its contrasting economic, legal, and cultural institutions of slavery and wage labor, and also various related narratives about the composition and aims of “We the People of the United States.” Many Americans followed Charles Pinckney of South

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  27

Carolina and later Democratic leaders in understanding the United States as having been deliberately created as a white man’s slaveholding republic (Annals of Cong. 1821, 1134–­45). Others, like Ohio’s Salmon Chase, contended that virtually all of the founders despised slavery and so, while reluctantly permitting states to continue it, they gave the national government only powers to support freedom over time (Foner 1970, 75–­79). Both these accounts had some historical plausibility, but they represented very different stories of who the American people were and what their values and institutions should be. As tensions between proslavery and antislavery Americans mounted in the years between the Compromise of 1850 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, two old friends and former Whig congressmen, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, elaborated from these sources modified rival stories of American political community and purpose. In a manner reminiscent of the former slave Frederick Douglass’s celebrated 1852 “Fourth of July” speech, Lincoln contended that the Con­ stitution, indeed American peoplehood itself, should be understood as dedicated to fulfilling for all the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a goal that should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere” (Lincoln 1905–­6, 2: 300–­301). Lincoln believed that without violating property rights established in law, national policy had to force slavery on a path to ultimate extinction and secure basic economic and due process rights for all, including African Americans. This meant banning slavery in new territories. While conceding that many framers had held such views, Stephens argued that they were “fundamentally wrong,” because the “great truth” was, as Pinckney and others had contended, that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the white race, is his natural and normal condition” (Stephens 1861). Because the United States’ founding fathers had not fully recognized that great “physical, philosophical, and moral truth,” once the party of Lincoln pursued the ending of slavery, Stephens thought white Americans had to found a new, unequivocally proslavery and white supremacist political community. Other political figures advanced different American stories based on these contextual materials. Some abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, insisted the Constitution was irreparably morally tainted by its countenancing of slavery and that there should be no union with slaveholders. Others,

28 / Chapter One

like Douglass, maintained that the Constitution should be read as justifying immediate abolition throughout the land (McFeely 1991, 168–­70). Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois maintained that although the United States was indeed a white man’s republic, “made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men” and not any “inferior race,” as Pinckney had said, slavery was not essential to it. White men in each state and territory should be able to decide whether they wanted that peculiar institution (Johannsen 1965, 33). We might expect, as the ambitious Stephen Douglas did, that this middle-­ ground position would prove most politically popular. But in fact, Douglas’s “moderate” stance only divided the Democrats and the proslavery vote in 1860, allowing Lincoln to be elected with less than 40 percent of the ballots (McPherson 1988, 223–­32). Having been brought to power through a coalition committed to banning slavery in the territories as a step toward its end, Lincoln insisted that there could be “no possible compromise” on that ban, urging allies to hold to it “as with a chain of steel” (Lincoln 1905–­6, 5: 196). His stance convinced proslavery Southerners, including a reluctant Stephens, that immediate secession was their best option (McPherson 1988, 234–­46). The results were a massive war; many new national civil rights statutes; and, eventually, three transformative amendments that ended slavery and formally established equal rights and citizenship for African Americans. This limited evidence suffices to show that the contexts of antebellum America spurred political leaders to elaborate the relationship of slavery to American peoplehood—­but those contexts also permitted many stories to be told. Hence it is reasonable to argue first, that the rival narratives advanced by Lincoln and most in the new Republican Party, and by Stephens and other proslavery former Whigs and Democrats, proved more capable of serving as the basis of coalition-­building than the alternatives formulated by Douglas, Garrison, and Douglass; and second, that the contents of these two most politically successful but sharply opposed stories made compromise over the extension of slavery unacceptable to each side. Perhaps this argument is wrong, and the role of Lincoln, in particular, in formulating his American story was not so important. Perhaps in human affairs political actors collectively always articulate the full range of conceivable stories, so that it is inevitable that whatever ones prove capable of serving to assist powerful coalitions will surface and will play that role. Or perhaps there are deeper cultural scripts that determine what types of stories get articulated and what do not. Perhaps, but there is no apparent reason to presume, on the one hand, that human agency is always so thoroughly

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  29

productive that no possible stories go untold, or that, on the other hand, underlying cultural, ideological, or discursive structures are so rigid that they leave actors without any real agency in deciding what stories they will advance. I lean toward the view that at least some of the time, political actors have imagined and formulated effective stories that were in important respects novel, and that if they had not done so, history would have gone very differently. The pertinent point here, however, is that there is no way to judge whether one of these explanatory options (or some other) is correct, except through analysis of the creation, contents, appeal, and consequences of the contesting stories of peoplehood that appeared in this momentous era in America’s “spiral of politics.” There is no reason simply to assume that preexisting institutional contexts made it inevitable that these stories would be formulated as they were or that they would play the leading roles that they did. It also seems misleading to describe these ideas as clusters that existed alongside clusters of parties and legal institutions, rather than as essential elements in their composition and comparative success. The spiral of politics, then, prompts us to consider important questions that other approaches can neglect, especially the roles played by ideas, including stories of peoplehood, and by the people who formulate and popularize such stories. Other scholars have suggested further useful specifications of the roles that such ideas and stories and what we might term “discursive” actors perform, especially in the second stage of the spiral. Vivien Schmidt argues that many of the ideas of political actors can be categorized into two broad types: “coordinative discourses” that use ideas to try to build and hold together coalitions of powerful or potentially powerful political actors and groups, such as the Republican Party, the Democrats, and the more radical abolitionist networks, and “communicative discourses” that seek to persuade a significant percentage of the larger public to support these coalitions and their policies, as in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and Frederick Douglass (Schmidt 2011, 56–­57). In their communicative discourses for the general public, coalitions are likely to feature compelling narratives of the larger political community, for example, their vision of American peoplehood and its values, while in coordinative discourses, they must define the coalition’s identity, for example, the Democratic Party or the Conservative Political Action Conference, and they are likely to focus more on strategic considerations for gaining power. But their coordinative discourses and their communicative discourses, that

30 / Chapter One

is, their “story of peoplehood” for their coalition, and their “story of peoplehood” for the larger political community they hope to lead, cannot be wholly unrelated. Actors are more likely to be credible and successful if their various discursive themes are reinforcing rather than contradictory, and actors may have particular versions of their narratives of their larger political community that they feature in their coalition-­building discourses.6 When Ronald Reagan said, as he did more than once, “what I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich,” he was advancing a theme that he was happy to include in his mass communicative story of American peoplehood (Reagan 1983). But it is likely this message had its greatest appeal among the economic elites whom Reagan sought successfully to coordinate in a powerful coalition. Back to the diagram. The third stage of the spiral of politics is the actual formations of coalitions—­which not only can be such things as political parties, social movements, and advocacy groups, but also armed militia—­ that compete to control governing institutions through various means. The primary ones are deal making, vote getting, and coercive force. Sometimes political actors and coalitions capture existing institutions for their purposes. Sometimes they create new ones. In the course of forming coalitions and competing for power, political actors often modify some positions in order to advance their more important or attainable goals. In all these regards, the spiral framework resembles predecessor historical institutionalist approaches, except that it does not present institutions simply as carriers of ideas or as accompanied by ideas. On this view, coalitions, institutions, and the policies they eventually produce are all constituted in significant measures by the ideas that define the shared purposes of the coalitions and the aims of the governing officials who create institutions or seek to turn existing ones to their ends. To be sure, the need for compromises in most politics, changing contexts, and the displacement of some political actors by others over time all mean that coalitions, institutions, and policies can rarely be understood in terms of the ideas of any one political actor or group. Even so, they also cannot be understood without a grasp of the partly overlapping, partly conflicting ideas of those who set their course, including those actors’ overarching accounts of shared peoplehood. In its fourth stage, the spiral of politics portrays those governing institutions controlled by different coalitions as interacting with each other to produce important political consequences. These consequences include the adoption of policies—­once again frequently the results of deals and compromises—­that, in the fifth stage, often significantly alter the broad

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  31

array of human and physical contexts. Some institutions may be strengthened, others transformed or terminated; some social practices may be reinforced, some banned; some forms of economic activity sponsored, others rendered unprofitable, or, like slavery, made illegal; some land, water, and air resources may be preserved, some put to fresh uses, some despoiled. Although the framework promotes attention to how institutional intercurrence and other contributors to political decisions may alter contexts, showing that politics matters, it does not presume that these decisions are all that matter for political development. It allows more explicitly than many other approaches for something that few scholars would deny: our contexts can be altered by factors other than governmental policies. When an earthquake shattered much of Mexico City in 1985, causing upheavals in social and political life, the quake itself was not primarily the result of governing policies. It did reveal the special vulnerability of the partly disfranchised Mexico City citizenry to natural disasters in ways that proved politically significant (Tavera-­Fenollosa 1999). The same can be said of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, though perhaps governmental policies contributing to climate change played more of a role in generating that storm. In any case, as David Mayhew has argued, in “the realm of primitive building blocks, there is a case for ranking events as the equals of interests and preferences in a seriously explanatory political science” (Mayhew 2005, 486). And not all events that affect politics are in their origins human events. In its sixth but never final stage, the spiral highlights the fact that these modified contexts, altered by politics and also by exogenous factors, are likely to shape and spur political actors who formulate modified ideas and values—­restarting the sequence of political development, but now with different content. That is why the framework is a spiral, not a circle; the same general process is followed repeatedly, but it includes the formulation of what may often prove to be new ideas, new coalitions, new policies, contributing to new contexts, new experiences of human life. On this view, political history is presumed to display similarities, even parallels, but never to repeat itself. The spiral is dynamic, affirming that an adequate political science must be in significant measure historical, as historical institutionalists contend. But it also must pay attention to the possibility that human agency, including agency in the formulation and embrace of ideas, is among the most significant stages of political life and political development. And among those ideas are stories of peoplehood that help to constitute political communities and identities, institutions, and policies.

32 / Chapter One

The Significance of the Spiral This spiral of politics framework is best seen as a plausible hypothesis about how politics generally works. Perhaps most controversially, it proposes that consequential political activities generally move through all these stages, and predominantly in this order. The structure of politics is a spiral, but it tends in one direction—­not in the sense that politics is presumed to move toward any ultimate end or telos, but only in the sense that important developments usually can be informatively mapped as steps along the spiral. This claim of directionality is, to be sure, a simplification, because the stages do not exist in sequential isolation from each other. Political actors may usually come to their basic ideas prior to forming coalitions, capturing institutions, and crafting policies—­but these processes involve compromises and processes of persuasion and rethinking that may lead them to support different ideas over time. Modifications in coalitions, institutions, and policies are also ongoing. The framework only presumes that major changes predominantly occur in this sequence, and so the diagram represents other alterations via smaller arrows. Even this presumption is a rebuttable claim, not a fixed premise.7 Yet taken as simply a plausible hypothesis about how politics works, the framework still has significant implications for research. It counsels scholars to attend to the path and directionality depicted by the spiral. They should be open to the possibility that beyond the specific political behavior on which they focus, the other stages of formulating ideas, building political coalitions, contesting for institutional power, and creating and implementing policies may ultimately prove to be important for explaining how and why conduct they study occurred, and what its broader significance is. The spiral expresses the belief that all such political activities may matter greatly. While the importance of each must always be in question, it is risky for the broad scholarly enterprise of studying politics to exclude any of them—­ though individual researchers cannot of course explicitly analyze all stages in every project. The point is that a variety of different kinds of scholarly research, conducted with the broader spiral in view, is likely to be necessary to achieve cumulative knowledge. Among these kinds of research are interpretive studies of stories of peoplehood. Similarly and importantly, the framework suggests that it is arbitrary to presume that any stage in the political spiral is the truly “foundational” one that grounds the others, or that any stage is instead epiphenomenal, so predetermined by previous ones that it can safely be neglected. The diagram of the spiral begins with various contexts, but for expository purposes only.

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  33

Those contexts should not be seen as definitive grounds of all politics, and certainly not as prepolitical grounds. They are rather results, in part, of past politics—­a previous spiral that included the adoption of politics that transformed contexts in ways that set the stage for a current spiral that will lead in time to future ones. Instead of privileging any claim about what drives the spiral, the framework presumes that what is most influential is always a matter for investigation. Economic, ethnocultural, physical environments; idea formation; processes of coalition building and competition by peaceful and violent means; and the structuring and interactions of governing institutions and policies, all are suggested to be plausible independent variables for some studies, and also plausible dependent variables for other studies focused elsewhere on a spiral. At this point in our knowledge, none can be presumed to be the definitive “ground zero” of political conduct. Instead, many if not all types of research on politics can be seen as illuminating different developments “along the spiral.” They represent specific claims about what factors are driving the spiral in some, many, or perhaps even all cases, or as claims about the processes through which the spiral moves, or as claims about the consequences of behavior along the spiral. By placing different types of research along the spiral, they can be brought into dialogue in ways that may help scholars see how disparate results and methods can inform each other, and what sorts of evidence might settle conflicting claims. Economic determinist accounts, for example, face the burden of showing that initial economic contexts strongly predict the ideas, coalitions, competitive success, and policies of political actors. The same is true of balance of power international relations theories, social psychological claims, arguments for the impacts of ideological traditions or neurological structures, and so forth. Rational choice models of strategic coalition building, voting behavior, and institutional interaction all can be placed along the spiral as accounts of how politics proceeds. Quantitative analyses of numerous issues, including who in the public is supporting particular actors and coalitions, how public opinion is structured on the issues, how often variables such as regime types or electoral systems are associated with outcomes such as wars, economic growth, or multiparty systems, are all desirable as investigations of elements of the political spirals visible in specific contexts, or as studies of patterns visible across spirals in different contexts. More ambitious theories of what drives politics in most if not all times and places can also be advanced, but they must be tested by their power in accounting for documented spirals of development in, at least, many times and places.

34 / Chapter One

Most pertinent here, of course, is the framework’s implication that qualitative interpretations of the ideas that political actors advance, including stories of peoplehood, are also needed to understand political spirals. The framework signals, though again it does not take as a given, that the stage of formulating and expressing ideas and values may well matter as much or more as many others. As in the example of antebellum America, due to the diversity of the contexts that shape political actors and their imaginative abilities, many actors at least appear to have meaningful capacities, genuine agency, and real relative autonomy in formulating ideas that are significantly different from those they inherit. These ideas include conceptions of their own basic identities, interests, and ideologies, and also “coordinative” ideas used to shape a sense of common identity among potential coalition partners, as well as “communicative” ideas used to persuade broader publics to give allegiance to a coalition’s account of the larger political community. Stories of peoplehood, like Abraham Lincoln’s vision of America as engaged in continual furthering of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Stephen Douglas’s story of America as an ever-­expanding white man’s republic, are surely crafted with a view to broad popular appeal. But actors like Lincoln and Douglas are not likely to advance those stories persistently if they do not attract other influential leaders into coalitions, and if they do not express what the actors themselves value and hope to achieve in political life. When actors are seen as striving to craft compelling narratives that can achieve all those things at once, drawing on what are generally finite but rich preexisting resources, it is reasonable to conceive of them as having some range of real but limited choices. That range defines the scope of their meaningful agency—­meaningful for understanding why they act as they do, meaningful for understanding how and why their choices help or hinder them in competition with their rivals, and meaningful for understanding what significance their actions has had in the eyes and lives of those affected by them. And unless we conclude that some human being will always imagine every possible story and advance them with whatever skills are necessary for success, we are likely to judge that the agency of the political actors who craft stories that serve to build powerful coalitions and shape institutions and policies has had great significance for most human lives. If political actors do formulate ideas that play important roles in defining goals, in coalition building, and in winning public favor, moreover, then the contents of those ideas merit study as explanatory factors. Some of the most interesting scholarship in contemporary political science, both qualitative and quantitative, explores these “ideational” processes (e.g., Lowndes 2008;

Stories of Peoplehood and the Spiral of Politics  /  35

Carstensen 2011; Noel 2012). But it remains an imperative responsibility, and a difficult, but not insuperable, task for scholars of ideas to make the case empirically that the ideas they study are significantly new, and that they can credibly be seen as having significant political consequences. The claim that Lincoln and other antislavery actors redefined American constitutionalism as dedicated to realizing the principles of the Declaration of Independence would be refuted if we found textual evidence that many others, including proslavery actors, defined the Constitution’s goals in much this way long before the late antebellum period. The claims that this reconceptualization helped recruit politicians to the new Republican Party and to win popular support would be refuted if we found most Republican leaders and voters either showed no awareness of this new view or rejected it. Either to falsify or to support such claims about ideas, scholars must rely at bottom on qualitative methods of interpretation (though not qualitative methods alone). We cannot defend any view concerning the political roles of ideas without first deciding whether or not some ideas are the same as previous ones, and whether or not they are expressed in the rhetorics, politics, and practices involved in organizing coalitions, winning public support, and designing and implementing governing institutions and policies. And we cannot make those decisions without interpreting not just the presence but also the content, the meanings, of the values, norms, and discourses in question. Similarly, we may test particular hypotheses by coding words and phrases and analyzing them quantitatively, but the coding decisions on which our quantifications rely will remain qualitative judgments. Therefore, to fail to engage rigorously in qualitative interpretive studies of ideas, and then to deny that ideas have played anything beyond a minimal, epiphenomenal role in politics, is to claim a conclusion that has not been earned. Similarly, to fail to do so while claiming to believe that ideas are important is to show a lack of faith or skill in one’s scholarly endeavor. In sum, the spiral of politics understanding of political processes argues that until and unless social science findings justify deeming ideas to be fully predictable or epiphenomenal, their careful qualitative study, including discourses of peoplehood, must be an integral part of the study of politics. With methodological anxieties at least temporarily kept at bay, let us turn to that endeavor, seeking to do it well and judging it by its results.

Two

A Theory of the Politics of People Building1

This chapter lays out the main elements of the theory of people building relied on in the ensuing ones. It focuses on the role that stories with what I call constitutive themes play in the political processes through which conceptions of political peoplehood are advanced, adopted, and institutionalized. But I will frequently highlight the reality that other elements, including coercive force and stories with economic and political power themes, are at least equally important in those processes.2 The presumption throughout is that successful political actors and movements deploy both force and narratives with intertwined economic, political power, and constitutive themes, though they rely more prominently on some at certain times than others.3 The special attention given here to constitutive themes should not be taken to imply that these other narrative themes, and exercises of force that go well beyond narratives, matter less. I emphasize constitutive themes chiefly because most work in political science instead features, and analyzes convincingly, the importance of coercion and economic and power motives and appeals. But my presumption throughout is that political actors and societies are likely to succeed over time only if they can sustain sufficient belief in all of their economic, political, and constitutive themes, while using force to control rivals who are not persuaded by any of the claims their stories advance. These arguments may seem uncontroversial, even obvious, to the discourse analysts of many sorts who can now be found in every social science discipline. Still, a good deal of scholarship in the social sciences minimizes the significance of narratives. Many judge the most important explanatory variables to be structural factors, such as entrenched institutional practices and customs, economic modes, demographics, socialization systems, unconscious cultural beliefs and attitudes, psychological drives, and other such

38 / Chapter Two

features of human life. All this research provides invaluable insights. The arguments here are not intended to deny the centrality of structural elements for understanding human experiences. Yet social, economic, political, cultural, and psychological structures are never self-­interpreting. No such feature of human experience can automatically narrate a conception of political peoplehood that can sustain a shared sense of “imagined community,” in Benedict Anderson’s well-­known phrase (1983). People have to compose such accounts, partly inspired and constrained by their structural contexts and the challenges of formulating effective political narratives. Although it is not clear a priori how many degrees of freedom political actors have in constructing stories, it is certain that they must construct them if coalitions are to be formed, institutions are to be created, and policies are to be adopted and implemented. Hence it makes sense to ask what roles different types of stories of political peoplehood play in the politics of people building and in political life more broadly. There is reason to think these roles highly significant, for good and ill.

The Politics of Peoplehood: Premises It is best to start by defining the terms this theory employs. As used here, stories, accounts, and narratives are interchangeable, as they are in common speech. Some readers have been alarmed by the apparently unscientific term stories, presuming it implies something that is wholly fictitious or not tightly reasoned. But there is nothing odd or contradictory about saying something is a true story, or, if not demonstrably true, at least reasonable. The use of the term stories here should not be taken to imply that the accounts in question are false. Most political stories do include some fictitious elements, but that is not because they are stories. It is because truth and reason often do not compete well in politics against false but stirring accounts. If applying the term stories to political discourses calls that tendency to mind, it is not to be regretted. Perhaps equally worrying is the presumption in this work that many types of discourses can be seen as advancing stories of peoplehood, not simply those that employ conventional narrative forms. Most presentations of empirical data in government reports, academic analyses, and political speeches can be interpreted as peoplehood stories, because they explicitly or implicitly explain the significance of the data reported by suggesting their meaning for what various human groups and communities are experiencing and why, and what their prospects are likely to be. The data therefore form part of accounts of collective identities that are likely to assist some political causes and not others, intentionally or not. Sociologist Mara Loveman

A Theory of the Politics of People Building  /  39

has recently noted, for example, that “Latin American officials used early national censuses to tell ‘stories of peoplehood’ in the guise of neutral demographic description,” using “racial statistics to craft narratives, build arguments, support claims, and draw conclusions about the essential nature and future prospects of Latin American nations” (Loveman 2014, 124). Although it might make scholarly work tidier to confine “stories” to discourses explicitly presented as such, we would omit many influential sources of senses of political community and fail to recognize their consequences if we defined the category so narrowly. It is better to risk straining to find the implicit accounts of peoplehood that often structure and are often conveyed by apparently nonnarrative discourses than it is to overlook them. On the other hand, because the term political peoples also refers to a disconcertingly wide variety of human associations, groups, or communities, it is important to underline that many groups do not qualify. Again, politics is understood here as contestation over who governs and how. A human community is a political people if and when it is a potential adversary of other forms of human association, because it is widely perceived to assert that its claims to authoritative governing powers can legitimately trump at least some of the demands on its members made by other associations. Stories of Peoplehood maps out how senses of political peoplehood can range from “strong” to “moderate” to “weak,” depending on how far groups claim priority over other allegiances, and from “wide” to “mid-­range” to “narrow,” depending on how many arenas of human life they seek to govern (Smith 2003, 20–­32). But there and here, I focus on “strong and wide” conceptions of political peoplehood, despite the fact, or rather because of the fact, that it makes sense to have deep normative reservations about such positions. A strong and wide conception of peoplehood is one that presents a political community as “inherently limited and sovereign,” in Anderson’s words (1983, 16–­17)—­as a society entitled to designate members and exclude nonmembers, as well as one with authority to override all claims on its members made by all other groups. Although a strong and wide peoplehood story may appeal to universalistic principles, the membership of all peoples has always been limited and therefore particularistic, in ways that have been highly consequential for their members and many outsiders. Members have special claims to protection and aid from their people’s governing institutions. At the same time, its rules or laws are ones that they must obey. It is the community for which they should be willing to fight and die. These strong and wide forms of political peoplehood are generally the main sources of political controversies and conflicts, within and across the political, legal, and physical boundaries they do most to construct.

40 / Chapter Two

Although today it is nation-­states who most frequently claim “strong and wide” peoplehood status, while other forms of political peoplehood tend to be more moderate and narrow, even this category of strong and wide political peoples includes many more groups than those most scholars identify as “nationalist.” The leaders who articulate such demanding senses of political peoplehood may not even be aspirants to governmental offices. They may be religious leaders, like some popes, imams, and the more radical leaders of America’s Christian Right, who critics contend place allegiance to a vision of a divinely governed Christian nation over allegiance to the US government as it now is (e.g., Hedges 2006). They may be economic and social movement organizers like Leon Trotsky and other internationalist-­ minded early twentieth-­century Communists (Mandel 1995, 1–­4, 29). They can be ethnic spokesmen, such as some champions of pan-­Slavic and pan-­ African identities; radical feminists or environmentalists; and many others (Rodney 1996, 730; Barzilai 2003, 62; Zubrin 2012, 196–­200). When any such leaders contend that the group for whom they profess to speak deserves the allegiance of all who belong to it in cases of conflict with virtually all others over virtually all aspects of life, they are promulgating a strong and wide version of political peoplehood. Not all groups do this. No school parent-­teacher association, businessmen’s civic club, film society, or soccer team has ever claimed ultimate sovereignty over its members—­though leaders of even these sorts of groups may on occasion claim their members’ allegiance and seek to mobilize them on some political issues, becoming “weak and narrow” political peoples, at least for a time. Winnie Mandela apparently turned the Mandela United Football Club into a violent political force in Soweto, for example (Wren 1989). One of the great issues of our age, moreover, is whether any political groups must assert strong and wide, indeed ultimate, sovereignty over their members. Although theorists like Thomas Hobbes have long proclaimed absolute sovereignty a necessity if peace, security, and a broad range of human goods are to be achieved, and international law has long recognized such sovereignty, in recent decades some scholars have predicted empirically and hoped normatively that forms of membership advancing absolutist claims will disappear as a result of processes of globalization and the decline of nation-­states (Soysal 1994; Bosniak 2000; Spiro 2008; Stevens 2009). The recent growth of forms of multiple citizenship, especially dual national citizenships and now citizenship in transnational unions, along with long-­standing experiences with federated arrangements, suggest that people can indeed maintain enduring allegiances to more than one political

A Theory of the Politics of People Building  /  41

people, even if there is considerable potential for conflicts in such arrangements (Choudhry 2001; Sejersen 2008; Maas 2013). The ensuing chapters will suggest that there is much to be said for a complexly federated and continually evolving world of “moderate and mid-­ range” and “weak and narrow” political peoples in which individuals could choose to belong simultaneously to many roughly equal and only “semi-­ sovereign” communities and move freely among them. One central lesson of the study of political peoplehood, however, is that such a world is not easy to achieve. Hobbes may prove to have been wrong, but he was not hallucinating. There are potent reasons why so many people throughout history have embraced memberships in more limited and exclusionary political societies presenting themselves as permanently sovereign over almost all aspects of their members’ lives. Because so many types of groups claim persons’ allegiances in cases of conflict, clashes between groups inevitably arise and sometimes escalate. When the government of an existing people is challenged—­by out-­parties, by a labor or social movement, by rival states, by separatists, by popular clergy, or by regional or global associations—­all such controversies are likely to prompt the government’s officials to advance a demanding account of peoplehood, to assert sovereignty strenuously on behalf of the political community they champion. Many people respond to such disturbing conflicts by supporting strong governments that promise to end them and bring peace. Those of us with normative concerns about absolutist forms of allegiance therefore face major challenges in considering whether and how we can forge stable, constructive political memberships that eschew them. The account of the elements of political processes of people building laid out here is an effort to assist exploration of those challenges and how they can best be met. It rests on four premises about all senses of political peoplehood, from strong and wide to weak and narrow. These four points are admittedly assumptions resulting from inductive reasoning on a range of examples and experiences, not from any systematic empirical study seeking to find whether they can be falsified. But in three decades of exploring the scholarship on political memberships, I have found no counterexamples calling them into question. These premises are: 1 No political peoples are natural or primordial, though many purport to be. All are the products of long, conflict-­ridden histories, and scholars must analyze them as human creations, formed by participants shaped by preexisting forms of peoplehood. Although many stories of peoplehood claim otherwise, they do so without credible historical evidence, and for reasons

42 / Chapter Two readily explained by the theory of people building offered here, as well as other kindred accounts. 2 Political peoples are created via constrained, asymmetrical interactions between actual and would-­be leaders of political communities and the potential constituents for whom they compete. These interactions are asymmetrical because it is actual and would-­be leaders who most directly articulate and seek to institutionalize forms of political peoplehood. If this premise appears too “top-­down” and disturbingly undemocratic, it is important to remember that the would-­be leaders advancing conceptions of peoplehood do not only include those who already hold government offices or even those who seek them. The category of leaders employed here is far broader, and many of its members are neither wealthy nor conventionally powerful. It includes spokespersons for social movements, large and small, old and new, such as Frederick Douglass in antebellum America; recognized and aspiring public intellectuals, in the media, in academia, in religious groups, and more, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and also politically minded artists—­novelists, musicians, poets, playwrights, film directors, actors, celebrity athletes, from Woody Guthrie to James Baldwin to John Wayne to Billie Jean King—­whose works and lives may inspire broader publics.4 As Alia Mossallam has recently argued in an analysis of the stories of peoplehood conveyed by popular songs in Egypt under Nasser, the idioms of mass culture can express and advance dimensions of political imagination that official historical narratives may not, and these often prove politically consequential (Mossallam 2012, 3). The contention here is only that some persons must actively articulate accounts of political identity and community that others come to embrace. Forms of political membership are undeniably built on shared experiences and in response to structural conditions, but this premise holds that they do not simply emerge spontaneously or organically. Nevertheless, there is a crucial “bottom-­up” dimension to peoplehood, because most would-­be leaders draw most if not all of the ideas for their conceptions of political community from beliefs, traditions, and practices generated by others, and because they are greatly constrained by what their potential constituents will accept. The forging of senses of peoplehood never takes place de novo, in a state of nature. Aspiring leaders always confront populations already endowed, individually as well as collectively, with a great variety of senses of identity and affiliation, with entrenched economic interests, political and religious convictions, historical and cultural attachments and animosities. These preexisting senses of identity, interests, and ideals are themselves partly the products of past politics of people building. They can be and often are exploited by aspirants to power, but they can

A Theory of the Politics of People Building  /  43 never safely be ignored. They set very substantial boundaries to the senses of peoplehood leaders can advance successfully. Nor are the identities, interests, and ideals of potential constituents simply static; most if not all people modify their senses of themselves and their aspirations over time in ways that alter what they expect and what they will accept from political leaders. Followers as well as leaders have agency. At a minimum, people can choose not to follow. They can also show that they will do so only under certain terms.5 Even so, this bottom-­up agency of constituents, though real, is itself constrained by the entrenched and evolving commitments and preferences of the constituents’ current and potential compatriots. It is not easy for anyone to persuade her fellow citizens to change. And members of mass publics must operate within existing structures of power, headed by current leaders, which can greatly restrict their abilities to join new coalitions or new political memberships, or even to express openly their dissatisfactions with the prevailing order. Such coercive constraints often limit how far the less powerful can engage in the politics of people making even if they wish to do so. Just as important, many individuals simply give political activities a much lower priority than their other pursuits. They prefer to choose occasionally among the conceptions of political peoplehood that are on offer rather than contribute to new ones. 3 Ordinarily, however, all these constraints are not powerful enough to determine entirely the sorts of accounts of political peoplehood that advocates advance and that people favor. The third premise, always open to empirical challenge, is that the “people-­building” stages in the spiral of politics are ones in which both would-­be leaders and those who wish only to be members of desirable forms of political community have meaningful agency in the stories of peoplehood they advance and support. Potent as they are, even economic interests can usually be effectively pursued in a range of forms of political community (Jung 2000, 30–­31).6 And even when membership in a political society is imposed by conquest, unwilling subjects can resist it via “weapons of the weak,” while they simultaneously sustain alternative conceptions of the “people” to which they inwardly profess allegiance (Scott 1985, 314–­50). In many settings, political elites also lack the resources, cohesive will, and institutional capacities to influence major aspects of the lives of many of those they formally govern, whose most valued memberships may be ones that state officials only informally recognize (Chatterjee 2004). 4 Finally, this theory presumes that although people construct political communities for many purposes, which must ultimately be understood

44 / Chapter Two to grasp any particular politics of people building, all share two general features. First, architects of all forms of peoplehood seek to create stable structures of power enabling them to accomplish their varied ends. Second, all seek to create forms of life that they regard as materially and normatively good, though their standards for the “good life” vary tremendously.7 These features mean that, on the one hand, we can analyze all the actors involved in people building processes as concerned to achieve and maintain power adequate to pursue their aims. But on the other hand, we cannot assume that power represents their sole goal, without reference to any further ends that they regard as materially desirable and normatively praiseworthy. To grasp their conduct, we must always consider both their contextual strategies for achieving power and any and all notions of the good that constrain how they believe power should be pursued and exercised.

The Politics of Peoplehood: Structural Features These, then, are this work’s four premises: forms of peoplehood are not natu­ ral; they are created by asymmetrical interactions between potential leaders and potential members; both leaders and members have agency in these processes; and proponents of all forms of peoplehood seek to achieve power and to promote ways of life they regard as good. These premises suggest that political processes of people building are likely to display certain structural features. The first is the fundamental fact that actors almost always pursue this politics through two types of instruments: coercive force and persuasive stories. Although political science has generally been a commendably tough-­minded discipline that places greatest stress on force, many scholars have come to acknowledge the importance of “softer” forms of power (Nye 2004). Competing narratives of peoplehood advanced by present or potential leaders necessarily play a prominent role in forging powerful coalitions and constituting governing institutions and policies that define membership and structure and distribute offices and resources. Again, even if leaders largely strive to construct the boundaries of their political community and the statuses of those within it by brute coercion, they always need at least some members who are persuaded to assist them by words, not by arms alone. Indeed, times of armed conflict may well generate the greatest pressures to advance inclusive stories of shared membership that can inspire a critical mass of people to undertake the enormous risks and sacrifices that wars often demand (Turner 1986, 70; Klinkner with Smith 1999, 3–­4). Hence compelling accounts of motives for giving allegiance

A Theory of the Politics of People Building  /  45

to leaders’ causes are often vital to their endeavors. We cannot understand their conduct or its consequences without grasping the characteristics of their stories—­what their contents are, what their structures are, how and why they work. The accounts of political peoplehood that would-­be leaders advance also are always likely to be crafted with two goals. Leaders seek to prompt constituents to embrace membership in the community or people they depict, and to persuade them to accept as leaders the very sorts of persons who are advancing these narratives. Thus their stories, however sincere, will always be partly self-­serving or partisan, structured to appeal broadly and to advance their specific aims. The content and structure of their arguments and the reception of their stories can be best comprehended if these dual goals are kept in mind. We also should recognize that this politics of people building is always ongoing, even within apparently well-­established and unified political communities. Inside and outside every political community, the current leaders always have rivals who seek to win support by advancing views of peoplehood featuring deeply held interests, values, and identities that are relatively neglected in the prevailing order. Those in power must take even possible conversions by their constituents to support for their opponents into account. Hence we should expect to find the two goals that structure the discourse of political leaders to be constantly present, sometimes implicitly, often explicitly—­though with content varying in response to whichever rivals loom largest at the moment. Whatever the specifics of the issues being addressed, politicians can always be heard to discuss them in ways that suggest, “This is the sort of political community we should have, and I am the sort of leader whom you should support.” This ongoing, competitive politics and the stories through which political contests are partly pursued also demand analyses that routinely encompass both domestic and international politics and that in fact attend to the continuing political construction and modification of those boundaries. Rivals or at least potential rivals to any set of ruling elites are always to be found within their government’s current borders and outside them, though again, the enemies that officials most fear are likely to change over time, leading the officials to stress themes that appear more concerned with what are deemed foreign or domestic policies. And because this point continues to be a bone of scholarly contention, it is wise to underline that people building always involves both maintenance and modification of preexisting senses of political identity. In some contexts the element of maintenance will be more prominent, particularly

46 / Chapter Two

when a political community is well established and reasonably functional. Its rival leaders are likely to offer heavily overlapping visions of peoplehood, competing over comparatively minor variations in their accounts of that community, its interests, values, and proper policies. But in some contexts, modification, even radical transformation, in existing political identities will predominate—­because existing political communities are coming apart and new societies with new regimes must be built. Yet both elements are always present, if in varying degrees. Leaders are never likely to win support, even in periods of revolution, if they are not speaking on behalf of at least some vital interests, values, and identities their constituents already possess. Otherwise, who would listen? But because power holders have rivals, and because conditions change, even within well-­ established political communities, successful leaders must always advance senses of peoplehood that modify preexisting conceptions of political community and political identity in ways that justify their distinctive leadership and policies.8 As one final structural feature, the politics of people building inevitably centers on senses of peoplehood that are to a significant degree exclusionary. This point is inescapably true philosophically: to embrace one sense of peoplehood and shared way of life is to reject others. It is almost as inescapably true politically. Most aspiring leaders surely aspire to lead as many people as possible. They will try to forge the broadest coalitions they can, and often the most wide-­ranging coalition will be the most powerful. Yet though some peoplehood coalitions are broader than others, all involve important exclusions. Because the established interests and identities of human beings are diverse and often at odds with each other, even the most ambitious leaders must decide who their core constituents are. They are certainly likely to include the most faithful activists in their coalition, and they also include the segments of the larger public who are their most probable supporters. They then cannot afford to have a coordinative story of their coalition’s iden­­ tity and aims or a communicative story of the larger political community that alienates most core constituents by including too many others whom the constituents perceive as threatening to their fundamental economic interests, political beliefs, religious or cultural norms, or other values. Leaders can determine just who and how many new constituents they can add as activists in or supporters for their coalition only in the perilous arenas of actual political struggles, and the results often surprise. But there is little prospect that any coalition will build support for a humanity-­wide political community in any future that we can foresee.

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Leaders realize, moreover, that some groups are likely to be supporters of their present or potential rivals no matter what the leaders say or do. The leaders have incentives to advance senses of peoplehood in which such groups are outnumbered, disempowered, discredited, or excluded altogether, by whatever means necessary. Consequently, the basic structures of the politics of people building involve continual, partisan, conflictual, often invidious, and always exclusionary processes centered on coercive force and political stories that involve many falsehoods and much injustice. The perhaps tragic human condition is that this fraught politics is inescapably central to making us who we are and to making it possible for human beings to flourish on this earth.

The Goals of Stories of Peoplehood: Trust and Worth What do the extensive existing extensive literatures on community, ethnicity, nationalism, peoplehood, citizenship, and related themes indicate about the sorts of people-­building accounts that can prevail and endure in such a politically competitive, constantly identity-­constructing world? I have previously suggested that many important works can be usefully organized according to what they implicitly or explicitly take to be the most difficult challenge facing the architects of sustainable senses of political community. Speaking broadly, two linked but distinguishable conceptions of the goals of people building emerge: trust and worth. The “trust” camp, which has burgeoned in the last quarter century, includes political theorists like John Dunn (1984), Mark Warren (1999), Russell Hardin (2002; 2006), and Francis Fukuyama (2008); rational choice–­ oriented political scientists like Margaret Levi and Valerie Braithwaite (1998), James Fearon and David Laitin (1996), and Andrew Kydd (2005); many economists; sociologists like Anthony Giddens (1985) and Charles Tilly (2005) concerned with coordination problems in complex societies, both among governors and the resistant governed; and also many scholars influenced by Robert Putnam’s claims about civil society (Putnam, 1995; 2000). These writers all suggest that the problem of people building, whether in the service of existing states or rival groups and goals, is fundamentally a problem of finding ways to generate trust, understood as including two different things: trust among the fellow members of a particular association, and trust between the association’s members and its leaders. It is especially the latter concern, the conditions under which potential members might trust potential leaders enough to invest in the form of association or

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community and leadership those leaders offer, that much of this literature features. Such trust is very usefully treated as a grand variant of problems of principal-­agent relations and credible commitments. Accounts of peoplehood can then be analyzed as stories of trust, narratives told by leaders to persuade constituents that if they embrace a certain political membership, they will be able to trust their governors and their compatriots to strive to advance the constituents’ interests, values, and identities. In contrast to these trust-­focused scholars are older intellectual historians of nationalism like Elie Kedourie (1961) and Hans Kohn (1957); contemporary political theorists like Michael Walzer (1983), Charles Taylor (1994), and Will Kymlicka (1995); analysts of symbolic politics such as Murray Edelman (1995); and comparative political sociologists and political scientists like Rogers Brubaker (1992), Liah Greenfeld (1992), Anthony D. Smith (1991; 1995), and Benedict Anderson (1983). They all stress the normative and psychological worth that accounts of political community have for potential members, given their histories and cultural and intellectual traditions. Perhaps surprisingly, they are joined in my analysis by some Marxist scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991) and Eric Hobsbawm (1990), and writers on political economy from Adam Smith (1776) through Ernest Gellner (1965; 1983) to the present. These scholars stress the economic worth, the wealth and prosperity, that membership in an association promises to provide, at least for some. I link these normative, psychological, and economic writers into a broad “worth” camp because for all of them, the basic task facing the proponents of a conception of peoplehood is to persuade its would-­be members of the distinctive worth or value—­economic, psychic, or normative—­that can be realized by loyalty to the political association thus understood. There can be little doubt that the trust and worth camps are both correct. The creation of relatively enduring senses of shared political identity sufficient to sustain associations and communities requires stories of peoplehood that inspire senses of both trust and worth, between members and leaders and among the members themselves. Indeed, I suggest that to engage in successful people building, it is necessary and sufficient to have a story or stories of peoplehood that can meet these broad challenges on an enduring basis. I say “story or stories” because coalitions sufficiently powerful to govern over time usually have to be put together by blending distinctive but overlapping stories that appeal to different parts of the activist coalition and the more general public. We may call the result the governing coalition’s “story,” but we should not lose sight of the fact that it has

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multiple components that are often in logical tension, even if they work collectively as powerful political cement. It is in fact because the different parts of overlapping stories of peoplehood often mean different things and matter in different ways to different constituencies that they can work politically, inspiring in a critical mass of constituents a sense of trust in their community’s leaders and members and a sense of the worth of giving allegiance to the dominant coalition’s vision. At the same time, their internal tensions and different interpretations form bases for mobilizing in support of change. And if economic, military, law enforcement, immigration, or other policies achieve far less than what the reigning account of the community has led constituents to expect, that account is likely to lose its capacity to persuade, and significant mobilization for change is to be expected. Success does not depend on having a good story alone. More precisely, sustaining a good story depends on results as well as rhetoric. One might object that “trust” and “worth” are not really two different categories, and they are certainly linked. People generally question the worth of communities with leaders and members they do not trust, and they usually do not sustain trust in leaders and memberships that fail to provide much that is of worth to them. It is important to specify both categories, however, because much literature now emphasizes trust alone, neglecting the irreplaceable and unique roles that themes of worth play in the politics of people building. It therefore bears underlining that if political communities do not make their members feel safe and strong, individually and collectively; if they do not provide prosperity; and if they do not embody a way of life that members affirm as normatively good, they will be vulnerable to challenges and change, however much the members may trust their leaders and fellow citizens. In making this case, I define “trust” as a person’s belief that the leaders and other members of a particular community are really trying to advance important values or interests the person has. They might do so because they share those values or interests, because their own differing interests are thus well served, because they have a sense of duty, because they have structural incentives to do so, or for some other reason. Whatever its basis, trust is simply the belief that those trusted are likely to try to do the right things, as seen from one’s own point of view. A sense of the “worth” of political leaders and particular communities is, in contrast, a belief that a community’s leaders and members are succeeding, or at least can succeed, in advancing the person’s values or interests if they try to do so. This belief may stem from benefits received; or from confidence

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in the leaders’ and members’ special competencies; in the great material or cultural resources of the community they are forming or sustaining; in favorable historical economic, cultural, or political trends; in divine assistance; or from other sources. Linked as trust and worth are, it is plausible to think that accounts of membership in a particular community might inspire in us a strong sense of trust without a strong sense of worth, and vice versa. Many Puerto Ricans, for example, trust that independence advocates seek to advance their island’s well-­being, while doubting their vision can achieve it. And at least some of those Puerto Ricans believe they can enhance their wealth by remaining under US sovereignty—­even though they do not trust Congress to weigh Puerto Rican interests fairly. In other words, many Puerto Ricans doubt that the leaders they trust best can provide worth, and many doubt that the leaders who can best provide worth merit their trust. This disjunction between the leaders who can most credibly provide trust and worth is, of course, profoundly disturbing. It has left Puerto Ricans deeply split over what form of political peoplehood they should pursue. The results of a 2012 referendum suggest strongest support for statehood, the option that would combine the benefits of American membership with real representation in the US government, justifying greater trust in it. But doubts and divisions persist (Patterson 2012).

The Themes of Stories of Peoplehood: A Typology What sorts of stories of peoplehood can overcome these types of differences in varied settings, meeting the challenges of inspiring unifying senses of communal trust and worth? Stories with three basic types of themes play necessary, interlinked, yet distinguishable roles in accomplishing both tasks. Successful narratives of peoplehood blend all three themes, though in very different combinations. These three types are economic, political power, and constitutive themes. To be clear, all of the themes are deployed as means to gain political power, among other ends. But only the second theme cultivates support primarily by featuring the power consequences of accepting or rejecting a vision of membership. Economic themes instead promote trust by indicating that particular leaders and various constituents can be counted on to work together for the constituents’ economic welfare. They also offer worth in the tangible and tempting form of increased wealth for all, individually and collectively. It may be objected that economic themes are, at least in the twenty-­first century, advanced not as “stories” but as rational arguments that deploy logical

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models, tested via rigorously assembled empirical evidence, to support economic recommendations. But the economist Arjo Klamer has argued that even academic economic debates are conducted by placing research results within the structures of larger narratives. He also contends that reliance on persuasive stories, with less concern for truth, is still more fundamental in political discussions of economics, which convey more clearly messages of what is good and bad for people than academic writings (2007, 33, 117–­22, 163–­75). When such economic themes are deployed to support conceptions of political peoplehood, they generally take the form of tales promising a bountiful future if a certain vision of membership is pursued, and tales of hardship if it is not. As examples, when the American revolutionaries described in the Declaration of Independence how King George was “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent,” and when Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” that “Our plan is commerce,” they were trying to inspire both trust and a belief in the worth of their proposed new political community extensively in economic terms (Beeman 2013, 431; Paine, in Jensen 1967, 423). Their narrative promised that if the American colonists gained their independence and united as one people, they would achieve a commercial prosperity they could not otherwise hope to achieve. Similarly, when the Fifth All-­Russia Congress of Soviets adopted a Fundamental Law for the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic on July 10, 1918, it sought to promote economic trust by promising the “abolition of all exploitation of man by man,” and economic worth via the socialist extension of “the prosperity of the exploiters” to the whole of the “working people,” who would essentially comprise the new Soviet people.9 Those economic themes of curbing exploitation and increasing and spreading the wealth have found echoes in most of the other peoplehood narratives told throughout human history. Although desires for economic accumulation may not drive all of political life, they are almost always fundamental to it. For brevity and theoretical parsimony I treat the next category, political power themes, as a single type. They can, however, be divided into several subcategories, for they may advance one or more of three related “power” conceptions. First, they generally promise that a political community’s officials and institutions will exercise their powers in ways that will give individuals a significant measure of physical protection and security against all who might assault them, including abusers in their own government—­a promise that can inspire trust and that most people see as having great worth. Second, they promise that if the policies recommended by a story of

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peoplehood are followed, the political community as a whole will be strong enough to defend against foreign enemies, a promise most members find reassuring, and that the community may also achieve a prominent place among the world’s great powers, a goal many members find stirring. And third, especially since the American and French revolutions, these political stories often promise that individuals will have a share of governing power through some system of representation, even if this power often is very limited. For some, representation provides a basis for trust in government. For others, participating in political self-­governance is itself an intrinsic good—­ even, for an odd few, the highest human good.10 Consequently, all three of these forms of power can promote senses of trust in a political community, its institutions, its leaders, and its members, as well as belief in their worth. Again as examples of political power themes: to inspire trust in those frustrated by regulation and taxation without representation, the American revolutionaries’ Declaration advocated government by “the consent of the governed,” including “Representation in the Legislature,” the “Administration of Justice” by independent judges and jury trials, and no “Standing Armies without consent of our legislatures” (Beeman 2013, 429–­31). To inspire a sense of the worth of a new federal regime, Paine argued that if Americans united as an independent nation, they “need fear no external enemy” (Jensen 1967, 440). The Bill of Rights then provided a set of protections against the national government’s invasion of people’s homes, lives, and properties, including procedural protections in federal criminal justice proceedings. The American revolutionaries and founders thereby promised political power in all three forms: personal security, national security, and representative self-­governance. Similarly, the preamble to the 1982 constitution of the People’s Republic of China narrated China’s long history as a tale of repeated subjection and oppression, and it concluded that at last with the founding of the People’s Republic, “the Chinese people have taken control of state power and become masters of the country.” The Chinese people were said to have since “safeguarded China’s national independence and security” against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and Article 2 of the Constitution asserted: “All power in the People’s Republic of China belongs to the people.”11 By such contentions, both early American and modern Chinese leaders sought to foster trust and faith in the worth of their nations partly via these tripartite political power themes. The final and most distinctive category, constitutive themes, refers as indicated to a wide variety of accounts that present membership in a particular people as intrinsic to who the members really are, because of traits deemed

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to be normatively good. These stories proclaim that members’ religion, race, ethnicity, ancestry, language, culture, history, class, customs, and practices or other such traits are integral to their very identities and affirm their moral value while also delineating their duties. All such constitutive themes imply that the persons depicted in them should not choose to belong to any other people if they wish to be true to their best selves and those to whom they are most akin. If they are accepted, constitutive narratives generally inspire trust. Sometimes they do so because people think that their fellow religious believers, ethnic compatriots, or linguistic partners have values and interests similar to theirs. Sometimes they do so because, as Fearon and Laitin (1996) and others suggest about ethnicity, people are more confident that they can identify untrustworthy conduct in those whose customs and social networks they know best. Constitutive themes are still more obviously able to inspire senses of worth, since their featured traits are depicted as inherently commendable. When Paine wrote that Americans were a people who could claim “brotherhood with every European Christian,” he both presumed and propagated ethnic, religious, and also gendered constitutive themes of this sort (Paine, in Jensen 1967, 421). He knew many colonial American men would take pride in seeing themselves as embodying and extending what was best in Europe and in Christianity (including a fraternal patriarchy). When he went on to suggest that Americans were in fact a new “chosen people” like the ancient Israelites, and that it was the plan of Providence to establish a New World nation that would be an asylum for all liberty-­loving people, he advanced a more specifically religious constitutive account (409–­13, 423–­24). His ancestral, cultural, and religious themes served to promote trust in the members and leaders of the incipient American people, as well as faith in the prospective nation’s moral worth. Similarly, when the Declaration’s authors spoke of their “cosanguinity” with there “British brethren” and chose to denounce the “merciless Indian savages” instead of treating them as fellow tyrannized subjects, they also implied an ethnic if not racial constitutive story of who Americans really were and would be, with religious and cultural overtones (Beeman 2013, 431–­32). An independent American people, reliant on “divine providence,” would not include indigenous tribal members, but only citizens who could be trusted to strive to protect the interests of European-­descended colonists against the Indians. The American people would not include savages, only bearers of a civilization of superior worth. Even accounts of peoplehood that foreground economic and political

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power concerns rarely refrain from weaving in distinct constitutive themes. Rather than seeking to replace ethnic identities with class conceptions, for example, the Soviet Union created “Union Republics,” each named for the distinctive nationality or ethnicity “rooted” there, and it gave all its citizens internal passports that indicated their ethnic or national ancestry (Brubaker 1996, 26–­35). And though the 1982 Chinese Constitution stressed that power belonged to “the Chinese people,” Communist official documents have long used different terms for “the people.” Belonging to “the people” understood as the gongmin—­possessors of legal Chinese nationality—­has never guaranteed all of the political rights and powers guaranteed to the people understood as the renmin (Feng 2006). In Communist interpretations, renmin has had a narrower, more constitutive meaning than gongmin, one in which economic class defines those most deserving of political empowerment. The renmin are essentially the Communist coalition’s core members: the urban working class, rural peasants, and their allies, valorized and trusted as the “real” people in Communist ideology and (generally) by the Chinese Communist Party (though more have come to be included in “the people” thus understood in the modern era [Feng 2006, 89]). Ethnic narratives, moreover, are not wholly absent; the Chinese governments on the mainland and Taiwan both employ the term “Han” to designate what is conventionally taken to be the largest and most essentially “Chinese” ethnic group, even though Chinese writers only began giving the term an ethnic meaning at the turn of the twentieth century (Chow 2001, 47–­48, 53–­63, 74–­76). As these examples suggest, constitutive themes can take a fascinating variety of forms involving appeals to language, geography, cultural traditions, economic identities, and much more. Yet they display strong tendencies to include three elements. First, as Margaret Canovan suggests, except for the ultimately unsuccessful exception of modern Communist regimes, these stories have historically tended to be religious or at least quasi-­religious (1996, 22). It is hard to discern a stronger basis for making a membership seem both intrinsic and morally worthwhile than to have it divinely assigned. Even when citizens come to view religious sanctifications of their society as more mythical than literally true, they can still value those religious accounts as beloved elements of their common identity, and many enjoy the lingering sense that there is after all something sacred about their nation. Illustrative here is the Danes’ affection for the Dannebrog, their national flag, which is said to have dropped down from the sky to inspire the Danes to victory in an early thirteenth-­century battle, an event celebrated throughout the country each June 15. Although few Danes still believe that

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the Dannebrog was truly a gift from God, many, probably most, venerate it as a crucial element of their “civil religion” (Warburg 2008). Second, as even the Communist examples suggest and as John Lie’s analysis affirms (2004), constitutive themes have a weaker but still powerful tendency to include ethnic and racial myths of common descent. After divine authorship, the most straightforward way to make a membership seem natural is to portray it as an expression of actual biological kinship.12 These kinds of doctrines can be politically problematic, for they pose logical obstacles to extending fully equal “naturalized” status to any persons born outside the group, even those who are regarded as desirable new citizens. When it suits the interests of a community’s core constituents and leaders, such “naturalizations” generally prove politically feasible—­but shadows of “outsider” status often linger. Third, this genealogical strain has frequently combined with entrenched economic and social arrangements to support the elaboration of gendered, often patriarchal themes within narratives of peoplehood. In particular, ancestral constitutive stories—­ethnic, racial, religious—­can prompt official concern with the roles of men and women not simply as members of the political community but as reproductive agents, as parents. They provide political incentives for community leaders to adopt rules that inhibit “their” people from openly bearing children with mates whose “foreign” origins would, again, threaten the credibility of claims of shared biological origins. As Nancy Cott has written, “laws of marriage must play a large part in forming ‘the people.’ They sculpt the body politic” (2000, 5).13 And enforcement of marriage laws is inevitably bound up with the construction of gender identities, statuses, and powers more generally. Often, political communities have assigned women special roles not only in their peoples’ biological reproduction, but also in their cultural reproduction. Political leaders have often charged “their” women with primary responsibilities for rearing children who will have identities, values, and commitments that will make them good members of their political society. And governing officials have therefore often claimed they were entitled to regulate not just female reproductive behavior but their morality more broadly, to make sure that the right lessons were being passed on to the next generation (Mosse 1985, 9–­14, 191). These concerns to regulate women have sometimes also provided motives to regulate sexual conduct and sexual orientations in general. In societies valorizing male leadership in heterosexual relationships within which women reproduce desirable community members, same sex male as well as female relationships can appear useless or actively subversive.

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Hence the politics of peoplehood can foster political pressures to regulate both women and men, especially their sexual conduct but also their behavior more generally, in ways that reinforce men’s economic and political interests in confining women to male-­governed “domestic” roles. In so doing, they often contribute to the institutionalization of heterosexuality and patriarchal constitutive accounts of peoplehood. These patterns are not inevitable parts of people-­building processes, but they are frequently recurring tendencies (Moghadam 1994, 3–­6). Despite these powerful tendencies, I have argued that constitutive accounts do not have to be religious or quasi-­religious, biological or quasi-­ biological, and gendered in inegalitarian, homophobic fashion. Stories presenting persons as constituted by a shared history, culture, language, or political ideology whose future they will inescapably shape in one way or another, but which they may modify and develop in many ways, can be just as potent in fostering a sense of intrinsic, normatively valuable community membership (Smith 2003, 65). It must be acknowledged, however, that these kinds of less essentialist and potentially more egalitarian and inclusive constitutive themes have difficulty gaining broad support, because they often challenge the normative values and the economic and political interests of powerful community members.

Politics and the Interweaving of Peoplehood Themes These difficulties in formulating successful and also morally attractive stories of peoplehood raise the question: why do leaders offer their distinctive blends of economic, political power, and constitutive themes, some more hierarchical, some more inclusive? Their choices first reflect their own driving concerns, which necessarily include gaining and maintaining power. But their goals often also include enhancing their own wealth, and also advancing what they see as noble causes inspired by the constitutive stories with which they were raised, as well as their personal psychologies and other experiences. What analyzing the politics of peoplehood highlights, however, is that their choices are also always strategic ones, guided and constrained by the possibilities for coalition building they confront, as well as by the options for narrative construction available to them. They must seek to weave together the three types of themes into a story that can attract from the populations open to their mobilizing efforts supporters who include a core of unshakable loyalists, along with other backers who may be less firmly committed but who offer resources, skills, and numbers sufficient to overcome opposing forces. The leaders must offer varied

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economic and constitutive appeals and political power promises that speak to the diverse concerns of these potential coalition members. Yet at the same time, they must try to make their economic appeals, their political power promises, and their constituent themes fit together well enough rhetorically and substantively that those most attracted by particular elements can nonetheless see themselves as appropriately joined with those attracted by others into a common group or people. The different themes need not logically entail each other or even be fully logically compatible, since most if not all people are capable of believing many inconsistent things without too much cognitive dissonance. But the themes should not oppose each other, logically or symbolically, so starkly as to make this difficult for people to do. It will be clear by now that achieving this level of narrative coherence is often challenging. The content and rhetoric of one appealing element can often undermine others. Potential donors with great wealth who are attracted by favorable economic themes may not wish to see political power extended to poorer constituents, but the poor may seek greater voice and be able to provide votes needed for victory. A leader’s fervent core constituents may be stirred by ethnic or religious themes hostile to recent immigrants who approve of the leader’s other messages and can provide valuable technical skills. A new regime may need military and economic support from other nations or from international bodies who impose demands for membership policies that the regime’s domestic constituents resent. The challenges the American revolutionaries faced are instructive in this regard. To deem the British monarch and British policies oppressive, they found it useful to champion republicanism and natural rights, especially in their mass communications. But these claims raised questions of who could be republican citizens with voting rights, or even persons with inalien­ able rights. If impoverished European-­descended men received the vote, or worse, if women or Native Americans or free Africans were included in the full range of natural rights, many male colonists with resources needed by the coalition of revolutionary activists might refuse to support the cause of independence. But though they were needed, such men alone were not likely to be sufficient for success. Revolutionaries like Thomas Paine therefore chose to employ a grand communicative rhetoric of republicanism and universal rights, while more quietly indicating the elite-­coordinating message that not all would really be equal citizens. Similarly, in order to promise prosperity, it made sense to proclaim that after independence American commerce would be unshackled, indeed assisted. But Americans divided greatly over whether slavery was legitimate in a commercial society. The genius of Paine as a political pamphleteer was that he blended the

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revolutionaries’ economic, political power, and constitutive themes in astonishingly inspiring ways that appealed to both masses and elites, despite their deep internal tensions. Yet while the revolutionaries managed to build a successful coalition, those dissonances remained as disruptive, potentially transformative elements within American peoplehood. Finding themes that work together well enough in both sound and substance to bond a dominant coalition and a larger political people that can both endure requires imagination, skill, and favorable circumstances. Yet opportunities for success nonetheless frequently arise, because those in power and all the different rivals who are contesting them face these same challenges. There are virtually always deep tensions among the values and interests of various segments of the governing coalition, even in long-­ established and reasonably well-­off communities. As the spiral of politics proceeds, these tensions, combined with changing resources and beliefs, can create new openings to build coalitions for substantial transformations. What is constant is that successful accounts of peoplehood inspire senses of trust and worth by threading together economic, political power, and constitutive themes in ways tailored to win the favor of a critical mass of activists and mass constituents. Only the specific substantive combinations that are advanced and that prevail alter over time, in ways that drive and are driven by the spiral of politics, with profound consequences. Still, the ubiquitous presence of all these themes in all long-­enduring narratives of peoplehood can be missed, because circumstances can prompt political leaders to feature some and minimize others. As Nadya Nedelsky has shown, after the fall of the Soviet Union, different coalitions formed to contest the future of Czechoslovakia, resulting in its dissolution in 1993. Those who then constructed the Czech Republic did so by emphasizing political power themes of personal protection, global community standing, and political representation, blended with reinforcing universalistic normative commitments. The preamble of the constitution they wrote reads: We, the citizens of the Czech Republic in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, at the time of the renewal of an independent Czech state . . . resolve to build, protect, and develop the Czech Republic in the spirit of the inviolable values of human dignity and freedom, as the home of free and equal citizens who are conscious of their duties toward others and their responsibility toward the whole, as a free and democratic state based on the respect for human rights and the principles of civic society, as part of the family of European and world democracies . . . resolved to abide by all time-­tried principles of

A Theory of the Politics of People Building  /  59 a law-­observing state, through our freely elected representatives adopt this Constitution of the Czech Republic. (Cited in Nedelsky 2009, 234–­35)

The creators of Slovakia feared that their distinct interests would be submerged in the new Czech Republic, so they bonded their people around an ethnic conception of their new nation. Accordingly, the Slovak constitution begins: We, the Slovak Nation, mindful of the political and cultural heritage of our forefathers and of our own statehood . . . based on the natural right of nations to self-­determination, together with the members of minority nationalities living on the territory of the Slovak Republic . . . adopt through our representatives this Constitution. (Cited in Nedelsky 2009, 195–­96)

This language conveys a clear constitutive message of the Slovaks’ ethnic sovereignty, in contrast to the political power themes of democratic self-­ governance in the service of human rights that the Czech constitution’s preamble advances. But it would be misleading to characterize Slovakian peoplehood as featuring only an ethnic constitutive story, and Czech Republican peoplehood as bound only by political principles expressing universalistic values. Minority nationalities gain some recognition as meriting political rights even in the Slovak constitution. The Czech Republic, in turn, has had difficulties embracing the Roma as equal members (Nedelsky 2009, 194–­97, 237–­39). The highlighting of one theme rarely if ever means that the others are wholly absent, and dissonances among them are almost always present as well. Yet though this virtually inescapable multiplicity of themes poses difficulties for coherent and compelling exposition, it also gives political actors engaged in people building a useful variety of options for gaining support. In addition to choosing to stress economic, political power, or constitutive themes, or some distinctive combination, proponents of particular forms of peoplehood can focus more on passionately inspiring trust than concretely promising worth. They can advance stories that are primarily positive about the proffered sense of community, or ones that are chiefly negative about rival conceptions of community, rival leaders, and rival groups. They can present their stories by relying heavily on emotional imagery, symbolism, music, art, parades, and pageantry, or via more rationalistic discourses. With all these narrative routes at their disposal, creative leaders can sometimes find accounts that can make a shared peoplehood seem

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trustworthy and valuable even to many who have long seen themselves as opposed to a particular nation or its leadership. But to do so on an enduring basis, leaders are likely to have to offer accounts of peoplehood that contain some version of all these themes, sufficiently blended so that they are stories that can be well told, in ways that can inspire senses of both trust and worth.

The Political Role of Constitutive Stories Skeptical readers may still ask, why so? Few, I imagine, are likely to question the need to promise a significant measure of economic welfare, personal security, and collective power. Indeed, many may be inclined to believe that accounts chiefly promoting senses of economic trust and worth, such as those advanced in most versions of classical liberal, neoliberal, and social democratic thought, or the narratives of law-­abiding, trustworthy, and valuable governmental and personal political power put forth by democratic, liberal, and republican writers, or both together, are sufficient as bases for politically potent conceptions of peoplehood. Constitutive themes may appear more fanciful and ultimately less important—­rhetorical window dressing for economic and power goals. They may also be seen as less rational and as more dangerous. I contend instead that compelling constitutive themes are necessary for any political society to long endure. The need for persuasive constitutive accounts can be appreciated by specifying the peculiar traits of such stories that enable them to play special roles in the politics of people building. Constitutive themes have at least three features that distinguish them from economic and political power stories as foundations for peoplehood. These features justify treating constitutive accounts as important, though they do not at all refute the charge that they can be dangerous. Their first distinctive feature is that they are more intrinsically normative. Most people, to be sure, regard concerns for personal sustenance and physical safety as unquestionably moral, and many think that it is normatively good to enhance a community’s wealth and political power. Still, most people think that pursuing riches and preeminent power risks moral corruption: as the familiar aphorisms have it, the love of money is the root of all evil; absolute power corrupts absolutely. In contrast, if we are persuaded that our communities are following divine will, carrying forward a great culture or language, fulfilling the destiny of a master race or sex, we have little doubt that they are doing what is right and good. Second, constitutive themes generally account better for why membership in a particular community is enduringly important. Universalistic-­minded

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normative philosophers sometimes overlook the political reality that this particularism is a message that many community members want to hear, as well as one that many aspiring leaders seek to advance. The reasons for the broad appeal of particularistic memberships are not hard to see. Most people live their entire lives in the political society into which they are born and raised, and many identify with it strongly. They are likely to be receptive to accounts that valorize it, and so them. Even many who admit the truth of many criticisms of their society and/or who feel themselves also to be part of other communities and traditions may be made to feel anxious and uncertain by the competing claims concerning their political society that they encounter. These anxieties can make them receptive to accounts that make their proper allegiances, and their relative priority, appear certain and clear (e.g., “For God, Country, and Yale,” usually endorsed with the understanding that America is God’s country, and that God belongs to Skull and Bones). Because many potential constituents strongly desire to hear their particular memberships affirmed, proponents of stories that present those memberships as compelling and right have competitive advantages against those who do not convey a sense that the memberships have special value. That is an advantage that most aspirants to leadership will not forego. And if advocates of a conception of peoplehood present it as simply instrumental to the achievement of wealth or political power by its members and leaders, they will not always be able to make a strong case for the worth of membership in that particular community. They may also fail to foster senses of trust between constituents and leaders and among many community members. People will know that their compatriots or their leaders may profit more by neglecting the shared interests of the political community in favor of more self-­seeking pursuits, or by transferring allegiances to other wealthy, powerful groups, associations, or even nations. Especially in the twenty-­first century, many economic elites may be suspected of being more committed to multinational corporations and the interests of fellow members of the global 1 percent than to the political communities of which they are citizens, and in any case they may hold more than one such citizenship. Many of the world’s poor may understandably be seen as more concerned to find better economic opportunities by moving if they can instead of maintaining their current political memberships. If, however, people believe that their religion or ethnicity or culture means that they are intrinsically part of one particular community and can achieve full realization only as part of it, matters are different. Then there is no ambiguity about where they belong—­and allegiance to its policies, institutions, practices, and leaders may well seem mandatory. As a result,

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constitutive themes are more effective in inspiring the senses of the unquestionable propriety of particular community memberships and the feelings of trust and worth that many seek. The third advantage of constitutive themes in comparison with economic and political power ones is that their normative claims are less subject to tangible evidence, and so harder to discredit, than promises of wealth, personal and national security, and a share in governance. Most people have reasonably clear notions of what counts as evidence of whether or not they are economically prosperous, at least within their own social realms, even if they do not know much about larger economic structures and distributions. And notwithstanding how complex power relations are, people can usually discern whether they are vulnerable to physical assaults, whether their society is incapable of defending itself, and whether they have any power to influence what their governments do. But what counts as clear, reliable evidence that we are indeed the chosen of God, the master race, an especially valuable civilization or culture, or even speakers of a language that has distinctive worth? Many authorities make such claims, and some sorts of evidence seem relevant. Still, definitive proof that these claims either are or are not true is more difficult to achieve than in the case of the other themes. These features explain why constitutive themes play an irreplaceable role in people building. They do so partly because they are in some ways less politically reliable but also in some ways more politically reliable than the other themes. They are less reliable because it is harder for constituents to judge their credibility via concrete evidence and because the core benefits they offer are less tangible. They are more reliable, however, because once they are accepted, it is equally hard for rivals to mount evidence against them. If allegiance to a conception of peoplehood is grounded on its economic or power benefits, then that allegiance is likely to falter whenever a person’s economic positions and prospects go sour or when a stronger neighbor dominates the community, at least if alternatives offering more of these benefits are available. But if adherents genuinely believe that membership in a particular people is part of who they are and what gives them worth, it is more likely that attachments to that sense of peoplehood will weather hard times, perhaps even long stretches of poverty and political subjugation. And if constitutive themes indeed play such central roles in peoples’ lives, they are not likely to be highly malleable or easily replaceable. Consequently, leaders are not likely to succeed over time unless they give a prominent place in their narrative of peoplehood to some version of the constitutive beliefs of those they govern. As Anthony D. Smith argues, even

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a “civic” nation like France has less visible but often internally appealing ethnic narratives holding that the French nation has been comprised of “true descendants of . . . republican heroes of ancient Rome,” or at least that French culture is a prerequisite for republican citizenship (A. D. Smith 1999, 75). For several reasons, then, both those who wish to lead political peoples and those who wish to feel that their political memberships are valuable commonly place great weight on constitutive themes that confer normative worth on their political communities. Hence we should expect leaders to try to propagate allegiance-­inspiring constitutive themes, and we should expect all especially long-­lasting societies to contain a constitutive story, or more often multiple overlapping stories, in which many members passionately believe. Yet compelling as constitutive accounts may be in certain regards, many people are not likely to be persuaded of them initially or to sustain faith in them if the communities and leaders they support are in fact unable to protect their members from physical violence and material privation, legal arbitrariness, or political servitude. Again, the lack of pertinent evidence can tell against embattled constitutive themes as well as for them. Hence leaders would be ill advised to rely on their constitutive themes alone, without compelling accounts of how constituents’ economic and political power interests will be well served by giving allegiance to the leaders’ vision of peoplehood. And sooner or later, those accounts will have to have their credibility sustained by affirming results.

Which Themes When? Four Hypotheses The foregoing analysis suggests at least four hypotheses about the role that constitutive themes are likely to play in the politics of peoplehood. 1 They will predictably be more prominent when the provision of economic and political power benefits seems uncertain or clearly deficient, due to unfavorable conditions or obvious shortcomings in a community’s leadership or resources. Thomas Paine was neither the first nor the last advocate of revolutionary change who sought to rally support for a perilous uprising against a far more powerful government by suggesting that the revolutionaries enjoyed the favor of divine Providence (Jensen 1967, 409–­13, 423–­24). As discussed in the next chapter, periods of founding or refounding, when new regimes are replacing older ones, are especially eras in which those attempting uncertain new political innovations frequently invoke constitutive themes to instill faith in their endeavors. Regime founders’ ensuing

64 / Chapter Two institutionalizations of their constitutive themes often mean that future generations are so extensively socialized in those accounts that their claims come to seem almost unquestionable. As a result of this widespread accep­ tance, the themes are far more likely to be adapted and perpetuated than to be ignored or abandoned by the regime’s later political participants. To be sure, bolstering senses of peoplehood through constitutive themes is not always easy. Calvert Jones has analyzed the efforts of the oil-­rich United Arab Emirates’ oligarchic leadership to promote civic loyalties and aid long-­run national prosperity by stressing the economic benefits of membership for UAE citizens (Jones 2012). Although UAE leaders have hoped that they could foster economically entrepreneurial citizens through this message, they are finding they have instead reinforced “rentier” mentalities characterized by beliefs that UAE citizenship should carry with it guaranteed access to lucrative public offices and other revenue sources. Although its public education includes themes valorizing Arab and Muslim identities in general, the UAE, a federation founded in 1971, has had difficulty folding constitutive themes that glorify the UAE itself into its national story trumpeting the economic worth of membership. It also keeps political power in very few hands. Consequently, if citizens are not given economic benefits and they believe they have better opportunities elsewhere, they feel little obligation to stay and support the regime by becoming the entrepreneurs its leaders think they will need in the long run. When oil revenues finally diminish, the UAE is likely to have to find compelling particularistic constitutive themes, or perhaps to begin to share political power, if it is to survive as a united political community. 2 Constitutive themes will also be more prominent when economic and political power benefits are being obtained, but by risky means, so that again, leaders need to inspire confidence that these measures can succeed over time. For example, Japanese political and economic leaders justified the extensive, highly leveraged lending by Japanese financial institutions to Japanese corporations in the 1980s that produced Japan’s fast-­growing “bubble economy” in part by invoking Japanese versions of “Asian values.” They contended Japan’s norms of communal loyalty and mutual support would temper the dangers of risky borrowing practices (Pye 2000, 244, 252). Those constitutive themes lost considerable credibility after Japan’s precipitous economic collapse, but they nonetheless still are sometimes invoked to uphold East Asian economic practices that Western economic analysts criticize. 3 Similarly, constitutive themes will be more prominent when economic and political power benefits are being obtained, but by morally questionable means, so that leaders need to shore up beliefs that they are acting legitimately. Few

A Theory of the Politics of People Building  /  65 examples are more obvious and more consequential than the elaboration, especially in the nineteenth century, of doctrines of white racial superiority to justify European imperialist domination of native populations in Africa and Asia, as well as the European-­descended American settlers’ exploitation of African American slave labor and their appropriation of the lands of the indigenous tribes (Le Melle 2009, 78–­79). These policies always faced charges of immorality, especially from proponents of egalitarian religious traditions, and so empire builders eagerly endorsed contrary religious and scientific doctrines asserting the propriety of their brutal practices. 4 Finally, because constitutive stories are foundational in the development of human identities, human psyches, and a sense of value and meaning, many people are likely to be made insecure when the ideas, institutions, and practices expressive of established constitutive themes are threatened, from whatever source, and when no available alternative looks very promising. When the European Union sought to adopt a new constitution, itself a transformative act, amid the EU’s eastern expansion and rising concerns about Muslim immigrants, a debate erupted over whether Christianity should be explicitly defined as historically central to European identity. Many US observers were surprised by this controversy because they perceived Europeans, especially northern Europeans, as far more secular than Americans. But the dispute revealed deep concerns even among more secular Europeans that European societies were transforming too rapidly, and the issues were divisive enough to contribute to the failure of all efforts to win support for a European constitution so far (Schlesinger and Foret 2006).

Such resurgences of even apparently declining constitutive themes in times of rapid change seem less surprising when we take into account how profoundly persons’ identities have been constituted by accounts valorizing the religion, language, cultural practices, racial or ethnic identities, and the gender ordering in which they have been raised. Many are predictably deeply disturbed when political, demographic, economic, or other transformations alter the patterns of life those stories have long celebrated. And it is likely that many of those whose senses of worth, identity, and material interests are strongly bound up with the arrangements expressive of such accounts will be responsive to a politics that promises in some way to refurbish them (Turner 1986, 104). Once institutionalized, then, constitutive themes can become in themselves a basis for their recurring prominence, whenever events spark a politics of social self-­preservation or reassertion. Hence we have ample reasons to expect that constitutive accounts justifying particularistic senses of membership, often in hard-­to-­refute terms

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of normative worth, will be enduring elements in any successful politics of people building. This analysis supports the many recent critics of the common distinction between “civic” and “ethnic” nations and of characterizations of societies as essentially “liberal,” “republican,” or even “liberal republican” (Brubaker 1992; Greenfeld 1992; Ignatieff 1993; cf. Yack 1996; Xenos 1996). All actual political communities contain ethnic narratives along with civic accounts of shared political principles, even if the latter may be more prominent in many contexts. All actual societies, whether they are deemed “liberal,” “republican,” “democratic,” or “liberal democracies” or “liberal republics,” in practice blend these traditions with constitutive themes valorizing membership in their own particular political community rather than another. Even so, no two regimes are identical. The content, ratios, and mixes of economic, political power, and constitutive elements in their stories of peoplehood vary tremendously, even among regimes that all profess to subscribe to democracy and human rights and mutually influence each others’ policies. Constitutive themes that are sharply and invidiously exclusionary or repressive are more prominent in some regimes and some historical contexts than others. The theory just delineated does not in any way imply that it is hopeless to seek to diminish the political sway of invidious constitutive accounts, such as racial, nativist, or narrowly theocratic narratives of political identity, or that it is always futile to strive to combat unduly self-­serving economic or political power themes justifying gaping inequalities and cruel hardships. It does not counsel against seeking to strengthen more inclusive and egalitarian elements in any and all prevailing senses of peoplehood. But it does indicate that the challenges to doing so in politically effective ways are great, for reasons that we must grasp if we wish to confront them effectively.

T hr e e

Narrative Structures and the Politics of Peoplehood MERAL UGUR CINAR AND ROGERS M. SMITH

Building on great historic predecessors, scholars in many disciplines are now taking more seriously the kinds of narratives or stories that political actors draw on, adapt, and deploy to build coalitions, institutions, and policies.1 This chapter is a collaboration that seeks to synthesize insights from a broader range of scholarship than either author has explored independently. In previous work, we have each argued in different ways that political peoples of varied kinds, including modern nations, are formed in part through the promulgation and institutionalization of stories or narratives that remodel politically potent traditions of identities, affiliations, and aspirations in order to build support for the kinds of political communities, institutions, leadership, and policies that their advocates favor. As the previous chapter delineates, Rogers Smith has focused on a typology of three kinds of content—­economic, political power, and constitutive themes—­that stories of peoplehood must contain. Meral Ugur Cinar has drawn on literary theories to advance a typology of four kinds of structure—­formalist, mechanistic, organicist, and contextual—­that national stories might take (Cinar 2012). Here we link these accounts of narrative contents and structures to elaborate a richer framework for understanding the politics of peoplehood. Our central argument is that especially when political communities are founded, their leaders tend to feature constitutive themes celebrating distinctive, intrinsically valuable elements of their community identity, and they choose narrative structures that are suitable for those themes. They then institutionalize the content and structure of the resulting national narratives in government-­approved textbooks and official documents, exhibitions, monuments, holiday rituals, and festivals in ways that shape popular opinion. The resulting popular beliefs can make it difficult to build political support for membership policies that seem inconsistent with the founding

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narratives’ content themes and narrative structures. We illustrate these patterns by mapping out the implications of different sorts of national stories for policies toward immigrants and minorities. The United States, Turkey, Austria, and Israel serve as examples of the types of narrative themes and structures we explore.

The Content Components of Stories of Peoplehood Our focus here is on national narratives, still the most important, though far from the only, form of political peoplehood. We contend that if the nation-­building narratives of would-­be leaders are to speak effectively to persons who always already have conceptions of their identities and interests, those stories must be historical, explaining how such members should understand the political community’s past, present, and likely future. And as Roland Barthes and Hayden White argued, all historical accounts of nations and other political peoples have literary structures (Barthes 1981, 7–­ 20; White 1975; 1978; 1990). They are stories with plots featuring certain sorts of recognizable characters—­but stories that can be plotted in more than one plausible way. Rivals for the leadership of any nation or people have strong incentives to plot their narratives in contrasting ways that can further their causes against their opponents. When they come to power, leaders generally seek to get their preferred stories of collective identity as fully and officially institutionalized as possible. We have already seen that leaders have options, but not unlimited options, in how they construct nation-­building narratives in light of their political circumstances, including the traditions of those whose allegiance they seek to gain and hold. Beyond those traditions, do nation builders face other constraints on the stories of collective identity they can tell? We argue that they do. There are certain substantive themes that narratives of national identity cannot neglect if they are to long endure. There is a limited range of narrative structures that they can credibly employ. And they are further limited by the fact that some narrative forms and content themes strongly reinforce each other, while other combinations generate tensions that can undercut their political efficacy. As elaborated in the previous chapter, successful political narratives must have an account of how membership in a political community will support economic well-­being; how that membership promises persons political power sufficient to insure personal and national security and a measure of political influence for citizens; and finally, the stories must have constitutive

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themes—­accounts depicting the community membership as intrinsic to who its members “really” are, in ways depicted as normatively valuable. Over time, national narratives must advance and blend all three content themes credibly if they are to continue to prevail over rival political visions. And all three content themes are pertinent to national immigrant and minority policies, with economic and political power concerns sometimes doing most to shape national decision making. But especially in founding eras, the constitutive stories that leaders prefer are most likely to determine the general structure for their national narratives that they find most desirable. The resulting combinations of constitutive themes and narrative structures help to explain why nations with broadly similar economic and political institutions and interests nonetheless adopt different immigration and minority rights politics and policies.

The Structures of National Narratives Many scholars agree that the way a nation represents its history conditions “its sense of what it was, is, can be and should be,” and that historical representations also influence how a nation conceives of its proper relationship to populations seen as “other,” affecting its policies toward international politics and toward internal diversity (Liu and Hilton 2005, 537). The relationship between historical representation, collective memory, and identity has been studied from many angles.2 Yet more is needed to understand whether and how, in combination with the contents, the general literary forms of historical narratives shape nation building, including perceptions of insiders-­outsiders and friends-­enemies and the trajectories of national politics and policies. Drawing on Meral Ugur Cinar’s research, here we lay out a theory of how the general or “metanarrative” forms of historical narratives operate to support or constrain different possible contents for those narratives, as well as how content themes shape choices of forms, in ways that help some political coalitions, causes, and policies and hurt others—­perhaps especially in regard to policies structuring full inclusion in the political community (Cinar 2012). We build on philosopher Stephen Pepper’s “world hypothe­ ses,” applying them to official historical narratives. Before turning to that task, we first note some points on the status of official, governmentally authored or authorized and institutionalized historical narratives. Official histories occupy a central place in the construction of collective memory.3 The institutionalized character of these histories gives them wide publicity, and recurrent exposure to them can make them

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especially potent in shaping popular understandings over time. The consistency of their messages is often enhanced by enforced standardization through bureaucratic curricular supervision. Their authors usually present them as objective and “quasi-­scientific, or at least . . . as ‘secure’ as the kind of evidence brought by lawyers before courts of law” (White 2011, 170). They are taught as such throughout a nation’s school system, giving them unusual authority. Under some circumstances, official histories represent the views of a single dominant political party or coalition in fairly undiluted form. For the sake of simplicity, here we focus on such periods in the early history of modern Turkey, Austria, and Israel. More commonly, official histories represent compromises among conflicting accounts of national identity—­though if the nation is reasonably cohesive, the resulting histories can still have important structures and themes in common, as we suggest has been true of the United States. We now turn to our typology of historical narratives and the ways they interact with the content themes they contain, reinforcing them in successful stories, undermining them in others.

Typology of Historical Narratives In developing this framework of narrative structures, we derive our categories from Pepper’s World Hypotheses. For Pepper a world hypothesis is a model of the universe of observations and inferences that represents a particular understanding of how that world works and what sorts of explanations for observations make sense (Pepper 1942). While Pepper himself did not apply his world hypotheses to historiography, we find them useful for categorizing historical narratives.4 They map out what may well be the main logical possibilities, and what appear to be the options most commonly pursued in practice, in regard to crucial features of all historical narratives: conceptions and explanations of change. Pepper identifies four main world hypotheses: formalist, mechanistic, organicist, and contextualist (Pepper 1942, 281). Formalist accounts are the most modest in regard to explanations of change. They suggest that the tasks of historical inquiry can be little more than the elaboration of empirically based taxonomies. The aim is simply to identify, label, and categorize the distinctive properties of historical objects and narrate the observed fate of these entities over time. In mechanistic narratives, the historian instead tries to identify unchanging laws or regularities in behavior that causally govern, or at a minimum predictably characterize, the operation of human activities. Like formalist

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accounts, mechanistic narratives take the units of historical analysis, including nations and peoples, as predetermined, given by factors outside the analyses. But they seek to explain the developing relationships between those units based on the law or set of laws or regularities that they posit as invariably operative (Lerner 2002, 62). Although the laws are not seen as originally products of human history, they do structure accounts in which changes in the interconnections of historical units can occur, and ones in which some units may be destroyed, others enabled to flourish. Hence these narratives elaborate more robust explanations of change, though they rely on laws and entities that in their essences do not change. In organicist narratives, explanations of change are still more central, because the particulars within historical fields are viewed as elements of continuing synthetic processes. Nations are seen as variegated entities engaged in processes of becoming, ones in which the whole, the nation, is always more than the sum of its parts. As Pepper uses the term, however, organicist accounts not only depict processes of change. They explain them in teleolog­ ical terms, identifying a final developmental condition as the end, telos, or ideal toward which the progressive steps of the processes aim (Pepper 1942, 281). Explanations take the form of understanding how developments contribute to the realization of the ultimate goal, conceived as an enduring and driving regulative principle, rather than appealing to unchanging behavioral regularities or laws (Lerner 2002, 69). Generally this realization takes the form of integrating previously disparate parts into larger wholes, including greater nations, which represent their completion and fulfillment—­and so also their transformation (Pepper 1942, 291–­92). But these processes of teleological integration may occur through means that display more variety over time than the laws stressed in mechanistic accounts. Contextual accounts incorporate change more pervasively than any of the others, though not to the extent that they suggest national histories that are anarchical, without any reference points through which to explain change at all. Contextual narratives treat historical units, again including peoples and nations, as dynamic elements that are in webs of relationship with other historical units. By understanding the particular characteristics of the elements and the ways they interact in their specific contexts, we can understand how they are altered and how their broader contexts are also transformed through those interactions. Understandings of what the historical units and their contexts have become can help us grasp the possibilities and the changes in the next period of development. But contextual accounts do not posit any fixed historical units, governing laws, or end points. They merely provide explanations of the conduct and events that

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happened within particular settings, their significance in those settings, and how they in turn structure later historical contexts and developments. They do not posit any ultimate telos or even any timeless, law-­like regularities in behavior. We might array Pepper’s four world hypotheses along a spectrum from “descriptions of change without explanation” to “explanations of change in terms of fixed laws” to “explanations of change in terms of fixed goals” to “explanations of change in terms of contextually comprehensible interactions.” Alternatively, we might describe the range as from “no explanations” of change to “explanations from below” (in terms of laws) to “explanations from above” (in terms of ends) to “explanations from within” (in terms of context).5 These types are general enough that it is hard to identify a fifth that could not be placed under one of these heads. But general as they all are, the four forms of narratives vary in important ways. One dimension of variation particularly pertinent to nation building is the malleability of historical entities, such as ethnic groups and nations. Formalism provides at most a record, not an explanation, of malleability. If an entity no longer seems to fit the category or label under which it was first placed, it is simply reclassified. A dinosaur was a reptile; what may be its distant descendant is a bird. No effort is made to explain the transformations involved in terms of causal laws, as in mechanistic accounts, or in terms of integrative teleological processes, as in organicist ones, or even in terms of contextual interrelations (White 1975, 14–­22). “The Formist considers an explanation to be complete when a given set of objects has been identified” (White 1975, 14). In mechanistic forms of narrative, things also simply are what they are at the outset, and we can only explain the shifting external relationships between them. Through these relationships, some entities may be broken up, recombined, or destroyed over time. But though one entity may be aligned with another from which it was previously distinct, as when we pour together olive oil and water, the entities are not understood to be altered in their essential characters by such developments. The polarities of oil and water molecules mean that they cannot be chemically bonded and transformed, only temporarily mixed. That is one reason we can expect the same governing laws to continue to apply to them. Mechanistic accounts treat political entities such as ethnic groups in similar fashion. In contrast, in organicist narratives, things become what they are chiefly through the teleological integrating of smaller entities into larger ones in historical processes. What once were sunshine, soil, and seed are now parts of a tree, as supposedly they were meant to be. In contextual narratives,

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things also become what they are, but through the interrelationships of different entities, without any regulative teleological principle visible in those relationships. A blending of Catholic and African spiritual beliefs may have generated the Santería religion in ways we can contextually comprehend, but few would claim that it was preordained that they would do so. Contextualism assumes that “reality consists of textured layers . . . as rope is constructed from strands of thread woven together” (Johnson et al. 1988, 825). But it does not presume that all the weaving that can be seen in history has aimed at forming special types of rope serving some overarching purpose. This means that formalism and mechanism treat historical entities as given, with characteristics that never really alter, while organicism and contextualism take the changes that appear to occur in interactive historical processes more seriously, as real transformations in what entities are. But in contrast to the teleology of organicism, in which parts are ultimately transformed into a variegated unity that represents the culmination of history, contextualism allows for the continuing coexistence of different entities without necessarily fusing them into a single whole. The context-­specific interrelationships between different units or groups may well never give way to the triumph of integrative forces. When it comes to structures of people-­building narratives, formalism drops out. Its structure is not one that political actors can use to develop compelling accounts of nationhood or peoplehood, for two reasons. Purely formal accounts provide neither compelling explanations for historical developments, nor do they support any definite normative messages. Formalistic explanations, again, are complete when elements of history are identified, labeled, and categorized. And though formalist categorizations do designate what “constitutes” particular entities, they do not in themselves present any constitutive characteristics as having intrinsic worth. While formalist historical accounts can trace what has happened to the entities they classify over time, they do not identify historical forces at work, or any persuasive normative standards, that political actors can invoke to depict what further developments are likely possibilities, and which are desirable and undesirable. Hence it is not possible to appeal to them to justify the worth of particular conceptions of political identity or the wisdom of particular policies. The other three, organicism, mechanism, and contextualism, provide three different ways of selecting and organizing historical events in order to create what are for many political actors far more usable pasts. As a result, throughout history and around the world, official historical discourses have consisted overwhelmingly of narratives that display either one or some

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combination of these three forms. The general form that political leaders adopt and seek to promulgate depends, again, on their circumstances—­and those circumstances also influence the content themes they find most compelling, for themselves and those they wish to lead.6

Combining Content Themes and Narrative Forms Apart from the unavoidable need to respond to circumstances, are there any illuminating general features about how the three peoplehood content themes relate to these narrative forms in processes of political people building? It is tempting to respond in customary social science fashion by laying out a matrix of the three content themes and the three politically usable forms and analyzing their compatibilities. Unfortunately, political life is more complicated. We cannot ignore the fact that political actors usually must deploy all three content themes in their stories of peoplehood, even though they may stress one or two. They sometimes blend narrative forms as well, though generally one predominates. In the abstract, moreover, each content theme can be combined with each general form. Aspirants to leadership stressing economic themes, for example, often claim in mechanistic fashion that economic science reveals laws of economic behavior proving that their vision of the community and its policies will bring prosperity. But they can also narrate in organicist fashion how history shows their nation is destined for immense wealth, if their preferred path is followed. Or they may offer contextualist accounts that identify opportunities for economic improvement in their current circumstances if the steps they recommend are taken. Similarly, those stressing political power themes, whether in foreign policy or in terms of the distribution of power within a political community, can claim that certain laws of international power relations or of political sociology support their messages, using mechanistic forms of narrative. They can instead appeal to senses of national destiny, using an organicist frame. Or they can, again, simply seek to establish their causes as contextually appropriate. Those featuring constitutive stories, perhaps religious, ethnic, or cultural, can present them as undergirded by iron laws of history, or as expressing an ultimate telos established by God, social evolution, or some other compelling source, or as capturing what persons most need to do in their contexts if they are to lead meaningful lives. In practice, however, political actors rarely have all these choices. They must adopt content themes that are likely to prove persuasive to their

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particular constituents, and their three content themes cannot actively work against each other, dividing coalitions they are attempting to build. They must also choose narrative forms that reinforce instead of undermine the credibility of the content themes they advance. How far these constraints structure and restrict the choices of different political actors in different types of circumstances is a large and fruitful field of inquiry, but we cannot map it all here. Instead, we focus on political actors in one type of setting: founders of newly independent nations whose circumstances permit them to elaborate and institutionalize national narratives that are relatively uncontested, and hence most directly expressive of their preferences. Actors so situated often have little need to differentiate between the stories they use to define and unite their political coalitions and those they use to constitute their new nations, which simplifies our task of analyzing those stories’ structures and themes. We advance three arguments in regard to such founders. First, they can rarely avoid emphasizing their constitutive themes of national identity, often giving them preeminence, because often they are not yet in position to promise extensive economic and political power benefits credibly. Second, they are then impelled to choose general narrative forms that work with, not against, those constitutive stories. And third, the institutionalization of both the form and content of these national narratives then creates barriers to the adoption of policies that do not fit well with them, even when these policies might advance some of the economic and political power interests of the founders or later national leaders. Those barriers should not be seen as always undesirable or always insuperable, but they must be understood if they are to be addressed constructively. In regard to immigration and national minority issues in particular, we contend that organicist frames with teleological content themes favor policies demanding considerable assimilation so that the nation’s ultimate organic end will be achieved, though the policies need not be starkly exclusionary or subordinating. Since even though full assimilation into the core national identity is perceived as possible, many forms of diversity appear inconsistent with realizing the national telos, the adoption of an organicist narrative form can work against sharply exclusionary policies—­but it generally also militates against demands for distinctive ethnocultural group rights of minorities and immigrants. Contextual narrative frames can, in contrast, be combined with constitutive themes that endorse more robustly pluralistic forms of inclusion in which at least some minorities can preserve their group rights and still be

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considered part of the nation—­though only if there appear to be contextual histories and rationales for such measures. When the dominant historical narrative is presented in contextual form, it is well structured to affirm claims that more than one group can successfully coexist within the boundaries of a nation without losing their distinctive identities, especially when those groups have lived together peacefully in the past. Hence contextualist accounts can build support for pluralist, inclusionary policies, particularly in regard to long-­present national minorities and immigrants sharing identities with those minorities. Mechanistic frames, in turn, support only policies consistent with the content of the laws that are held to govern how various political units must relate if a nation is to survive and flourish. By making it difficult to imagine the transformation of the units into fundamentally new wholes, those laws tend to set barriers to conceiving of substantial demographic changes as desirable or even possible. Instead, a nation’s policies should reflect the deeper necessities for national survival that the laws that mechanistically govern it express. But in all cases, even ones featuring mechanistic structures, although institutionalized content themes and narrative structures shape and limit possibilities for political change, in practice they are never wholly determinative. Their complexities and internal tensions mean that political stories always provide opportunities for reinterpretation and elaboration that, aided by favorable external conditions and skillful leadership, can result in more inclusive and egalitarian national narratives, as well as more restrictive and hierarchical ones.

Founding Eras, Constitutive Stories, and Policy Implications: Four Examples To illustrate the tendencies and constraints imposed by particular narrative forms and themes, we now analyze the national narratives institutionalized by the founders of the United States and modern Turkey, Austria, and Israel, along with the implications of those narratives for issues of immigration and minority rights. It is generally not hard to see why political actors stress the content themes that they do. Some are personally committed to economic or political power goals, or cultural or ethnic or religious causes, and their credentials may also enable them to advance those themes most credibly. But often aspirants to power face populations in which certain economic, political power, or ethnocultural concerns are dominant due to

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recessions, foreign threats, demographic shifts, or other causes. Would-­be leaders then often stress responsive themes, whatever their own preferences. Of the array of types of political circumstances that human experience displays, our focus here is on founding eras—­which are always refounding eras, since they always involve populations that have previously been part of differently conceived political communities, with established senses of identity, interests, and values. The launching of new political regimes is, on the one hand, usually a precarious enterprise, involving so many disruptions of, if not outright opposition to, preexisting ways of life that even ardent supporters doubt whether new regimes will succeed. At the same time, new foundings are generally made possible because a relatively cohesive group has gained enough power to undertake political restructuring—­ including institutionalizing its own national narratives. We suggest that due to this combination of circumstances, political leaders in founding eras are particularly likely to stress constitutive themes that can inspire loyalty and confidence in their new citizenries. They also choose the narrative form or forms that are best suited for conveying their constitutive themes. And often they institutionalize the resulting national narratives in ways that constrain later policy making on issues such as immigration and minority rights policies. The reason we expect many founding leaders to stress constitutive themes is that because they are heading new, fragile political endeavors, they are rarely in position to offer substantial and enduring economic and political power benefits credibly, even though they often have gained control over some resources and offices they can distribute immediately. Since their long-­term prospects can seem risky, it makes sense for them to make loyalty to their new form of peoplehood seem as normatively compelling as possible. Again, constitutive themes, which suggest that a failure to give allegiance betrays who one is in terms of one’s one most valuable traits, often make that case most effectively. But to be persuasive, the contents of the constitutive accounts leaders tell must resonate to a significant degree with the current values, interests, and traditions of the populations they seek to lead. Leaders in founding eras, then, usually feel pressures to weave bright threads of constitutive themes with contextually appropriate contents into their national narratives. They adopt narrative structures that reinforce rather than undermine those constitutive stories. And once those themes become institutionalized, political patterns are set that can still be navigated in different policy directions—­but some directions become far more difficult to pursue than others.

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The United States This pattern is evident in the first nation to declare independence from a European empire successfully, the United States. In addition to promising that their new regime would provide greater commercial freedoms and more substantial political representation, the American founders maintained repeatedly that Britain had become hopelessly decadent, and that the North American colonists, not the English, were now the carriers of the providentially favored cause of political and religious liberty (Smith 1997, 74). As Ruth Elson demonstrated, early American textbooks went on to portray Americans “as created out of Europeans by devotion to a true religion, high moral principles, and a love of liberty that made life in Europe impossible. . . . Traditional British liberty, seeded in the hearts of the settlers, would inevitably flower in opposition to the parent plant” that had become a “corrupt monster” (Elson 1964, 113–­14). That pervasive pattern in American textbooks is significant, because unlike in the three later cases, at the outset of the United States, state school systems did not exist, and many Americans’ wariness of renewed central governmental power meant that only the most nationalist-­minded American leaders supported the creation of national educational institutions. Even so, and despite their great differences on other issues expressed in their varied coalitional and national stories, early American leaders almost uniformly articulated in their public writings and official documents the belief that their new nation was a model and haven for the world, a “city on a hill,” a crucial part of God’s providential plan for human liberty, perhaps even the key to the “cause of all mankind” (Smith 2011a, 132). As David Tyack has argued, virtually all the “educational intellectuals of the Revolutionary period agreed that correct political doctrines should be taught to the young and that leaders should exercise eternal vigilance against errors that could destroy liberty.” That civic education required reverential presentations of the “Founding Fathers,” since as Benjamin Rush put it, “their supposed talents and virtues . . . will serve the cause of patriotism” (Tyack 1999, 925). Although in later American history many groups contested how they and their beliefs were portrayed in textbooks, the books themselves generally continued to hold that “the United States was literally God’s country,” most favored among the world’s nations (Tyack 1999, 925–­ 26). Even as explicitly religious content has become more controversial, the United States has still been portrayed as having a kind of innate “virtue” that gives it “evolving moral superiority” over the rest of the world (Foster 1999, 255).

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And in the American case as in the subsequent ones, the constitutive themes adopted by the new nation’s founders had consequences for the narrative forms they could deploy. The enduring early American faith that their nation was somehow what Abraham Lincoln would call the “last, best hope of earth” has meant that many American leaders have most often adopted teleological organicist frames in which the plot of world history involves the ultimate global triumph of the American way. As Indiana senator Albert Beveridge put it in 1900, God “has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America” (Beveridge 1900b). Similarly, in 2004, President George W. Bush assured Americans that they would fulfill their national “mission” to “lead the cause of freedom” because “that greater power who guides the unfolding years” had “called” them to do so (Bush 2004). Sometimes these national narratives have including mechanistic elements, as when late nineteenth-­century imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt and Reverend Josiah Strong presented the expansion of US power as part of a “final competition of races” in which, in accordance with Darwinian laws of nature, the fittest must prevail (that meant the American branch of the Anglo-­Saxon or English-­speaking races) (Burton 1965, 105; Strong 1891, 222). The policy implications of these narratives in regard to foreign and domestic policies have varied, from isolationism to imperialism and from enforcement of racial hierarchies to efforts at universal uplift. But rarely have American leaders presented their national story as simply a contextualist one, without any expectation of the ultimate vindication of the United States as the world’s greatest nation, and they have rarely espoused policies that did not appear to aim at realizing that status, whatever the policies’ other, more immediate benefits. In regard to policies toward immigration and minority rights, different American leaders have been able to support some sharply opposed policy prescriptions while deploying the same politically potent narrative structures. Some, like Abraham Lincoln’s German-­born ally Carl Schurz, have contended confidently that because “America and Americanism” represent “the last depositories of the hopes of all true friends of humanity,” America should clasp “mankind to its great heart,” welcoming immigrants while leading the world to freedom, and also supporting greater rights for domestic minorities (Rischin 1976, 118, 129–­30). Others, like Senator Beveridge, have maintained that it was the destiny of the United States to add ethnoculturally distinct members to its growing empire, but they must be governed by the “English-­speaking and Teutonic” Americans whom God and nature had made “the master organizers of the world,” entitled to govern

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over those of an “inferior race” (Beveridge 1900b). Still others have concluded, like Senator John Miller of California in 1882, that the United States could only maintain its status as “an example” that “will light the fires of liberty in every civilized land” if it kept “pure the blood which circulates through our political system,” excluding, for example, “the gangrene of oriental civilization” that Asians would bring (Miller 1882a, 1487). But whether American leaders have narrated their national story in support of inclusive and egalitarian policies toward immigrants and minorities, inclusive but hierarchical policies, or sternly exclusionary ones, most have done so within content and narrative frames holding that the United States is a “shining city on a hill” with a special place in world history, as Ronald Reagan loved to assert (Gold 1988, 159–­76). Despite their malleability, those frames have had constraining consequences. Most leaders have supported policies requiring immigrants and national minorities to prove their worth for American citizenship, first by avowing allegiance to American political principles and mastering pertinent American history, second by largely assimilating to dominant American political, linguistic, and cultural forms—­while doing both with little public aid and few special accommodations. A comparative study of Canadian and American social studies education concluded that despite affirmative action and “other ongoing efforts to celebrate cultural diversity,” Americans have generally adhered to an assimilationist “melting pot” view of beneficial American policies rather than embracing a “cultural or ethnic mosaic” view (Hardwick, Marcus, and Isaak 2010, 259; Foster 1999, 253). Sociologist Irene Bloemraad has argued that the United States’ policies toward legal immigrants are indeed unusually demanding, including comparatively elaborate naturalization tests and long waiting periods. Yet they do less to foster willingness to integrate into the political community than more multicultural, assistance-­oriented programs, such as those favored in Canada—­a country with a broadly similar economy and an even higher percentage of immigrants, though also with more selective immigration rules (Bloemraad 2006). But whatever economic and political advantages multicultural aid policies may or may not have, they are hard to advance, much less defend, within the teleological organicist frames and self-­celebratory constitutive stories that shape the dominant plot lines in American national narratives. Turkey Turkey, above all Atatürk himself, insisted that the Turks were an ancient people who had historically repeatedly led the major advances in human

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civilization. That role had been submerged under the Ottoman Empire, but Turks would resume it in their new Turkish Republic, even as they adopted more modern economic and political institutions (Cinar 2012, 51). Atatürk insisted that the “history of the Turkish nation” dated to “much older times” than the Ottoman Empire, and that the Turks’ ancestors had “established great states” and operated “big and far-­reaching civilizations” throughout history. He admonished: “it is our duty to search and study this history” so that the “Turkish child will find more energy in doing great deeds” like those of “its ancestors” (cited in Mercil, Tarhan, and Gunal 1990, 18). Although modern Turkish leaders have, like American ones, thus presented their nation as a leader in the development of global civilization, their constitutive story is one in which a core historical unit, the Turkish people, has played that role since the dawn of time, rather than latterly picking up the mantle of their corrupted kinsmen, as in the case of the American revolutionaries. Turkish textbooks credit Turks with having fostered Aegean, Mesopotamian, Etruscan, Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian civilizations, among others (Inan et al. 1996 [1930], 42, 74–­114, 131, 148, 170, 172, 227; cf. Aydın 2001, 42). In the process, this Turkish core has often added other peoples whom the Turks believe they have enriched with Turkish cultural identities and progressive capacities. This constitutive theme lends itself to organicist narrative forms and the teleological processes of change they elaborate. As in the United States, contextualist accounts whose plots do not preordain the triumph of the Turks are less useful. Nor have modern Turkish leaders chosen to employ mechanistic evolutionary accounts, now more discredited than when nineteenth-­century Americans advanced them. Official histories instead present the Turkish nation as capable of not just including but changing and improving people from most other ethnic backgrounds. Turkish history textbooks relate that while Turks were migrating from Central Asia, they mixed with other groups as part of teleological processes aimed at the realization of the homogeneous Turkish nation-­state in Anatolia (Turhal 1990, 86). Because the establishment of this Turkish state is the desired result, everything that happened in between is told as a continuous process leading to Anatolia’s Turkification. Because the organicist narrative is teleological, the parts that constitute the whole are only meaningful within the whole, which is the Turkish nation. We only learn what positive effects the interaction between Turks and other groups (Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Anatolian, Aegean, Arabic, Italian, and Iranian) had for others, not those others’ contributions to Turks. Minorities are included in the majority group and thrive by becoming more and more Turkified.

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These organicist narratives and themes of Turkish civilizational superiority conveyed in Turkey’s official histories have legitimated inclusionary but highly assimilationist policies toward immigrants and domestic minorities. Their self-­celebratory stories give Turks confidence that history proves they are capable of incorporating non-­Turkish groups without being harmed. Since the narrative tells them that historically, many groups joined their nation freely and as part of Turk’s historical mission, the organicist narrative makes it easier to view those who are not ethnically Turkish as part of the Turkish community. However, it matters that the same narratives, centered on a teleological unified Turkish nation, ignore any positive contribution non-­Turks made during the Ottoman Empire and other eras, in fields of culture, architecture, cuisine, or any other area of life. These histories, even more than the American ones, imply that minority groups not only have to embrace Turkish political principles. They must lose their distinct cultural identities almost entirely once they become part of historical Turkish states. Since the histories do not suggest that it is possible for minority groups to make positive contributions while retaining their distinct characters, there is no place for them in the political community if they do not agree to meld their identities into the Turkish nation, the teleological aim and the whole that is bigger than its parts. As a result of these characteristics, Turkish organicist narratives deny a positive role for ethnic pluralism. Total integration into the society as a fully assimilated Turk is expected. Anything else is seen as deviation, threatening and foreign. These patterns are visible in recent Turkish debates about cultural rights, where politicians and the media often portray demands for cultural pluralism as ill-­intended, separatist, inflammatory claims. The organicist narrative form and teleological content continue to constrain discussions of what is possible, contributing to hesitations and anxiety about recognizing minority rights. This is especially clear in regard to the Kurdish minority in Turkey. Turkish organicist narratives portray demands for Kurdish recognition as remnants of backward ages, products of underdevelopment or external provocation, rather than as legitimate claims that can be voiced within the boundaries of the Turkish political community. Governing politicians in Turkey from all across the political spectrum have long joined in framing controversy over the Kurds as traceable to the Kurds’ alleged backwardness, outside agitators, or both. The former claim has implied that the problems are ultimately transitional, whereas the latter suggests that the nation faces dangerous enemies who must be stopped. Despite their contrasting views in other regards, the majority of politicians,

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including ones as diverse as Bahçeli, the leader of the far right Nationalist Action Party (NAP), the late prime minister Ecevit and current left leader Kılıçdaroğlu, all present Kurdish issues as products of socioeconomic underdevelopment, regional backwardness, and reactionary behavior exploited by external forces (Turkish Daily News 1999; Barkey and Fuller 1998, 112; Kirişci and Winrow 1997, 148; Milliyet 2009). The theme of the centrality of external provocation has been particularly stressed in debates over Turkey’s potential accession to the European Union in order to combat images of Turkey as inherently repressive. The Kurdish issue was framed as external provocation by important political figures such as former junta leader and president Evren, former NAP leader Türkeş, former chief of general staff Güreş, former prime minister and president Demirel and Ecevit (Milliyet 1985; Gunter 1997, 53; Sarıgil 2007, 181; Hürriyet Daily 1997). In 2010 Prime Minister Erdoğan stated that demands for education in another mother tongue constitute actions that aim to divide the country (Takvim 2010). These accounts have been accompanied by some substantial but controversial state investments in the Kurdish region in order to cultivate it, the Southeast Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP) being the prime example. But while the organicist forms and content themes of historical discourses in Turkey facilitate certain forms of inclusion, they undercut any legitimate platform upon which minorities can demand recognition as distinctive communities and still claim to be loyal citizens of Turkey. Austria Rejecting Communism and, especially, Nazism, post–­World War II Austria’s new leaders agreed that far from being essentially German, Austria had throughout its history shown unique capacities to blend different peoples, cultures, and institutions into a harmonious, peaceful, and productive whole, though these capacities had been recently effaced by foreign oppression (Cinar 2012, 161–­63). Ernst Fischer, a Communist history writer and the Austrian Second Republic’s first minister of education and culture, argued that “what is genuinely Austrian, what is the Austrian national character,” had to be “answered historically,” because “Austrian” was “not a racial but a historical political category” that embodied a unique culture comprised of multiple communities (Fisher 1945, cited in Fellner 1988, 269 and Suppanz 1998, 66). It was definitely not only German. To dissociate Austria from the Nazi past, Austria’s postwar founders and later leaders have primarily employed contextualist accounts in order

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to elaborate Austria’s distinctive characteristics, though they have also deployed mechanistic forms in certain regards (Bischof and Pelinka 1997, 3; Zollner 1984, 37). Austrian official histories have stressed the web of relationships intertwining German and non-­German elements, especially during the Habsburg Empire. Differentiating Austrian from German history has required stressing the complexity of Austria’s past, its territorial history, and its multiethnic heritage. Consequently, historical units that constituted the Habsburg Empire are presented in interactive and multidirectional contextual settings, without any specific telos as in organicist accounts. Nor are the varying developments in Austrian narratives usually presented as law-­ governed and predictable, as in mechanistic narratives. The dominance of contextualist modes of argument is evident in the ways Austrian historical narratives explain developments through specification of the interrelationships among the agents occupying the historical field at a given time. Austrian history is told as a story of becoming over time, evident in the frequent use of the word “Entwicklung” (development, evolution) or “das Werden Österreichs” (the becoming of Austria) in Austrian history textbooks (Gsteu 1956 [1947]; Heilberg and Korger 1975 [1950], 121; Lemberger 2008, 107). Unlike in Turkish narratives, the agents that come together in Austrian histories do not lose all their distinctive characteristics as a result of this process, as shown by the emphasis on the supranational character of the Habsburg Empire and the mentioning of Hungarians, Bohemians, Slavs, and other groups as simultaneously members of the Austrian Empire and entities on their own. Rather, in typical contextualist fashion, continuing interrelations, not the subsuming of smaller entities into one homogeneous whole, are at the center of the dominant Austrian narratives (Marboe 1948 [1969], 5). This point is illustrated by the emphasis on the contribution of different groups to Austrian art and architecture, such as the baroque style, and the contribution of non-­Germans such as Przemysl Ottokar and Prince Eugen to the political and military success of Austria (Gsteu 1956 [1947], 301–­2, 312). Yet the Austrian leaders’ need to distinguish themselves from Germany by celebrating their cultural pluralism has always had limits. The preexisting identities and values of the primary groups that comprise modern Austria have permitted and perhaps required frames that support the exclusion of some to whom those groups have long-­standing senses of opposition. Consequently, the Austrian example also features secondary mechanistic elements, invoked in discussions of the Turks in particular and the East in general. Austrian history textbooks frequently refer to Austria as the bulwark of the West, especially “against the Turk” (Gsteu 1956 [1947], 248). In these

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representations the Austrians constitute an unchanging essentialist category. So do the Turks. And the law that governs their relationship is constant enmity, with Austria’s role serving as a barrier to incursions into the West from all dangerous outsiders, especially Turks. Official narratives reinforce this image by downplaying the cultural interactions and borrowings between these groups through history. Undeniably, the Austrian and the Ottoman wars throughout centuries, and the fact that advances of the Ottomans in Europe were stopped in Vienna twice, in 1529 and 1683, all have played important roles in this regard. They have shaped collective memories that work against acceptance of Turks and instead valorize Austrian resistance to Turkish incursions. However, there have been other, more pacific and mutually beneficial interactions between Turks and Austrians throughout history, such as trade and cultural exchanges. Robert Hunt argues that the continued presence of a Muslim empire on its eastern borders for several hundred years in fact had profound effects for Austria: “Everything from architecture to street names to social customs such as coffee drinking and smoking were a consequence of this encounter, and the ‘ Turk,’ whether as hero, clown, or friend became a familiar part of Austrian culture” (Hunt 2002, 116). But most Austrian national narratives eschew these potentially positive features of contextualist interactions in favor of ones in which relations with Turks have always manifested fixed laws of enmity. More centrally, however, the contextualist forms and content themes that comprise the repertoire of Austrian national historical narratives are frequently used to justify more pluralistic policies vis-­à-­vis historical minorities across the political spectrum.7 To be sure, the plasticity of contextual narratives leaves room for interpretation about scale of inclusiveness and pluralism. While the Green Party maintains that constructive interactions with a wide range of minority and immigrant groups should be seen as constitutive of Austrian identity at its best, the ultranationalist Freedom Party (Freiheitlichen Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) insists that history indicates that peaceful pluralism is only possible with, and so needs to be limited to, Austria’s historical minorities. Nonetheless, the dominant narrative forms have favored a citizenship model where historical minorities can preserve their group rights and distinctive cultural traits in the public sphere and still be considered part of the nation. The narratives also have worked against the institutionalization of sharply assimilatory or exclusionary policies, even after the rise to greater power of Jörg Haider’s far right FPÖ. This does not mean that minorities, even historical minorities, have equal rights in Austria. Yet the very fact that

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minority rights can be voiced without being seen as criminal and treasonous is striking. Nonetheless, there are instances when Austrian leaders, especially the anti-­immigrant Freedom Party, use mechanistic frames to insist on the need to exclude or deny rights to outsiders who are not historical minorities, especially Turks.8 Evidence from the contemporary Austrian political arena strongly supports our findings. As parliamentary debates on laws concerning historical minorities’ rights show, there is a consensus across the Austrian political spectrum in favor of using a contextually framed Austrian past to justify a pluralistic minority rights regime. For example, all political factions deployed contextualist historical discourses in debates concerning the 1976 Ethnic Groups Act, which sought to establish a common legal framework for Austrian historical minorities. Social Democrats Herbert Pansi and Heinz Kapaun and conservatives Felix Ermacora and Robert Graf pointed to historical grounds to define the nation’s obligations toward its long-­ standing ethnic minorities. These politicians stressed that different groups coexisted in Austria for centuries and that it was part of Austrian tradition to grant rights to historical minorities (NCRA Stenographic Minutes 1976, 30, 14: 2846, 2865, 2870–­74, 2874–­75). More recently, during debates over the constitutional amendment of 2000, which introduced constitutional protection of historical minorities, deputies from all four political parties (the Social Democrats [Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ], Austrian People’s Party [Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP], FPÖ, and the Green Party) used contextual discourses to justify minority rights. The same is also true for the parliamentary debates on dual language signs in 2011. In all these cases Austrian politicians emphasized the interrelationships between and the contributions of different ethnic elements in Austria throughout its history.9 While contextualism has served as a powerful narrative frame for the rights of historical minorities, however, in the speeches of the more mainstream parties, the ÖVP and SPÖ, no such claims are made for new minorities. Tellingly, in none of the debates over laws concerning immigrants, such as the 1992 Residence Act, 1998 Citizenship Law, the 2005 Citizenship Law, the 2005 Aliens Police Act, the 2005 Settlement and Residence Act, and the 2009 Aliens’ Law Amendment that modifies the 2005 Asylum Act, do deputies from the ÖVP or SPÖ extend the contextual narrative to new minorities. Those parties’ spokesmen have left the statuses of these groups largely unaddressed. In contrast, the Green Party has tried to extend inclusive contextualist themes to new minorities, whereas the FPÖ has framed contextualism

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very narrowly, holding that only the exact demographic components of the imperial past should be eligible for Austrian inclusion and pluralism.10 Israel Finally, the creators of modern Israel deployed still more long-­standing religious and political traditions to present support for their new nation’s independence as a blow against centuries of unjust oppression, if not indeed the fulfillment of divine will for God’s chosen people. Most famously, the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel stressed that the “Land of Israel” was the birthplace of the Jewish people, where they “created cultural values of national and universal significance.” After “being forcibly exiled from their land,” Jews “in every successive generation” strove to regain their ancient homeland—­with the World War II massacre of European Jews showing definitively that the problem of Jewish homelessness could only be solved via creation of a sovereign “Jewish State” in Eretz Israel (Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel 1948).11 In 1953 Ben Zion Dinur, the Israeli minister of culture and education who introduced the “Memory of the Holocaust and Heroism Law” (sometimes called the Yad Vashem Law), argued that “the nation exists only to the extent” that it “knows how to combine its past experiences into a single entity” (translated in Ram 1995, 97). In Israel as in all these cases, the new regimes’ founding leaders were probably right to judge that it would be far more possible to build and maintain support for their new nations if they made their existence seem morally compelling in terms of deeply valued components of their members’ identities, and not simply a means to greater wealth and political power. But in contrast to the United States, Turkey, and Austria, Israel’s founders advanced their constitutive message via narratives with predominantly mechanistic structures. The fundamental governing law or mechanism expounded in these narratives concerns Jewish sovereignty and is imbued with prescriptive significance expressive of Jewish religious traditions. It states in effect: when Jews have a state of their own in the homeland of Israel, they prosper. When they do not have that state, they suffer. This narrative structure responds to the longings of many Jews at different points in history for a safely autonomous political community, and it is well suited to convey inspiring constitutive themes of their chosen peoplehood. Consequently, in mechanistic fashion, official Israeli narratives take Jewish and non-­Jewish units as predetermined, unchanging elements

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that do not evolve into significantly different entities over the course of history. Instead, at most Jews achieve temporary periods of “coexistence” with other groups who are always aware of their differences and the potential for conflict (Firer 2004, 83). The fundamental mechanistic pattern of Jewish history, in which Jews flourish when sovereign in Israel, but live in risk of persecution when outside Israel, never changes. Consequently, depictions of Jewish life in “exile,” “outside the sovereign space of their own territorial state,” are predominantly negative, whether they are in the West or the East (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 94–­95; see also Piterberg 1996; Zerubavel 1995, 14; Feige 2002; Shohat 1999). These accounts also convey skepticism about how much of value anyone besides the Jews ever contributed to Israel’s development. Elie Podeh contends that, for example, “both the first-­and second-­generation” Israeli textbooks depicted the 400-­year period of Ottoman rule over Palestine in “highly negative terms” (Podeh 2002, 77). Podeh also notes that in 1972 students taking an annual nationwide eighth-­grade test (the sekker) were asked questions based on a passage that asserted “the Arabs and Christians who had settled in the Land of Israel produced nothing of importance, leaving behind no significant achievement,” and he argues that the text’s aim was to delegitimize Arab and all other non-­Jewish claims to Palestine (Podeh 2002, 78).12 The timelessness of this law governing the flourishing of the Jewish people and Israel is reinforced by the ways in which in official Israeli historiography, events that belong to different ages are often described with similar terms. For instance, events of Arab or Palestinian resistance in Palestine against the Jewish settlement are usually described as “riots,” “disturbances,” or even “pogroms” (Podeh 2002, 94; Kimmerling 1995, 49). Baruch Kimmerling argues that use of the term “pogrom” links the Jewish-­Arab/Palestinian conflict over the land to earlier vicious attacks on Jews by anti-­ Semitic gentiles (Kimmerling 1995, 49).13 Ella Shohat similarly contends: “analogies between the Arabs and Nazis, a symptom of a Jewish-­European nightmare projected onto the structurally distinct political dynamics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, have become a staple of Zionist rhetoric” (Shohat 1999, 6–­7). Podeh argues that in textbooks, “Jewish traumatic experiences in the biblical, as well as the modern, era” are “major prisms through which Arab history” is portrayed, using terms that often analogize “Haman, ‘Amaleq, pogrom, Hitler, and Nazis” with modern Arab actors and actions (Podeh 2002, 96, 144). The recurrence of mechanistically governed historical patterns in Israeli narratives is also visible in their presentation of all developments that threaten to work against sovereign Jewish rule over Israel as existential

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dangers in a continuing struggle for independent survival.14 In the dominant forms of Israeli historiography, events in different eras presented as those of “Antiquity,” “Exile,” and “Return to the Land” are all told as instances of what Zerubavel calls the unfaltering “conflict formula.” The particular enemies and heroic figures change, but the conflict situation, the danger and the solution, persist (Zerubavel 1995, 218). The “Jewish people” is presented as a constant entity moving in time between two options: persecution and sovereignty in Israel. The mechanistic law of history is that Jews have no choice in either insisting on the latter or experiencing the former. The lessons of this mechanistic historiography for policies toward Israel’s current neighbors as well as the Palestinian minority within Israel are, if any­ thing, even clearer than in the cases of the narrative structures and constitutive themes in the other three examples. Because the prevailing narratives leave little room for the possibility of including groups that do not belong to the nation’s constitutive ethnic category, they challenge pluralistic, egalitarian policies toward ethnically distinct immigrants or domestic minorities whenever those policies raise worries that Jews will no longer be sovereign in Israel. The continuing controversy over Israel’s decisions to limit rights of family reunification for those who marry residents of the West Bank or Gaza Strip in order to reduce security risks, understood to include the danger that Jews will lose their supermajority among Israeli citizens, displays these issues vividly (Friedman 2013). Yet that very contestation, and the fact that Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel and other foundational documents contain features beyond the mechanistic narrative of the need for Jews to have their own state in Israel, shows that the nation might still choose to extend its national narrative and policies in a range of directions. The declaration promises that the state of Israel “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants” and “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex,” guaranteeing “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture” and safeguarding “the Holy Places of all religions” (Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel 1948). It appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation” in governing institutions, even as it presents that “upbuilding” as “the redemption of Israel” via “the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land” (Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel 1948). The potential of those founding commitments to serve as elements in more inclusive Israeli stories of peoplehood might be strengthened if many

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Israelis recognized, admittedly against the grain of their most prevalent national narratives, that what it means to be Jewish has been a continuing, contested historical construction, and that Israelis have some real choice about how to define what is most important to their national identity in the twenty-­first century. This recognition might permit imagining an Israel in which not the maintenance of a Jewish supermajority, but rather adherence to certain values fundamental in most Jewish traditions, and also in many other moral and religious traditions, is seen as most crucial for making Israel a more inclusive and fully democratic state in which Jews as well as other Israelis can flourish. Whether such an imagined Israeli community can ever be politically successful is of course a difficult question. For many Israelis, the issue of what conception of Israel is truly desirable also remains hard to resolve—­especially in light of the long-­standing moral authority and pervasive political power of the mechanistic Israeli narrative that counsels against risking in Israel any loss of sovereignty by those who identify and are widely identified as Jews. The prevailing themes and structures of such potent, deeply institutionalized national narratives can be altered under some circumstances, but they can never safely be ignored.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that historical narratives, once institutionalized, have long-­term effects, visible even after the initial ruling group is no longer in power. National narratives are reproduced through the legal mechanisms that ensure the standardization of the history taught in schools and through the broader socialization of people in these widely circulated stories.15 The national narratives then provide reference points at critical junctures, as well as parameters for much routine policy making. To be sure, these institutionalized founding narratives are never the whole story. The existence of political pluralism and new media outlets in many parts of the world mean that dominant historical narratives have been increasingly challenged, especially since the 1980s and 1990s. However, the fact that these narratives continue to be prominent parts of the debates on the conceptualization of the nation and the place of minorities in the United States, Turkey, Austria, Israel, and other countries suggests that the long-­term legacies of both the forms and contents of historical narratives are significant. The effects of these narrative forms and content themes include shaping popular and elite understandings of who can be rightful and desirable members of their communities, as well as views on what policies are likely to advance community members’ shared interests and values. As

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a result, when analyzing the politics and policies of contemporary national states toward immigrants and domestic minorities, and for many other purposes, scholars should attend to the ways that the established forms and contents of national narratives provide leaders and citizens with cognitive road maps indicating what paths they can and should follow on their way to making history.

Four

Personal Stories and Communal Stories in the Politics of Peoplehood

The discussions so far have explored the themes and structures of the stories of collective political identity that play important roles in political life, in crafting coalitions that seek to gain power in larger societies and in defining and bonding those larger societies themselves. This chapter widens the lens further to encompass not only “peoplehood” but also “personhood.” It considers the political roles played by the personal stories of aspiring leaders and their potential constituents in relationship to communal accounts of political coalitions and communities, as well as the relationships of the personal stories of leaders and constituents to each other. It does so in order to suggest that lessons can be derived from the theory of the politics of peoplehood for the empirical opportunities and constraints facing aspirants to power and for some long-­standing normative issues concerning the selection of appropriate representatives in modern democracies. The arguments are illustrated through the examples of recent American presidential candidates, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama. But with some modifications they are likely to apply in most modern democratic systems. The previous chapters have suggested that when elaborating narratives that can assist their rise to power, political leaders generally have some degrees of freedom but also strong limitations in regard to the tales they can tell. Although many political figures have proven remarkably adept at mythologizing their own pasts, it is not easy for people to present themselves as having a different race, sex, regional and religious origin, and class status than they actually possess. There also are usually some facts about their past activities and affiliations too well known to be denied. These features of their personal identities partly determine the activist coalitions they can realistically seek to form and their prospects for popular approval in the

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political communities they wish to lead. Furthermore, aspirants to leadership must cope with the reality that the presentations of themselves that most inspire activists may be a liability in gaining broader support, and vice versa. They must decide how they can adopt narrative structures and content themes that will enable them to depict their personal stories credibly and persuasively, contributing to effective coordinative and communicative discourses. In the great bulk of modern societies that profess to be democratic, candidates for power also face a further challenge arising from normative tensions that political theorists have long recognized as inherent in the very concept of democratic leadership. As Hanna Pitkin argued long ago, many citizens expect their elected leaders to act as “delegates,” implementing as fully as possible the policy preferences of those who voted for them. Many voters want their leaders to do just what the voters themselves would do if they were in power. But many also believe that leaders should at least sometimes act as “trustees,” supporting policies that are in the leaders’ judgment in the best interests of their constituents, even if this means going against their voters’ current preferences (Pitkin 1967). Often voters expect the best delegates to be those candidates who offer the fullest descriptive representation, who seem most like the voters themselves. They are the ones voters find it easiest to trust. But if voters are seeking trustees who can provide able substantive representation—­who can succeed in producing results that voters find to be of great worth—­they may prefer candidates who appear to have the special knowledge, experience, and talents needed to do the job. Because they are special, those candidates will be different in many ways from the voters. Of course, voters want both: leaders they can trust and leaders who provide worth. But these dual desires compound the difficulties of self-­presentation facing aspirants to power, because they are pressed to claim both to be ordinary, just like those they wish to govern, and to be extraordinary, able to do things few others can. In various writings, the Australian political theorists John Kane and Haig Patapan have contended that these features of democratic representation pose fundamental problems for democratic legitimacy that cannot be overcome, only more or less well managed. They maintain that democratic officials who simply “mirror” their constituents and act as delegates doing whatever their constituents currently prefer will often fail to provide the kind of effective trustee leadership voters really want. But if officials seek to exercise such leadership, if they act in ways that show that their identities, abilities, and aspirations differ from those of their constituents, and if they use their distinctive talents in the service of policies that challenge the

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constituents’ preferences, they may well be seen as oppressive elites, not as democratic representatives at all (Kane and Patapan 2008, 10–­12). In defining themselves to potential constituents, in telling their personal stories, would-­be democratic leaders therefore must somehow present themselves as “at once exceptional and distinctive and intimately and accessibly like them” (S. Smith 2010, ix). Although, as Sidonie Smith suggests, this challenge may be more acute for candidates in presidential than in parliamentary systems, it is one that, as she also stresses, all democratic leaders face to some degree (S. Smith 2010, x, xv). It may in fact have become more central to modern democratic politics around the world with the proliferation of instant communications and fascination with celebrities, including political celebrities (S. Smith 2010, ix–­x). It therefore seems worthwhile to consider how aspirants to democratic leadership can manage all these challenges more rather than less successfully, and in ways that seem normatively defensible. In response, here I draw on the framework for analyzing political leadership laid out so far to suggest that one important means through which candidates negotiate all these difficulties is the manner in which they weave their own and their constituents’ personal stories into their communal stories, both coordinative and communicative, in order to inspire trust in their leadership and belief in the worth of the policies they advance. Many seek to do so by advancing stories of collective peoplehood that incorporate compelling elements of the personal stories of most voters, along with carefully crafted presentations of the stories of the leaders themselves. Coalition-­ building activists and supportive voters alike can often be won over if they can see their own values, interests, and aspirations in the accounts of their political community that candidates advance, and if they are convinced by the candidates’ personal stories that they are good bets to realize the promises of the narratives of peoplehood they advance. But would-­be leaders must be wary of providing personal and communal narratives for activists and the mass public that are so dissonant as to cast the trustworthiness of the leaders into doubt. The central empirical claims in this chapter are, first, that we can see in the discourses of successful candidates narrations of their personal stories that are designed to highlight their traits that are expected to appeal to activists and voters (while minimizing their unpopular features), along with similarly selective characterizations of the personal stories of their potential constituents, all woven into energizing and broadly consistent coordinative and communicative communal stories. The examples of recent major American presidential candidates suggest that, though much more determines

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ultimate electoral success, candidates’ fortunes are shaped in part by how well they fulfill these narrative tasks. Second, those examples also suggest that insofar as aspirants to power can persuade activists and voters that the candidates’ personal stories, their constituents’ stories, and the candidates’ communal narratives of their political coalitions and broader communities are all mutually reinforcing, most supporters are not likely to be worried by the fact that a candidate’s personal story is different from their own. The more they can see both themselves and the candidate in a candidate’s overarching narrative of peoplehood, the less they need to see the candidate as descriptively like themselves. They can vote for leaders distinctive enough to be able to provide worth without worrying that the leaders do not merit their trust.1 The central normative claim defended here is that insofar as candidates have connected their personal stories and those of their constituents with their stories of larger peoplehood relatively honestly, there can be few democratic objections to their subsequently governing as trustees, claiming legitimate authority to act in what they judge to be their people’s best interests, rather than simply complying with popular preferences. But to the degree that they have won power through misleading personal and communal stories, they cannot claim to have mandates to act as trustees for their constituents. Consequently, the ways that leaders link their personal stories and their accounts of their constituents’ identities to their broader stories of peoplehood are important for judging how far they can advance normatively defensible claims to democratic legitimacy. In support of this argument, consider the campaign strategies of the leading candidates in the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections. The four candidates who won the widest support, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama in 2008, and Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012, faced very different challenges and opportunities. John McCain and Mitt Romney were in many respects prototypical American presidential candidates, both white men from prominent families, one a military hero, the other a successful businessman, each of whom could claim significant accomplishments in public offices. But conservative party activists regarded both with suspicion, and though both presented themselves as Christians, Romney belonged to the once-­persecuted Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-­Day Saints, while McCain was not perceived as deeply religious. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in contrast, sought to be breakthrough figures, either the first woman or the first man of modern African descent to be nominated by a major party for the presidency. Although their candidacies showed the enduring impact of the modern women’s and civil rights movements, most

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of whose adherents could be expected to be active in their coalitions, the long history of defining the American citizenry as primarily what Thomas Paine called a “brotherhood of European Christians” meant that both Clinton and Obama confronted major challenges in persuading many voters that someone other than an accomplished white male was a trustworthy and able presidential candidate. In their coordinative discourses aimed at particular constituency groups and in their mass communicative discourses, including their featured pre­ sentations on their campaign websites, the campaigns of all these candidates clearly sought to present the candidates’ personal stories, their perceptions of their constituents, and their broader narratives of their parties and their nation in ways designed to meet their distinctive challenges. Those challenges were not all of equal magnitude, and the candidates did not display equal skill in confronting them, nor were they equally favored by events; so some fared much better than others, with Barack Obama prevailing each time. But they all crafted narratives that represented strategic responses to the obstacles and opportunities their personal and political circumstances afforded them. All did so in ways that appear relatively honest, so that if they had been elected, they could have defensibly claimed authority to be the people’s trustees and not simply their delegates. Yet even for Obama, the narratives that propelled him to the presidency also set barriers to his uses of its powers. The candidates varied most in the content themes they emphasized. John McCain foregrounded his capacities to provide political power in the form of strong national security, Mitt Romney his promise to bring economic prosperity. Albeit often implicitly, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each sought to turn the features of their identities that could be liabilities into assets by emphasizing constitutive themes suggesting that their distinctive racial and gender traits might give them special capacities to serve the common good. Like virtually all candidates before them, each also highlighted different parts of their message when speaking to different elements of the coalitions they sought to build and to the general public, while they still sought to keep their messages as coherent and unified as possible. Strikingly, the candidates did not pretend to any great extent that they were just like the great majority of the Americans they wanted to represent. With the partial exception of Clinton, the emphasis in their personal stories was on how exceptional, not how typical, they were. They appeared to regard pressures to show that they were much like other Americans as only a minor constraint. The fact that their campaigns chose to present the candidates in these ways, and the fact that they all had considerable electoral

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success—­with the candidate who was in demographic terms the most conventional, John McCain, doing the worst, and the candidate who was arguably the least conventional, Barack Obama, doing the best—­together suggest that democratic legitimacy does not require descriptive representation so much as the more complex relationship between candidates’ personal stories, activists and voters’ personal stories, and the candidates’ communal stories of peoplehood depicted here. At the same time, despite their many differences, these candidates all treated the organicist structures and exceptionalist constitutive themes predominant in American stories of peoplehood as mandatory, and all also frequently spoke in conventionally religious terms. In only mildly varying ways, each assured their constituents and the broader public that Americans and America are exceptional, uniquely committed to universal values that express divine standards, and having a special role to play in world history. If their narratives show that candidates have ample political space to advance a range of personal stories and communal themes successfully, they also indicate that there are constraints that few can safely violate.

Personal and Communal Stories of Peoplehood The arguments made here concerning how aspirants to power link their own personal stories, the personal stories of various constituents, and the leaders’ communal stories of peoplehood are illustrated in fig. 4.1.2 As the diagram indicates, successful communal stories of peoplehood are generally ones in which both coalitional activists and general voters can see connections between the collective narratives and their own individual stories of personhood—­including their personal economic aspirations, their longings for personal security and a meaningful share in communal political power, and their senses of what is normatively valuable in their personal identities. If this is to occur, candidates’ stories must include discussions of people the constituents see as like themselves, even if the candidates are not. And if those stories are to inspire senses of worth, they must also provide persuasive grounds to believe that a government that pursued the path the candidate lays out would actually aid such people. Thus economic themes must project a grasp of the constituents’ economic needs, combined with a plausible strategy for improvement for those constituents and the political community generally. Political power accounts must speak to the specific forms of physical vulnerability constituents are experiencing and to the ways they feel they are politically disempowered, as well as ways the political community generally is more vulnerable and less powerful

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COALITIONAL/COLLECTIVE COMMUNAL STORIES Economic

Power Constitutive

CANDIDATE PERSONAL STORIES

CONSTITUENT PERSONAL STORIES

Economic

Economic

Power

Constitutive

Power

Constitutive

4.1  Relationships of personal and communal stories

than it should be. Constitutive themes must find a place in the communal narrative for persons with the kind of valuable traits that constituents see as fundamental to their own identities and provide a credible account for how the values expressed therein will be sustained and advanced in the future. It is notable, however, that empirical studies of voting and public opinion have long offered powerful evidence indicating that most citizens are concerned about how the broader community and various groups within it are faring, as much or more as they are about their own personal prospects (e.g., Kinder and Kiewiet 1981; Mutz and Mondak 1997; Funk and Garcia-­Monet 1997; Funk 2000). That is one reason why it is so important for aspiring leaders to articulate compelling communal stories of peoplehood, not simply to make promises (or, as Mitt Romney had it, “gifts”) to different constituencies. Even so, none of this research suggests that most activists or voters will support candidates who seem likely to make their personal economic condition worse; or deprive them of physical safety, political voice, or national defense capabilities; or to embrace policies that are hostile to the things that constituents see as most normatively worthwhile in their own lives and identities. It only seems reasonable to believe that people want candidates to offer communal economic, political, and military power, and constitutive accounts in which they can see their personal concerns included, respected, and advanced. When it comes to the relationship between candidates’ personal stories and the communal stories of peoplehood they advance, voters’ expectations are likely to be different (indicated in the diagram by sequential instead of direct arrows). Constituents are not likely to be eager to hear that the candidate’s personal economic welfare or power ambitions will

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be furthered if the political community embraces the candidate’s vision of shared peoplehood—­though when it comes to the candidate’s personal constitutive traits, the situation is different, as we shall see. The candidates’ personal economic and political power stories do matter for the credibility of their communal narratives. But rather than seeking assurance that a candidate will pursue his or her own economic and power interests through public service, activists and voters are likely to want to be persuaded by a candidate’s personal story that they can trust the candidate to be dedicated to and capable of achieving the economic, power, and normative aims for the society as a whole that the candidate’s communal story defines. Most probably want to hear a candidate biography that gives them reason to believe the candidate will strive to do what he or she is promising to do in these matters, and that the candidate has a track record and personal abilities that augur success. Governors who have instead presided over state economies plunged into recession, generals who have lost battles, and reformers who are found to be on the payrolls of the gangsters or malevolent corporations they claim to oppose, are rarely viable candidates. But if it is correct that many, perhaps most activists and voters are concerned chiefly with whether candidates are offering a compelling vision of economic, political, and normative well-­being for the community as a whole, and one in which they can see a place for their own interests and aspirations, then it is not important for constituents to see the candidates’ personal stories as just like their own. There need not be close links, much less homologies, between candidates’ personal stories, especially their personal economic and political power stories, and constituents’ personal stories (which is why the diagram shows no links between these elements of candidates’ and constituents’ personal stories). What matters most is for candidates to interweave their personal and communal stories effectively enough for activists and voters to be attracted to the various forms of worth the candidates’ communal stories promise, and for them to be persuaded that the candidate, if elected, will lead the political community to provide those forms of economic, political power, and normative worth in significant measure. As Kane and Patapan argue, people may in fact have more confidence that they can trust candidates to achieve what they promise if the candidates appear to have experiences and talents that set them well apart from and even above their typical constituents. So long, that is, as members of the political community trust not only the candidates’ abilities but also their motives and goals. That is why the constitutive themes in the personal stories of candidates operate differently than the economic and political power ones. Although the constitutive

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components of candidates’ identities that they present as morally commendable need not match those of most people they are seeking to lead, they must involve values that activists and voters esteem and not ones that they see as opposed to their own. Furthermore, the ethical traits candidates present as deeply embedded in their characters must directly reinforce, rather than undermine, their accounts of how they can achieve the communal goals they propose. Thus when generals become presidential candidates, as they often do, many of the electorate may well regard them as having personal qualities of patriotism and valor that are all the more morally admirable because they are genuinely exceptional. Many voters see these qualities as justifying trust that once elected, the former general will work selflessly and skillfully to keep the nation strong and free. Many presidential candidates, including George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, benefited from such perceptions. But if voters see the candidates’ love of country and martial spirit as more reckless and brutal than virtuous, as in the case of George Wallace’s vice presidential candidate, General Curtis LeMay, who said Americans had an unwarranted “phobia” about the use of nuclear weapons, then voters are likely to doubt the normative worth of the candidate’s vision and to distrust the ways the candidate would pursue communal goals (Carter 2001, 41–­ 42). If a candidate is portrayed as having lied about his record of service, as the Swift Boat ads said of John Kerry, a basis for regarding the candidate as admirable can turn into fuel for condemnation (Zernicke 2006). It is likely, then, that in most cases, voters wish to see the normatively constitutive features of a candidate’s personal story as close to their own values, even if the candidate remains in many ways distinctive.

The Cases of the American Presidential Candidates The speeches through which the four major 2008 and 2012 presidential candidates announced their campaigns; spoke to special coalitional constituencies; in three cases, accepted their party’s nominations; and the biographies presented on the candidates’ websites all show how these candidates narrated their personal stories and those of other Americans, and how they linked these accounts to their communal narratives of their coalitions and of American peoplehood.3 Consider first the 2008 Republican nominee, Arizona senator John McCain. Like other recent American politicians seeking to connect with “ordinary” citizens, McCain informally announced that he would run for president on a talk show, the Late Show with David Letterman, on February 28,

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2007. He made his official announcement on April 25, 2007, in New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first presidential primary. There McCain stressed his support for the Iraq war, better care for veterans, and less wasteful, more competent governance, as well as his experience and his record of putting problem solving above partisanship (Nagourney and Cooper 2007). These points foregrounded his national security credentials while also distancing him from the unpopular Bush administration. But in doing the latter, he heightened conservative concerns that he was too much of a “maverick” to be the party’s nominee. McCain’s presentation of his personal story to the general public, articulated in a short biography that soon appeared on his campaign website, offered similar themes.4 As a Protestant white man, McCain was demographically similar to most American presidential candidates historically, distinctive only in being older than most. His campaign team may therefore have found it unnecessary to make their candidate’s identity appear familiar to most Americans. Instead, even in sketching his personal story, the website stressed his goals as well as what was most distinctive about his background. Its second sentence stated three themes: McCain’s life showed him to be dedicated to “reforming Washington, eliminating wasteful government spending, and strengthening our nation’s armed forces.” The first of these themes appealed most to voters who were not strong partisans, the second to economic conservatives, but both received much less emphasis than the third. The bio devoted one sentence each to asserting McCain’s commitment to reducing governmental spending and fighting the undue influence of special interests in Washington. Two-­thirds of the presentation aimed at buttressing confidence in McCain’s ability to accomplish the third goal, strengthening the military. The website told the extraordinary story of how the Arizona senator “continued the McCain tradition of service to country passed down to him from his father and grandfather,” both “distinguished Navy admirals,” by serving in Vietnam, and how he spent five and a half years in the “Hanoi Hilton” after being shot down and badly injured on a bombing mission in 1967. The website listed his five naval medals and ended by mentioning his wife Cindy and his many children and grandchildren.5 This personal story was obviously not one that defined John McCain as descriptively similar to many other Americans. Its overwhelming stress was on how he was a military hero from a line of military heroes, one who had taken exceptional risks, endured incredible suffering, and rendered extraordinary service in defense of the American people. Correspondingly, his website responded to the question, “Why John McCain?” by repeatedly

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emphasizing the importance of “a strong national defense,” by insisting that “America Faces a Dangerous, Relentless Enemy in the War Against Islamic Extremists,” and by contending that “John McCain is best prepared to lead and defend our nation and its global allies as Commander-­in-­Chief from day one,” enabling us to “defeat our enemy.”6 McCain’s website also discussed his themes of strengthening the economy through limiting taxation and spending and restoring trust in government through fighting special interests, fulfilling the needs for economic and normative appeals. But his overwhelming emphasis was on his political power theme, the challenge of having a government strong and determined enough to protect citizens’ personal security from terrorist attacks at home and defeat the enemy around the globe.7 This story is certainly one in which virtually all American voters could feel deeply and personally implicated. All shared the national trauma of the September 11, 2001, attacks, and most have since remained profoundly concerned about whether they and their families, friends, and neighbors are safe against terrorist violence, and about the power of terrorists to frustrate America around the world. McCain’s personal story offered most Americans grounds to believe that he felt these concerns as deeply as they, if not more so. Nonetheless, McCain’s biography did not primarily suggest that the former combat pilot was descriptively much like those he would represent. He was instead presented as fit for leadership because he was “remarkable,” with an “unwavering lifetime commitment to service” and great acts of martial valor.8 It was what was different about him, far more than what was the same, that indicated voters could trust in his dedication and capacity to realize his story of, above all, enhanced military security and power for all Americans. Nonetheless, McCain did have to reassure, in particular, various types of conservative activists that he was really one of them, even as he also sought to persuade other Americans that he was not a narrow ideologue or partisan. A major test of McCain’s coordinative message came on February 7, 2008, when the candidate spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a key forum for conservative coalition builders. Presenting himself as having been, like many in the room, “a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” McCain told his audience that he could not hope to succeed as the Republican nominee “without the support of dedicated conservatives, whose convictions, creativity and energy have been indispensible to the success our party has had over the last quarter century.” Although he conceded that many conservatives “disagreed strongly” with some of his positions, McCain insisted that he was “proud to be a conservative” because

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he believed, like religious conservatives, that “liberty is a right conferred by our Creator,” and because he shared the “most basic of conservative principles . . . that the proper object of justice and the rule of law in our country is not to aggregate power to the state but to protect the liberty and property of its citizens.” He presented his past and public positions as “the record of a mainstream conservative,” despite some departures, especially on immigration, and he promised to campaign as “clearly conservative” (McCain 2008c). In these ways McCain linked his personal story to those of CPAC activists, while offering a vision of the Republican Party and the American people as appropriately dedicated to the principles favored by religious and economic as well as national security conservatives. The next month, McCain addressed the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, seeking support from the foreign policy community that would reinforce his national security-­centered campaign. He began by describing his personal experiences of war and called the hatred of terrorists for the West “the central threat of our time.” Invoking Democratic president Harry Truman’s teleological claim that God had created America “and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose,” McCain argued that America must lead the world, but as a “model citizen” who lived up to its best ideals and cooperated respectfully with other nations in dealing with a wide range of environmental, health, and economic problems. Then he returned to his core theme, that the president’s “first and most basic duty” was “to protect the lives of the American people” by combating the “transcendent challenge of our time,” “radical Islamic terrorism.” Although the substance was much the same as in McCain’s CPAC speech, he never once used the term “conservative,” instead calling himself “a realistic idealist” who favored “international good citizenship” (McCain 2008b). When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination on September 4, 2008, McCain again eschewed any explicit reference to conservatism. Instead he noted he had been “called a maverick,” which he said meant that he did not work for a party, a special interest, or himself, but instead “for you,” for all Americans. He maintained his subordinate themes of low-­ spending, promarket economics and opposition to corruption. But McCain climaxed his speech with a surprising retelling of the story of his captivity in North Vietnam. It was now a coming-­of-­age tale in which McCain, a previously self-­centered, often irresponsible young man, learned through the much-­needed support of his fellow Americans to love his country as “an idea, a cause worth fighting for.” McCain then promised to “fight for my cause every day” as “a proud citizen of the greatest country on Earth” (McCain 2008a). In so doing, McCain clearly sought to make his story of

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America as the world’s leading nation, whose security must be protected above all, the crucial source of meaning in his personal story, in ways that could inspire all Americans to embrace McCain’s vision of their common peoplehood and trust him to serve their most fundamental interests and values. The candidate surely hoped this presentation would be so compelling that the variations in his self-­descriptions offered to different groups of activists would seem minor matters. Although Hillary Clinton did not gain her party’s nomination in 2008, she began as the front-­runner, maintained extensive support, and retained her viability for future presidential campaigns. She announced her candidacy in a video on her website on January 20, 2007, with an opening statement that stressed themes also prominent in her website biography and throughout her campaign. Clinton did not explicitly highlight her historic role as a female presidential candidate, and she sought to answer doubts about her possible feminine weakness by stressing her national security credentials. Nonetheless, the concerns she emphasized were ones many Americans were likely to identify with women, and ones that many would believe a woman could best address. Describing herself as the product of “a middle-­class family in the middle of America” who believed in “the promise of America,” Clinton said she had devoted her life to fighting for “women’s rights . . . children’s health care, protecting our social security” and “protecting soldiers” (CNN.com 2007). Similarly, her lengthy website bio strove to persuade voters that this long-­famous, long-­controversial candidate actually had a great deal in common with most Americans.9 It too began, “Hillary was raised in a middle-­class family in the middle of America.” From this “classic suburban childhood,” it stated, she went on to “become one of America’s foremost advocates for children and families,” especially “middle-­class families” and “military families.” The website then detailed how Clinton’s life showed the reality of “the promise of America,” because her father, “the son of a factory worker,” built his own (initially) “small business,” and her mother had a “tough childhood,” left by her young parents to be raised by her “strict grandmother.” But Hillary’s mother ultimately learned “what a loving family could be,” and she created with her husband “a classic 1950s middle-­class suburban childhood” for her children, one in which young Hillary was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout, even a “Goldwater girl,” as well as a “regular in her church youth group.”10 After these points connecting Hillary’s life with experiences with which many Americans could identify, including church membership, the website biography became an account of great achievements, including commencement speaker at Wellesley, followed by Yale Law School, but the

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website stressed how there Clinton “focused on questions about how the law affected children.” It then stated that she “followed her heart and a man named Bill Clinton to Arkansas.” The emphasis in discussions of her subsequent career remained on her multifaceted concerns for children, modified only by the addition that as senator, Clinton “continued her advocacy for children and families” and also became “a national leader on homeland security and national security issues.” Still, foremost on her website’s list of issues was “strengthening the middle class” and “working families.” That goal was followed by “providing affordable and accessible health care,” with particular notice of children; next by “ending the war in Iraq;” and then the website listed her positions on eleven other issues.11 What to make of this presentation of Clinton’s personal story in relationship to her story of American peoplehood? Undeniably, the website depicted her as someone with a great deal in common with middle-­class Americans of both parties and with those who see themselves as having risen or as striving to rise from tough working-­class backgrounds via “hard work” and playing “by the rules.” It explicitly linked her personal story to the understanding of the “promise of America” that she sought to further through her leadership. This promise—­Clinton’s communal story of peoplehood—­was defined above all as being able “to provide a good life for your family.” The website united economic, power, and normative constitutive themes around a vision of an America in which all families are physically, financially and medically safe and secure, offering the love and support that can enable their members to flourish. But though the website fostered a sense that Hillary Clinton could be trusted to pursue those goals because of experiences and qualities she had in common with most Americans, it was at least equally devoted to highlighting what was distinctive about the candidate. As Sidonie Smith has written about Clinton’s 2003 book Living History, the candidate’s personal narrative was “a breakthrough story of overcoming the gender barrier to presidential leadership” (S. Smith 2010, vi). Even though the website avoided explicit attention to the fact that she was the first woman to have a serious chance at winning a major party presidential nomination, it gave her story a distinctively maternal cast, even while also stressing her toughness and military expertise. Its most constant theme was her advocacy for children and families, along with her extensive experience and especially her work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She was portrayed as tested and tough, but above all as an extremely smart and dedicated woman—­a daughter, wife, and mother—­who championed children and families. Although it was obviously unusual, indeed unprecedented, for such a person to be a major

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presidential candidate, Clinton claimed to be devoted to family values that most Americans share and wish to see featured in their common story of American peoplehood. Throughout her campaign, Clinton adhered to this message before virtually all audiences, with only minor variations. More than many analysts recognized, she consistently presented herself as the proponent of causes voters could be expected to see as appropriate for a woman. In a May 2007 speech in New Hampshire in which she labeled herself “a thoroughly optimistic and modern progressive,” Clinton stressed that “a new progressive vision for this new century” must focus on “our middle-­class and hardworking families” and “child poverty” as part of achieving “both strong economic growth and economic fairness” (Clinton 2007a). In speaking to the Urban League, a predominantly African American group likely to be attracted to Obama’s candidacy, Clinton emphasized that after Yale Law School, she had gone to work for Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund and devoted the rest of her speech to her subsequent efforts to help “our young people,” especially black young men, succeed (Clinton 2007b). Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars prior to the appearance of their favorite John McCain, Clinton spoke of how veterans “sacrifice for our American family” and called for better health care and career aid for “our sons and daughters” in the military services. Although Clinton typically did not explicitly identify America as the world’s greatest nation in the way the other candidates often did, here she not only spoke of “the promise of America,” but also maintained that people all over the world loved America’s ideals of freedom and democracy, its hope, and optimism, so that with the right leadership committed to “the best of who we are,” the twenty-­first century “will be America’s century” (Clinton 2007c). When her campaign nonetheless faltered and she needed overwhelming “superdelegate” support if she were to wrest the nomination from Obama, Clinton wrote to the delegates, making the case that she was “best prepared to put together a broad coalition of voters” to win the election. She also stressed that she stood for “all the women who are energized for the first time, and voting for the first time,” connecting a strategic coordinative appeal with her predominant communicative theme (Clinton 2008a). When she finally conceded to Obama, she was persuaded to highlight more than she had during her campaign that she had run “as a daughter who benefited from opportunities my mother never dreamed of . . . as a mother who worries about my daughter’s future and a mother who wants to lead all children to brighter tomorrows” (Clinton 2008b). The Clinton campaign’s interweaving of her personal story as a woman who had shared the experiences of most Americans and who had

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made special contributions to families and children with her communal story of America as a great family working hard for high ideals ultimately fell short, but it kept her at the forefront of American politics. Barack Obama, whose candidacy was probably even more novel, chose in 2008 to stress explicitly how highly unusual his personal story was. Yet it was also, in his telling, very much “part of the larger American story,” as he asserted in his celebrated 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech that made him a major figure in national politics.12 And by announcing his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007, outside the Old State Capital in Springfield, Illinois, where the last successful Illinois presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, had given his famous “house divided” speech, Obama also linked his personal story to Lincoln’s examples and contributions to American history, as he would do repeatedly thereafter. In his announcement speech, Obama did not explicitly call attention to his multiracial origins. Instead he spoke of the development of his Christian faith as a community organizer in Chicago, his experiences as a civil rights lawyer and teacher, and the lessons he learned as a state legislator in Springfield about how to work successfully with those of different views and backgrounds. He promised, like Lincoln, to remember that, “beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people,” and to work to “finish the work that needs to be done, and usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth” (Obama 2007a). His 2008 campaign website’s candidate biography tracked portions of these speeches closely.13 It began by calling attention to how Obama’s father grew up a goat herder in Kenya, while his mother was born in Kansas to parents who served in World War II, then benefited from the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Program, before finally settling in Hawaii, Obama’s birthplace. The website noted Obama’s educational achievements and his work as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, and legislator prior to contending, “It has been the rich and varied experiences of Barack Obama’s life—­growing up in different places with people who had different ideas—­ that have animated his political journey . . . he still believes in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose” focused on “solving the challenges of everyday Americans.” The website then described his work in the Illinois Senate and US Senate providing tax breaks for “working families,” supporting education, reforming criminal justice procedures, promoting transparency and ethics reform in government, and working to aid veterans and advance the nation’s military and economic security. In so doing, the website mentioned by name two Republican senators with whom he worked, and not any Democrats. The website concluded that Obama is

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“most proud and grateful for his family” and listed their names and their membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ.14 Although Obama’s website biography was brief compared to Clinton’s, his “issues” section was even longer. It included twenty-­one issues arrayed in alphabetical order, with the first being “civil rights,” focused on his efforts to enforce voting rights. No particular issue, not even Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq war, was featured on the website as a whole. Instead, it was headed with a quotation that connected the candidate’s personal story and those of the voters to the vision of American peoplehood his campaign consistently advanced. The quotation stated: “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington . . . I’m asking you to believe in yours.” The site similarly told voters, “Your own story and the American story are not separate—­they are shared. And they will both be enriched if we stand up together, and answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century.” This call echoed his 2004 keynote, which proclaimed: “we are connected as one people” and referred to America as “a magical place . . . a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many,” premised on equal rights and the belief that along with the pursuit of their “individual dreams” that these rights make possible, Americans recognize that they pursue the goal of “e pluribus unum”—­out of many, one—­ and so have obligations to each other, that “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.”15 Thus Obama’s personal narratives suggested that the very distinctiveness of his story is what gave him understanding of and faith in America’s communal story of rights and freedoms, equal opportunities, and civic concern for others (cf. S. Smith 2010, vi). And it presented that story as one in which all Americans have a stake, born of their aspirations for themselves and their families and also the values that help make them who they are as Americans.16 It is hard to think of a clearer example of a candidate overtly connecting constituents’ personal stories and his personal story, not so directly to each other, but to a shared communal story of peoplehood, in ways that sought to inspire trust in the candidate and faith in the worth of the common vision being advanced. To be sure, Obama’s website biography did present elements of his personal story in which many Americans could see themselves directly. His story expressed a sense of personal identification with midwestern and West Coast Americans, immigrants, veterans, beneficiaries of federal education and housing programs, churchgoers, social justice supporters, devotees of family, and the legacy of the national icon, Lincoln. Yet the reality remains that very few Americans really have backgrounds similar to Barack Obama’s,

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so his main theme was how “the diversity of my heritage,” not his descriptive similarity to most voters, was a major source of his dedication to “the true genius of America.” Thereafter, Obama varied his emphases before different audiences, but again not dramatically. At a Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration where he identified himself with the “Joshua generation” charged with carrying on the work of the “Moses generation” of civil rights leaders, for example, he criticized the Justice Department for challenging an affirmative action program for African American graduate students in math and science, something he rarely addressed, but he also challenged blacks who regarded “reading and writing and conjugating your verbs” as “something white” and “cousin Pookie” who laid on the couch instead of voting (Obama 2007b). In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, the candidate criticized the auto industry as “on a path that is unacceptable and unsustainable” because it did not support moves to energy efficiency and alternate energy sources that, he insisted, would mean more jobs (Obama 2007c). To teachers in the National Education Association, Obama offered high praise and promises of support but also reiterated his calls for increased teacher accountability (Obama 2007d). When he accepted the Democratic nomination, Obama touched on all these themes and more, stressing that he was “not the likeliest” or most “typical” candidate, and concluded by recalling “a young preacher from Georgia” speaking before “Lincoln’s Memorial” at the 1963 March on Washington in order to convey the message to “people of every creed and color, from every walk of life” that “in America, our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one” (Obama 2008). Because his message was that Americans could through principled compromises find common ground and progress without effacing their diversity, Obama was able consistently to discuss issues in ways that acknowledged different points of view, reducing the need to alter his standard speech before different constituencies. Obama’s 2008 campaign faltered not so much when it called attention to the ways he was distinctive from many in his audiences, but rather when he conveyed the impression that he might not understand or care about many of those from whom he was different, like the blue collar workers of Ohio and Pennsylvania—­arousing concerns that he would not grant their interests and values an appropriate place in his American story. The most notable examples were the controversies over his membership in the congregation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, some of whose sermons seemed antiwhite or anti-­American, and over Obama’s own comments at a fund-­raiser about how many small town Americans facing job

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losses and other experiences of decline “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” (Kantor 2008; B. Smith 2008). When Obama was identified with such views, his distinctiveness could, indeed, stir doubts about him. Yet it cannot be denied that his emphasis on his unusual background, accompanied by his skill in connecting it with an uplifting narrative of American peoplehood in which many voters could see their own stories, formed a prominent part of one of the most meteoric rises in the history of American politics. In 2012, the Obama campaign modified his website biography, trimming the discussion of his background while, understandably, adding a list of what it labeled his “accomplishments” as president.17 The trimming included eliminating the sentences emphasizing how “the rich and varied experiences of Barack Obama’s life—­growing up in different places with people who had different ideas” enabled him to “unite people around a politics of purpose” benefiting “everyday Americans.” Instead of this constitutive story stressing the value of Obama’s distinctiveness for more typical Americans, the website biography now primarily featured economic themes. It presented the president as a man “driven by the basic values that make our country great: America prospers when we’re all in it together, when hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded, and when everyone—­from Main Street to Wall Street—­does their fair share and plays by the same rules.”18 His list of accomplishments began with his “economic plan that saved American from a depression” and also included his contributions to health care, consumer protection and financial reform, college loans, and rescue of the auto industry, along with equal pay for women, the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and the ending of the Iraq war, reduced troops in Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden.19 Although individual rights and national security themes were not absent, the central message was now that Obama’s personal story displayed values that would contribute to greater economic prosperity for the country as a whole, equitably distributed among all Americans. Since his renomination was not in doubt, during the 2012 campaign Obama spoke mostly at campaign rallies, not to activist constituency groups, and he overwhelmingly stressed economic themes. In place of promising that his multiracial, multinational, multireligious background would help him promote national unity, he now stressed, as he told supporters in New Orleans, that he was “carrying your stories with me,” because “I see my own story in your story,” and so was determined to “finish what we started and . . . remind the world just why it is that the United States is the greatest nation

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on Earth” (Obama 2012a). His nomination acceptance speech was structured similarly, promising that “new plants and factories can dot our landscape . . . new energy can power our future . . . schools can provide ladders of opportunity to this nation of dreamers . . . knowing that Providence is with us,” the “citizens of the greatest nation” (Obama 2012b). Obama’s 2008 constitutive theme of building unity amid diversity was now subordinated to a predominantly economic message enwrapped in a standard organicist narrative structure of American exceptionalism. In light of the economy’s slow recovery from recession and the continuing hardship millions of Americans faced, this theme was understandable. But it was also one that Obama had some difficulty conveying effectively. He stated in July, 2012, that the “mistake of my first term” was “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right . . . the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times” (Boerma 2012). The statement was surprising in light of Obama’s well-­established narrative skills. His difficulties instead probably stemmed in part from the fact that his economic policies, as modified or rejected by Congress, simply had not been tremendously successful. His signature theme of being the candidate who could unite Americans also rang hollow in light of the unstinting opposition of the Republican-­controlled House. Yet insofar as it is true that candidates benefit from being able to connect their personal stories to their communal ones in ways that can inspire senses of trust and worth, Obama had a further problem. Unlike in 2008, when he could clearly weave his personal story of a remarkably diverse background that generated commitment to all Americans with a communal story of pursuit of the national goal of “e pluribus unum,” Obama could not easily tell a personal story of economic success that reinforced the credibility of his communal economic story. Hence he struggled to find a narrative voice as compelling as the one he achieved in 2008. Those problems were reinforced by the hardly unrelated fact that, amid a crowded field, Republicans nominated to oppose Obama a candidate who did have a personal history of economic success that his campaign trumpeted as evidence for his communal story of the path to American prosperity. At the same time, Mitt Romney’s campaign was sensitive to the danger that their candidate could be perceived as economically privileged throughout his life and so as out of touch with ordinary Americans. When he announced his candidacy at the “beautiful farm” of a New Hampshire supporter on June 2, 2011, Romney began with a litany of the nation’s eco-

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nomic woes and promised to restore “the American ideals of economic freedom and opportunity” because “I have lived it.” He stressed his success in business, as well as his triumphs as organizer of the Salt Lake City Olympics and governor of Massachusetts, which came, he said because “I went at it like I ran businesses.” He promised to restore an America where “business and entrepreneurs were encouraged and respected, and a good worker could almost always find a job” (Romney 2011a). Like his opening statement, Romney’s website biography also stressed, somewhat like Hillary Clinton’s, that his father “came from humble origins” and “apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter and sold aluminum paint” before beginning his highly successful business and political career. It added that Mitt and Anne Romney themselves “have faced hardship,” citing her multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, which she survived in part through “her husband’s unwavering care and devotion.”20 It then emphasized that Romney was “not a career politician” but a product of “the private sector” where he had gained “impressive skills” and an “intimate knowledge of how our economy works.” When he had turned to public service, he had brought to it “conservative principles” of “stringent fiscal discipline” and budget trimming. His bio ended by returning to his business career, noting in its last line that when he “returned to his old consulting firm, Bain & Company, as CEO” he overcame “financial turmoil” and “led a successful turnaround.”21 Again, this was a blending of Romney’s personal story with his communal vision of a hard-­working, entrepreneurial America that he would modify only slightly for different activist constituencies throughout his campaign. To the Republican Hispanic Assembly, he presented himself as a “conservative businessman” who shared their conviction “that America is the greatest nation in the history of the world and the most powerful force for good,” and while celebrating “legal immigration,” he promised to be “resolute” in combating “illegal immigration” (Romney 20011b). Confidently insisting to the Conservative Political Action Conference that “you have consistently supported me,” Romney said this was not because he had studied Burke and Hayek like many there, but because he had “lived conservatism” in his family, faith, and work, in all the ways he often described (Romney 2012b). Addressing the NAACP Convention, Romney did stress that equality of opportunity could not be called “an accomplished fact” because a bad economy was “worse for African Americans in almost every way.” But the answer, he maintained, was “the free-­enterprise system” as well as vouchers and charter schools to improve education, and reliance on God (Romney 2012c). When he accepted the Republican nomination,

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Romney advanced his standard themes but also explicitly acknowledged that he was a Mormon, while stressing that he had never felt different from any other churchgoing American. He also added that he had left the auto business in Michigan to prove he could succeed without aid from his father. Buttressed by these reassurances concerning the least conventional features of his background, Romney’s message remained that he would foster a “united America” that could “unleash an economy that will put Americans back to work, that will once again lead the world with innovation and productivity,” while also maintaining a strong military, upholding divinely endowed rights, and helping those in need (Romney 2012a). As in the case of the 2008 candidates, then, Romney’s personal story of distinctiveness was strongly tied to his communal story of collective goals, in ways meant to inspire trust in the credibility and worth of both. Just as McCain, the military hero, promised to provide national security against terrorism; Clinton, the smart, tough, experienced woman, knew how to take care of American families and the American family; and Obama, the child of astonishing diversity, promised to help a multicultural nation achieve unity, so Romney, the brilliantly successful CEO, offered to lead the nation back to prosperity. In each case, the candidates’ stories were presented in ways that assured voters that the candidates did understand the experiences and concerns of ordinary Americans, but in no case were the candidates themselves presented as ordinary. Given that Romney was in 2012 in some respects better positioned than Obama to weave together his personal and communal stories in ways that addressed the nation’s pressing economic concerns, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that the Republican nominee decisively won the first presidential debate, focused largely on domestic issues, especially the economy (Blake 2012). Romney did, however, ultimately lose. He was hindered by comments that reinforced fears about his empathy for less privileged and successful Americans, especially his criticism of the “47%” of Americans he expected to vote for Obama (Hartmann 2012). Equally or still more decisively, when pitted against Obama, his economic personal and communal stories also did not enable him to win much support from the growing portion of the electorate that was nonwhite, especially in light of his statements on immigration in the primaries (Shear 2012). For many of those voters, it is likely that Obama’s frequent contentions since 2004 that he is a leader dedicated to promoting unity without effacing diversity, as well as one concerned for all Americans, not just the more advantaged, still held strong appeal. For both candidates, it was not when they presented themselves as distinctive, but when they became seen as distinctive in ways that

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made them indifferent or hostile to the identities and aspirations of other Americans, that they ran into electoral trouble.

Conclusions The evidence of these campaign discourses provides some reason to conclude that modern democratic leaders and their campaign strategists believe that it is indeed important for candidates to offer compelling stories of communal peoplehood advancing economic, political power, and constitutive themes, with their relative prominence depending both on the candidates’ most salient personal features and what is most pressing in their larger political contexts. These candidates also all sought to persuade voters that both the candidates’ personal stories and those of activists and voters were reassuringly expressed in the candidates’ communal stories. They were not equally successful in doing so: John McCain struggled to convince conservative activists that he was a fellow true believer and the mass of voters that he was a maverick who owed allegiance only to them. Clinton’s message of her distinctive female concerns and experiences proved less charismatic than Obama’s promise to transcend racial differences without effacing distinctive identities. Both Obama and Mitt Romney stumbled when leaks of their private “coordinative” remarks to donors communicated disdain for large portions of the American populace. But revealing as those leaks were, they did not suggest the candidates were likely to pursue policies sharply different from those they were publicly advancing, with only modest shifts in emphasis, before different core constituency groups and the general public. All did so, moreover, while presenting themselves as having certain distinctive talents and achievements that made them more able than most to realize through public service the legitimate interests and highest ideals of Americans. It did not appear vital for voters see the candidates’ personal stories as descriptively similar to their own, so long as the candidates’ personal economic and power interests did not seem actively opposed to those of the voters. It nonetheless was important for candidates’ constitutive values to be generally aligned with those of most voters, and for candidates to show understanding of the diverse economic, security, and moral values of those whom they wished to represent and to lead. These patterns do not allow us to conclude that democratic voters really only want substantively effective “trustees,” not descriptively representative “delegates,” or that the tensions between simultaneously appearing to be “one of the people” and to be an appropriately gifted leader of the people

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are nonexistent. Again, in regard to normative values, a significant amount of descriptive representation seems a necessity, and it is plausible to think more generally that voters will trust candidates and be inclined to embrace the worth of their communal stories if they do perceive the candidates as in many ways people like themselves. It is probably no accident that the two historically most distinctive candidates, Obama and Clinton, devoted significant space in their official biographies to what can be read as assurances that these candidates were actually more connected to “everyday” Americans than they might first appear. Romney, the candidate born to the greatest wealth, also went to some length to establish his identification with those who have faced material struggles. Yet probably because voters do want leaders who can lead, as well as mirror, it seems not only safe but useful to call attention to the ways candidates are special—­so long as the exceptional talents and experiences they claim appear to be directed to the service of larger causes in which voters can see their own stories being advanced. To be sure, the evidence and arguments here cannot support any claim that the effective interweaving of personal and communal stories is the key to democratic electoral success. Obama’s success against Hillary Clinton in 2008 probably came at least as much from his campaign’s superior strategic planning and development of organizations in later primaries as from his “soaring speeches” (Joyner 2008). McCain not only had difficulty harmonizing his coordinative and communicative self-­descriptions; more fundamentally, his military message was not best suited for a time when his party was identified with the unpopular Iraq war, and it was of no avail when the economy went into free fall in September. And even though Romney’s personal and communal stories appear to have been strongly reinforcing and well attuned to the electorate’s focus on economic concerns in 2012, while Obama struggled to connect his personal and communal narratives, this advantage was not enough for victory. Whether Romney might have prevailed if he had avoided the “47%” gaffe, and if he had not associated himself with immigration positions perceived as leaning toward nativism, is difficult to say. Still, these presidential campaigns clearly display a concern to interweave the personal stories of the candidates with the voters’ stories and with the candidates’ narratives of the nation as a whole as effectively as possible. The relative successes of these campaigns suggest that such interweaving is possible even for candidates who are far from descriptively representative. And if, as in the case of all these figures, candidates have presented themselves, their personal and communal stories, and their claims to special abilities fairly consistently and honestly throughout their campaigns, then it seems

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normatively appropriate for them to claim democratic mandates to act as trustees rather than mere delegates of their people, should they win election. From the standpoint of democratic theory as well as American democratic practices, that conclusion may be a reassuring one. But the analysis here also suggests some sobering lessons for candidates and elected officials seeking to sustain popular acceptance of their leadership and legitimacy in these ways. It seems indisputable that officials whose communal stories have promised prosperity and power will be in trouble with their constituents if their society instead experiences deepening poverty and military failures, even invasions during their watch. The more prominently normative constitutive elements in stories of peoplehood, however, can provide leaders with some insurance against such economic and power downturns. If voters really believe that their leaders are championing, for example, the one true religion; their community’s precious cultural heritage; or indeed its pristine ethnic purity, the leaders may be able to retain support even in the face of adverse material developments (Smith 2003, 98–­117). But if it is true that it is particularly important for voters to believe that their leaders’ normative values are broadly consonant with if not identical to their own, then it is likely that officials with whom most voters have only limited descriptive similarities may be especially vulnerable to evidence that they in fact do not share the values and interests of most voters—­more so than candidates who are widely seen as in virtually all respects “one of us.” Not only may they have more difficulty as candidates in initially inspiring voters with trust that they truly share and will further the voters’ values. They are also likely to be more vulnerable to having trust in their legitimacy eroded by adverse developments in any arena. As we have seen, when the wealthy, white Romney was perceived as not caring about many poor, nonwhite voters, and when Obama, the biracial candidate of “e pluribus unum,” was perceived as dismissive toward rural religious whites and a follower of a “black power” pastor, their campaigns suffered greatly. To put this caution generally: voters are likely to be slower to trust candidates who appear descriptively dissimilar, except in their constitutive goals, than those who are more demographically representative. Voters are then likely to be more deeply outraged by such candidates if they appear over time to be untrue to their normative commitments. If this is so, then candidates who have succeeded by especially stressing their distinctive qualities, tempered only by shared values, may need to succeed more extensively across the board, and particularly to be more visibly true to their normative stories, than other, more descriptively typical officials, if they are to continue to be seen as legitimate democratic leaders.

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Or, to put it in a campaign-­style sound bite: candidates’ personal stories can differ from the voters’ stories—­but it must be difference that voters can believe in. If not, the voters are likely to throw the rascals out, since in all modern democracies, there are always other rascals with attractive stories scrambling to be thrown in.

Pa r t t wo

Exploring American Peoplehood

Five

Individual Rights in American Stories of Peoplehood1

Challenges of linking the personal stories of leaders and constituents to each other and to communal stories of peoplehood can be found, with significant variations, in every society. The United States has, however, long displayed particular combinations of the personal and the communal that have struck many observers as distinctive. Strong senses of communal identities and obligations seem logically incompatible with highly individualistic norms. Yet Americans’ understandings of their peoplehood are often said to combine intense patriotism with an equally ardent individualism and fierce attachments to individual rights. Alexis de Tocqueville, the most influential interpreter of American political culture, wrote that he could not imagine “a patriotism more trying or loquacious” than Americans displayed, and that Americans were unusual and commendable in their widespread commitment to “the idea of individual rights,” though dangers also lurked in their high degree of individualism (Tocqueville 2004, 585–­87, 719, 799). Many commentators since have advanced similar observations. In a Pulitzer Prize–­winning work, historian Michael Kammen argued that America’s “curious amalgam” of “collective individualism” was one of the central “contradictory tendencies of our contrapuntal civilization” (Kammen 1972, 115–­16, 269). This apparently paradoxical combination of patriotism and individualism, intriguing enough in itself, accompanies a still more disturbing pattern. Americans have long stressed their commitments to universal individual rights in some of their political discourse and official documents. But they have also explicitly or implicitly denied basic rights to millions of people on the basis of many traits, especially race and gender but also age, disability, sexual orientation, and sometimes their religious and political beliefs.

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By analyzing the origins, content themes, and narrative forms of the predominant American stories of peoplehood, these seemingly contradictory mixes of communal/individualist and universalistic/exclusionary elements in American life can be seen as not only comprehensible but also as deeply interrelated. The argument that structures part II of this book is that Americans first turned, in many cases reluctantly, to discourses of universal natural rights to help build a broad revolutionary coalition by inspiring trust in their cause and a passionate sense of its worth. They thereby forged conceptions of national identity that valorized their communal membership as a vehicle for the realization of individualist pursuits, a vision that has long proven able to stir profound patriotism, even as it has also engrained in Americans an intense wariness of the potential of governments to impair rather than secure individual rights. Those same coalition-­building tasks meant, however, that early Americans defined who could claim such putatively universal rights narrowly. The core constituencies who could be mobilized to support the revolution included slave owners, along with farmers and land speculators eager to acquire territory from the native tribes, and many religious European-­ descended colonists who regarded their faiths and their customary practices, including men’s patriarchal prerogatives, as morally mandatory. I have suggested that effective peoplehood stories usually contain religious or quasi-­ religious elements, racial or other ancestral themes, and contents structuring gender roles to favor appropriate reproduction of the body politic, all built in part on the traditions, practices, and identities that potential constituents already possess. The economic, religious, racial, and gendered beliefs and interests of those the revolutionaries sought to recruit, indeed the beliefs and interests of the revolutionaries themselves, often propelled conceptions of the new American nation that limited the scope of claimants to universal rights. As a result, the American revolutionaries built into the “imagined community” of their new nation profound tensions. Commitments to secure individual rights for all have frequently been a source of patriotic pride and sometimes a guide for political purposes, but they have vied with many restrictive beliefs, policies, and practices that America’s founding leadership maintained or freshly established. Those beliefs, policies, and practices made many demands to extend more rights to more people in order to realize the nation’s principles appear instead to be threats to a prosperous, peaceful, powerful, and moral America. The resulting tensions have been important factors in American political development. Prevailing inegalitarian arrangements and their ideological defenses have helped privileged actors

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to oppose or limit change, even as universalistic rights rhetorics, along with other discourses, have proved valuable for building reform coalitions who could champion change in the name of America’s founding values. This chapter focuses on the role of rights discourses in American political peoplehood. But readers should constantly bear in mind that these discourses have always been advanced simultaneously with, often in contestation with, but often also in combination with, many doctrines restricting the kinds of races, national origins, gender roles, and religious and political beliefs that truly count as “American.” Previous scholars have given a range of responses to how we can best understand the mix of universalistic natural rights rhetoric and exclusionary policies and practices at America’s founding, as well as the paradoxical American impulses toward ardent individualism and chauvinistic patriotism visible since. Although the account advanced here differs in some respects from these understandings, it builds on elements in them all. The paradox of how Americans seem to accept the “primacy of individual identity over communal ties” while having a “remarkable self-­confidence” in their national superiority has been accounted for through a wide range of factors, including early Americans’ Protestant providentialism, their proud rejection of aristocracy, their desires to assert themselves against European scorn, the opportunities provided by unsettled lands and new occupations, and America’s relatively rapid rise to global economic, military, and political power (Kammen 1972, 65, 98, 113–­16; Kazin and McCartin 2006, 7, 10). These explanations differ, but they all have some force, and they are not incompatible. Because the structures of America’s most prevalent stories of peoplehood portray the nation as pursuing a teleological moral mission of advancing freedom, those narratives can encompass all these claims as reasons for proud beliefs that America is the land in which individual liberties flourish, to the ultimate benefit of all. Perspectives are far more divided on the troubling American combinations of universalistic rights rhetoric with beliefs, policies, and practices that have denied rights to many in America. Many scholars and patriotic Americans, whether conservative or liberal, explain them by invoking the teleological themes of American national narratives. They contend that the universalistic, egalitarian phrases in the Declaration of Independence and various other documents of the founding era expressed sincere convictions, but ones that Americans were not able to realize fully immediately—­though by and large they have sought to do so over time, with hard-­won but continuing success. Thomas West, for example, has contended that Americans came “to understand the meaning of their principles more fully as the

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Revolution proceeded,” and most came to see blacks as entitled to natural rights, but they felt compelled to compromise over slavery and did so in the unduly optimistic hope that slavery would gradually be peacefully extinguished over time (West 1997, 6, 8, 18, 31). Because many Americans then turned away from their founding principles, slavery’s extinction was not peaceful, but West and others believe the founders have been vindicated by the fact that its end finally came. Many scholars on the left instead see the founders largely as hypocrites. Although a few later felt obliged to live up to their revolutionary rhetoric, most resisted doing so until and unless powerful political pressures beyond their control compelled greater compliance. During the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, for example, Francis Jennings wrote that it was “a huge embarrassment to ideology” that the universal rights principles of the Revolution did not apply to Indians, and he questioned whether they ever really had come to do so fully (Jennings 1976, 322). Joan Hoff Wilson argued that “the increased benefits of Lockean liberalism” during the revolutionary period “accrued to a relatively small percent of all Americans” and were accompanied by “increased sexism and racism exhibited by this privileged group both during and after the Revolution” (Wilson 1976, 387). Those judgments continue to have strong defenders today. Other scholars and some conservative public intellectuals have advanced a third argument. They contend that we should accept that the revolutionaries upheld only what they perceived as their legal rights as Englishmen, so that whatever the merits of arguments for universal, egalitarian human rights, the aims of the founders should figure in that debate to a very limited degree, if at all. In particular, the distinguished historian John Phillip Reid has long contended forcefully that scholars have been wrong to argue that in the course of the Revolution, the American leaders abandoned claims to English rights and relied instead on “the natural rights of man rather than those peculiar to Englishmen.” He has maintained that throughout, the revolutionaries “asserted their rights as ‘Englishmen’ and only as Englishmen” (Reid 1986, 5). To Reid, it is neither surprising nor contradictory that Indians, African-­descended slaves, and women did not successfully claim protection from revolutionary ideology or the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. They were not Englishmen (Reid 1986, 13–­14). The view advanced here on American individualism and American patriotism, and on the nation’s universalistic rights doctrines and its substantial rights limitations, does not fit wholly into any of those listed above, though it has points in common with each. It presumes that rights doctrines are propagated and institutionalized as elements of the politics of constructing

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peoples. In a similar spirit, Richard Primus has argued that individual rights doctrines generally originate as political instruments that political actors adopt chiefly to accomplish certain immediate purposes in their specific political contexts (Primus 1999, 2–­3). But those contexts and the people-­ building efforts they involve can sometimes prompt actors to articulate broader aims, going beyond their immediate goals, that the rights are said to serve. To widen their appeal, the rights may be presented as universal, applicable to all human beings, and defined in grander terms, such as eternal, natural, and divine. Regardless of their motives, once political actors pronounce these grander conceptions of rights, and especially if the rights thus defined are institutionalized in some ways, they become available as instruments for other political actors to deploy for causes going beyond the concerns that gave rise to the initial advocacy of the rights. As Daniel Rodgers has written, the transformative politics of the revolutionary era made talk of universal “Natural Rights” one of “the basic tools of politics” in America in just this way. And natural rights talk has proven a tool that has been, because of its prestige and its frequent universalism, especially “sharp with subversive possibilities” (Rodgers 1987, 45–­46). But rights have still remained merely available as weapons that American political actors might use in what have remained uncertain, contingent political contests. The inner logic and the rhetorical power of universal rights doctrines have assisted, but they have not compelled or guaranteed, the further elaboration of rights either to support or to attack the status quo. They have always faced countering themes in potent American stories of peoplehood, and actors with strong motives to deploy those themes.

Rights Talk in the Revolutionary Era Trying to understand these patterns in terms of the politics of American people building is unnecessary, however, if Reid is right to insist on “the Englishness” of the rights that Americans invoked to give constitutional legitimacy to their revolution (Reid 1986, 9). Yet as others have noted, much evidence suggests that Reid’s claim is overstated (Hamowy 1991, 685–­86). His argument rests partly on his choice to focus only on “official claims to rights in actual controversy,” made in “official colonial petitions, resolutions, or declarations,” rather than widely read but unofficial statements like John Adams’s 1765 “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (Peek 1954, 3–­21), Jefferson’s 1774 “Summary View of the Rights of British America” (Jensen 1967, 256–­76), and Paine’s 1776 “Common Sense” (Jensen 1967, 400–­446), as well as works with fewer but important readers, like James

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Otis’s 1762 “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (Jensen 1967, 19–­40). Reid acknowledges that one can find in such “political pamphlets and anonymous newspaper articles claims made to rights on the authority of nature alone”—­as Adams put it in 1765, “RIGHTS . . . antecedent to all earthly government,—­Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws—­Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the Universe” (Reid 1986, 18, 91; Peek 1954, 4–­5). But Reid sees this pamphlet literature as filled with rhetorical excesses that did not express accurately what the revolutionary leadership really thought about rights. Reid’s contrast between official documents and rabble-­rousing pamphlets is cogent, but there are revolutionary-­era documents that blur the distinction. For example, taking what Benjamin Franklin called “the unanimous act of a large American city,” in 1772 the Boston Town Meeting adopted Samuel Adams’s “A State of the Rights of the Colonists,” which begins with an extensive discussion of the “Natural Rights of the Colonists as Men” (Jensen 1967, 235). That sort of document is hard to classify as a purely “private pamphlet” or fully “official act.” It is moreover neither surprising nor decisive that official documents largely emphasized claims that imperial authorities were violating the colonists’ legal rights. In 1774, while serving on a committee in the first Continental Congress, John Adams and Richard Henry Lee urged the members to appeal to the laws of nature and natural rights to challenge British policies. Others like Joseph Galloway, James Duane, John Jay, and John Rutledge successfully argued against Adams that natural rights arguments were “feeble.” They insisted that claims made in terms of the British constitution would be more persuasive to imperial authorities. They also favored promising to comply with royal requests for men and funds if repressive imperial policies were altered (Adams 1850, 370–­74; Beeman 2013, 116–­17, 139). Their position made much sense. As Rodgers notes, to change the minds of ministry officials or members of parliament, resistance leaders needed “a soberer language of charter precedents” and of at least “implicit” constitutional guarantees (Rodgers 1997, 48–­49). Recall that political actors often face related but distinguishable tasks of inspiring in others a sense of trust in themselves and their intentions, and a sense of the worth of their policies and plans. Most colonial leaders in what eventually became the revolutionary era considered themselves first and foremost to be “subjects of the British Crown” who were deeply loyal to the British monarchy (Beeman 2013, 3). They strongly preferred to win more favorable British policies by presenting themselves as reliable members of the Empire, not as radical dissidents. So in their official communications, the colonial leaders sought

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to maintain the trust of British imperial authorities that colonial Americans would remain loyal if their pleas were heard and that the colonies were and would continue to be of great worth to Britain. Arguing primarily in terms of English constitutional rights rather than natural rights provided assurance that despite their disagreements with British policies, colonial officials could be counted on to think and act as law-­abiding Englishmen. Accordingly, when the First Continental Congress issued its “Declaration of Rights” in October 1774, it largely heeded Duane, Galloway, Jay, and Rutledge and referred only briefly to “the immutable laws of nature.” Instead its members stressed their rights as “English colonists” entitled to the “English liberty” that was the birthright of all “free and natural-­born subjects” of the British Crown (Continental Congress 1774; Beeman 2013, 117–­19). When the Second Continental Congress issued its “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms” on July 6, 1775, they similarly claimed to be contending for “that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.” Although they invoked divine justice, they did not speak of divine or natural rights (Ver Steeg and Hofstadter 1969, 449). Yet the debate continued, right up to July 1776, with the ground shifting along the way (Beeman 2013, 118). The leading official documents began echoing the natural rights language of the angry pamphleteers. In June 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, chiefly drafted by George Mason, proclaimed in its first article, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Because men could never properly divest themselves or their progeny of their original, natural rights, colonial Americans and all their descendants were entitled to assert those rights, whatever lawyers might say about the evolving English constitution. The next month, the Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence simply announced that the American revolutionaries held “these truths to be self-­evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Both documents would soon be echoed in state declarations of indepen­ dence and early Bills of Rights, including those in Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Pennsylvania (Maier 1997, 165). Scholars like Rodgers and Hamowy therefore maintain that, in the latter’s words, “as open rebellion with Great Britain approached, the colonists

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increasingly resorted to arguments based not on the prerogatives peculiar to Englishmen but rather on man’s natural rights” (Rodgers 1987, 55–­56; Hamowy 1991, 686). But Rodgers stresses that many revolutionaries did so only “slowly, hesitantly,” because they were aware of the “subversive” potential of rights talk to be used against some of their own hierarchical privileges, and because seventeenth-­century doctrines of the state of nature, natural rights, and an original social contract had long been disparaged by many eighteenth-­century British political and intellectual leaders (Rodgers 1987, 46, 52–­57). He suggests that the “need for precedents” nonetheless drove many American writers to merge their historical pasts with state of nature doctrines in ways that helped them conjure up rights existing prior to the English constitution that they could deem both historical and natural (54–­56). Reid’s answer to such arguments is to insist that, apart from the odd “rhetorical flourish,” official documents invoked natural law and natural rights, if at all, only as “alternative authority” for what were still recognized to be at bottom positive rights under the English constitution (Reid 1986, 91–­92). He is surely right to argue that most revolutionaries never gave up their beliefs that the substantive rights for which they contended were properly theirs as part of the unwritten English constitution, nor did most ever alter the basic list of rights to which they felt entitled. Throughout the revolutionary era, they demanded recognition of their property rights, their rights to representation and to taxation only with consent, their right to be governed under the rule of law, and their right to resist a government that persistently violated their legal rights, among other themes (Reid 1986, 6). Both the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence stressed these points, long argued in terms of English constitutional law, and they did not suggest that their authors now viewed these rights as purely natural. They can be read as stressing the rights’ natural character chiefly because many revolutionaries saw themselves as temporarily in a state of nature while they threw off oppressive British rule and established new political and legal regimes (Shain 2007, 125–­27, 135–­36). Yet though Reid is persuasive in arguing that the revolutionary leadership never conceded that their rights lacked any English constitutional foundation, it is undeniable that over time the official documents as well as the pamphlets began to feature nature as the ultimate basis for these rights, in political society as well as in the state of nature, even if their scope could be legitimately limited in society. Reid contends instead that always, “Natural rights were the reflection, not the essence; they were the confirmation, not the source of positive rights.” But his sources say just the opposite, that

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natural rights “are the only Foundation of all just Authority, and the sole Reason for all Laws,” so that “civil rights are, or ought to be, a confirmation of natural rights” (Reid 1986, 94–­95). The central concern of this chapter, consequently, is not whether but why the revolutionaries came to give greater emphasis on nature as the source of rights that they did still hold to be their rights as Englishmen. Rodgers and others suggest that it was because, though they never admitted it, the revolutionaries came to recognize that the English precedents were actually against them, that they were only “British subjects on the outposts of a ramshackle empire” over which the King-­in-­Parliament had come to be officially established as absolutely sovereign—­after their ancestors had left England, true, but in ways that still bound all loyal and true British subjects such as they professed themselves to be (Rodgers 1987, 54). I have also endorsed that view (Smith 1997, 77). Reanalyzing these developments in light of the theory of the politics of peoplehood advanced here, however, I have come to think that the weakness of their legal arguments was not the chief factor at work. The best indicator of their main motive is a fact that Reid observes but does not explain. He is right that the language of natural rights appears primarily in the “rhetorical” preambles of revolutionary documents—­but why is that? What led the revolutionaries to feature these claims instead of their specifically English ones, if the latter were at the core of their thinking? Their motives may well have been the same as those of most of the revolutionary pamphleteers, and of political actors seeking to win support for novel senses of peoplehood everywhere. When the colonial leaders wrote the preambles or the first articles of the documents that definitively declared independence from Britain and founded new governments, their primary audiences were no longer imperial ministers or parliamentary members. They chiefly wrote, as Pauline Maier has stressed, for domestic consumption, for the fellow colonists whom they sought to inspire to join the highly risky revolutionary cause and then to support the new regimes they were creating (Maier 1997, 130–­31). Such inspiration was badly needed. Even as the Continental Congress chose to declare independence on July 2, 1776, delegates like Abraham Clark of New Jersey agonized that they were “now embarked on a most Tempestious Sea, Life very uncertain, Seeming Dangers Scattered Thick Around us” (cited in Beeman 2013, 2). For these purposes they required as I have suggested compelling stories with economic, political power, and perhaps especially constitutive themes to inspire their fellow British American subjects to embrace a new vision of their proper political community and political identities, one in which

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they would be American state and national citizens. The revolutionaries particularly needed constitutive accounts because, whatever the strength or weaknesses of their legal arguments, they were not likely to persuade many to support their cause out of purely legalistic or even predominantly prudential, materialist considerations. Although they could and did appeal to the economic grievances and denials of political power many colonials were experiencing under British rule, though they could suggest the commercial benefits of ending trade restrictions and the advantages of winning their sovereignty, the revolutionary leaders could not credibly promise the colonists great benefits in terms of either economic prosperity or national political clout in the near future. Instead their course held out the prospect of long, hard struggles and sacrifices—­times that would try men’s souls. Yet they needed somehow to arouse potential supporters with a sense of the transcendent worth of this demanding endeavor. Again, under such circumstances, leaders throughout history have found that they could best win adherents by presenting their cause as morally right, as divinely supported, and as true to the highest, noblest features of their people’s intrinsic nature. Those are exactly the themes that, at the point of greatest crisis and risk, the American revolutionaries chose to stress to their potential compatriots, often presented within narrative frames promising that America was destined to be a great independent nation with liberty and justice for all. Beyond invoking divine providence in various ways, they increasingly gave content to these narratives by asserting that they were restructuring governments to secure the universal, inalienable rights with which they were “endowed by their Creator,” in accord with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence proclaimed. Its language appealed simultaneously to many religious believers and to those Enlightenment-­minded Americans who saw nature as exhibiting a rational, moral lawfulness. The Declaration’s contention that “governments are instituted among men” to “secure these rights” also identified the practical achievement of inalienable rights for all (or perhaps only all members of the political community?) as the central aim of government more explicitly than any preceding political founders had ever done. Rhetorical flourishes their talk of natural rights may well have been. But rhetorical flourishes are usually made for serious reasons. They are efforts to robe their authors’ themes in the most attractive and exciting garments available. So the revolutionary experience made not only opposition to oppressive imperial governments, but also the idea that legitimate governments secure inalienable rights, a basic constitutive theme of many of the stories of American peoplehood that the new nation’s leaders proclaimed. They also often

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advanced that theme using organicist teleological narrative forms. Richard Beeman has affirmed that in “the decades following adoption of the Declaration of Independence, as Fourth of July celebrations became an important American ritual, it would become commonplace for American politicians and civic leaders . . . to depict the American Revolution, and the creation of a democratic American nation that came into being in the aftermath of that Revolution” teleologically, “as part of a divine plan, the inevitable result of the efforts of a virtuous citizenry dedicated to freedom” (Beeman 2013, 2). In these stories lie a large part of the explanation for how Americans came to combine fierce patriotism with strong attachments to individualism and individual rights. Their political projects of revolution and refounding were understood to be historic and heroic, worthy objects of patriotic passions, because their governments were destined to secure individual rights, certainly for themselves, and as at least an example to all humanity. And momentously, these stories also reminded all Americans that their political ancestors defiantly broke the laws of a repressive government in order to enforce still-­higher laws. This paradoxical notion of the greatest Americans as “outlaw law enforcers” would resonate in American popular culture down to the present, visible in portrayals of fiercely independent cowboy heroes like “Wild Bill” Hickok and the masked Lone Ranger, apparently shady but noble private detectives like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, crime-­busting rogue cops like Dirty Harry and Axel Foley, and vigilante superheroes like the Dark Knight. The same theme is equally discernible in American narratives of both real and fictional political figures, including the rebellious slave Nat Turner, the insurrectionist abolitionist John Brown, the upstart voter Susan B. Anthony, the union activist Joe Hill, the feminist protestor Alice Paul, the civilly disobedient activists Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., the Stonewall rioters, and many others. Yet the constitutive theme of America as a vehicle to secure divine or natural individual rights was never the only one in prominent American stories of peoplehood. As illustrated in chapter 2, portrayals of the members of the new nation as favorites of the Protestant God, as the only surviving uncorrupted persons of English, or British, or perhaps European ancestry, as manly lovers of republican freedom instead of effeminate dependence and servitude, all were interwoven with talk of inalienable rights in the writings of Tom Paine and many others. And the reluctance of many revolutionaries to adopt the language of natural rights at all, along with their continuing specification of rights largely in terms of what they saw as their rights as Englishmen, indicate that both Rodgers and Reid are largely right. Many in America’s founding generation did perceive talk of universal natural rights

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as dangerously hard to contain, in need of delimitation if those at the margins or at the bottom of society were not to invoke them on behalf of excessively radical transformations. For though the American leaders trumpeted their dedication to natural rights in their hour of revolutionary need, they soon turned away from that rhetoric as they began in earnest to construct political systems that could endure. The 1787 Constitution’s preamble did not explicitly promise to secure natural rights for all, only to “form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Goals of peace, security, prosperity, and freedom—­but not necessarily natural rights—­for the founders and their descendants—­but not necessarily all human beings—­take priority in the narrative of the establishment of the Constitution by “We the People of the United States” with which the document begins. In creating both the Constitution and in many of the new nation’s formative statutes, many early Americans undoubtedly felt they had to insure that their new governments would serve the interests, and thereby secure the support, of the most privileged and powerful members of the new states and nation. Any emphasis on types of rights talk that could be used to challenge those advantages surely seemed inadvisable. Attention to the community-­building roles played by stories of peoplehood also suggests another factor that may have been at work. Constitutive appeals to God and nature can be uniquely useful during times of political and economic hardship, but they are, after all, at best inspiring intangibles—­ arguably, only pretty words. If they are endlessly repeated but not reinforced by the enjoyment of other benefits, their appeal to all constituents is likely to pale. What once rang sonorously begins to clank. In contrast, the provision of things of tangible worth such as economic goods, personal and national physical security, and a share of political power is likely to cement allegiances as these benefits repeat and accumulate. Life without these resources comes to seem unthinkable. Not merely to reassure the privileged, then, but to retain the support of many more Americans, it made sense for the leaders of the new governments to emphasize in their words and deeds how their new regimes would promote the “general Welfare” and provide for the “common defence,” not simply pursue grand moral principles discernible in nature. Changes in these more mundane directions clearly did occur, especially in official documents. Rodgers notes that though state bills of rights established in the late 1770s often used the language of natural law and natural rights, by the 1790s, as states continued to modify their constitutions and to

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add bills of rights, such phrases fell out of fashion (Rodgers 1987, 60–­64). This pattern was evident not only in the new federal Constitution of 1787 but also in the Bill of Rights added to it in 1791. The first ten amendments expressed the deep-­seated concerns of the revolutionary generation that their new national government might prove too powerful, like its British predecessor, invading the prerogatives of the states and local communities and threatening personal security (Amar 2005, 316–­19). But only the Ninth Amendment’s reference to unspecified rights “retained by the people” still hinted that there might be rights not arising from any foundation in positive law—­a hint that almost all American judges have ignored through all subsequent history, just as many have not regarded the Declaration of Independence and its view of governmental purposes as binding law, much less the definitive guide to constitutional interpretation (Amar 2005, 328, 389–­90). Although especially in the wake of Lincoln’s speeches many Americans now have come to read the Constitution as dedicated to fulfilling the principles of the Declaration, by itself the text of the 1787 Constitution provides no explicit indication that its framers believed that governments are instituted among men chiefly to secure rights of any kind, much less inalienable, divine, natural rights for all humanity. Unlike the white-­hot core of the revolutionary era, the early constitutional period was not a time when invocations of rights shone brightly in the discourses radiating from the new nation’s centers of power.

The Rebirth of Rights Talk Even so, the revolutionary era left a legacy of official documents and popular discourses narrating American identity, American purposes, and American greatness as centered on the securing of universal natural rights over time, combined with the belief that sometimes this securing had to be done by daring figures outside and even arrayed against the pillared halls of governmental power. Not long after launching their new nation, Americans did begin to hold Independence Day commemorations, but most scholars believe that it was especially worker associations in the 1820s that revived the language of natural rights, often via adaptations of the Declaration of Independence (Foner 1976, 1–­7; Rodgers 1987, 72; Maier 1997, 197). In 1829, George Henry Evans of the New York Working Man’s Party published “The Working Men’s Declaration of Independence,” which proclaimed the “natural and inalienable rights” of “one class of a community” in “opposition to other classes of their fellow men” who denied them a political “station of equality” (Foner 1976, 48). In 1834, the Boston Trades’ Union

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declared that, “With the Fathers of our Country, we hold that all men are created free and equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that “laws which have a tendency to raise any peculiar class above their fellow citizens, by granting special privileges, are contrary to” these rights (Foner 1976, 53). Many more examples could be added. Why was it American workers who first seized on the Declaration and its invocations of natural rights to champion their political cause? Was it because the logic of putatively universal rights obviously could be extended to encompass their demands? Perhaps, but if so, why did not other, more visibly oppressed groups, including slaves and women, stress rights language sooner? Ironically, white male workers, who also readily claimed to be America’s true “people,” may have first found natural rights rhetoric a plausible vehicle for their endeavors because of what they had in common with the distinctive traits valorized in many of the constitutive stories of the American revolutionaries, rather than what they had in common with all humanity. In this regard, Reid’s argument is partly vindicated: rights assertions came most readily to those who most resembled the traditional bearers of English rights. True, these workingmen were Americans, not Englishmen. Although Evans was an English immigrant, many others were not even of English descent. But they were overwhelmingly men of northern European ancestry, like most of the revolutionaries. At least some could credibly claim the “Founding Fathers” as their literal biological ancestors, and they felt similarly entitled to basic freedoms. The American workers also perceived themselves, like the early American revolutionaries, as driven by circumstances to challenge the legitimacy of the unequal class structure under which they labored. For the revolutionaries, that oppressive structure had been a governmentally enforced hereditary aristocracy that they came to repudiate in the name of egalitarian republicanism. For the workers, it was an aristocracy fostered by other sorts of governmental special privileges, such as grants of corporate charters, monopoly rights, public business and public lands to the already advantaged, accompanied by preferential judicial treatment. Yet it was still an aristocracy inconsistent with a republic based on equal rights. And like the revolutionaries, the workers faced a steep uphill fight with few immediate rewards and great dangers of punishment from authorities claiming to be enforcing the law. Many working-­class leaders believed as fervently as the colonists that constitutional law, properly understood, was on their side, yet many courts believed vested legal rights validated the privileges of the financial and employer elites against whom the new labor associations fought (Orren 1991, 68–­121; Wood 2007, 251–­54). As a new

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movement breaking what the courts said were laws, the workers needed the moral legitimacy, the psychological uplift, the sense of the compelling worth of their cause that the language of natural rights, natural law, and divine support had provided to the revolutionary insurgents, men who in so many ways seemed like themselves. But if their demographic and situational similarities to the revolutionaries aided American workers in turning the language of natural rights to their purposes, their words and deeds dramatized for all how this language could be deployed in new ways. In an era marked by renewed fervent religiosity and moral crusades, others soon followed suit. None did so more dramatically or radically than the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Still, the radicalism of his stance should not be overstated. If Jacksonian wage laborers could proclaim themselves a class subjugated by a governmentally supported economic aristocracy, it was no great leap to say that slave laborers were far more oppressed—­if only one accepted that slaves were human beings with equal basic rights. In the first issue of The Liberator in 1831, Garrison declared accordingly his commitment to “the great cause of human rights” based on assent to the self-­evident truth “maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’” For Garrison, these principles demanded “the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population” (Ver Steeg and Hofstadter 1969, 321–­22). Garrison’s consistently religious rhetoric leaves little doubt that he was drawn to the language of rights not so much from a desire to invoke nature or reason or to gain any political advantage, as from his wish to express faithfully the moral edicts of the God in whom he passionately believed. He felt impelled to devote himself to abolition above all to satisfy his own conscience. Yet he surely knew that many white workers had recently been using “rights talk” much the way he was attempting to do. He also knew that religious defenses of such rights were best suited to discomfort at least some of those deeply invested in slavery or simply content with the status quo. This was a familiar, indeed now-­patriotic language that could win the trust of potential allies and their confidence in the worth of the abolitionist cause, while at the same time condemning as hypocrites those who professed the same religion and patriotism but supported slavery. By speaking ceaselessly of human rights and attracting equally pious and idealistic women activists, the abolitionist movement helped generate the nineteenth-­century women’s rights movement, commonly dated to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. In its famous “Declaration of Sentiments,” again modeled on the Declaration of Independence, Elizabeth

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Cady Stanton and her allies gave the language of rights still more expansive scope. They defined themselves not as an oppressed “class” or “people” but as “one portion of the family of man” seeking the “position” to which “the laws of nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” The truths they held to be “self-­evident” included the claim that “all men and women are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” among which they included “her inalienable right to the elective franchise.” They, too, sought to turn working-­class men’s claims to rights to their advantage, though none too inclusively: they noted that they were being denied rights, including voting rights, now conferred on “ignorant and degraded men” (Foner 1976, 78–­79). They also knew that, much less than American workers and almost as little as American slaves, they had slight shelter in the structure of positive rights built into American law. They sought to use Blackstone, the great proponent of the common law doctrine of coverture that subordinated women to their fathers or husbands, as authority for their higher law appeals, noting that “Blackstone . . . remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other” (Foner 1976, 81). They discreetly ignored the fact that for Blackstone, the law of nature also mandated gender inequality. For women as for workers, abolitionists, and the American revolutionaries, proclamations of the natural and divine basis of the rights they claimed were not chiefly devices to persuade governing authorities. They were primarily means to override arguments about formal legality and to fire up or shame constituencies from whom they sought support, under circumstances in which they could not promise immediate material benefits. The revolutionary rhetorics identifying American peoplehood and American greatness with the securing of rights for all, and the accompanying recognition that at times unjust positive laws must be violated if those goals were to be fulfilled, meant that reformers could hope at least some of their countrymen would see their appeals as having moving moral authority. Many making these proclamations were sincere. But like the American founders, when they spoke of universal human rights, they did so with particular groups claiming particular rights chiefly in mind. Sometimes they did not show much ardor for natural rights contentions advanced by others. White male workers often did not champion the rights of slaves or women. Women suffrage advocates sometimes treated the rights conferred on foreign-­born immigrants and even African American men as improvidently granted. Their shared language of rights helped promote some alliances, but far from anything resembling a united front.

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Rights talk had greater political efficacy when deployed by the middle-­ and upper-­class white male spokesmen for the new mainstream political party that rose on the ashes of the Whigs, the Republicans, led after 1860 by Abraham Lincoln. His record, too, displayed some inconsistencies and significant personal evolution, but from the early 1850s on, Lincoln was one of the most steadfast antebellum advocates for guaranteeing the basic rights delineated in the Declaration of Independence, though not necessarily other rights, to all persons, regardless of color or gender. In the 1857 Springfield speech that launched his campaign for the US Senate, Lincoln framed the Declaration’s principles as the telos of American constitutionalism as well as American peoplehood. Ignoring the reference in the preamble to “ourselves and our Posterity,” Lincoln presented the Declaration and the Constitution as dedicated to realizing basic rights for all people over time, in accord with natural and divine law but by means of American statesmanship and patriotic popular self-­governance. As noted in chapter 1, Lincoln said that in arguing that legitimate governments should seek to secure inalienable rights, the Declaration’s authors “set up a standard maxim for free society” for “future use” that should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere” (Lincoln 1905–­6, 2: 300–­301). The Constitution, Lincoln contended, should be interpreted as a frame for pursuing that quest, not as a retreat from it. From this perspective, Lincoln had written in 1855 against Know-­ Nothing nativists who read the Declaration to hold, “all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.” He contended in 1857 that in regard to the Declaration’s rights, especially “her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands, without asking leave of anyone else,” a black woman “is my equal and the equal of all others” (Lincoln 1905–­6, 2: 299). He then made this understanding of the Declaration and the Constitution, and the contention that the Declaration mandated and the Constitution empowered Congress to outlaw slavery in all the territories, the centerpiece of his campaigns against Stephen Douglas for the Senate in 1858 and the presidency in 1860. Lincoln did not originate this view. But most scholars agree with Garry Wills that Lincoln did more than perhaps anyone else to foster widespread belief that the Constitution and, indeed, the United States as a political community rest on the Declaration and its new American vision of government as devoted to securing natural rights for all over time (Wills 1992, 38–­39; cf., e.g., Rodgers 1987, 77–­78; Maier 1997, 207–­8; Shain 2007, 116–­22, 144–­45).

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Yet Lincoln’s example only underlines that though rights talk could serve to help build American political coalitions, the logic of universal natural rights claims was far from sufficient to bring about political transformations, regardless of who invoked them. His opponents were quick to deploy constitutive themes denying that blacks, Catholics, members of native tribes and others had equal claims to the natural rights of the Declaration, and their arguments were politically potent. The Illinois state legislature preferred Douglas, who skillfully articulated these themes, to Lincoln for the Senate in 1858, and in the presidential election of 1860, Lincoln’s views had decidedly minority appeal. Over 60 percent of the vote went to three other candidates who all in one way or another favored permitting the extension of slavery. It was this fragmentation of the proslavery vote, not Lincoln’s natural rights views, that allowed him to be elected. And though women and workers sometimes organized and mobilized impressively and won some legislative battles in the antebellum era, for the most part their talk of natural rights did not greatly alter the judicial rulings and other structures of public policy and power that enforced class and gender inequalities in American law and life (Orren 1991, 122–­44, 173–­82). It was only under the extraordinary circumstances of the Civil War, when Southern Democrats first left Congress, then returned bowed by defeat, that the Republicans and more radical equal rights advocates gained enough support to pass statutes and constitutional amendments providing new national guarantees of basic rights. Even then, national lawmakers largely followed the framers of the original Constitution by avoiding natural rights language. In the Thirteenth Amendment, they banned slavery and involuntary servitude, and in the Fourteenth, they committed the national government to upholding the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” along with guaranteeing due process when states dealt with the “life, liberty and property” of persons. But they officially referred to natural rights only in the 1868 Expatriation Act, which echoed the Declaration of Independence more fully than any other US statute has ever done by terming expatriation “a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Expatriation Act of July 27 1868). Outside this context of the specific right that had been at the heart of the American Revolution, US lawmakers still treated natural rights language as something more appropriate to political agitations than to major legal documents. After some three decades of worker, abolitionist, and women’s rights movements invoking natural rights as justifications for radically transformative changes, it is likely that at least

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some legislators preferred not to encode into the nation’s basic laws terminology that they saw as dangerously hard to control. Thus as the late nineteenth century proceeded, egalitarians returned to the Declaration of Independence, rather than the positivistic postwar amendments, to invoke higher law authority for their positions. Labor leaders and socialists probably did so most frequently, while adding the radical contention that “inalienable rights” included claims to the economic “means” to realize those rights (Foner 1976, 85, 100, 121, 131). The opponents of Chinese exclusion in the Congress also insisted that race-­based immigration restrictions would violate the natural rights principles of the Declaration, which had made the United States “the recognized champion of human rights” in the world (Smith 1997, 359–­60). The National Woman Suffrage Association continued to call on the nation to honor “the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776,” as did proponents of African American rights (Foner 1976, 107; Smith 1997, 376). But all these very reasonable arguments from natural rights premises were made in losing causes. Opponents successfully derided them as “Utopian,” as “sentimentalist,” even saying that the Declaration’s espousal of equal rights was “absolutely false” (Smith 1997, 361). Indeed, the most politically potent uses of natural rights language in the late nineteenth century came on behalf of the legitimacy of economic inequalities, in defenses of the property rights and economic liberties of the employer and capitalist classes (Rodgers 2007, 268–­70). The pattern was set by Justice Stephen Field in his influential dissent in the 1873 Slaughter-­ House Cases, which on the whole served to limit the capacity of the postwar amendments to protect the rights of American citizens, especially, as it turned out, African American citizens. Field protested that the Fourteenth Amendment had given the federal courts new authority to protect “the natural and inalienable rights which belong to all citizens,” with economic liberties first and foremost among those (Graber 1991, 30). Although his views did not carry the day then, Supreme Court majorities later deployed them to oppose many regulatory laws from the Progressive Era through the early New Deal. Such uses of the language of natural rights exemplify one of the other types of occasion in which political leaders find constitutive accounts valu­ able: when economic and political benefits are being obtained, as they were by leading business interests in the late nineteenth century, through means that are questionable in terms of prevailing moral discourses. Assurances that nature and God approved the rights of the wealthy gave an aura

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of legitimacy that could impress even many who were experiencing severe hardships under prevailing arrangements. This language also held out hope that all Americans would eventually share in the benefits for all that secure economic rights supposedly provided. Nonetheless, the subversive potential of natural rights rhetorics remained. So while judges sometimes spoke briefly of natural law and natural rights and cited authorities who had elaborated them, most chose officially to ground economic rights on the positive law authority of vague and permissive clauses like “due process” and, to a lesser degree, “equal protection.” At times, conservative advocates of economic freedoms also argued for a range of other civil liberties, but usually with the understanding that these rights could reasonably be confined to white men, preferably those of Anglo-­Saxon or at least northern European ancestry who were, after all, uniquely fit for lives of liberty (Graber 1991, 17–­36). Even so, by the dawn of the twentieth century, after natural rights claims had been employed to support colonial revolution, abolitionism, workers’ rights, women’s rights, rights of immigrants, rights of employers, and more, everyone recognized that the language was expansive enough to be used to valorize almost any cause. Yet by the same token, while Americans across the spectrum often argued in terms of rights, including natural rights, their shared language did not generate any shared trajectory in regard to the protection of basic freedoms. Many eminently logical rights claims came to naught. The rights that could be meaningfully enjoyed in practice as well as in law were generally the rights favored by those who could wield other forms of power.

Contemporary Rights Talk Partly as a result of this dispiriting reality, many left-­leaning Progressive intellectuals and activists vociferously rejected natural rights discourses, seeing them fundamentally as means to block egalitarian economic and social reforms. One of the greatest American thinkers of the era, John Dewey, proclaimed that “natural rights and natural liberties” existed “only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.” Claims of individual rights, especially those of the owners of property rights, “must yield to the general welfare” (Graber 1991, 67–­68). As Rodgers has noted, early twentieth-­century Progressives made their “constitutive stories of peoplehood out of other ingredients,” including narratives of “social and industrial justice” and the “common interest” (Rodgers 2007, 271). Their views remained mostly in the minority until the Depression brought Franklin D. Roosevelt and large

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majorities of New Deal Democrats to the presidency and the Congress. They in turn repopulated and transformed the obstructionist Supreme Court. Many Progressives and New Dealers did champion individual rights in certain contexts, and some still spoke of natural rights. A number echoed the calls of labor leaders for rights to the economic means to well-­being. From his first presidential campaign through his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly called on Congress to enact a new “economic declaration of rights” or an “economic bill of rights” that would protect American workers and consumers (Hammond, Hardwick, and Lubert 2007, 407; Roosevelt 1944). But in contrast to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in the first half of the twentieth, the language of natural law and natural rights predominantly served to justify systems of inequality in America, while proponents of egalitarian change spoke most often of democracy and democratic legislation, science, progress, and the common good. Those patterns changed again with World War II, the Cold War, and especially the civil rights movement. The impact of the struggles against racist Nazism and fascism on political discourse, not just in the United States but also around the world, is discernible in the founding documents of the United Nations. The preamble of the UN Charter affirms “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations” (United Nations Charter 1946). Subsequently, the United Nation’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” adopted on December 10, 1948, spoke in its preamble of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” words especially reminiscent of the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments. Its Article 1 also announced that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” phrases not too different from those of George Mason in 1776, and the list of particulars that follows also echoes many found in his declaration, in the Declaration of Independence, in the Bill of Rights and the postwar amendments, along with more novel provisions that echo FDR’s economic goals (United Nations General Assembly 1948). But these were not first and foremost restatements of positive law guarantees. Although in these documents the language of “natural rights” gave way to the term “human rights,” perhaps due to the philosophic and political assaults on the natural rights doctrines common in the first half of the twentieth century, there can be no doubt that “human rights” were also seen as inherent, inalienable, fundamental rights that rest on the “dignity and worth of the human person,” as the Universal Declaration states. In this international environment, which included threats of UN investigations of American segregation, the United States faced new external

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pressures to address its massive systems of civic inequality. Returning black soldiers, many joining the great migration of American blacks from southern farms to northern cities, added domestic pressures as well. Collectively these circumstances helped incubate the American civil rights movement, which in turn made rights central to American political discourses once again (Klinkner with Smith 1997, 161–­241). Although talk of “natural” rights and natural law was less common, civil rights leaders like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. regularly traced these back to the “inalienable rights” proclaimed in Declaration of Independence, a document that King called a “promissory note” that the nation had yet to fulfill for “black men as well as white men” (King 1963, 305.) First the courts, then the president and the Congress responded to these pressures by banning racial segregation and passing the momentous 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, among other measures. The Supreme Court in the 1960s also extended most of the Bill of Rights guarantees to the states, especially rights of the accused, and it discerned a new constitutional “right of privacy” in 1965 that proved capable of supporting broad rights for women to choose to have abortions in 1973. These developments helped spur related movements for women’s rights, rights of religious minorities, welfare rights, consumers’ rights, rights of the disabled, rights of indigenous peoples, gay rights, rights of immigrants, children’s rights, animal rights, and much more. Scholars eventually described the resulting era as a “Rights Revolution,” as a new “Age of Rights,” as an era dominated by “rights talk” (Sunstein 1990; Henkin 1990; Glendon 1991). As political opposition to many of the changes initiated in the civil rights era grew in the 1980s and 1990s, many debated whether all rights talk, whether it concerned “natural” or “human” rights, tended to be too absolutist, too conducive to selfishness, too dismissive of community responsibilities to be healthy (Holmes and Sunstein 1999). Yet even efforts to limit civil rights transformations often appealed to alternative rights discourses, including doctrines of property rights, seen once again as natural rights, as well as the more communal doctrine of states’ rights (Epstein 1985; Klinkner with Smith 1997, 300, 329). These modern political controversies over the scope and character of personal rights, human and sometimes now also animal, have plainly played a role in the different scholarly depictions of the scope and character of rights doctrines at the nation’s founding and in subsequent history noted at the outset of this chapter. By and large, it is more middle-­of-­the-­road scholars supportive of most modern changes, particularly the overthrow of official racial segregation, who have tended to agree with King and other activists

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that those developments are bringing to fruition promises advanced in the rights-­centered narratives articulated, though never universally embraced, at the nation’s inception. It is generally conservatives, viewing modern movements for personal rights as having gone too far in ways that have damaged key social and political institutions and practices, who tend instead to hold that the framers held more bounded conceptions of rights that activists are now unduly expanding. And it is those at the opposite end of the political spectrum who, believing that US political, economic, and social systems require far more radical egalitarian transformations than have occurred, contend like conservatives that early American conceptions of rights were quite narrow. Left scholars see those early rights doctrines as containing too many built-­in class, race, gender, and religious biases to be any kind of guide to social justice. Some on the scholarly left add that the American narratives valorizing courageous individual “outlaw law fulfillers” who dramatically stand up against unjust laws, institutions, and practices in the name of higher morality, then head off into the western sunset or the neon-­lit urban night, can in practice operate as conservative forces. When these stories fail to elaborate how deeply even conscientious individuals “are implicated in larger social and historical structures,” they can mask the need for “concerted public action” to transform those socioeconomic and political structures in truly substantial ways. Tarantino’s Django may have freed his wife but he did little to subvert the system of slavery. Eastwood’s Dirty Harry may have captured or killed vicious offenders despite an ineffective, corrupt criminal justice system, but he, too, left that system intact. These kinds of, at best, unduly narrow versions of American individualism are said to do as much or more to preserve the status quo as to change it (Turner 2012, 1–­3). The evidence and arguments about the place of rights talk in US history advanced here are pertinent to these contrasting characterizations, but they cannot settle all the disagreements. They do raise doubts about claims that there is anything inherent in constitutive stories of universal personal rights that render governmental policies and citizen practices more individualistic, litigious, inefficient, or irresponsible, on the one hand, or more concerned for the disadvantaged or the victims of injustice, on the other. Discourses featuring rights, including natural rights, have been advanced for many different purposes, individualistic and communitarian, egalitarian and inegalitarian. And they have never been by themselves enough to insure success for any endeavor. Rights themes in political narratives have served to inspire support for precarious, sometimes desperately serious, sometimes eccentric causes on the part of the weak, and they have also provided bulwarks for the

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estates of the powerful. Yet they have never aided any cause so strongly as to make its success inevitable. Perhaps, then, constitutive accounts valorizing universal rights, especially in the early language of natural rights and the now-­prevalent terminology of human rights, have never really mattered very much politically. But that proposition is improbable. The very ubiquity of these discourses shows that political actors have thought them useful, and analysis of their role in American stories of peoplehood suggests why. Rights stories have not been potent enough to determine the course of human events, but in their different forms they have helped political leaders and government officials to forge coalitions and movements in support of their policies. Even as rights narratives have built into American political institutions and daily life tensions between American communal and individualistic commitments, and conflicts between inclusive and restrictive policies and practices, they have advanced often enticing, sometimes irresistible invitations for some unlikely companions to get into the same political beds. When other factors have conspired to help the resulting coalitions to endure and to enact the policies they could agree upon, much has been done by Americans that might not otherwise have occurred—­including success for a revolution by small, distant colonies against the world’s greatest empire; success for those who resisted forms of involuntary servitude deemed essential by much of the electorate; partial success for the disfranchised targets of gender and racial discrimination; and yes, also success for European-­ descended Americans in displacing native peoples and, for many decades and in many places, resisting pressures for civic equality across racial, ethnic, religious, and gender lines, as well as success for the wealthy few in resisting the redistributive impulses of democratic majorities, even in periods of great economic hardship. In American history, the politics of rights has indeed made for strange bedfellows, and the couplings of those bedfellows have often given rise to surprising, sometimes disturbing, sometimes inspiring progeny. In the course of the nation’s troubled past and present, in the case of America’s politics of rights, those progeny have, more than once, been new births of freedom.

Six

Contesting Meaning and Membership in American Peoplehood

The prominence of quests to secure individual rights in American stories of peoplehood should not obscure the reality that most of the nation’s political narratives have defined and celebrated conceptions of communal identity—­of “We the People of the United States”—­while asserting, as both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did, the authority and capacity of that people to govern themselves. The legacy of the American Revolution not only included the notion that a government loses legitimacy if it violates inalienable rights. As Jason Frank has stressed, the Revolution’s “enthronement” of the “people” as “the ground of public authority” also conveyed the lesson that whenever a government was illegitimate, groups could announce that they represented “the people” and, acting “out of doors,” claim the Declaration’s “Right of the People to alter or abolish” that government via peaceful or even violent resistance (Frank 2010, 3, 86). The great example of the Revolution thereby encouraged what Frank has called America’s recurring “postrevolutionary dramas of popular self-­ authorization,” in which “appeals to the people” by a remarkable variety of groups have often been “the motor of a distinct form of political contestation” (3, 19, 25). Both privileged and insurgent groups have been able to make an extensive array of claims in the name of “the people” because just who the American people are, and who speaks for them, has never been clear or uncontested. And many groups have often felt impelled to make such claims, because prevailing American stories of peoplehood have assigned them only subordinate status within the American republic, or denied them membership altogether. The demands that subordinated groups have advanced in the name of more expansive notions of the people have, in turn, often been met by fresh rejections of their claims to be “real” Amer­ icans. Over time, political struggles have made prevailing conceptions of

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American peoplehood more inclusive in many ways. But the notion that not everyone belongs is inherent in the very idea of distinctive peoplehood, and all major American political movements so far have been built through the embrace of important exclusions. This chapter explains how rival narrations of “We the People” have de­­ fined and served the sometimes clashing and sometimes allying interests and identities of different groups throughout US history.1 It focuses on the constitutive themes of religion, race, and gender that are so often politically potent, with special concern to convey how these themes have historically been intertwined with one another, and with economic and political power themes. The knitting and reknitting of conceptions and coalitions espousing different visions of “We the People” has been the warp and woof of American political development. Important as “rights talk” has been throughout American history, varying definitions of peoplehood have set boundaries as to who could actually claim what were often described as universal rights. And since the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s ended many traditional forms of racial, gender, and religious subordination or exclusion, differing conceptions of American peoplehood have been deployed in contests over what if any differentiated civic statuses for various groups, in­­ cluding racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, women and LGBT Amer­ icans, religious communities, corporations, the poor, the disabled, and more, are consistent with democratic equality. Indeed, in the twenty-­first century, many are questioning how far national peoplehood itself, which imposes lesser rights or outright exclusion on persons not deemed citizens, is consistent with equal rights and democracy for all. But if battles over American peoplehood now display rising challenges to the very legitimacy of this form of political community, the potential of these contests to challenge established interests and identities were visible from the nation’s start. John Adams, who argued vigorously for championing the revolutionary cause in terms of natural rights in 1774, nonetheless cautioned as early as May 1776, and frequently thereafter, against altering “the qualifications of the voters” to realize principles of popular sovereignty. He warned, “New Claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from twelve to twenty-­ one will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level” (Keyssar 2000, 1). For Adams, the “word people” meant not any “motley rabble” of “fractious persons,” “saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish Teagues, and outlandish jacktars,” but only “the greater and more judicious part of the subjects of all ranks” (Frank 2010, 89). Although

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Adams was a sincere republican who conceded that “all ranks” deserved to be represented, if only by their “greater” members, he still believed that considerations of race and ethnicity, gender, class, age, and moral character all must constrain who could really claim to be equal members of, much less to speak for, the people of America. In this he was typical. Few potent stories of peoplehood in America have ever lacked such constraining constitutive notions, generally tied to the economic and power interests of more established Americans like Adams. Yet even those restrictive conceptions, like American commitments to securing natural rights, were often first promulgated in efforts to build support for precarious new enterprises, rather than in endeavors to protect existing ones—­in keeping with the hypothesis that constitutive themes are often featured when economic and power benefits are uncertain. Often leaders can inspire faith in novel ventures only by stigmatizing many groups that their core constituents already distrust. As those ventures gain success and become institutionalized, restrictive themes often play the other hypothesized roles, providing reassurances about benefits that are being obtained by means that appear risky or immoral, and buttressing now-­established arrangements in the face of new threats. And whenever constitutive, economic, and power themes have been used either to assail or uphold the status quo, they have repeatedly been blended and reblended to forge often surprising coalitions capable of gaining authority to govern. Strikingly, American political rivals have often combined many of the same ideas in contrasting ways in order to build support for sharply opposed institutions and policies.

The Colonial Heritage The different American colonies were founded for a variety of reasons, some fundamentally as business enterprises promising economic gains, some as gifts to proprietors that British monarchs wished to reward or cultivate by conferring dominions on them. Proponents of colonies aimed primarily at economic or political goals often claimed, however, also to be serving re­ ligious ends (Guyatt 2007, 20–­23). That is unsurprising, because again, religious conceptions of peoplehood usually have great moral and political force. And there can be no denying that many of the first colonists did immigrate chiefly out of desire for better opportunities to practice their preferred forms of Christianity. It is understandable that their colonial political leaders, who were also often their religious leaders, used theological accounts of their communities

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to inspire senses of faith and hope in the members of what were initially small, weak, poor communities struggling with harsh circumstances. It is also understandable that later American leaders have not hesitated to elaborate these religious conceptions of peoplehood, more than colonial financial and power motives or any other theme, to provide uplifting content to the stories of national identity that advanced their political projects (Guyatt 2007, 4; Beasley 2004, 46–­47, 64). The one national holiday that celebrates America’s colonial experiences is Thanksgiving, conventionally portrayed as a day devoted to expressing gratitude to God in the manner of the Plymouth, Massachusetts, Pilgrims. And many of those portrayals suggest that Americans have always been the modern “chosen people” of the God to whom the Pilgrims prayed (Siskind 1992, 168–­72). The notion that the community that New England colonists built might prove to have a sacred place among the profane nations of the earth featured in the oft-­cited sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” that Massachusetts Bay Company Governor John Winthrop reputedly gave to his fellow Puritans in 1630 as their ship, the Arbella, first approached the shores of the New World. Referencing the Gospel of Matthew 5:14, which states, “you are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden,” Winthrop told his company members that while they still had all the duties that they had in England, they now had “to doe more service to the Lord” and keep themselves “better preserved from the Common corrupcions of this evill world” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 15). If they did so, he promised: The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his owne people . . . hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the Lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken . . . wee shall be made a story and a by-­word through the world. (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 16)

Already, then, this early leader cast his narrative of peoplehood in organicist teleological form, even though Winthrop, like many later proponents of providentialism, stressed that failure to act virtuously would make disgrace, not divine approval, the new people’s destiny. It may seem absurd for Winthrop to have contended that the eyes of the world were on the passengers of the tiny Arbella. And for those who do not share Puritan theology or a taste for rocky soil and frigid winters, it also seems unlikely that God

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intended to make the New Englanders His special people and dwell among them if they were faithful. But this was plainly a religious constitutive theme that served to inspire a sense of the enormous worth of the new form of peoplehood the Puritans were establishing, as well a sense of trust that, despite the huge difficulties they faced, they would succeed. Since Winthrop did not rely on coercion, and he could not offer his fellows much in the way of economic benefits—­and he also proved unwilling to share much political power—­this promise of being part of either a glorious story if the colonists embraced his vision, or a degraded one if they did not, was crucial to the Puritan settler project. But even in colonial Massachusetts, this religious narrative proved to be adaptable to support more and less inclusive notions of who could be part of that new people. In later years, Winthrop showed that he believed the members of God’s new city had the right to dictate the terms on which immigrants would join them, and to exclude the unwanted. Winthrop always insisted that God meant for English Puritans to come to New England and nowhere else (Guyatt 2007, 12). But in “A Defense of an Order of the Court,” Winthrop justified refusing religious dissidents entry into the colony by arguing, first, that no “common weale can be founded but by free consent” of its members, and second, that “persons so incorporating have a public and relative interest in each other . . . and in all the means of their wellfare so as none other can claime privilege with them but by free consent.” Holding that a commonwealth “is a greate family,” Winthrop insisted that “as a family is not bound to entertaine all comers, no not every good man (otherwise than by way of hospitality) no more is a common wealth” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 18). In response, Henry Vane, whom Winthrop had recently defeated for the colony’s governorship, argued that the Christian nature of the Massachusetts commonwealth meant that it could not exclude everyone, particularly not “eminent Christians,” since “Christ bids us not to forget to entertain strangers” (Davis 1996, 36). Winthrop, then, claimed powers to refuse immigrants in order to insure that the colony’s divine mission would be fulfilled. Vane argued that this mission demanded an open door for, at least, Christian strangers who sought to join. Their overlapping religious themes of the colony’s identity meant that the two leaders both urged allegiance to the colony on Christian grounds, and both also privileged the claims of Christians to membership. But Winthrop blended his religious arguments with familial imagery and an account of popular political authority in ways that justified greater restrictions on new members than Vane believed

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Christianity allowed. It is likely that both men thought welcoming “all comers” would prove politically beneficial to the more tolerant Vane. With varying degrees of sincerity, many American leaders from Thomas Paine to Barack Obama have valorized their contrasting notions of American peoplehood in similar religious terms, even as they have blended them with other themes and championed very different senses of how inclusive and egalitarian Americans ought to be. In the years leading up to the Revolution, providentialist arguments for separatism were especially prominent in New England sermons, though they resonated with Protestants throughout the colonies (Guyatt 2007, 89–­90. 104). Consequently, as noted in earlier chapters, in “Common Sense” Paine did not hesitate to suggest to Protestant America that its discovery had preceded the Reformation “as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years” (Jensen 1967, 424). Paine would later go on to acknowledge that he was a deist who doubted that God ever intervened in human history. But when seeking to fire up belief in the moral legitimacy and potential success of a revolution against the world’s greatest imperial power, he felt compelled not simply to appeal to the prevalent forms of religiosity but to build them into his account of the core of American peoplehood (Guyatt 2007, 90, 105).

The Intertwining of Themes Still, as we have also seen, Paine did not rely exclusively or even primarily on religious themes. He combined them with stirring economic and political power accounts of Americans’ new commercial republican peoplehood. He also tied them to carefully crafted and explicitly gendered ancestral conceptions: the revolutionaries could claim “brotherhood with every European Christian,” a formulation that presumed, as the rest of Paine’s language did, that full political standing should be restricted to men, even as it also rejected the notion that the colonists had special, unseverable ties of kinship to Great Britain (Jensen 1967, 421). That sense of British kinship was perhaps the most potent of the Loyalists’ arguments against revolution. (Loyalists minimized providentialist claims, for few Americans wished to hear that God meant them to augment British greatness [Guyatt 2007, 111–­ 14].) Paine’s emphasis on the diversity of the colonists’ ancestry was a vital counterargument to the Loyalists’ kinship appeals, and it attracted colonists from other parts of Europe to the revolutionary cause. Paine also accused the British of having “stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us,” underlining that only those of European descent shared in the new American peoplehood he advocated (Jensen 1967, 435).

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Similarly, Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence the following summer complained that King George had “endeavored to prevent the population of these states” by “obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners,” even as the king “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages” and promoted the capture and carrying “into slavery” of “a people” whom his represen­ tatives were inciting “to rise in arms among us.” Jefferson even suggested that, though the colonies should be able to naturalize all the Europeans they wanted, “Scotch and foreign mercenaries” did not share “our common blood” (cited in Beeman 2013, 423, 425–­26). In their radical Enlightenment hearts, both Paine and Jefferson were probably most excited about the American Revolution because of its potential to champion economic and political “natural rights,” making the “cause of America,” as Paine put it, “the cause of all mankind” (Jensen 1967, 402, 424). But despite their universalistic aspirations, both these advocates of human liberties knew that the appeal of their commercial economic themes and republican political promises of rights, representation and national independence all would be undermined if they favored the claims of African American slaves to freedom, of Native Americans to land, or of women to political power. And Jefferson, at least, stood to suffer very material losses from any such developments. Paine therefore specified “the people” of the United States to whom and for whom he wrote as one in which European-­descended Christian men would govern themselves and all other persons present on American soil as they fulfilled over time the nation’s providential telos. Jefferson’s Declaration invoked the authority of “nature’s God,” which most Americans saw as the God of the New Testament, on behalf of an “us” that did not include Native Americans or African Americans. Mixed in compelling but potentially explosive combinations with conceptions of American peoplehood as devoted to securing individual natural rights and government by the consent of the governed, this conception of “We the People of the United States” as preeminently a nation of white Christian men has, despite challenges and erosion, continued to stir the hearts and minds of millions of Americans down to the present. Yet it is crucial to note that from early on, many Americans defined the telos of their peoplehood in less religious, more purely political and economic terms—­though without abandoning ancestral and gendered elements. Hector St. John Crèvecœur, the naturalized French immigrant who published the first widely read book by an American author, Letters from an American Farmer, in London in 1782, praised his adopted country as

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“the asylum of freedom, as the cradle of future nations, and the refuge of distressed Europeans”—­but not because of its service to the Protestant God (Rischin 1976, 21–­22). Crèvecœur instead rejoiced that in America “all sects are mixed as well as all nations,” so Americans were becoming “less zealous and more indifferent in matters of religion,” as he himself was (28–­29). In his telling, Americans were Europeans who had “become men” due to “new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system” that inspired them to pursue prosperity through labor and to enjoy freedom in a country that gave them “land, bread, protection, and consequence” (Rischin 1976, 24–­26, 32–­33). The predominance of economic and political power promises—­for European-­descended men—­was clear. When George Washington wrote in the 1780s to Irish and Dutch admirers that America should be “open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions,” making it “an Asylum” for “the needy of the Earth,” his stress was also on economic opportunities as well as republican political and religious freedoms, not on America as the home of Winthrop’s God (Rischin 1976, 43–­44). Again, however, neither proposed welcoming the Africans and Native Americans already resident in the land as equal members of the American “Asylum” for all needy “Nations and Religions.” Nor did either argue against what some women were beginning to depict as the oppression of their sex. The absence of religious themes did not mean the abandonment of all other restrictive constitutive concerns. Indeed, the same more secular sense of America’s special identity, which served for Crèvecœur and Washington as a ground for welcoming European immigrants into an inclusive American people, could also serve as a source of opposition to large-­scale immigration much like that of John Winthrop. In his Notes on the State of Virginia written in the 1780s, the same Thomas Jefferson who did not believe he shared “common blood” with the “Scotch” expressed great concern that European immigrants raised under “absolute monarchies” would bring with them “the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness.” They would then infuse into American law “their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent mass” (Peden 1955, 85). The coming of such Europeans should not be encouraged. Jefferson adhered to that position until the 1790s, when he came to see the French revolutionaries as partners in the global cause of human enlightenment and emancipation—­and when he found that immigrants for the most part voted for Jeffersonian Republicans (Zolberg 2006, 97).

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Boundaries and Battles in the Newly Constituted Nation Jefferson’s shift reflected the reality that after the adoption of the Constitu­ tion, the new republic’s leaders soon formed into rival camps with different visions of the new nation. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the long-­standing potency of religious conceptions of American peoplehood, at the national level these rivalries did not involve any major conflicts over the place of religion in American life. With the Anglican Church established in South Carolina and only recently disestablished in Virginia, and the Congrega­ tionalists established in New Hampshire and Connecticut (and still established for practical purposes in Massachusetts), while Rhode Island and Pennsylvania professed commitments to religious freedom, the Constitu­ tional Convention could not and did not consider establishing any “Church of the United States.” Instead it banned religious tests for public office. The Constitution’s example contributed to the gradual ending of all governmental establishment of churches at the state and local levels throughout the United States during the early nineteenth century, and the identification of the United States as dedicated to securing rights that included extensive religious freedoms (Foner 1998, 26–­27). Even so, the claim that the American people were in some sense providentially chosen never lost favor, and it continued to be combined with a range of other constitutive, economic, and power themes. For example, in defending the proposed Constitution in the second Federalist Paper, John Jay wrote: Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—­a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side through a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties. (Shapiro 2009, 12)

Jay, a New Yorker of French and Dutch but no English ancestry, sought to repel contentions that the new American states had too little in common to

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remain “one united people.” But in so doing, he provided authority for later claims that Americans needed to be “a band of brethren” who shared “the same ancestors . . . the same language . . . the same religion” and more, if they were to remain true to their principles of government and retain providential favor as well as the liberty and independence they had won. Again, this was a vision of peoplehood that could make demands for women’s rights, rights for racial, ethnic, and national minorities, and linguistic, religious, and cultural rights all appear immorally divisive. Jay himself had suggested the constitutional restriction that the president of the United States must be a “natural born Citizen” (Smith 1997, 122). He soon became a leading Federalist who strongly opposed slavery but also joined in what John Higham termed the “first great wave” of American nativism in the late 1790s (Higham 1966 [1955], 8, 19). From the very first Congress, American leaders began debating whether the United States really should see itself as the “asylum” for the world’s oppressed, as Washington had urged, or whether that policy was too risky. Conservative Federalists like Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts claimed that Americans were more “wise and virtuous” and “better qualified” for republican government than any people on earth, but they were so as a result of their “early education,” and Sedgwick doubted that “republican character” could be formed any way “but by early education.” Hence immigration and naturalization of adult foreigners should be discouraged, as Federalists like Sedgwick would go on to do via the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (Smith 1997, 160–­63). Both sides of the debates that emerged in the 1790s over naturalization and alien rights accepted that the new American republic was the freest and best political society in the world, but they disagreed sharply over whether this meant it must remain the place of refuge for all humanity, or whether it would lose its special qualities if those not born and bred to Americanism gained entry in large numbers. The early American national and state leaders who came to align as Jeffersonian Republicans or Hamiltonian Federalists disagreed over many other issues as well, including the role of the national government in promoting economic development, the forms of economic growth—­financial, manufacturing, agrarian, free or slave—­that American governments should favor, and the scope of other powers assigned to the nation and the states in the new federal system. In Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), John Jay as chief justice of the US Supreme Court and his Federalist ally James Wilson of Pennsylvania used what Wilson called the “radical” question of whether “the people of the United States form a Nation” to argue that national people­­

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hood overrode state memberships, making it imperative for citizens of one state to be able to sue another state’s government in federal courts. Fearing national consolidation, the “people of the United States” vehemently disagreed. They quickly ratified the Eleventh Amendment, repudiating Wilson’s view of the people and their powers in favor of more state-­centered Jeffersonian Republican conceptions of their political identity (Smith 1998a, 27–­29). More dramatically, in those years the Washington administration found its policies increasingly challenged by Democratic-­ Republican societies that claimed to speak for “the people” against a central government that, like all governments, needed to be kept from falling into vice (Frank 2010, 138–­42). Those societies helped build a national Jeffersonian coalition that eventually eclipsed the Federalists. But if the new nation’s emerging political factions differed sharply on many economic and political power issues, they largely agreed on some fundamental boundaries to American peoplehood. Although the institution of chattel slavery was so controversial that most sought to keep it out of national debates, the first Congress had no trouble deciding that naturalization should be limited to “free white” persons of “good character” who swore to “support the Constitution of the United States” and who had lived in the United States for at least two years, one year in the state where they sought admission (Foner 1998, 39–­40). Congress did not address, much less resolve, divisive questions of whether native-­born free persons of African, Asian, and Native American ancestry could be equal members of the American people, but the 1790 Naturalization Act provided authority for doubting their desirability. As for women, James Wilson explained in his 1792 Lectures on Law, prepared for his appointment as professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, that they were “neither less honest, nor less virtuous, nor less wise” than men. Still, God and nature had prepared them for “something better” than “publick government and public law,” the virtuous life of “domestick society” (Wilson 1967, 85–­88). Few among the nation’s all-­male officeholders disagreed.

The Imagined Peoples of Antebellum America In light of how the Revolution generated political narratives that predominantly presented white Christian men, especially native-­born ones, as the appropriate leaders and members of the American people, it is not surprising that from the Democratic-­Republican societies on, groups led by such men continued to claim most often and most vociferously to speak for “the

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people” against their opponents. As the early national period gave way to the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the white workingmen who revived the Declaration’s notion that legitimate governments should secure rights for all, not just economic elites, also claimed the mantle of the true sovereign “people” speaking out against the idle rich (Rodgers 1987, 82–­83). Those who were not white, not male, not Christian, and not native born also often insisted that they belonged to and spoke for the real “people,” wrongly denied recognition by illegitimate governments. America’s heritage made it rhetorically more difficult for them to do so, however, than it was for them to invoke universal natural rights. Still, their challenges often provoked opponents into fresh elaborations of restrictions on American peoplehood, sparking contests that were critical to US history. Despite or perhaps in confirmation of John Adams’s anxieties about stressing popular sovereignty, by the 1820s it was common for commemorative orators in all regions to praise American commitments to that principle as appropriate to the “moral constitution of mankind” and consistent with the “wisdom of Providence” (Blau 1954, 43). As former New York senator Nathan Sanford observed in 1821, though the British Parliament represented the three estates of crown, aristocracy, and commoners, “here there is but one estate—­the people” (Keyssar 2000, 43). This sense of sovereign American peoplehood, combined with needs for new settlers to develop uncultivated lands; soldiers to fight foreign foes, native tribes, and insurrectionary slaves; and voters to assist emerging partisan causes, all worked to eliminate most property and taxpaying qualifications by the 1840s (Keyssar 2000, 26–­52). But as in the revolutionary era, the coalitions for these democratizing changes were built in ways that did not threaten too many other interests and values of the already enfranchised and of those men still seeking the vote. In the early nineteenth century, many proponents of an expanded suffrage, while claiming to “have been taught by our fathers, that all power is vested in, and derived from, the people, not the freeholders,” also held that voting was a “social,” not “natural right,” and that for “obvious reasons, by almost universal consent, women and children, aliens and slaves” should be “excluded” from the franchise (Keyssar 2000, 36). Even among enfranchised white men, just who truly comprised the people and who could speak for them remained profoundly contentious. In the midst of the “Bank War” and currency conflicts of the 1830s, William Leggett, the pro-­Jackson editor of the New York Post, wrote that by “the people of the United States . . . we mean emphatically the class which labors with its own hands,” rather than the nation’s “scrip nobility” (Blau 1954, 69). Writing for the Working Man’s Advocate in 1844, Lewis Masquerier

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similarly argued that the “producers” of America were being oppressed by a “non-­producing, tyrannical, and aristocratic class,” and that “the whole people . . . can at all times alter or abolish any law, government or alliance which has become oppressive” (Foner 1976, 66). Whigs and other partisans of propertied interests passionately renounced all such claims that “the people” really consisted only of the “industrious” working classes and that these did not include most landlords, investors, bankers, or their lawyers. The harshest resulting clash came in the form of Thomas Dorr’s rebellion in the name of a disfranchised, largely wage-­worker majority against a Rhode Island state government operating under a crown charter that limited power to wealthy gentry families with extensive real estate holdings (Rodgers 1987, 102–­7; Keyssar 2000, 72–­73). Defending the legitimacy of the “People’s Constitution” that the Dorrites wrote and ratified via their own statewide referendum in 1841–­42, Democratic attorney and journalist Benjamin Franklin Hallett contended like Masquerier that according to “the American principle of POPULAR government . . . the people are the ultimate source of power and can change government without a law permitting them to do so” (Blau 1954, 119). Asking next, “Who are the people?” Hallett answered: the whole population, except “those persons not competent to form a contract,” such as “children under twenty-­one years, idiots and insane, strangers and women,” and “slaves” in some states (Blau 1954, 123). These advocates of workingmen championed republican political power themes and economic appeals for greater opportunities and more equitable distribution of wealth, but most continued to build providential religious tropes and racial, gender, disability, and age constraints, among others, into their accounts of American peoplehood. And Hallett, at least, so fully accepted the view of America as a commercial republic that he defined eligibility for full political status in terms of personal capabilities to make contracts. Similarly, in 1834 the Massachusetts Democrat and trade unionist Fred­ erick Robinson praised “the industrious classes” as “the democracy of the country,” while also admonishing his “fellow citizens” in those classes that “we are the natural guardians and protectors of the other, the weaker and the better half of our own species”—­their “mothers . . . wives . . . sisters” (Blau 1954, 322, 340). Even defined as “industrious,” for Robinson the “people” did not include women as politically or economically equal members. New Jersey’s 1776 constitution granted the vote to “inhabitants,” making it the only state in which women voted for a time, but in 1807 the legislature restricted the franchise to “free, white male” citizens (Keyssar 2000, 54). And as reformers overturned property and tax requirements in ensuing decades, states inserted the term “white” in their voter qualifications throughout the

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south and in most northern states, while the federal government did so in the territories (Keyssar 2000, 55). These racial restraints, only inconsistently applied to Native Americans when the latter chose to assimilate, reflected the desires of many whites to exploit black labor, as well as their wish for what W. E. B. Du Bois termed the “public and psychological wage” of being recognized as social and political superiors, whatever their incomes (Du Bois 1992, 700; Keyssar 2000, 55–­60). But even though few in American positions of power or in the white male electorate questioned the racial and gender privileges of American white men, many still saw that these privileges were vulnerable to ideological challenges in a republic dedicated to securing universal natural rights and government by the consent of the governed—­all the more so as economic franchise restrictions were discredited. In light of the now-­established traditions holding that the American people had a special place in human history and in the plans of Providence, it is not surprising that many nineteenth-­ century American leaders turned to religious themes to legitimate economic and political benefits being obtained through morally dubious means, even as others used those themes to challenge racial and gender hierarchies and to keep hopes alive in times of trouble. Nicholas Guyatt has detailed most fully how proponents of removal for Native Americans and colonization for free African Americans, on the one hand, and dissident champions of equal rights for those groups, on the other, all claimed to be following divine providence (Guyatt 2007, 173–­ 213). Jackson’s secretary of war Lewis Cass thought Cherokee removal was the “obvious design of providence.” New Jersey senator Theodore Frelinghuysen instead insisted God wished white Americans to share the “common bounties of a benignant Providence” with the tribes on a more equitable basis (195, 198). Henry Clay claimed in 1829 that if the US government sent free blacks to create a “confederation of Republican States” in Africa, those states would “thunder forth in behalf of the rights of man” in accordance with God’s will (191). William Lloyd Garrison instead told white Americans that the “guilt” of their racial oppressions was “unequalled by any other on the face of the earth,” and that divine punishment would surely ensue if they did not immediately “secure to the colored population of the United States, all the rights and privileges which belong to them as men, and as Americans” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 560, 563). A few leaders conceded that in fact American commitments to securing rights for all, and to realizing the historic destiny of a people imagined as comprised at heart of white Christian men, could not be reconciled. In 1827, soon-­to-­be New Jersey governor Peter Vroom defended colonization of free blacks by

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asking, “Shall we put them on a footing with ourselves, and accord them equal rights? Strict justice and the spirit of our free institutions would seem to require it—­and yet it is utterly out of the question” (Guyatt 2007, 184). Not in all minds. Some tribal leaders, along with their few clerical and official supporters, insisted that God would wreak “vengeance” on those who did not recognize the just claims of the Native American peoples to sovereignty comparable to America’s (Guyatt 2007, 200, 202). Some women insisted on their rights and on their equal membership in the American people. In her 1848 address to the Seneca Falls Convention at the dawn of the American women’s rights movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton protested “against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed,” with denials of “rights that belong to citizens” so heinous they were “a disgrace to a Christian republic” (DuBois 1981, 31–­32). And in Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July speech, he addressed his audience as “fellow-­ citizens” and asserted his equal share in the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as he contended that in practice, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine” (Davis 1996, 219–­23). By the time of Douglass’s oration, the many American defenders of racial hierarchies were elaborating scientific as well as religious doctrines purporting to find support for the nation’s peculiar institutions in both nature and God (Smith 1997, 203–­5). These arguments enabled figures like Stephen Douglas, the Illinois senator and national Democratic leader, to deny confidently that “the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man” (Johannsen 1965, 46). Douglas counted on the fact that while many Northern voters opposed the expansion of slavery and so had doubts about his version of “popular sovereignty,” few whites were prepared to accept blacks as equal citizens (Johannsen 1965, 47). His rival, Lincoln, in 1858 felt impelled to contend only that blacks were entitled “to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence,” while denying any “purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races”—­a position he did not alter until 1865, and then at the cost of his life (Johannsen 1965, 52; Smith 1997, 299). Bonded with religious themes and economic and political concerns, racial restrictions on American peoplehood were too potent to be challenged without violence, then and for over a century to come. The question of whether American peoplehood should nonetheless be open to all white “strangers” from abroad divided both the parties internally, though Democrats were more pro-immigration and Whigs more restrictionist. The issue became acute from the early 1830s through the 1850s as immigration rose, especially with Catholics from Ireland and Germany,

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along with Scandinavian and British Protestants, immigrating. In 1835 the New York inventor, painter, and dissident Democrat Samuel F. B. Morse published the seminal statement of American anti-­immigrant nativism, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration. Like Paine, Morse argued that “the onward march of the world to liberty,” first set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, had been “more completely developed in this land of liberty, and exhibited perpetually to the gaze of all the world” (Morse 1969 [1835], 5, 7). In response, Morse believed, monarchists and Catholics in Europe were conspiring to destroy America by sending hordes of often covertly antirepublican immigrants to American shores. Morse’s story of peoplehood combined religious and republican themes to reassert that America’s special historic significance justified strong opposition to immigration. The response from most Jacksonian Democrats, still beneficiaries of immigrant votes, was to affirm America’s providential status but argue from it to more open policies. Democratic pamphleteer Henry E. Riell wrote in 1840, “As a native American, I exult in the triumphant truth that the country which gave me birth is destined, both politically and physically, to be the free asylum for the oppressed and the distressed of the universal world” (Rischin 1976, 93). But many native-­born Americans no longer shared Riell’s exultation, preferring to believe, as Virginia Whig John M. Botts said in 1851, that the “Anglo Saxon race of people in the United States are the only people ever formed by the hand of God, that are capable of self-­government” (Rodgers 1987, 91). As such nativist sentiments grew in the early 1850s, especially among American Protestants, Botts’s Whigs disintegrated over both slavery and immigration. The antislavery cause then proved sufficient to unite many former Whigs with “free soil” Democrats under the umbrella of the new Republican Party. As previously noted, Abraham Lincoln, the party’s first great leader, rejected the anti-­immigrant sentiments that many Republicans still harbored, contending that if the Declaration were read to mean “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics,” he would move “to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty” (Rischin 1976, 115). In so arguing, Lincoln, too, was expressing rather than challenging the traditions holding America to have a special telos. He believed that the United States was the world’s exemplary case of republican government, history’s test case for the possibility of a nation dedicated to realizing the proposition that all persons, including all races and both men and women, are created equal in their natural rights. Stephen Douglas employed the same organic

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teleological narrative structure, promising that his policies would propel the American people to increase “in territory, in power, in strength and in glory until the Republic of America shall be the North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world” (Johannsen 1965, 33, 48). Few white American men were ready then or for many ensuing de­ cades to accept that Providence, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution really meant that nonwhites and women were full and equal members of the American people (and some continue to resist today), yet enough in the North were willing to support Lincoln’s insistence that the nation should seek to extend the rights of the Declaration of Independence to all those in the territories to precipitate civil war. On Christmas Eve of 1860, less than two months after Lincoln’s election to the presidency, the “people of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled,” contended that they had become one of the “free and independent States” of America via the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and that while they had subsequently entered into a “compact between the States” when they ratified the Constitution, they had done so because the “right of property in slaves was recognized” in it. Now, Northern states had “united in the election of a man to the high office of the President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery,” and who headed a party that believed “a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.” So “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world,” the people of South Carolina declared their union with “the other States of North America” at an end (South Carolina Convention 1860). They soon joined other slaveholding states in a new Confederate States of America that, to its white Christian slave-­owning leaders, represented the finest form of American peoplehood. Many commentators have noted that as the staggering costs in resources and human lives of the ensuing war mounted and as the outcome remained deeply uncertain, Northern leaders in general and Lincoln in particular increasingly sought to inspirit those called on to make so many sacrifices by imbuing the struggle with profound religious significance, as in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” Although Lincoln professed it to be beyond human capacities to know divine will, and hence whether God was on the side of the Union, he still did not hesitate in his sobering second inaugural to insist that, much as everyone wished for the war to end, “If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash

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shall be paid with another drawn with the sword . . . still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’ ” (Lincoln 1905–­6, 7: 330–­31). In the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, the ranks of those who were equal members of the American people were officially expanded by the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to include “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” as Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment stated. All understood those words were meant to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that Lincoln had assailed and Stephen Douglas had defended, with its insistence that slavery was constitutionally protected throughout the territories and its denial that African Americans could be US citizens. But just what else those statutes and amendments meant for the proper composition of the American people remained very much unsettled, with answers to be wrought out by political struggles.

Civic Contractions, Populist Pressures, and Imperial Expansion Two years after Lincoln’s death, Elizabeth Cady Stanton urged Kansans to carry the struggle against oppression further and render American peoplehood more fully inclusive by approving referenda enfranchising all women and African American men. Doing so would “acknowledge their citizenship,” “grant their rights parallel with their duties,” and seize an opportunity given by “Providence . . . to make the first experiment of a genuine republic,” vindicating “the principles of our Fathers” (DuBois 1981, 117). But after Kansans rejected both causes, male abolitionists concluded they should not push for too much rapid change and declared it “the Negro’s hour.” Enfranchisement of women would have to wait. An outraged Stanton attacked her erstwhile allies as part of a male “aristocracy” that “considers it important, for the best interests of the nation, that every type and shade of degraded, ignorant manhood should be enfranchised, before even the higher classes of womanhood should be admitted to the polls” (DuBois 1981, 120). Her rhetoric invoking race and class restrictions on who should be enfranchised Americans, awkwardly appended to her continuing universalistic appeals, did not succeed in building a potent new coalition for women’s suffrage. Instead, it signaled a profoundly consequential breech in the ranks of those seeking to promote more inclusive forms of American peoplehood. Many Native Americans resented just as bitterly the postwar reform-­ minded “Friends of the Indians” who thought benevolent treatment meant

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converting the tribes to Christianity, breaking up their common lands into individual farms (with whites gaining vast tracts in the process), and conferring on them tutelary second-­class forms of American citizenship (Smith 1997, 390–­93). In 1879, Chief Joseph of the northwestern Nez Perce tribe, recently defeated in its efforts to resist forced resettlement on reservations, wrote in the North American Review that whites and Indians could become “brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all,” so that “all people may be one people”—­if only Indians were recognized as having “equal rights,” to be “free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade” where they chose, to choose their own teachers, to follow their own religion, to “think and act and talk” for themselves (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 939–­40). But few whites were willing to treat indigenous peoples as capable of equal rights, however defined. The late nineteenth century did witness some remarkable efforts to build political coalitions across race, regional, gender, and farmer and industrial worker divisions in order to build state and national “People’s Parties” that would, as the 1892 Populist presidential candidate James Baird Weaver said, champion the “plain people” against the “monopolistic and plutocratic elements” in American life. To be sure, Weaver also invoked familiar constitutive themes by stressing that the Populists were continuing the struggles of the “Anglo-­Saxon race” against “the encroachments of monopoly” and building on “Christian enlightenment” to achieve “a golden age of popular power” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 794, 796). But other “People’s Party” leaders, including Kansas governor Lorenzo Dow Lewelling and, for a time, Georgia congressman Tom Watson stressed that the party’s program was “immensely beneficial to both races” and would prevail because “a just God sits on the throne in Heaven” (Tindall 1976 [1966], 124–­25, 151, 157). Various allied state “People’s Parties” had some black and female leaders, including the Texas orator and former slave John Rayner and Montana’s Populist attorney general candidate, Ella Knowles (Goodwyn 1978, 185, 328). The 1892 People’s Party platform, invoking “the blessing of Almighty God” and “in the name and on behalf of the people of this country,” urged that “equal rights and equal privileges” be “securely established for all the men and women of this country” (Tindall 1976 [1966], 90, 93). But as these efforts to build a popular coalition of unprecedented inclusiveness met opposition from well-­financed, well-­armed, and often ruthless corporate interests, many white male Protestants including Watson retreated. They began actively opposing the rights of African Americans (and Jews, and Catholics) while giving little support to women’s advocacy

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(Goodwyn 1978, 325–­29, 339). For in response to these reform movements advancing visions of American peoplehood that threatened the racial, gender, and religious privileges of the bulk of the electorate, along with the economic interests of the wealthy, political and intellectual support for restrictive conceptions resurged. Even as they built on older inegalitarian traditions, these late nineteenth-­century views of desirable American peoplehood were greatly buttressed by the rise of new Darwin-­inspired evolutionary theories that presented the poor as inferior to the rich, women as inferior to men, and nonwhites and even many southern and eastern Europeans as inferior to northern Europeans, especially Anglo-­Saxons (Smith 1997, 291–­94, 349–­57). After male abolitionists turned away from active support for women’s rights, most Republicans began to retreat from unpopular commitments to racial equality as well, first for Asian immigrants, then for African Americans, often invoking these new arguments. By the late 1890s, leading members of the party of Lincoln were trumpeting the desirability of imperial governance justified by religious and scientific doctrines of racial superiority. In 1882, Republican senator John Miller of California introduced the first Chinese Exclusion Act. He contended that “in the economy of Providence” humanity was divided into “nations, separated by the peculiarities if not the antipathies of race,” which had in the course of “struggles . . . for exis­ tence . . . evolved distinct civilizations” that were “radically antagonistic” as “the result of evolution under different conditions” (Miller 1882b, 1482–­ 83). Miller thought these antagonisms could not be overcome: “Forty centuries of Chinese life has made the Chinaman what he is. An eternity of years cannot make him such a man as the Anglo-­Saxon . . . it is cruel and wicked to risk, by an experiment, the degradation of the American laborer to the Chinese standard” (1485). Americans would suffer economically, politically, and culturally if Chinese immigration continued. Instead, Miller urged: “the surest way to popularize and extend the blessings of civil liberty, free government, and American institutions is by example. Let us keep pure the blood which circulates through our political system . . . let our civilization be progressive and make free governments in the United States a perfect success, and an example will be furnished the world which will light the fires of liberty in every civilized land.” Miller insisted, however, that America could not play its exemplary role if it experienced “the debasement of our civilization through the injection in to the body-­politic of a poisonous, indigestible mass of alien humanity, or the admixture of antagonistic races” (1487). In response, fellow Republican William Moore of Tennessee upheld Lincoln’s view of the telos of American peoplehood, contending that if

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Miller’s proposed Chinese exclusion were adopted, the “establishment of such a precedent by the United States, the recognized champion of human rights—­the nation of all others in the world whose chief pride and glory it has been to truly boast of being known and recognized everywhere as the home of the free, the asylum of the oppressed, the land where all men, of all climes, all colors, all conditions, all nationalities, are welcome to come and go at will, controlled only by . . . laws applying equally alike to the people of every class—­is one that does so much violence to my own sense of justice that I cannot, under any stress of evident passion, consent to aid in establishing it” (cited in Smith 1997, 360). But in this clash Miller prevailed. He and other western Republicans as well as Democrats realized they could gain their objectives by forming a cross-­party, pro-­white-­supremacy “political alliance of the South and West” aimed at reducing rights for both Chinese immigrants and native black Americans, as Alabama senator John F. Morgan urged in 1878 (King and Smith 2011, 54). Chinese exclusion, justified in part in terms of stories of American peoplehood with pronounced racial as well as economic and power themes, became the first in a long series of explicitly race-­based immigration restrictions that would extend in one form or another to 1965. America’s global role was to be an example to those races capable of its high level of civilization, which Miller believed the Chinese could never attain. Both he and Moore continued to claim for the American people a special status among the nations of the world as a model of human liberty, but their contrary stances on race led them to present diametrically opposed policy conclusions as ethical imperatives. Similarly, on the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, the National Woman Suffrage Association expressed “pride in our great achievements as a people,” while contending again that “all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship” in America, but American women still lacked the franchise in most states and territories, and where they did possess it, as in Utah, it was imperiled (Foner 1976, 107, 110). The NWSA insisted the “wealth, thought and labor” of women as well as men had “made this country what it is,” and it demanded that women receive “all the political and civil rights that belong to citizens of the United States” (Foner 1976, 112–­13). But despite their continuing insinuations of the propriety of race and class privileges, support for the NWSA’s cause receded in the late nineteenth century. Male leaders of both parties agreed with President Grover Cleveland that the “mothers of our land” should “live according to God’s holy ordinances,” each radiating “the warm light of true womanhood . . . within her pure and

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wholesome family circle,” unlike the enfranchised Mormon women of Utah (Beasley 2004, 128). And at the century’s end, many American leaders, especially the Republicans who had fended off the rise of Populism, began contending that the United States was destined not simply to be a model or an asylum for the liberty-­loving people of the world, but something more: a global empire. Proponents of the Spanish-­American War of 1898 elaborated both economic and political power arguments for this goal. Knowing an overseas American empire to be morally dubious in a nation born of rebellion against imperial rulers, however, they also justified their policies using intertwined racial and religious themes. The postwar speech by Indiana senator Albert Beveridge cited earlier contended, “geography and trade developments made necessary our commercial empire over the Pacific,” because the “power that rules the Pacific” would, with the growth of global commerce, be “the power that rules the world” (Beveridge 1900a, 704–­5). But Beveridge moved quickly from these economic and power themes to his racial and religious claims: “God has not been preparing the English-­speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-­contemplation and self-­ admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world. . . . And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man” (Beveridge 1900a, 711). His Senate colleague George Hoar, the last lion of Reconstruction-­era Radical Republicanism, replied, “you will have to enlarge the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence . . . you will have to build anew a Constitution . . . before you can find your right to buy and sell that people like sheep.” He insisted the United States must never “do a base thing for all this wealth, all this glory, all this empire,” and he considered striking down an “infant republic” to be base (Hoar 1900, 712). But Hoar’s view of America had waning support. Beveridge’s positions denying equal rights to nonwhites in the new colonies were adopted by the Congress and later upheld by the US Supreme Court in rulings that still stand (Smith 1997, 430–­39).

New Progressive Visions of American Peoplehood The support of northeastern and midwestern Republicans for racially justified imperial foreign policies, combined with the alliance of westerners of both parties and southern Democrats in favor of Chinese exclusion

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and African American subordination, meant that as the nineteenth century ended, there were few champions for racially inclusive conceptions of American peoplehood, with equal rights for all. Instead, during the first half of the twentieth century, leading figures in all the leading parties and in most government positions either actively supported or acquiesced in views like Beveridge’s. As Eric Foner has noted, “the language of ‘race’—­ race conflict, race feeling, race problems—­had assumed a central place in American public discourse” with “the resurgence of an Anglo-­Saxonism that united patriotism, xenophobia, and an ethnocultural definition of nationhood in a renewed rhetoric of racial exclusiveness” (Foner 1998, 131–­32). Most of the nation’s black, tribal, Latino, and Asian inhabitants were governed as second-­class members of the American people, though the United States did pull back significantly from its 1898 overseas imperialist venture, found to be more burdensome than beneficial. Notoriously, starting with Mississippi in 1890, states began using a wide range of devices, including literacy tests, poll taxes, complex registration systems, and inequitable administration of many rules to deny most African Americans the franchise (Keyssar 2000, 111–­12). These efforts reduced registered black voters to single-­digit percentages of their voting-­age men by 1910 (114–­15). Mexican Americans were similarly disfranchised in states like Texas, where they were deemed “foreigners who claim American citizenship but who are as ignorant of things American as the mule” (112, 123). In the early twentieth century, the national Democratic, Republican, and the Progressive Parties all acquiesced in these state-­level patterns of vote restriction (King and Smith 2011, 63–­64). But older challenges to these restrictive notions of American peoplehood still persisted, and as the nation experienced interlinked demographic, cultural, and intellectual changes, new, more inclusive views began to emerge. Most significant were those advanced by figures on the more left-­leaning side of the Progressive spectrum, including Walter Weyl, Florence Kelley, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the American versions of socialism espoused by Eugene Debs and others (Smith 1997, 410–­11, 419–­ 24). Lincoln’s example inspired many of these writers and activists, but most did not fully share his conception of American peoplehood and American republican institutions as dedicated to advancing individual natural rights for all, regardless of race and gender. As noted in the last chapter, influenced by late nineteenth-­century doctrines of evolution and historical materialism as well as by judicial uses of property rights to invalidate progressive social and economic legislation, most rejected self-­evident natural rights

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and prevailing conceptions of individualism. They insisted on the social character of human existence and on the need to act cooperatively for the common good of the different groups people valued (Foner 1998, 152–­53). Progressives of almost all stripes also rhetorically favored greater democracy, more power to “the people,” and more power to impartial experts, masters of new social and natural scientific knowledge—­views that obviously contained deep internal tensions with which reformers have struggled ever since (Rodgers 1987, 183–­84; Foner 1998, 154). Progressives also divided sharply over whether popular rule was best realized at local levels of government and in an economy of democratic unions and small businesses, as Louis Brandeis favored, or at the national level through administrative state agencies and large corporations, as Herbert Croly urged, or even via transnational associations, as Randolph Bourne suggested—­or somehow at all levels at once, so long as they were all democratic and scientifically informed, as John Dewey preferred (Smith 1997, 413–­24; Foner 1998, 142, 153–­55, 158–­61, 190). Most pertinently here, progressives differed as well over just whom they meant by “the people.” Even as they apotheosized democracy, most progressives continued to believe that modern science had shown the reality of racial differences, and that most nonwhites and some whites, at home and abroad, needed tutelary rule before they would be prepared for self-­governance. They were wary of the “ignorant” lower classes and, while they backed the franchise for women, most continued to favor confining doctrines of gender difference. Progressives generally supported and sometimes initiated the Jim Crow–­ era disfranchisement measures that hindered many poor whites as well as blacks. They also called for policies of both immigration restriction and mandatory assimilation to insure the “100% Americanism,” rather than the “hyphenated Americanism,” of newcomers (Smith 1997, 416–­19; Foner 1998, 185–­89). In the 1920s, these views triumphed with the adoption of a new immigration system of race-­based national quotas. Its chief author, Republican representative Albert Johnson of Washington, insisted as John Miller had that “our capacity to maintain our cherished institution stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed. . . . It is no wonder, therefore, that the myth of the melting pot has been discredited. . . . The day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races has definitely ended” (Daniels 1990, 55). But there were a range of Progressive views to the left of these positions, including some that went so far as to abandon providentialist themes and challenge the primacy of American peoplehood itself. Philosopher Horace

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Kallen, a Jewish immigrant appalled at surging American nativism, argued for a democratic version of what he called “cultural pluralism” (Kallen 1924, 43). He urged Americans to see their common peoplehood as no more special than “citizenship in any land with free institutions,” because America should be a “democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autonomously through common institutions in the enterprise of self-­realization through perfection of men according to their kind” (Kallen 1924, 59, 64, 116, 123–­24, 132). By “their kind” Kallen meant chiefly their ethnocultural groups, a “second nature” that he saw as almost as unalter­ able as “first nature.” His view challenged repressive Americanization policies and immigration quotas, but in the Progressive Era Kallen did not criticize racial segregation (Smith 1997, 423). Still, we must recognize that while Kallen was not then a full-­fledged racial egalitarian—­after World War II he supported the civil rights movement—­ many black Americans also believed that racial and ethnic identities had fundamental importance and should be recognized and accommodated, not eliminated, in a democratic America. In 1897, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that although their circumstances led many American blacks to “deprecate and minimize race distinctions,” differences did exist (Du Bois 2007, 5). He defined the races as families of human beings, “generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses,” that had developed over time “spiritual and mental differences” that enabled each to give a distinct “spiritual message” to all humanity (8, 10–­11). He thought that as the races did so over time, “the ideal of human brotherhood” would become a “practical possibility” (16). But in the interim, Du Bois rejected the view that it was “my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American” (12). He insisted that “We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion,” but to be able to combat the nation’s racial inequalities, American blacks needed their own colleges, newspapers, businesses, literature, and art (13). Although Du Bois became a tireless foe of oppressive Jim Crow institutions and practices as stigmatizing and unjust, he and many other black Americans often argued during the twentieth century that blacks must act primarily in solidarity with each other if they were truly to progress. In contrast, John Dewey stressed that people were social products of an extensive “pluralism” of “groupings”—­families, churches, towns, cultural associations, professions, and more—­and he refused to give any group, including American peoplehood, intrinsic primacy (Dewey 1920, 200–­204). Instead his central message was that all these groups should be democratized: human fulfillment came when there was “a responsible share on the

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part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs,” many of which might be, as Randolph Bourne contended, “international and . . . trans-­national” (Dewey 1920, 204, 209). For Dewey, the “moral meaning” of democracy was not to realize any special national or racial telos or divine mission. It was to use democratic processes to insure that “all political institutions and industrial arrangements” contributed to “the all-­around growth of every member of society,” without respect to “race, sex, class or economic status” (Dewey 1920, 186). These linked but contrasting minimizations of the nation in the name of ethnocultural groups, or on behalf of all democratic groups regardless of race, sex, class, or national boundaries, provided influential critiques of prevailing policies. They were, however, too radical to be the basis of broad coalition building within a populace long accustomed to more celebratory narratives of American peoplehood (Foner 1998, 190). Many Progressive activists, including the economist and journalist Walter Weyl and the settlement house worker and leader of the National Consumers League Florence Kelley, instead advanced a more politically potent vision of Americans as members of a “consumers’ democracy.” In his 1912 book The New Democracy, written in part to aid Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party campaign, Weyl attacked the “plutocracy” that had arisen during the Gilded Age, including its disregard for the interests of African Americans, immigrants, and women (Weyl 1912, 15, 78–­95, 302, 345–­47). But Weyl argued that because plutocrats used their wealth, generally gained with the aid of public policies, to charge high prices and pay low wages, the “great mass” of the population shared “a common antagonism to the plutocracy” in their capacities as “wage earner, salary earner, taxpayer and consumer” (244, 249). And he said that of these identities, “that of the consumer is the most universal, since even those who do not earn wages or pay direct taxes consume commodities” (249–­50). Consumers were also “undifferentiated,” in that all “who buy shoes” are “interested in cheap good shoes” (250). Mobilization of Americans as consumers could generate “the motive force to revolutionize society, to displace our present duality of resplendent plutocracy and crude ineffective democracy with a single, broad, intelligent, socialized, and victorious democracy” (254). Similarly, Florence Kelley joined the budding consumer movement of the 1890s because she recognized that “every person is a consumer,” making this status best for political organizing (Kelley 1899, 289). At the same time, she stressed that American consumers should use their purchase and voting power to improve the conditions of workers, boycotting products made

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under substandard labor conditions and supporting laws regulating work and wages (289, 303–­4). Although Kelley was a socialist, she increased the political viability of the National Consumers League and its affiliates by presenting the interests of “the people” understood as consumers and workers, not socialism per se, as their foremost concern. And though Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party of America obviously went further, Debs was able to lead it to numerous municipal electoral victories and a relatively impressive “fourth party” showing in the 1912 presidential race in part by minimizing the tensions between his class-­centered version of internationalism and American patriotic traditions (Foner 1998, 143, 158–­59). When indicted for opposing World War I in 1918, Debs stressed that he saw himself as in the tradition of “Washington, Adams, Paine” and other American “revolutionary fathers” who believed “a change was due in the interests of the people” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 843–­44). He insisted: “I love the people of this country.” But he added that he nonetheless supported “internationalism,” especially in support of “the common people,” because “the human race consists of one great family,” who should not be subject to corporate “slavery” and made “cannon fodder” for capitalist interests (843–­45, 847–­48). This class-­centered internationalism went too far for the courts. Despite Debs’s invocations of American revolutionary precedents, the Constitution, and “Christian civilization,” he was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. The Socialist Party was tainted with an image of anti-­Americanism that sharply curtailed its electoral prospects ever after (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 847–­48; Foner 1998, 177). In contrast, with extensive support from male Progressives, including a previously reluctant Woodrow Wilson who cited the “immense practical services” women rendered for “the common cause” during World War I, feminists finally won the female vote in 1919 (Beasley 2004, 132–­34). But they did so in part because some continued to weave themes of racial, nativist, and class interests into their advocacy, and many suggested that traditional gender roles would be extended but not eradicated by this reform. Even Jane Addams, who resisted nativist hostility to immigrants and expressed support for African Americans, urged female suffrage because “woman’s traditional function has been to make her dwelling-­place both clean and fair . . . if woman would fulfill her traditional responsibility to her own children; if she would educate and protect from danger factory children . . . if she would bring the cultural forces to bear upon our materialistic civilization; and if she would do it all with the dignity and directness fitting one who carries on her immemorial duties, then she must bring herself to

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the use of the ballot—­that latest implement for self-­government” (Davis 1996, 350). Addams’s close friend Florence Kelley later opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, seeing it as a threat to laws protecting women workers (Storrs 2000, 44–­48). It was, then, possible in Progressive America to advance conceptions of “the people” that were newly inclusive in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity, especially when stressing the shared economic and political interests of consumers and workers in the new industrial age. It was even possible to propose nonprovidentialist internationalist views. Still, the political winners remained views that championed an American people imagined as divinely favored and displaying many racial, ethnic, class, and gender differentiations and subordinations, even as they promised democratic progress and more widely shared abundance. With American politics as a whole becoming more conservative in the 1920s, the more elitist strands in progressive thought came even more to the fore. Walter Lippmann, the nation’s leading public intellectual, and others challenged the notion that it made sense to speak of “the people” as a rational political actor in anything but the most minimal sense (Lippmann 1993). In The Public and Its Problems John Dewey responded with a philosophically impressive but less politically influential defense of democracy (Dewey 1927). Then, beginning with the Great Depression and accelerating through World War II and the Cold War, key beliefs of the more left-­leaning Progressives began to receive more politically viable articulation—­especially contentions like those of Weyl and Kelley that Americans should see their nation as a “consumers democracy” that supported workers, along with the calls of Kallen, Bourne, and Du Bois for embrace of egalitarian cultural pluralism. Success still came far more readily, however, when those tenets were allied with rather than opposed to traditions valorizing the special character of American peoplehood. And many victories still proved vulnerable over time to reassertions of less inclusive conceptions of who the American people really were.

Depression, War, and Civic Inclusion As unemployment and poverty rates skyrocketed after the 1929 stock market crash, both radical and more mainstream political figures began giving renewed voice to older Jacksonian, populist, and socialist conceptions of the real American “people” as its oppressed working classes, rather than simply the primarily Protestant American middle class. They were aided by Prohibition’s discrediting of the severe Protestant moralism that many Progressive visions had featured, and by increased acceptance of the “white

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ethnics” who remained and grew politically more powerful, especially within northern Democratic ranks, after the substantial closing of the immigration doors in the 1920s. Even so, these economic conceptions of American peoplehood were most politically successful when they moderated strict class appeals, portraying America as a “consumers and producers republic,” rather than primarily a workers’ state. And as Lizabeth Cohen has shown, over time, especially with the decline of labor in post–­World War II America, these views increasingly evolved into advocacy of simply a “consumers’ republic” (Cohen 2003). It is still notable that in May 1933, the Socialist Party of America gathered four thousand delegates from numerous organizations in a “continental congress for economic reconstruction” that sought to shape the agenda of newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It denounced the “economic kings and financial barons” who had gained “absolute control over the economic life of the people” and insisted “the American people” could share in “unheard-­of wealth” if the “workers and farmers of America” gained power and built “a new economic system of justice and freedom” (Foner 1976, 156–­58). This was a class-­focused story of peoplehood featuring themes of political power to achieve radical economic ends, and crafted to echo America’s tradition of people’s revolutions. In that spirit, Woody Guthrie and other radical artists soon sang to the nation’s suffering multitudes: “This land is your land / This land is my land / This land was made for you and me.” Roosevelt himself used rhetoric that blended worker and consumer concerns. FDR campaigned on “meeting the problem of under consumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably,” as he said in his 1932 Commonwealth Club address (Hammond, Hardwick, and Lubert 2007, 407). As noted earlier, Roosevelt also sought to adapt America’s vaunted aims of securing rights in fundamental ways. He called for “an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” aimed at insuring that “purchasing power is well distributed throughout every group in the nation,” with “wages restored and unemployment ended” (407). In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt claimed a “mandate” from the “people of the United States” to provide “leadership” in the form of “direct, vigorous action” to achieve these ends. And when he met resistance, he spoke in still more combatively populist tones (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 1183). In his annual message to Congress in January 1936, FDR attacked “the political puppets of an economic autocracy” that sought to “provide shackles” to “the liberties of the people” and the “people’s government” (1186).

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These economically focused portrayals of American peoplehood remained central throughout FDR’s long years in the White House. In his 1941 State of the Union speech, Roosevelt identified the “basic things expected by our people” as including “Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it” and “the enjoyment of . . . a wider and constantly rising standard of living” (Hammond, Hardwick, and Lubert 2007, 415). In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR elaborated his desired “economic bill of rights” as including the “right to a useful and remunerative job . . . the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” along with rights to “a decent home,” “a good education,” “ade­ quate medical care,” “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment” (Roosevelt 1944). This list suggested an array of government employment and social welfare programs and concerns for workers and the poor as well as all consumers. Even with extensive support from American workers, many middle-­class consumers, recent immigrants, many northern blacks, and, more ambivalently, southern white Democrats, FDR did not achieve anything approaching his most transformative economic and political goals. But the New Deal did reestablish for a time a widespread sense that the real “people” of America were its workers and consumers, not its capitalist owners. Aided by the left-­inspired Popular Front writers, poets, painters, and musicians who celebrated America’s diversity, that people was now more widely understood to include a great plurality of white ethnic and religious groups—­ Jews, Catholics, Irish, Poles, Italians, and more, all stalwarts of the New Deal coalition, made less threatening to America’s ethnocultural identity by the national origin quota system’s cut-­off of fresh immigration and economic conditions that discouraged newcomers (Foner 1998, 210–­14). But Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition also depended all too heavily on white southern Democrats who continued to resist fiercely all more racially inclusive conceptions of American peoplehood, including economic programs that might permit southern black men and women to improve or escape ill-­paid farm and domestic jobs. Helping to filibuster an antilynching bill in 1938, the fiery Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo proclaimed that “red-­blooded Anglo-­Saxon white southern men” would not tolerate any measures that served to advance racial equality and urged instead sending blacks to Africa (Klinkner with Smith 1997, 133). Other southerners spoke less outrageously but equally insistently against structuring New Deal temporary relief, employment, and social welfare programs to include benefits for African Americans, much less adopting measures specifically aimed at improving their conditions (Lieberman 1998).

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After World War II, many New Deal programs for the middle class expanded, including the Social Security Act pension and medical programs, tax breaks for home buyers and home owners, funding for higher education and more, carrying forward the view of American peoplehood as a prosperous consumers’ democracy. But as tensions with the Soviet Union rose, economic and racial conservatives had increasing success in depicting aid to the poor and support for organized labor as leaning toward socialism or even Communism. An alliance of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats passed the Taft-­Hartley Act in 1947, reducing labor rights and triggering a decline in union membership, especially in the private sector, that has continued since (Storrs 2000, 10, 255–­56; Cohen 2003, 153–­64). As the power of labor began to wane, organizations including the National Consumers League and even some unions increasingly stressed the interests of their members primarily as consumers. In 1934, the NCL board still insisted that it should focus on using purchase power to express “the consumer’s conscience” about production practices, but within a few years, the organization began a transition that led it by 1969 to identify its primary goal as simply “achieving effective representation of the consumer interest in both private and public decision-­making” (Cohen 2009, 153, 418n35, 520n45; cf. Storrs 2000, 250–­51). The first post–­New Deal Democratic president, John F. Kennedy, championed not FDR’s broader “economic bill of rights” for all Americans, but instead a “Consumer’s Bill of Rights” calling for rights “to safety, to be informed, to choose, and to be heard” (Kennedy 1962). Kennedy’s proposal retained some of the Progressives’ sense that consumer citizens should participate actively in public life, but the emphasis now was far more on the rights of consumers than on their civic duties. This rhetoric reflected and reinforced the “rights revolution” that was succeeding in winning congressional and judicial invalidation of the systems of racial hierarchy and discrimination that had so pervasively structured American life for so long. Consumer democracy themes and practices were among the many international and domestic factors that came together to make these successes possible. Although during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and ’60s conservatives sought to portray all reformers as closet Reds, they found it hard to disparage groups for exercising their purchasing power within America’s market systems. Similarly, it was easier to presume that African Americans, women, and others lacked intellectual capacities for various types of work, education, and political rights than it was to portray nonwhites and women as nonconsumers. As a result, not only many middle-­class Americans but also many women workers and African Americans heightened their political activism

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on the basis of their identities as consumers from the New Deal era on. They demanded equal terms in employment, retail sales and services, and housing transactions, and they resorted to consumer protests and boycotts when denied them (Cohen 2003, 165–­91; Glickman 2009, 263–­68). As civil rights proponents assaulted all rationales for second-­class citizenships, the ascendancy of consumerist conceptions of American democracy helped make more equal treatment of all citizens in terms of basic welfare seem appropriate. Nonetheless, for most civil rights reformers these conceptions of America were less compelling than the long-­standing themes of Christian morality and individual rights that they deployed on behalf of their equal membership in American peoplehood. None did so more eloquently than Martin Luther King Jr. His 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” argued: “We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. . . . For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—­and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. . . . We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands” (Davis 1996, 414–­15). Progress toward equality for African Americans helped inspire a wave of other movements on behalf of those experiencing various kinds of discrimination, and often these groups also claimed their rights to equal membership in the American people. Many did so, however, in tones more reminiscent of Dewey’s democratic philosophy than King’s black church social justice rhetoric. The 1962 Port Huron statement of the Students for a Democratic Society presented its authors as “bred” to “American values” of “government of, by, and for the people” they “found good,” but they argued that the American political system in actuality “frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests” (Davis 1996, 429, 436). The SDS leaders sought “the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation” (Davis 1996, 432). The reliance on male pronouns in this SDS statement was, however, a sign of continuing restrictive gender conceptions that made many reform-­

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minded women feel they needed their own movement (Foner 1998, 298). The founding “Statement of Purpose” of the National Organization of Women, written by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray in 1966, proclaimed in similarly Deweyan but more gender inclusive language: “NOW is dedicated to the proposition that women, first and foremost, are human beings, who, like all other people in our society, must have the chance to develop their fullest human potential . . . as part of the decision-­making mainstream of American political, economic, and social life” (Sinopoli 1997, 151). And though, despite Murray’s founding role, the organization faced accusations of being focused on the interests of white middle-­class women, it stressed its concern for “Negro women, who are the victims of double discrimination of race and sex,” and urged “equality of civil and political rights and responsibilities on behalf of women, as well as for Negroes and other deprived groups” (Sinopoli 1997, 152–­53; Foner 1998, 296). Immigrant and civil rights groups also joined in these years to press successfully for abolition of the national origins quota system and its racially charged limits on which outsiders could gain entry into American peoplehood. In opposition to change, West Virginia senator Robert Byrd sounded once again the dangers of “immigration of persons with cultures, customs, and concepts of government altogether at variance with those of the basic American stocks.” He maintained: “We must not throw open the gates to areas whose peoples would be undeniably more difficult for our population to assimilate and convert into patriotic Americans. The alien inflow to America from potential waiting lists of applicants from Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, and so forth can profoundly affect the character of the American population and, in the long run, can critically influence our concepts of government” (Byrd 1965, 23794). But Byrd’s fellow southern Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson, then in the midst of his efforts to make the repudiation of the Jim Crow system a central achievement of his presidency, condemned “the harsh injustice of the national quota system” because it “violated the basic principles of American democracy—­the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man,” so that it was “un-­American in the highest sense” (Johnson 1966, 1038). Aided by both the heightened power of immigrant advocates and voters and the civil rights passions of the 1960s, reformers won passage of the 1965 Immigration Act—­a cornerstone with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act of a historic national statutory restructuring of American peoplehood, designed to create at last a racially egalitarian and inclusive nation (King and Smith 2011, 86–­88, 149, 238–­40).

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Just what it meant for American peoplehood to be inclusive and egalitarian in regard to racial identities and many others remained, however, much disputed. Although Martin Luther King contended that ending legal segregation was only a “short-­range goal” on the way the “ultimate goal” of a fully integrated American society, in the late 1960s a rising number of African Americans began expressing stridently long-­harbored doubts about integrationist ideals (King 1991, 118). In their 1967 manifesto Black Power, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton openly denounced school desegregation proponents for reinforcing “the idea that ‘white’ is automatically superior and ‘black’ is by definition inferior,” and they contended that “ ‘integration’ is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy” (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967, 54). Their insistence that equality must not mean assimilation on terms advantageous to already powerful groups resembled Horace Kallen’s defense of cultural pluralism versus “Americanization,” and it was echoed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by some more radical feminists, Chicano and Native American activists, emerging gay rights proponents and disability advocates, and many more. Over time, in more moderate and more extreme forms, “multiculturalism” and a “politics of difference” rather than “integration” became for many the preferred vision of egalitarian democratic peoplehood (e.g., Young, 1990). For these advocates, the central problems of American democracy were no longer understood chiefly as tasks of reconciling majoritarian restrictiveness with universal rights for all. They instead involved deciding what forms of differentiated treatment were truly consistent with equal democratic membership, and what kinds were instead unjust forms of subordination or marginalization. Although reformers never ceased to feature the importance of the economic needs of diverse groups for these questions of appropriately differentiated treatment, conceptions of Americans simply as “undifferentiated” consumers provided few answers. And though both Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson continued to use religious language celebrating America’s destiny to be a land of freedom and equality while admonishing Americans to complete their mission, those discourses, too, often did not speak to or for many from distinctive cultural backgrounds. Consequently, many reformers from the civil rights era onward advanced views resembling the more secular and cosmopolitan discourses of left Progressives like Dewey, Bourne, and Kallen, which did wrestle with reconciling democratic equality and cultural diversity. The challenges to American religious traditions in the 1960s went so far that Harvard theologian Harvey Cox anticipated the end of the use of the term “God” in American politics (Cox 1966, 234).

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But events proved Cox to be strikingly wrong. Political theorist and Democratic policy adviser William Galston has suggested that the reverse occurred. He believes that even though many of the 1960s challenges to inegalitarian racial, gender, economic, religious, and political institutions and practices were still cast in religious terms as well as democratic and human rights traditions, collectively they “contributed to the breakdown of consensus,” undermined social senses of shared standards, and helped set the stage for the resurgence of politically and religiously conservative views of American peoplehood and purposes (Galston 1991, 268–­69). Although LBJ’s vision of America as a “Great Society” was more racially inclusive, it still chiefly promised abundance for all in a modern consumers’ democracy. Those promises always had less inspirational appeal than religious and moral themes, and they proved a frail basis for unity when economic difficulties and social conflicts mounted in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Conservative Revivals and Their Critics As Americans were demoralized by high unemployment and inflation following the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, and by rising crime rates, growing controversies over school desegregation, affirmative action, and abortion, and the Iran hostage crisis, liberal economic, social, and foreign policies lost much popular favor. Longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly successfully mobilized rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment in order to protect practices that helped women satisfy what she called their “natural maternal need” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 1409). During the decade, Ronald Reagan, long an icon to economic and foreign policy conservatives, also became a hero to a newly mobilized “Religious Right,” and he increasingly benefited from the support of both traditional racial conservatives and the many more Americans who preferred “color-­blind” policies to race-­targeted measures. By 1980 he headed an expanded conservative coalition that became the dominant force in American politics from 1980 through 2008 (Rodgers 2011, 127–­30, 167–­69; Smith 2013b). Providentialist themes had always been present in American political discourses, but quantitative analyses of inaugural and State of the Union addresses confirm that Reagan employed such rhetoric more than twice as often as any other modern president, subsequently exceeded only by George W. Bush (Coe and Domke 2006, 316–­19). But Reagan originally became known for doing so when he invoked Winthrop’s image of America as a city on a hill in a celebrated address at the first Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974. This speech did much to attract religious conservatives

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to Reagan, and he repeatedly employed the image for the rest of his career, making it central to his story of America. Reagan began, “You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage . . . our heritage does set us apart.” He then decried the “widespread disaffection with things military” and the “assault” on “capitalism and free enterprise” he saw in modern American life, as well as the growth of the federal government’s size and cost, though he applauded American improvements in health care, racial justice, and other kinds of material and cultural progress. Reagan ended, “Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind . . . we are today, the last best hope of earth” (Reagan 1974). By thus embedding his long-­standing market economics and anti-­ Communist national security themes in a stirring providentialist narrative of America’s mission, Reagan found a fresh way to inspire millions of Americans. In his 1974 speech Reagan also indicated that though America had made advances in civil rights, it still had work to do. But he subsequently buttressed his appeal to racial conservatives by stressing that the 1960s civil rights achievements should be understood as aimed only at equal opportunity for individuals, not racial quotas, and by interpreting Martin Luther King as believing that “true justice must be colorblind” (King and Smith 2011, 123). Yet while he and his administration used this view to reject most proposals by civil rights advocates in the 1980s, Reagan generally presented his story of American peoplehood in positive, optimistic terms, especially welcoming immigrants as fresh contributors to American economic and cultural greatness. After his presidency, others in the modern conservative coalition elaborated his account in more negative and exclusionary fashion, particularly when leaders who looked instead to America’s democratic progressive traditions were in power. In 1993, for example, with Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House, Christian Coalition founder and 1988 presidential candidate Pat Robertson contended that most of the American people, including “workers . . . small businesses, store owners and managers . . . a majority of large corporation leaders . . . established religious institutions . . . conservative politicians” and “large numbers of Hispanic and Asian immigrants”—­in other words, the nation’s economic groups, religious groups, and new immigrants—­ supported “traditional values and historic, republican virtues . . . natural and eternal principles, the kind that make possible the vision of one

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nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all” (Kramnick and Lowi 2009, 1464–­65). But these Americans were now engaged in a “clash over cultural ideals” with “progressives” who “want special status based on race, physical, mental, or social disabilities, and personal and sexual preferences” and who “assaulted” traditional “religious conviction” (1465, 1468). If the self-­proclaimed progressives prevailed, Robertson believed, America would “soon find itself on a high-­speed ride to chaos and anarchy”; though he assured his supporters that instead, “Christian civilization” would triumph (1464, 1470–­71). Conceding that these differences were real, Robertson’s critics contended that despite his appeal to new immigrants, his rhetoric reasserted conceptions of America as a morally traditionalist Christian nation to a degree that left little place for many others. Other conservatives revived assertions of the need for racial restrictions on American peoplehood. In 1994, conservative think tank scholar Charles Murray and Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein caused an uproar by arguing that social psychological evidence showed the intellec­ tual inferiority of African Americans and Latino immigrants to whites and Asians (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, 1–­6, 642–­43). In 1995, journalist Peter Brimelow responded to the increases in Latino and Asian immigration after the end of the national origins quota system by noting, “the American nation has always had a specific ethnic core. And that core has been white.” He contended that modern policies were “bringing about an ethnic and racial transformation in America without precedent in the history of the world—­an astonishing social experiment launched with no particular reason to expect success” (Brimelow 1995, 9–­10). In the mid-­1990s, these views formed part of a political climate that did not produce actual reductions in immigration, but it did result in laws that limited immigrants’ eligibility for social assistance and legal protections against detention and deportation (King and Smith 2011, 245–­47). Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, employed providentialist language even more than Reagan to justify two wars launched after the Septem­ ber 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, especially the controversial Iraq war (Smith 2009c, 211–­13). But he resisted restrictive immigration and citizenship proposals that suggested racial and religious exclusionary goals, though his administration adopted severe measures to combat radical Islamic militants (King and Smith 2011, 247–­48). To the right of Bush’s self-­ professed “compassionate conservatism,” others inside and outside of the Republican Party sought more aggressively to reassert older and narrower notions of American peoplehood.

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After the stunning rise to the presidency in 2008 of Barack Obama, the son of a visiting African scholar, numerous Tea Party groups formed in different parts of the country, all claiming the mantle of the colonial rebels’ “people’s revolution” against tyranny. Many Tea Party spokespersons and documents stressed economic issues of excessive spending, deficits, and high taxes, and political power themes holding that the federal government was usurping power from the people. Racial and religious concerns were, however, far from absent. Through extensive analysis of survey and interview data, Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto have concluded that many Tea Party supporters saw what they believed to be “the ‘real’ America: a heterosexual, Christian, middle-­class, (mostly) male, white country,” the “country they love, slipping away” (Parker and Barreto 2013, 3). Insofar as Tea Party supporters and other Americans did adhere to the venerable but long-­contested conception of the “real” American people as overwhelmingly white, male, Christian, heterosexual, and middle class, they were right to see it giving way to newer, broader notions of American peoplehood. To be sure, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama never hesitated to use religious appeals, but both spoke the language of black church, social gospel concerns to right the injustices of this world, rather than the traditional morality and the goal of eternal salvation stressed by Protestant fundamentalists and other more conservative believers (Coe and Domke 2006, 316; Smith 2012, 7–­13). More secular modern liberals have generally stressed “consumer democracy” style economic and political power themes along with the modern rights doctrines discussed in the last chapter that traditionalists understandably see as threatening. Both Clinton and Obama also endorsed the kinds of notions of America’s special status and mission long featured in organicist teleological American narratives, but they have generally interpreted them to mandate civic inclusiveness. Seeking to maintain broad political support, Clinton did sign several major laws reducing immigrant rights, while Obama increased deportations of unauthorized immigrants, drawing sharp criticism from immigrant advocacy groups. Still, they stressed they were bowing to necessity, not fulfilling their aspirations for America. In a 1998 speech that exemplified his preferred themes, for example, Clinton discussed how to “strengthen the bonds of our national community” as immigration made the nation “more racially and ethnically diverse.” He argued that America’s “ability to lead” the world “rests in no small measure on our ability to be a better place here in the United States that can be a model for the world.” He maintained, not unlike Reagan,

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that “More than any other nation on Earth, America has constantly drawn strength and spirit from wave after wave of immigrants” (Clinton 1998). For Clinton as for Crèvecœur, George Washington, Henry Riell, William Moore, George Hoar, and many others, the American people had a special character and destiny, but they required great receptivity to newcomers. Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama also repeatedly stressed that immigration has allowed Americans “to form a multicultural nation the likes of which exists nowhere else on earth” (Obama 2006, 232). Yet he has also insisted that multiculturalism need not prevent groups from participating in a widely beneficial common American identity that he appears to regard as still more fundamental. Obama’s celebration of America’s diversity while also insisting on its singular greatness, shared by all its citizens, has been his central rhetorical theme since his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. As noted previously, there Obama expressed gratitude “for the diversity of my heritage” even as he stressed that his story is “part of the larger American story” in ways that make him profoundly patriotic, since “in no other country on earth” could his story be “even possible.” Obama then deliberately echoed Lincoln by tracing that possibility to America’s commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but he did not confine his sense of the purposes of American peoplehood to securing individual rights. Instead he argued, in terms reminiscent of the early twentieth-­century Progressives’ emphasis on sociality and the common good, that “alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we’re all connected as one people. . . . I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. . . . It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum: ‘Out of many, one.’ ” Then Obama inspired a deafening roar by proclaiming: “there is no liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America: There’s the United States of America” (Obama 2004). Obama thereby used familial and biblical language to link his vision of American peoplehood simultaneously to the Declaration’s goals as understood by Lincoln, but also to the nation’s religious traditions, and to more modern democratic conceptions of multicultural inclusiveness and collective responsibility for the social welfare of all. In an impressive rhetorical feat, he both commended Americans’ diversity and minimized the significance of their differences—­though he did so in part by deflecting

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attention away from those differences, rather than engaging directly the tensions they fostered. In his 2006 book of political positions, The Audacity of Hope, Obama similarly suggested that Americans could build unity without effacing their diversity via a Dewey-­like politics of “deliberative democracy” that would enable Americans to find how best to “marry” the “ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community” (Obama 2006, 92, 94–­95). By presenting older American political and religious themes and modern democratic progressive egalitarian commitments as cohesive elements of his conception of American peoplehood, Obama built coalitions broad enough to win two presidential elections. Yet Obama did not define clearly what Americans shared, beyond concerns for peace, prosperity, and distinctive forms of flourishing. He provided no guides as to just what forms of civic differentiation, what special rights or accommodations for different groups, were consistent with democratic equality. His promise was that deliberative democratic processes would enable Americans to identify compromise solutions to all their shared problems. Although they aroused many hopes, his victories hardly ended conflicts over American identity and values. Instead, his presidency was often frustrated by partisan polarization, especially after major Democratic defeats in 2010. Obama was anathema to most Republicans, while advocates of more robust forms of multiculturalism as well as more sweeping egalitarian economic transformations found his support for “mainstream” forms of American identity, policies, and practices radically inadequate. Most, however, still reluctantly supported him. In contrast, proponents of views of American peoplehood as centered on white male believers in traditional forms of religiosity rightly perceived Obama as advancing an America very different from the one they favored. They remained fiercely determined to resist those transformations.

Conclusion That fact only affirms, however, that contestation over the meaning and membership of American peoplehood remains central to the politics of the twenty-­first century, as throughout US history. Many of the Tea Party voters who elected figures like Senators Rand Paul and Jim DeMint, like many of the African Americans and Latino Americans who voted in overwhelming percentages for Barack Obama, passionately felt that they were the “real” American people, or at least who and what Americans should really be. The examples discussed here, moreover, do not begin to exhaust the range of

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groups that have advanced and are advancing their own stories of American peoplehood to express their values and legitimate their causes. Economic and political power aims are prominent in these endeavors, but they have always been intertwined with constitutive themes, often concerned with religion, ancestry, and gender. In particular, beliefs that American peoplehood rests on governance primarily by accomplished, heterosexual, religious white men, especially Christians, have constituted traditions that many have sought to protect and ones that many others have sought to overthrow. And today as in the past, some partisans of sharply opposed views of “We the People of the United States” feel entitled to act “out of doors” should American governments come to be dominated by the most extreme of their rivals. But though contestation over who “the people” really are, heightened by claims for their sovereign authority even when acting outside legal channels, remains intense as it has been throughout US history, the substance of those contests has changed. From the founding through the Progressive Era, battles centered on whether American peoplehood was actually devoted to securing natural rights and, even more, over who could claim such rights, so often deemed equal and universal, yet so often deemed the province of only a few. Then many Progressives replaced securing natural rights with the goal of realizing the promise of democracy. But many Americans found this change dangerously relativistic, and in any case, what that democratic promise was and who could share in it remained disputed. From the New Deal through the Great Society, more racially inclusive conceptions of America as a “consumers’ democracy” with equal rights for all citizens gained ground. But they proved vulnerable to economic setbacks, and they provided few answers to questions that came to the fore in the wake of the civil rights triumphs of the 1950s and ’60s. People might be “undifferentiated” as consumers, but they were and often wished to be highly differentiated in regard to religion, race and ethnicity, cultural traditions, gender and sexuality, physical and mental abilities, economic resources, skills, aspirations, and more. What forms of differentiation were really consistent with being equal members of a democratic people? What forms were invidious new forms of inequality? What kinds of recognition, aid, and accommodations for different identities and statuses, and what kinds of equal and uniform rights and duties, were necessary for Americans to be “one united people” engaged in forming “a more perfect Union”? By the twenty-­first century, the challenges of reconciling democratic equality and diversity, even more than tasks of reconciling majoritarian democracy and minority rights, had become fundamental to debates over

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American peoplehood. And as we will see in part III, many more were now questioning, as Progressives like Dewey and Bourne had done, the centrality of nation-­states like the United States for modern efforts to realize diverse forms of democracy for all—­even if alternative, more desirable forms of peoplehood remained, as they have always been, hard to envision, and harder still to create.

Pa r t t h r e e

Moderating Peoplehood

Seven

From Providentialism and Exceptionalism to a Politics of Moderate Peoplehood

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of normative things. The chapters in this part argue that in the twenty-­first century, political participants ev­ erywhere, perhaps most of all in the United States, are well advised to create and sustain flexible forms of “moderate peoplehood” that renounce claims to unlimited sovereignty and strive to recognize and accommodate as many of the multiple memberships persons have as proves politically feasible. 1 This case will be argued in ways applicable to most if not all peoples, but it is best to begin with America. Because the United States is the world’s only real military superpower as well as its largest national economy (though its economic advantages have declined), it has unique global leadership responsibilities that reinforce certain features of its political culture, making acceptance of a less assertive sense of its national identity more difficult. But for that reason, America’s role in fostering moderate forms of political peoplehood is particularly important. From this standpoint, the conceptions of “We the People of the United States” surveyed in the preceding chapter raise two major concerns. First, American political leaders have almost always claimed that the United States is commendably exceptional among all nations, past and present—­ whether because of divine favor, or its “Creed,” its institutions, its culture, its physical resources and geographic location, or other reasons. Although elected leaders have sometimes “viewed with alarm” the course of their nation, they include no major dissenters to the idea that America at its finest is truly exceptional, the best that a political people can be. That proud claim, present at the founding, only became more pronounced as the United States gained its premiere economic and military status. Second, American leaders have often advanced providentialist teleological narratives of their nation’s

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identity and purpose, contending that Americans are in some way or another on a mission from God. The prevalence and contents of these narratives have varied over time, but the pattern has persisted, and it has not always favored moderation. Are these themes of exceptionalism and providentialism in American stories of peoplehood morally problematic? The dynamics of peoplehood elaborated so far suggest that they are. I will argue that it is wiser today to embrace more moderate, malleable, and multiple conceptions of peoplehood than those that have long prevailed in the United States and many other societies. Governing authorities of all peoples should accept that though they can legitimately assert some authority over some dimensions of their members’ lives, most members feel attachments and obligations to other groups that merit respect and sometimes deference. Officials should recognize that it is also legitimate for members to change affiliations over time. But before elaborating that view we should ask whether there is any point in doing so. In light of what we have seen about how the politics of peoplehood works, providentialist and exceptionalist themes are understandably tempting, perhaps especially in America. Political leaders in the United States, and also to greater or lesser degrees in every long-­enduring community, have felt at times that they could best hold the allegiance of their constituents against rivals by proclaiming that the peoplehood they uphold is enormously, even supremely valuable. Given the power of religious faith in most lives, many have done so by dressing their visions in providential raiment. It may seem all too academic to dwell on normative worries about these predictable features of the politics of peoplehood. Moreover, the tendencies of leaders to attribute to their peoples priceless worth are not only powerful. They are also in some ways desirable. They express beliefs and values that are deeply meaningful to many, and they help build and sustain institutions and attachments that contribute to many forms of human flourishing. Yet such doctrines are also dangerous, prone to generate chauvinism, imperialist excesses, unjust exclusions, internal repression, or simply stultifying parochialism. Combating those dangers must be a central task of the politics of peoplehood. And daunting as the task is, modern developments do make it empirically imaginable and normatively right for Americans and others to seek in the twenty-­first century to build thriving communities only on the premises that no political society should claim comprehensive superiority to all others, nor should any assert exclusive sovereign authority over all it deems to be its people.

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Exceptionalism Reconsidered: From the City on a Hill to a Great Metropolis on a Plain? Given the place of the United States in the world of the twenty-­first century, few obstacles to the embrace of moderate conceptions of peoplehood are greater than those posed by the venerable American tradition of claiming that the United States is both different from and better than all other nations. One of the most striking features of the competing visions of American peoplehood reviewed in the previous chapter was their unanimity on how exceptional the United States is, or can be and should be. Proponents and opponents of immigration, franchise expansion, isolationism, and imperialism all justified their contrasting policies as means of realizing the special character of America and Americans. American exceptionalist rhetoric heightened still further after the Sep­ tember 11, 2001, attacks. Pundits quickly rushed into print numerous books all proclaiming the United States “the last, best hope of earth,” as Lincoln had done (e.g., Berns 2001, ix–­x; Bennett 2002, 14; D’Souza 2002, 193). Con­ sti­­tutional scholar Walter Berns insisted: “Our lot is to be the one essential country . . . and this ought to be acknowledged, beginning [with] our schools and universities, for it is only then that we can come to accept the responsibilities attending it” (2001, ix–­x). Conservative polemicist Dinesh D’Souza called America “the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence” (2002, 94). Former secretary of education William Bennett asserted that the United States has brought “more freedom to more people than any nation in the history of mankind . . . a greater degree of equality to more people than any nation in the history of mankind . . . more justice to more people than any nation in the history of mankind . . . our open, tolerant, prosperous peaceable society is the marvel and envy of the ages” (2002, 150–­51). Hyperbolic as these quotations may sound, their authors surely saw them as strictly factual, and they have since received more balanced and thoughtful expression. In 2014, after Bush’s Iraq war had been widely discredited and the Obama administration had sought for years to pursue less militant, more multilateral foreign policies, historian Robert Kagan published in the New Republic an analysis that won bipartisan praise titled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” (Kagan 2014). Echoing Berns, he insisted that however weary Americans had become of leading the effort to build “a liberal world order,” they remained the only hope for its achievement. Despite their economic growth since the end of  World War II, America’s allies still “lacked the

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power and the security to see and act beyond their own narrow interests.” Kagan conceded that American notions of a “liberal world order” were legitimately controversial and could be enforced only by power, not global consent. But he concluded that if the United States refused to be the hege­ monic “judge, jury, police, and, in the case of military action, executioner” on behalf of a liberal world order, all world order would break down, immediately violating American values and eventually endangering American interests. Embrace of American exceptionalism therefore remained essential in the twenty-­first century. The favorable responses to Kagan showed that today as in the past, and today perhaps still more understandably, exceptionalist rhetoric is not con­ fined to conservatives or to champions of expanded American military interventions abroad. Throughout his career, Barack Obama himself, though he opposed and eventually ended the Iraq war, and though he faced criticism for not being sufficiently full-­throated in support of American exceptionalism, has nonetheless regularly stressed his belief that his story is possible in “no other country.” He began his second inaugural by asserting: “What makes us exceptional—­what makes us American—­is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago,” and he cited the Declaration of Independence’s passage affirming human equality in terms of “unalienable rights.” He then called “the most evident of truths—­that all of us are created equal” the “star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall” (Obama 2013a). Some might well question whether America is “exceptional” in the depth of its commitment to realizing those rights, especially today. Still, Obama’s example underlines not only the near unanimity of the nation’s leaders in favor of American exceptionalism but also how this rhetoric has been deployed on behalf of virtually every political cause, conservative, liberal, and radical, in American history. So it may seem not just pointless but irresponsible to critique such American exceptionalist rhetoric, and to suggest that US policies should move away from assertions of unilateral national sovereignty and toward intertwined, flexible forms of moderate peoplehood. Many arguments for recognizing the sovereignty of distinct peoples suggest the value of a world organized into a variety of particular political communities—­rather than any kind of more equal but more uniform global political structuring, such as a cosmopolitan federation of similarly resourced republics, or even a single world state. The whole history of humanity may be said to provide evidence that the world is better off being divided into separate, very different, and therefore unequal peoples, since only certain particular peoples have

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ever succeeded in achieving institutions and forms of social organization able to provide a significant measure of peace and prosperity to at least some of humanity. Those are not achievements to be discarded lightly. Robert Dahl, along with many others, also stressed long ago the inescapable point that in any case, meaningful participation in self-­governance becomes more difficult as the scale of democracies grows more extensive (Dahl and Tufte 1973, 1–­12). Having a world of many smaller democracies therefore seems desirable from a democratic point of view. David Miller and other scholars, including many concerned with trust and social capital, have further suggested that the collective political will to assist persons in need comes more easily if they are seen as fellow members of a particular political community (Miller 1995). Jeremy Rabkin has contended that global peace, security, and prosperity are more likely to be achieved by citizens and governments concerned to uphold their nations’ honor than by those whose cosmopolitanism lulls them into tolerating vicious conduct (Rabkin 2013). Ayelet Shachar, a critic of current global arrangements, concedes that memberships in distinct, bounded civic communities can foster “a sense of belonging; freedom from want; inclusion in the franchise; access to whatever public goods, privileges, and benefits attach to the status of membership,” and also feelings of participation in “a shared culture, language, history or collective identity” that helps to comprise “their joint ethical enterprise as members of a particular state” (Shachar 2009, 58, 149). So the question be­ comes yet more acute: what is wrong with strong claims to sovereignty, re­ inforced by celebratory exceptionalist rhetorics? There is certainly nothing wrong with any political community seeking to be the best that it can be, and that enterprise can undoubtedly be motivated by convictions that its best is of supreme worth. The fundamental problem is that because claims of American exceptionalism, and similar claims in other political regimes, respond so well to the desires of political leaders and members to valorize their particular communities, they often work against those communities becoming the best that they can be—­ especially under modern conditions. Strong exceptionalist claims tend to reinforce assertions of absolute national sovereignty—­why should the best nation defer in any regard to lesser ones? Such claims can in turn spawn practices of indifference, negligence, and intolerance toward other communities, even a sense of entitlement to dictate to ones seen as not worthy of respect. These have always been dangers arising from excessive political particularism of the sort that exceptionalist claims breed. But today these dangers loom larger than ever. As a result of technological advances in resource exploitation, energy production, and

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nutrition and health care that have been accompanied by globe-­spanning pollution, dangerous climate shifts, and overcrowding, poverty and attendant conflicts in many locales, both isolationism and imperialism threaten more far-­reaching destruction of human lives, natural resources, and vital institutions than ever before. Kagan and others may be right that America’s allies are reluctant to assume the military responsibilities of global leadership in its place—­but finding a new hegemon is not what the alternative of pursuing a politics of moderate peoplehood seeks. It rather means that the United States and other nations should almost always engage in foreign military interventions only when they can build genuinely broad multilateral support for doing so, as George H. W Bush did for the Persian Gulf War far more than the United States has done subsequently. And in economic affairs, the very success of America’s postwar efforts to help rebuild Europe and Japan, along with the recent growth of China and India, mean that the United States simply no longer has the same degree of global economic clout it once commanded. It has therefore become impossible to imagine that the world’s major economic, environmental, and security issues can be dealt with adequately by the unilateral actions of the United States or any existing state. If it was ever otherwise, modern global problems mean it is now irresponsible for any political people to believe that it need not develop cooperative, respectful, reciprocal relations with many others—­relations that include acceptance of limits to its superiority and its sovereignty. More is needed than can be said here to make the case for these points fully. But if they are accepted, they make it imperative today to try to foster forms of political community that still assert significant claims on the loyalties of their members and significant authority over various phases of their lives, without asserting absolute sovereignty over all aspects, or primacy over all the interlinked but alternative communities to which they must accept that their members may also belong (Smith 2003, 164–­74). Contrary to sovereignty theorists, human experience shows that people can and often have lived simultaneously in many overlapping communities, all exercising some but not total authority over their lives. It is admittedly a difficult and unending challenge to negotiate the often-­shifting relationships among multiple moderate memberships peacefully and productively, but it is one we should accept as central to the tasks of modern politics. Such moderate senses of people’s different memberships in fact have a lengthy lineage. For example, in 1799 the “Constitution and Rules” of one of America’s earliest ethnic associations, the Welsh Society of Pennsylvania, proclaimed the belief that: “To be good citizens of the World and the Nation

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we live in, yet to have especial fellowship with the descendants of our ancestors, is perfectly consistent with true patriotism and universal philanthropy” (Davies 1995, 239). A world where people can have senses of belonging to their ethnic groups, which may be local or which may cross state borders, even as they feel loyalties to their national communities and to all humanity, is a world that can be seen from many points of view as having more potential to promote justice, democracy, and human flourishing than the world of peoples asserting strong sovereignty as we now have. But this view faces two kinds of potent objections. First, on further consideration, the plausible counterarguments I have already noted, along with others, might compel the normative conclusion that there actually is no strong case for softening the bounds of current forms of political peoplehood significantly. Second, even if it is normatively desirable to do so, it may appear so politically difficult to bring about such changes that human improvement is best sought through different routes. I next elaborate further reasons to reject these objections, but I do not profess to refute them decisively. Instead, in conscious imitation of the tasks of all political coalition builders, I simply suggest that there are a number of views that converge in support of the positions I regard as most defensible on balance. Given our fallibility and our diversity, that is generally the best guidance human beings can achieve when making moral judgments. Three Arguments against a Westphalian World of Sovereign States With some historic distortions, the view that the world is most legitimately structured as a set of sovereign states, bound to one another only by very minimal humanitarian obligations as well as whatever special ones that they agree to impose on themselves, is often traced back to the 1648 Treaty of  Westphalia (Krasner 2001). Although the world has never been organized in full accord with Westphalian premises as they are commonly understood and though rapid changes are visible today, this understanding continues to have a powerful grip on political imaginations, institutions, and practices. But two arguments prevalent in recent scholarship, as well as one derivable from the portrait of the politics of peoplehood drawn here, provide particularly compelling normative reasons for pushing further toward a different, “postsovereignty” political order. The first and perhaps greatest normative challenge to the status quo of sovereign states is the stark reality of global inequality. The partitioning of the globe among particular sovereign peoples today means its division is into communities that are vastly unequal in the resources, wealth, and the

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opportunities they provide their members. Shachar has summarized the pertinent evidence with eye-­opening clarity. She cites World Bank statistics showing that over 2.7 billion people, roughly 45 percent of the world’s population, live on between $1 and $2 a day, with these people concentrated in Southeast Asia, sub-­Saharan Africa, and to a lesser degree Latin America. Whereas in the early 2000s, the average annual per capita income in the United States was over $30,000, in these regions it was less than $1,300 (much less in sub-­Saharan Africa in particular). Disparities in education, health care, and life expectancy are similarly vast (Shachar 2009, 24–­26). These realities mean that globally, people face brutal inequalities in their opportunities to lead long, materially comfortable lives that provide persons with a range of choices to pursue happiness. Those inequalities depend extensively on whether they were born into a wealthier or poorer society. Unless one believes that the inequalities represent binding mandates of divine will, it is difficult from any normative perspective that endorses even minimal concern for all human beings to argue that they are desirable. They can be defended only if no alternative that appears conceivable or attainable would be more egalitarian and at least as free and productive. Second, though aspirations to make participation in self-­governance meaningful speak against governance via means of a world state or vast continent-­spawning federations, they also make clear the democratic de­ ficiency of the current structure of political boundaries. Robert Dahl long observed that there is a strong case for including in democratic decision making all minimally competent persons whose interests are affected by the decisions in question, though his concern about expanding the scale of democracies led him to stress this view only in regard to those who were already members of a particular political people (e.g., Dahl 1970, 51; 1989, 146–­47; 1998, 86). Among others, Ian Shapiro and especially Robert Goodin have gone further, contending that a “principle of affected interests” argues for restructuring decision-­making processes in ways that do not necessarily map onto existing boundaries (Shapiro 1999, 38–­39; Goodin 2007; 2012). In some cases only a subset of a community’s citizens might be able to claim to be significantly affected, but many important decisions by many powerful states affect so many that they may well make a case for some forms of “global democracy,” in Goodin’s phrase (2012). These writers suggest the construction of numerous multilayered and overlapping processes of democratic decision making in which the participants vary according to their relationships to the matters being decided. Envisioning, much less establishing, such complex democratic structuring on a global scale is admittedly highly

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daunting, though many such processes already exist. But it cannot be denied that in an increasingly interconnected world in which the political decisions of particular communities and groups often have worldwide consequences, concerns for government by the consent of the governed call into question doctrines favoring the absolute sovereignty of particular states. The further challenge to those doctrines that I seek to add to these concerns to achieve greater material equality and democracy stem from values of human self-­development and self-­realization that have come to be associated with modern liberalism. Most of those who today embrace the label “liberal,” along with many advocates for human rights and human dignity who resist that term, endorse some variant of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, the contention that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (Mill 1975, 10–­11; italics added). Variants are required, because al­ though in On Liberty Mill incorporated some of the sense of the validity of diverse forms of self-­realization advocated by the German liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt, the adjective “civilised” in the preceding quote reflected the fact that he also adhered to notions of “civilized” versus “barbarian” societies that displayed Enlightenment rationalism’s capacity to justify imperialism at its worst. Consequently, modern Millians tend to adapt the harm principle along lines reminiscent of nineteenth-­century romantics like Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggesting that each person is entitled to the maximum amount of self-­defined self-­realization possible, consistent with the self-­defined self-­realization of others. This principle is seen as consistent with granting to all “equality of concern and respect” for their views of the human good, accorded in recognition of the capacities for moral agency that express their human dignity (e.g., Dworkin 1978, 182). Even if the discredited distinction between “civilized” and “barbaric” forms of self-­realization is abandoned, however, today Mill’s maxim still must be further modified. It is addressed to how modern national governments should structure the lives of their individual members. For reasons that will be clear, we must also consider how those governments should structure their relationships with a variety of groups inside and outside their borders, as well as with how individuals may appropriately understand their own relationships to those groups. Political analysts and advocates who value personal self-­realization must take explicit account of the realities that persons are shaped by group memberships and that, as Will Kymlicka has stressed, individuals make choices about how they can best define and realize their identities, aspirations, and obligations on the basis of their groups’ “cultural narratives,” from which people gain their initial senses of who they

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are and what they might become (Kymlicka 1995, 83). As a result, many persons find it difficult to conceive how they can truly honor their valued affiliations and pursue their other goals if they are denied membership in the groups that have conveyed their constitutive cultural narratives, or if those groups are unable to pursue their preferred ways of life due to lack of power, authority, or resources. Kymlicka has argued from these premises that cultural minorities often should have their group identities recognized and accommodated, especially when they reside involuntarily in states with majorities with very different cultural traditions and practices (1995). But it is appropriate to go further still, in recognition of the reality that most persons today, perhaps more than ever before, grow up exposed to many different cultural narratives conveyed by different groups with which they are affiliated, as well as by more mass media. That is why most if not all persons form identities that are multiple and complex, capable of being developed in many different directions. For such persons, no single direction and no single group can plausibly claim to be their one, true authentic venue for personal self-­realization. Many (probably most) people instead feel they can be most fulfilled if they can, like the Pennsylvania Welsh, simultaneously profess and pursue allegiances to their ethnic groups, their national states, and indeed all of humanity, among other memberships they find valuable, including their trades, churches, and families. These circumstances are of course the very ones that give rise to an intensely competitive politics of peoplehood. But I believe that for political authorities and indeed for individuals, they support a modified Millian maxim of political morality. Governments of various sorts of human associations should seek to structure their rules, institutions, and practices so that members can retain full, enfranchised status within them while simulta­ neously pursuing other affiliations and obligations. Limits on flexible, multiple memberships should be imposed only insofar as political and administrative obstacles make them necessary for an association to sustain itself and achieve its morally defensible collective goals to an appropriate degree. And because all have at least potential agency in the politics of peoplehood, this modified Millian morality also applies to personal choices. Individuals who find that they have many possible pursuits and memberships that can seem fulfilling to them should also seek to choose those that can coexist most easily with the maintenance of multiple opportunities for others. For political peoples and individuals, this modification means focusing less on whether their decisions about their memberships and pursuits harm other communities and individuals, more on whether those decisions beneficially accommodate and help others’ aspirations, as well as their own.

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To paraphrase Mill, “the best uses of their powers by communities and individuals are those that aid others without doing harm to themselves.”2 Why should persons or peoples adopt this modified Millian maxim? Why should they choose, among a range of possible self-­fulfilling paths, those that seem most likely to benefit as many other groups and persons as possible? The short answer is, “why not, whenever they can see that these choices are about as likely to prove fulfilling for them as any other?” More broadly, on whatever philosophic, religious, or moral basis people may value human freedom and self-­realization, if they recognize the multiply constituted, interconnected character of almost all modern human identities, they have strong reasons to endorse forms of political peoplehood, and to make personal choices, that permit all persons to help continue the stories of all the groups with which they identify to the greatest degree feasible. Those reasons, along with concerns for global economic equity and for government by the consent of all who are governed, counsel against seeking to maintain a world of distinct absolute sovereignties, and in favor of transitioning further toward a world of interconnected and only “semi-­ sovereign” peoples. Yet however attractive these arguments may be, it remains true that they are both very general, insufficient by themselves to indicate what specific new forms of peoplehood and accompanying institutions and policies should be adopted, and potentially quite radical, pointing to sweeping transformations in existing economic, political, and social arrangements. The worries that such changes may sacrifice accessible venues for democratic participation, sources of social trust, the contributions of patriotic honor, the American leadership needed for a liberal world order, and much more all remain. In the remainder of this book, I draw from the general case for recognizing multiple, moderate, intertwined forms of peoplehood just reviewed some specific arguments concerning the political obligations of regimes committed to democracy and rights. These obligations counsel in favor of policies that would be important but limited, not revolutionary, steps in the direction to which all these arguments point. In light of how valu­able and valued existing forms of at least putatively sovereign peoplehood are for so many, it seems both prudent and defensible to seek to modify them through gradual processes. Even such processes face major political obstacles. Before turning to those policy arguments, it makes sense to pause and consider the second objection, that however normatively desirable moving beyond a Westphalian world of sovereign states to a system of interconnected, flexible, moderate peoples may be, such changes can never command enough support to be

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feasible. Whatever their philosophic credibility, the normative arguments I have reviewed—­concerns for greater global material equity, democratic self-­governance, and expanded opportunities for individual and group self-­ realization—­may have consequences too threatening to too many to make them worth pursuing. Could Americans, for example, ever be content with seeing themselves not as the world’s shining city on a hill, but simply as one great metropolis among many others on a global human plain—­a metropolis that is complex, diverse, exciting, creative, with deep problems along with genuine glories and grand potential—­but no special manifest destiny? Or will that sort of national narrative always lose politically to more traditional organic teleological ones? Can, in short, ideas of moderate peoplehood ever serve to build political coalitions that can gain sufficient power to bring a stage of such fundamental transformations in the twenty-­first-­century spiral of politics? Building Coalitions for Moderate Forms of Peoplehood These political worries cannot be lightly dismissed, since both the overarching account of the politics of peoplehood advanced here and the specifics of US history confirm that exceptionalist stories are not easily abandoned or defeated. But core constituencies to support change can be identified in the United States and elsewhere, and there is reason to think that their numbers can be increased. Part of the work to be done is educational: acceptance of more moderate senses of peoplehood may be facilitated when more people recognize themselves as in fact having multiple, interrelated memberships and affiliations that they find meaningful. And if they understand all these memberships as contestable, alterable human creations, it seems likely that many will prefer forms of political community that permit them to pursue as many of the affiliations they value as possible, to move among them as fluidly as possible, and to negotiate the conflicts in the obligations they generate as peaceably and productively as possible. A significant step toward fostering multiple moderate forms of political peoplehood, then, is simply to make the case for an understanding of our identities and groups in the ways presented here as clearly as possible. That has been a primary motivation for this work. Still, some people will be more open to persuasion than others, and so some are more likely to be mobilized into coalitions seeking to modify existing forms of political society. Many scholars of globalization believe that numerous factors may be making more people around the world amenable to seeing themselves and their world in less parochial and particularistic

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ways today. These writers point to the spread of world-­spanning communications, information, and transportation systems; the great variety of transnational social and political networks and organizations these systems have enabled; the deregulation of capital markets; the proliferation of international free trade agreements, and the accompanying rise of multinational corporations and heightened international flows of capital, labor, and goods; the development of regional and international security alliances; sharper awareness that environmental trends endanger populations around the globe; and the proliferation of international human rights agreements and institutions, along with other factors, as elements that prompt more people to think of their well-­being as bound up with billions of distant persons with whom they share what David Held terms “overlapping communities of fate” (Held 2000). Among people shaped by these global developments, immigrants, who often move to the more powerful and affluent nations that must cooperate for any changes to be successful, appear particularly likely to have such senses of multiple overlapping communities and therefore to be inclined to support moderate senses of political peoplehood. Consequently, the growing numbers of countries with relatively large first-­and second-­generation immigrant populations—­often driven, to be sure, primarily by economic interests on both sides of the immigration flows—­may be strengthening the potential for building coalitions within nations and across nations in favor of more moderate senses of peoplehood and more multilateral policies and institutions. The number of countries permitting dual nationality “quintupled between 1959 and 2005” primarily because of what David Cook-­Martín has called an international “scramble for citizens” of certain desirable sorts—­highly educated professionals, domestic workers, star football players (Cook-­Martín 2013, 154, 159). Many of these dual nationals, as well as those immigrants still confined to one nationality, are most concerned to maintain their associations with and build support for their specific countries of origin. But if many immigrant groups did so successfully within many societies, they might collectively produce wide-­ranging patterns of cooperative interaction between a number of national states that would make the overall global structure seem less a system of stubbornly separate and unequal sovereignties. At the same time, changes pursued through many of these more bilateral routes are likely to appear less radical and threatening than more purely cosmopolitan positions—­to which they may nonetheless serve over time as stepping stones, if people so choose. But as Bruce Robbins has recognized, the fact that modern conditions, including heightened immigration, are shaping “habits of thought and

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feeling” that include new senses of “multiple belonging” does not necessar­ ily mean that most people are coming to have senses of concern and respect for all of those with whom they see themselves as increasingly intertwined (Robbins 1998, 3). Instead many interpret these connections as reasons to bond more closely with those persons and groups they see as most trustworthy, against the diverse many who now have more power, and perhaps the will, to harm them. So again, politics has a crucial role to play in persuading people that they are better served, materially and morally, by choosing to pursue at least some goods that not only serve their own aspirations but also those to whom they are interconnected—­perhaps even all of humanity. Through what practical steps might this politics be pursued? In recent years a number of scholars, many inspired by John Rawls’s doctrine of “public reason,” have advanced views on what sorts of “ethics of public discourse” are appropriate in, at least, modern liberal democracies (Rawls 1999, 132–­38). The political impact of any and all such doctrines can certainly be questioned, but most societies do display prevailing norms of political practice that have some force, and those norms can only be generated through advocacy and education. In that spirit, I have suggested that the political discourse ethics of modern societies should include—­as a corollary of the modified Millian maxim holding that communities should aid others when in doing so they would not harm themselves—­a norm holding that candidates competing for power should be obliged to give some explicit indication of what their preferred policies imply, not just for the members of their political community, but for many of those outside it as well (Smith 2008a). This globalization of political discourses might over time broaden conventional political “imaginaries” in ways that would make a politics of moderate peoplehood more conceivable. Political actors cannot, of course, be expected to elaborate the worldwide implications of their proposals in intricate detail or on all matters of public concern. But in an age of intensified global communications, leaders and educated publics in every country are already aware that domestic energy production, manufacturing, transportation systems, and consumption practices all contribute to environmental and energy problems that affect much of the world’s population. Most societies already participate in one or more transnational associations and organizations that seek, at least putatively, to safeguard against military conflict and to combat international crime, from the United Nations to NATO, the African Union, and more. Many have regional and international trade agreements and relationships with international investors and lenders that officially link their domestic economies with many others. For these reasons and many more, few leaders can

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deny that their policies will have repercussions for millions, often billions, outside their borders. Without insisting that they must attach any specific moral value to the fates of any or all of those millions and billions, it is altogether appropriate to expect them to state as part of political and policy debates what they expect the broader consequences of their major policy measures will be. When the structure of the politics of peoplehood is kept in view, moreover, it is not hard to see what might motivate political actors to accept, practice, and enforce this element of a public discourse ethic. As we have seen, within every society, the persons in power have rivals who wish to find grounds to challenge them and to win support wherever they can find it, both within and outside their community’s boundaries. Whenever aspirants to power believe the consequences of their policies for at least parts of the larger world are more attractive than those of their opponents (or at least can be made to appear so), they are likely to highlight such consequences and fault their adversaries for failing to do so. Even when the main political actors in a particular community agree on measures that have adverse affects on those outside their borders that they do not wish to acknowledge—­such as, perhaps, manipulation of the value of their currency to gain international economic advantages—­many of the adversely affected outsiders can be counted on to insist that the community’s leaders take responsibility for their actions. Modern communication systems make it possible to advance those complaints in ways too visible and audible to be easily ignored. And in an increasingly intertwined world, adversely affected outsiders are likely to have at least some allies within the offending country who champion their cause for economic, ideological, or kinship reasons. People who perceive themselves or their affiliates as victims of selfish policies are likely to try to persuade many in their society and around the world that the irresponsible conduct immediately harming them will ultimately harm everyone. For these sorts of reasons, Gerard Delanty has argued that today “peoplehood is increasingly being defined in and through global communication, with the result that ‘we’ is counterposed not only by reference to a ‘they’ but by the abstract category of the world” (Delanty 2006, 30). A number of sturdy political, economic, and social motives, then, may reinforce moral ones to foster a politics in which actors feel pressured to acknowledge and defend the larger global consequences of their policies and practices. The adoption in many societies of this sort of globalist discourse ethic might well contribute in turn to political spirals shifting governing officials to more limited and flexible senses of their authority. Simply acknowledging that a community’s actions generate transnational problems creates some

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pressure to develop policies and institutions to address those problems peacefully and constructively. Many of those policies and institutions are likely to be multilateral, and so they will temper severely isolationist policies and perhaps, over time, political cultures. For if political actors around the world became more accustomed to spelling out the transnational implications of the actions they favor, they may become more conscious of adverse consequences of their policies that, on reflection, they genuinely seek to avoid. Even when they would prefer to ignore those effects, they may decide that the costs of having to justify them make different, more moderate and generally beneficial courses preferable. It remains certain, however, that notions of what global consequences are acceptable will continue to vary and to be in sharp conflict. The most politically sensible strategic response to this plurality of visions seems almost too obvious to state, but it is still one that participants in many regimes could pursue more extensively and self-­consciously than they do now.3 The core idea is that all political, social, and economic actors whose views of the goods that governments should pursue reach beyond particular borders need to devote less time and energy to insisting on the rectitude of their views, and more to identifying areas of agreement around which they can build broad national and transnational coalitions to support appropriate policies and institutions. To be sure, to identify any agreements, activists must first articulate their distinctive senses of what contributes to human well-­being and why. Yet at times those elaborating what they take to be God’s dictates for humanity, or the philosophically derived moral requirements of human rights, or the lessons of economics or the natural sciences for globally beneficial environmental, energy, health, and economic measures, appear determined to insist that everyone accept their views in as pure a form as possible, not to canvass areas of agreement despite continuing differences. In July 2007, for example, the Vatican indicated that because the Catholic Church is the one true, universal church, other Christian bodies should not be called “churches” (Hogan 2007). Pope Francis has since set a different tone, but today many academics, activists, and public intellectuals offer views on global institutions, ecology, basic human rights, and more that are couched in similarly uncompromising terms. Understandable as that is, those who wish to build coalitions that can prompt the powerful in more privileged communities to assist others must adopt different strategies and rhetorics. They must identify and focus their energies on measures on which there is some prospect of winning

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agreement. Although there are important differences, there are also important overlaps in the accounts of human goals in most variants of the world’s major religions and in the public philosophies of most of the world’s political communities. There are equally profound differences but also some widespread agreements on the character of the common problems that humanity faces in the twenty-­first century, including environmental degradation, energy shortages, gross economic inequalities, immigration pressures, epidemic diseases, natural disasters, and a plethora of international security concerns. It only makes sense for those who recognize that their own realization is intrinsically connected to that of people throughout their society and around the world to adopt a pragmatic politics centered on building broad reform alliances on as many matters a possible. Doing so represents a politics of moderate peoplehood that is more likely to produce constructive results, however limited, than any other course available.

Providentialism and the Ethics of Public Discourse The implications of pursuing policies of moderate peoplehood in relation to those outside existing national boundaries will be further pursued in the next chapters. But that politics also has great significance for domestic policies. To make discussion of them more concrete, it makes sense to focus on the normative issues presented by religious discourses and groups. Given the literally cosmic scope of religious beliefs, and given the renewed prevalence of church-­state controversies in the United States and many other states, reflections on the relationship of religious obligations to civic ones can serve as guides to challenges raised by other demanding and conflicting allegiances. Providentialism may often do the most to strengthen the claims of governments to supreme authority. Yet religious groups often feel most entitled to place what they see as their obligations to God above the demands of the state. From an agnostic perspective, I have long argued against trying to create a purely secular public realm in which political officials and institutions do not articulate religious beliefs or the religious origins of their values, and in favor of granting religious commitments equal treatment with those of secular groups and citizens. Only such treatment is consistent with the Millian maxim proposed here—­to aid others to pursue their preferred forms of self-­realization, insofar as doing so imposes no harm on oneself. I have also, however, argued against giving religious believers special privileges that others cannot claim (Smith 1998b, 191–­93; 2003, 140–­58). And like many,

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I became concerned about the political role of providentialist rhetoric when President George W. Bush deployed it to an unusual extent to gain support for a global “war on terror,” and especially the Iraq war. Still, since most presidents and other American politicians have often made religious references, there is again a prior question to consider: was Bush’s reliance on providentialism unusual? If not, there is less reason to think it problematic. But a range of published sources as well as my own research confirms that, as noted in the last chapter, presidential religious rhetoric became less common during the twentieth century, and it then was revived by Ronald Reagan and carried further by the younger Bush. The leading quantitative study of the topic is by communication scholars Kevin Coe and David Domke (2006).4 They did content analysis of all inaugural and State of the Union addresses from Franklin Roosevelt through the speeches of the second President Bush. These speeches were chosen because all presidents give them and because inaugural addresses tend to be “epideictic,” ceremonial, and vision defining, while State of the Union addresses tend to be “deliberative,” concerned to provide policy proposals and arguments. Coe and Domke also coded religious expression as displaying petitionary or prophetic postures. Petitionary statements request or offer thanks for divine aid. Prophetic ones imply “a knowledge of God’s wishes, desires or intentions” (2006, 316). Their results, achieved with a high coefficient of intercoder reliability (0.94), show that Ronald Reagan initiated a new era in which “God” references per presidential address more than doubled compared to presidents from FDR through Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush ranked highest in references per address and references per one thousand words, exceeding even Reagan (Coe and Domke 2006, 316–­19). The second Bush and Reagan also adopted the prophetic posture in 47 percent of their addresses, compared to 0 percent for pre-­Reagan Democrats, 5 percent for pre-­Reagan Republicans, and 15 percent for the first Bush and Clinton, all statistically significant differences (320). Both Reagan and George W. Bush, and especially Bush, made prophetic statements most often in relation to the role of the United States in promoting freedom in the world. As Coe and Domke noted, this rhetorical posture “treads closely to claims regarding a divine vision for U.S. foreign policy” (324). Reagan generally made prophetic statements carefully, knowing they were controversial. In his 1984 State of the Union address, Reagan observed in a defense of school prayer that “we must be cautious in claiming that God’s on our side, but I think it’s all right to keep asking if we’re on His side” (Reagan 1984). Although he often argued that God had “entrusted in

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a special way to this nation” a responsibility for the global “defense” of freedom, his religious rhetoric chiefly offered an inspirational view of America that helped build the modern conservative coalition, but did not provide justifications for specific policies (Reagan 1987; 1988). Initially the same was true of George W. Bush, whose first inaugural address culminated in one of the most explicit and eloquent providential narratives of American peoplehood ever offered by an American president: We have a place, all of us, in a long story. A story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-­holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story. A story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that ev­ eryone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born. Americans are called upon to enact this promise in our lives and in our laws; and though our nation has sometimes halted and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other course . . . After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?” Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate, but the themes of this day he would know, our nation’s grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity. We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with His purpose. Yet His purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another. Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today; to make our country more just and generous; to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life. This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.” (Bush 2001b)

Bush’s words were beautiful and sincere. Yet the assertion by an elected leader to his fellow citizens that “we are not” the “author” of the “American story” sits uneasily with the nation’s founding doctrine of popular sovereignty, the promise of government by consent of the governed. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, argued in more civic republican terms: “well into our third century as a nation, it remains

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the task of all of us, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story” (Obama 2013b). Still, Bush’s minimization of human agency in favor of divine will has a distinguished pedigree in religious thought. And at this point, Bush’s providentialism was not invoked to support of any particular policy. In the judgment of many interpretive scholars along with Coe and Domke, that was one of the many things that changed after September 11, 2001. For example, the Lutheran theologian Caryn Riswold noted that Bush’s September 20, 2001, speech advocating military action against Al Qaeda and Afghanistan’s Taliban regime said America was “called to defend freedom” and concluded, “The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them” (Bush 2001a). Riswold argued that Bush was suggesting that his call to arms was “justified by God” and promising Americans “certainty of the outcome” of a war. By presenting America as “the favored nation under God,” Bush’s rhetoric presented a “subtle justification for violence . . . a retribution theology as national policy” (Riswold 2004, 44–­46). After analyzing Bush’s post–­September 11 speeches, communications scholar Denise M. Bostdorff reached similar conclusions. She saw Bush as repeatedly invoking Protestant traditions holding that “the U.S. has a sacred, civil covenant,” harkening back to “the covenant between God and New England” that “periodically needs to be renewed by current citizens” (Bostdorff 2003, 294, 306). He also relied heavily on the “theme of predestination” because, she argued, “citizens were more likely to support the war . . . if they believed the effort would ultimately succeed.” She, like Riswold, thought “Bush’s rhetoric often went beyond simple confidence to outright certitude” (307). These readings support Coe and Domke’s coding of Bush’s rhetorical posture as distinctively prophetic. Other examples are too numerous to cite, but some merit quotation. In his widely praised 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush contended that “Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth,” and that as part of this plan America has a “mission to promote liberty around the world.” He concluded: “we can be certain that the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom” (Bush 2003). In his speech accepting his second presidential nomination, Bush returned to his “story of America,” a “story of expanding liberty” in which “America is called to lead the cause of freedom” because freedom “is the Almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in

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the world.” He assured Americans that they “have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom” (Bush 2004). Bush’s second inaugural address argued that America must now make “the success of liberty in other lands” the centerpiece of national policy, for this task represented “the calling of our time” (2005). Bush acknowledged, however, that liberty might take different forms around the world, that “when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own.” The speech also seemed newly mindful of the example of Lincoln’s second inaugural, which perceived divine justice in American suffering but refused to claim divine sanction for the Union cause, saying only that “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Somewhat similarly, Bush stated that Americans had “complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom,” but not because “history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events.” Nor did Americans “consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills.” Still, Bush insisted, “History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.” This evidence leaves little doubt that building on traditions going back to the colonial era, George W. Bush made a teleological providential narrative central to his vision of American peoplehood. He especially invoked it in support of his controversially expansive use of force overseas. Bush also stressed the value of America’s religious traditions when proposing greater reliance on faith-­based groups to address domestic problems (Formicola, Segers, and Weber 2003). Still, he included cautions and qualifications. So one may well ask, what if anything really was wrong with Bush’s religious discourse? More generally, what standards should guide normative judgments concerning the role of religious narratives in stories of political peoplehood, as well as the place of religious groups in political life? The preceding chapters have indicated why religious stories can be politically so potent, and why they are likely to be invoked to support measures that otherwise appear morally dubious. When we consider the use of providentialist language to justify Native American removal, African American slavery and colonization, and the imperialism of the Spanish-­American war, on the one hand, and its role in inspiring support for the American revolution, the abolitionist movement, farmer and worker mobilizations, the women’s suffrage campaign, and the civil rights movement, on the other, it is evident that religious accounts have profound appeal and emancipatory potential, even as they present perils. That is why regimes like the United

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States’ that profess values of human rights and democracy must strive not to diminish, but instead to manage constructively, the place of religious groups and religious ideologies in their political societies. Management should not and need not mean marginalization. When we recall humanity’s long history of vicious religious conflicts, we may well decide that the United States and many nations in modern Europe have on the whole done well to rely instead on mixtures of recognition and accommodation of religious beliefs, practices, and organizations in some regards, and substantial separation of religion and government in others—­with the particular combinations varying in different times and places, according to what works to achieve peaceful democratic inclusion in those circumstances. Still, these combinations often face threats that they will come un­stuck, either through controversies over whether governments are too hostile to particular religions or all religions, as religious nonprofits and corporations are now arguing in America, and as Islamic minorities contend in Europe, or through disputes over whether governments are too favorable to some religions, as critics of religious exemptions from requirements in American public policies, and of any recognition of Christianity in EU documents, often charge. Reflections on the politics of peoplehood suggest some further guidelines for confronting these challenges that exemplify more general features of a politics of moderate peoplehood. If we acknowledge that all forms of political peoplehood are continually contested, frequently changing entities, we are likely to be especially skeptical about one type of religious discourse: claims that particular leaders, policies, practices, or communities have divine authorization for the complete allegiance of those they govern. It is more reasonable to regard all current arrangements as impermanent things that members may reasonably wish to reconsider, alter, or abandon. It is still sensible to worry about whether reforms will endanger essential contributions to human well-­being that current arrangements are supplying. Still, it is only prudent to doubt that any existing human community, whether state or church, solely and fully embodies all that is truly sacred. This conclusion does not mean that people cannot interpret their memberships as in accord with God’s will, or that they should not try to persuade others to agree. It means that both members and outsiders are always entitled to dispute all claims that certain forms of peoplehood are divinely or naturally mandatory. Still, that is no reason to marginalize religious allegiances and communities in the vital endeavor of building sustainable societies and institutions that are as responsive to the aspirations and values of their members as possible.

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Consequently, admonitions to political leaders to speak only in secular terminologies, as sometimes urged by admirers of John Rawls’s “public reason” or Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, seem politically unrealistic and ethically dubious (Smith 2008). Intellectual honesty requires us to concede that however skeptical we may be of political theologies, the truth of secular perspectives is far from established. As democratic theorist Alan Keenan argues, some common ground is more likely to be found if we resist regarding those who disagree with us as simply ignorant or corrupt and instead recognize the multiplicity, ambiguity, and uncertainty present in all conceptions of political identities and values, including our own (Keenan 2003, 178, 186). US experience also suggests that efforts to drive religious discourse out of politics only provoke the assertive religious self-­righteousness and public conflicts that advocates of church-­state separation seek to avoid, and it does so on terms that enable religious groups to portray themselves as martyrs. It is appropriate for religious arguments to be advanced in democratic politics fully and openly—­so long as they are not privileged with exemptions from the criticisms to which public advocacy should be subject. There is all the more reason to welcome expression of religious views if we recognize that no societies can long endure without foundations comprised of varied constitutive themes that overlap in giving support to their predominant senses of peoplehood and basic values and institutions. This fact means that proponents of democracy and human rights, like all other political actors, must decide what sorts of constitutive themes they and their preferred political communities should embrace. Personally, I would like to see the United States and other communities embrace reasonably truthful historical stories of their identities, regarding their political societies as human creations with traditions, achievements, challenges, and opportunities that their members may see as normatively compelling and fundamental to who they are, and that they may wish to continue and improve. But again, it is neither feasible nor appropriate to say that all members must understand their peoplehood in secular historical terms—­who am I to insist that providentialist accounts of American identity are wrong? And though I find it misleading to think about real-­world memberships in terms of a divine covenant, or a hypothetical secular social contract or ideal speech situation, I would not forego the support for democracy and human rights that have been built in the United States and elsewhere through arguments for conceiving of peoplehood in those terms. Moreover, even in telling a historical narrative of peoplehood, it is in many circumstances only accurate to acknowledge the constitutive role that religious traditions have played in the development of a people. Although

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we should not accept characterizations of the United States as simply a “Christian nation,” we absolutely should affirm that American political culture and history cannot be understood without grasping the role of different forms of Christianity, and later other religions, in generating much that has been central to American experiences and values. The same is true of modern Europe. With all that said, the dangers that religious rhetoric may be used to give moral credibility to unjust policies remain great. The first guideline concerning religion and politics drawn from the politics of peoplehood, then, is this: Citizens should make it a precept of good civic conduct to engage in close scrutiny of, especially, prophetic (rather than petitionary) religious discourse claiming divine mandates for political leaders and policies, just as courts employ strict scrutiny for certain official actions. More generally, citizens should be skeptical of all political claims to unquestionable authority. Applying such scrutiny, it is clear that George W. Bush’s prophetic rhetoric displayed, at best, severe internal tensions in regard to the very values of democratic self-­governance and religious guidance that it upheld. It can be deemed normatively questionable on its own terms, as well as other standpoints. As noted, Bush’s providentialist insistence that “we are not this story’s author” risked suggesting that, in the final reckoning, Americans need not feel responsible for the morally controversial steps they take. Fostering a sense of the people’s lack of responsibility for their major decisions is not ethically desirable. With but occasional disclaimers, Bush also repeatedly urged Americans to accept as a prophetic “certainty” that his military policies would succeed, because America was on God’s side. Those persuaded were likely to be discouraged from engaging in the critical reflection on the nation’s policies that is appropriate to democratic civic and personal conduct. Indeed, when a president’s course is presented as carrying out the plan of Providence for all humanity, it becomes unclear whether citizens legitimately can dispute it. Bush’s speeches argued to the faithful that dissent was a kind of sin—­when healthy democracies need dissent, as many early Americans grasped well (Martin 2013). Bush also failed to provide any authority for his prophetic providential arguments via exposition of religious traditions, texts, or revelations. He often used phrases drawn from Protestant hymns, biblical translations, and doctrines, yet he never tried to show publicly just where, how, and to whom God had revealed a plan to give America a special role in achieving freedom for all humanity, or why Americans should infer that this plan gave them a duty to pursue Bush’s foreign policies. Yet as Riswold’s critique showed,

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many believers who identified with the president’s Protestant traditions interpreted those traditions differently. Even if we accept that it is right for political leaders to invoke the guidance of religion on public issues and to offer arguments aimed especially at fellow believers, it is still right to ask that the leaders lay out the evidence and reasoning supporting their accounts. Religiously based political claims are not rationally self-­evident. All those who favor ethical political discourse should criticize modes of rhetoric that valorize democratic ideals while discouraging democratic practices, and that claim to show citizens the mandates of providence without telling them where its prophetic interpreters have looked. Bush’s rhetoric failed on all these counts. Bush commendably eschewed, however, the most objectionable form of prophetic rhetoric. In light of the fact that we are all shaped by multiple, contesting stories of peoplehood, it is especially damaging for the leaders and institutions in democratic regimes to treat any particular cosmological perspective, religion, or set of religions (like the “Judeo-­Christian tradition”), or indeed religious faith itself, as essential to the values to which members of such societies must subscribe. It is one thing to say that Christianity has heavily shaped American or European cultures. It would be quite another to say that one must be Christian or have Christian values to be American or an EU citizen. Even Israel, which bestows a “right of return” and a guarantee of Israeli citizenship to people around the world whom it deems to be Jews, does not insist that Israeli citizenship be confined to Jews, much less to believing Jews. Many think Israel has far to go before it truly provides equal citizenship to its Arab citizens and thereby resolves the profound tensions in its quest to be both a democratic and a Jewish state. But whether or not it can do so, Israel does officially accept the obligation to address those tensions. Similarly, though values of democracy and human rights mandate that proponents of all religions should be entitled to express their views openly, and that many receive certain limited kinds of public recognition, democracies must oppose the rise to power and the institutionalization of stories of religious peoplehood that present particular religious faiths as inescapable qualifications for civic memberships. What forms should opposition to excessive religious power take? The younger Bush’s administration gave new prominence to long-­standing claims that after the 1960s many American governments became hostile to religious groups, rather than seeing them as partners in realizing civic goals who were entitled to some exemptions from policies that needlessly burdened their faiths. The ensuing controversies over church-­state relationships have parallels to issues involving the calls of many other groups, including

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racial and ethnic minorities, immigrant communities, former colonies, indigenous tribes, persons with disabilities and with nontraditional sexual identities, and more, for more appropriate recognitions and accommodations in public life. All these claimants can be seen as political peoples prodding the United States and other democracies to build more flexible and fluid political systems in which persons find it easier to balance multiple commitments and thrive in many communities at once (even though some may do so only as a way station to gaining sovereign power for themselves). Guidelines for how governments should treat religious groups can therefore suggest policies appropriate to moderate, democratic, and internally diverse forms of peoplehood more generally. If citizens should subject the claims of political leaders to prophetic authority or other unquestionable mandates to strict scrutiny, the counterpart precept, expressive of my modified Millian maxim, is this: Governments should only deny the claims of religious groups and other groups to special accommodations for their ways of life when those denials are necessary to achieve compelling governmental purposes, which must be more than simply hostility to the groups in question. This view gives pause both to conservatives like Justice Antonin Scalia, who has worried that granting religious free exercise claims may make each person’s conscience a law unto itself, and liberals like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has feared that undue deference to religious groups may permit them to engage in unjust discrimination. Those worries and fears cannot be lightly dismissed. Yet if we accept that religious groups have rights comparable to, but not greater than, others within any political society, then necessary denials of claims to special exemptions may still frequently occur. Equal treatment of all groups requires that if special accommodations are provided to some, they must be provided to all who claim them—­and so accommodations to religious bodies and others may well seem too expansive to be manageable (Smith 1998b, 193–­94). When, for example, private corporations like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties wish not to include contraceptive coverage for their employees in their health insurance plans, it is crucial to consider how widespread requests for such exemptions from otherwise applicable federal policies are likely to be, and how much they will limit employees’ practical opportunities for affordable contraceptive care. If granting an exemption is likely to impose massive burdens on achieving major governmental goals, then such special privileges can be denied. The same reasoning applies to the demands of religious groups to engage in discrimination in hiring or proselytization while performing civic services with public funds. The question

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must always be, can vital public purposes of insuring just economic opportunities and freedom from harassment be achieved, while still providing such accommodations to religious groups and all others who seek them? Sometimes the answer will be no. But the hope and expectation of a politics of moderate peoplehood is that in a truly diverse society, often requests for specific privileges will be so limited that they can safely be granted. Whenever this is so, they should be granted, to religious groups, to racial and cultural communities, to all valued human associations. Political societies should seek to be as flexible, inclusive, and accommodating as they can, without fueling destructive controversies and divisions. They should do so in part because their own goals are always debatable, and yet they cannot in practice avoid having shared goals that are not really neutral toward the values and pursuits of the diverse communities within their bounds. Although, appropriately, there is massive debate over what constitute true “public goods,” only radical anarchists deny that there are some vital human goods that must be achieved through the actions of governing institutions. Large, well-­established groups usually shape those actions, rendering them compatible with the groups’ own beliefs and practices, much more than smaller, weaker groups do. That is why Episcopalians and Presbyterians have always found it easier to comply with American educational and Social Security tax policies than the Old Order Amish and Mennonites. The latter cannot be expected to see such policies as neutral toward their faiths, and they are often understandably resentful toward the American governments claiming sovereign power to impose them. It is in the interests of all not to provoke such resentments unnecessarily. So long, then, as accommodations to minority religions and other groups do not substantially endanger what a political society has defined as their members’ basic civil rights or the achievement of other fundamental public goals, they can serve to make it more possible for persons to value and inhabit multiple memberships at once—­which in turn enhances their prospects for fulfilling lives. At the same time, the imperatives of building enduring communities also suggest that, so long as minority groups are not unduly burdened, limited special recognitions for powerful groups that have helped build support for particular forms of peoplehood are acceptable. On this view the established churches of northern Europe are defensible, so long as they do not impose any substantial subordination or exclusion of other religious and cultural perspectives. Often in modern times they have not. But in Europe, Israel, the United States, and everywhere else, special privileges either for dominant religious groups or for unpopular minorities

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always run the risk of fostering animosities, intolerance, and invidious discrimination. So the fundamental normative message that the case of religion suggests for achieving moderate forms of peoplehood remains twofold. The politics of peoplehood is conducted most legitimately when those engaged in it place a heavy burden of proof both on claims to unquestionable providential mandates for leaders and policies, and on claims that governments cannot accommodate those groups who are burdened by policies that primarily express the values and interests of others. However deep the challenges that religious groups and religious beliefs pose to the processes of constructing and maintaining desirable political societies, because those processes cannot be presumed to be infallible, because they are vitally important activities of imperfect human beings, we need to pursue politics in ways that engage and challenge religious perspectives constructively, striving neither to enthrone any nor to expel any irrevocably. And as I have stressed, what is true of religious groups, whose adherents often believe that their duties to their deities override their obligations to any other human beings or human authorities, is also true of all of the many other types of political peoples—­linguistic, ethnic, and regional communities; trade unions; GLBT and disability groups; multinational conglomerates; radical environmental associations; and so many more—­that claim measures of recognition and accommodation in many societies. As Keenan, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and other democratic theorists are now contending, more legitimate forms of peoplehood can be built over time only through never-­ending processes of political construction that are as inclusive and as democratic as they can be, while they still generate enough ongoing consensus on membership, institutions, and policies to sustain effective arrangements for meeting human needs and promoting human well-­being (Keenan 2003; Ochoa Espejo 2011). Often achievement of a workable consensus will require recognition of many kinds of “differentiated citizenship,” the extension of limited special recognition and aid to some groups, the granting of limited exemptions to others. Just what the terms of inclusion of different groups should be, and how far inclusions can extend, can and should be defined by what prove to be the practical boundaries of political acceptability and administrative feasibility in any particular time and place. Over time, those differentiated forms of membership will shift, and political boundaries are likely to vary from those that structure the current array of putatively sovereign nation-­states. Whether we see these developments as resulting from the will of God, the will of the people, or both, so long as political peoples are defined in ways that permit as many as possible to feel they are flourishing as fully as possible, there will be little reason for regret.

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Conclusion Despite the long-­standing prevalence of Westphalian ideals valorizing sovereign nation-­states, there are a number of normative arguments and empirical circumstances that make it possible to see why a world of interlocked, multiple, flexible, and moderate political peoples might today be desirable; how coalitions to create that world might be built; and what sorts of stan­ dards for political discourse and public policies should then prevail. Concerns for global economic equity, democratic inclusiveness, and group and individual self-­realization all counsel in favor of exploring new intertwined forms of moderate peoplehood. Norms calling for political attention to the global consequences of national policies, with the aim of aiding diverse forms of individual and group self-­realization whenever this can be done without great costs, can promote a pragmatist, reformist politics conducive to such senses of peoplehood. Similarly, within states it is desirable for citizens to support accommodations and aid for many different groups whenever this is feasible in light of shared public goals, even as it is also wise for citizens to be vigilant against any and all claims to unquestionable authority. But although many of the necessary transformations are already underway, and conditions are in place for many more that might make these normative views seem not only desirable but also politically feasible, both the practical obstacles to change and the normative objections to seeking change remain great. They constitute, indeed, a far vaster landscape than this work can traverse. Instead, the remaining chapters offer examples of how the politics of peoplehood can support certain kinds of policy reforms, in ways that may help readers reflect on whether these are paths that should be pursued.

Eight

The American “Promiseland” and Mexican Immigrants1

Immigration and Peoplehood The reasons for embracing multiple, overlapping, relatively flexible forms of political peoplehood just rehearsed amount to little if they cannot be elaborated to provide useful guidance on controversial issues of political membership. This chapter and the next advance arguments for changes in immigration and aid policies that are, at a minimum, controversial. Al­ though it is too much to hope that they will prove persuasive to all, I believe they support the conclusion that thinking of membership issues in terms of the empirical and normative arguments about the politics of people­ hood advanced here helps us to conceive of new possibilities that are worth exploring. It is especially appropriate to focus on implications for immigration pol­ icies, because in the last two decades, immigration issues have loomed ever larger both in the politics of many immigrant-­receiving states and in norma­ tive political theory. But many, though by no means all, of the political and normative discussions are structured in binary fashion. They oppose the “special” obligations many think people owe to their fellow national citizens in light of their shared civic identities to the “general” obligations they owe to all human beings in light of their shared humanity (e.g., Wellman 2001; Miller 2005; 2007; Holtug 2011).2 Both sorts of claims merit serious consid­ eration, but a growing body of scholarship raises a third possibility: along with special obligations to fellow citizens and more universal obligations, citizens may have special obligations to some noncitizens that they do not have to all humanity (e.g., Erskine 2002; Bader 2005; Goodin 2007; Bauböck 2007a; 2007b; Abizadeh 2008; Ypi, Goodin, and Barry 2009). Attention to this possibility offers the hope that we may be able to identify policies

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that can produce meaningful change while being less radically transforma­ tive, and so perhaps more politically feasible, than full-­blown cosmopolitan views. The policy proposals in this chapter rest on the belief that nations and citizens should routinely consider whether they have specific sorts of spe­ cial obligations to some noncitizens when they decide on immigration and naturalization policies. There are many reasons to do so. I term my own argument for such consideration the “principle of coercively constituted identities” (Smith 2008; 2010). Building on the general case for supporting diverse forms of human self-­realization made in the previous chapter, I ar­ gue that nations and citizens have special obligations to persons, including noncitizens as well as citizens, insofar as those persons’ identities, aspira­ tions, and interests have been coercively constituted by past and present actions of the nations’ and citizens’ governments. The principles officially espoused by such governments require them to extend some form of assis­ tance to such noncitizens, which might include “most favored nation” trade status, a form of confederation in which the noncitizens maintain consid­ erable autonomy, or options of partial or full citizenship, including eco­ nomic, social, and voting rights. The weight of this obligation depends roughly on the degree to which they have coercively constituted the nonciti­ zens’ identities, values, and aspirations. Governments may also have obliga­ tions to noncitizens they have not coercively shaped in these ways, but if so, those duties rest on different grounds. Here I contend, as I have done previ­ ously, that this principle implies that the United States and its state govern­ ments have obligations to extend special opportunities for membership to Mexicans (Smith 2011b; 2013). In the next chapter, I argue that most former and current colonial powers, including the United States, have special obli­ gations toward most residents of their former or current colonies. In neither case do I insist that these kinds of special obligations are the only or the primary obligations that nations and citizens have. I presume instead that national governments have many other, often-­competing obli­ gations, to individual citizens, groups, and subordinate state and local com­ munities, to noncitizens, to humanity at large, and perhaps even more. I also presume that some of these duties rest on different bases than the ar­ gument I make here, and that these obligations can be met in various ways that may not include paths to residence or citizenship. The content and relative weight that should be assigned to all these obligations, as well as the policies that should be used to fulfill them, are all highly contested questions—­and appropriately so. No one has a philosophical template that can enable us to find indisputable answers. My overarching view is that

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political communities should generally reach decisions through democratic processes involving robust and broadly inclusive debate. My aim is only to raise considerations that might be neglected in such processes.

Special Obligations and the Principle of Coercively Constituted Identities Especially in modern democratic and liberal theories, governmental obli­ gations to noncitizens (and also to citizens) are often presented as arising from the active or tacit consent of all involved (Schuck and Smith 1985; Ypi, Goodin, and Barry 2009, 105–­7). I focus here, however, on arguments that nations may have obligations to noncitizens that their governments and citizens are reluctant to recognize because they do not see themselves as having actively consented to those obligations, and they do not believe they are involved in cooperative ventures with the noncitizens in question that amount to tacit consent. Rather, governments and citizens are here held re­ sponsible for past and current coercive actions of the governments that they are reluctant to acknowledge as generating obligations. As Sarah Song observes, two main types of rationales have been ad­ vanced for special obligations to some noncitizens: “affected interests” ar­ guments and “coercion” arguments (Song 2012, 40). The first set of views holds, as noted in the last chapter, that anyone whose important interests are significantly affected by a government’s decisions should have some say in those decisions (e.g., Dahl 1970; Shapiro 1999; Goodin 2007). The sec­ ond set of views, building on aversions to governmental infringements on personal liberties, holds that governments are not entitled to coerce indi­ viduals who are not threatening them and who have not consented to their authority (e.g., López-­Guerra 2005; Abizadeh 2008). Song, like many others, expresses concern that both these arguments would create so many obligations to noncitizens, including extensions of voting rights and perhaps citizenship itself, that they would undercut de­ sirable, even necessary features of systems of democratic self-­government, such as political equality and solidarity (Song 2012, 41). Some of the de­ cisions of a powerful government like the United States affect important interests of virtually every person in the world. And because many coer­ cive policies such as immigration restrictions are enforced, if not actively against everyone in the world, at least against everyone who seeks entry in violation of them, they too point to very widely inclusive democratic decision-­making processes (Abizadeh 2008, 44–­48; Song 2012, 49–­52). But if people throughout the world were to vote on American policies, Song and

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others contend, opportunities for real political influence would in practice be greatly diminished and highly unequal, violating democratic norms. And most voters might choose without the sense of solidarity with, and solicitude for, their fellow citizens that bounded membership in democratic nation-­states can provide (Song 2012, 57–­60). The principle of coercively constituted identities clearly falls into Song’s second, “coercion” camp, but I seek to show that it is less open to these criti­ cisms. It focuses not on all governmental actions that affect people’s inter­ ests, and not even on all governmental exercises of coercive power. It applies only to governmental coercive measures that can credibly be assigned sub­ stantial roles in the constitution of persons’ identities, interests, and aspira­ tions. I also define coercion narrowly, as involving the actual or threatened imminent use of physical force. Even so, the tasks of judging when com­ munications amount to coercive threats, and especially what actions make “substantial” contributions to constituting identities, still raise worries that this position will prove a slippery slope, opening the door to endless claims of special obligations. But policy making involves deciding on priorities, and some claims to have been coercively constituted are far more fully sup­ ported empirically than others. As a result, the priorities supported by this principle are tolerably clear, even when their weights are disputable. The focus here is on outsiders, but in my view it is especially this princi­ ple of coercively constituted identities that requires governments to extend citizenship to most if not all persons born and raised on their territories. All such persons have had their identities extensively constituted by coercively enforced state policies concerning permissible forms of family structures, educational curricula, religious and cultural practices, political action, eco­ nomic pursuits, and much more. Although some states grant far more ex­ tensive freedoms than others in these regards, all treat some choices in each of these arenas as properly punishable. Few today permit incestuous mar­ riages, human sacrifices, or racial or gender disfranchisements, for example. These patterns highlight the fact that many forms of coercion are widely regarded as necessary and beneficial—­and rightly so. The principle of coer­ cively constituted identities simply holds that coercive state policies foster state responsibilities, not that they are unjust. The case for this principle depends on the premise defended throughout these pages, that political communities are forged and sustained in part through normative constitutive stories of peoplehood. The argument from the importance of these stories to special obligations to some noncitizens has four parts.

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First is the claim that members of all political communities generally feel senses of obligation to live up to the demands of their constitutive stories, and they generally should feel so, unless their communities’ constitutive stories are wholly indefensible. But most societies are bound in part by nar­ ratives embodying values that are compelling from many normative view­ points. And people are not likely even to be capable of normatively valuable conduct if they do not attach some weight in critical reflection to the ac­ counts of moral obligation and purpose through which their very awareness of the possibility of worthwhile conduct has been generated. Otherwise, how could critical moral reflection begin? The second step is the previously mentioned observation that all mod­ ern governments professing to be constitutional democracies—­indeed, all advocates of democracy and human rights—­officially affirm (on varying grounds) that all human beings have at least some minimum of moral worth and are entitled to respect for their dignity and their capacities to lead free lives. These commitments form part of the constitutive stories that most modern democracies use to justify their existence, giving those stories a quality that Toni Erskine has called “embedded cosmopolitanism.” The par­ ticular moralities of many “morally constitutive communities,” she notes, include transnational normative commitments (Erskine 2002). In general accord with the view developed here, Erskine adds that the scope of morally constitutive communities should also not be identified with state borders, because neither persons nor communities are in fact so tightly bounded. They are generally embedded in “a web of intersecting and overlapping morally relevant ties”—­including ties arising from transnational coercive policies and practices—­that can generate duties to noncitizens (474–­75). The third step of the argument again invokes Will Kymlicka’s contention that although people are generally shaped by multiple internally diverse, evolving, and overlapping cultures, the actions of governments often mean that persons have had their identities and values substantially constituted, through no choice of their own, by specific political communities. As a re­ sult, many people find it hard to conceive of normatively meaningful lives that lack engagement with, and often membership in, those political com­ munities (Kymlicka 1995, 82–­83). Some people may consider a political community’s role in constituting their identities as of inestimable benefit. Some may deem it a curse. Most are likely to see both good and bad. But for all, the identities thus formed remain their starting points in formu­ lating their conceptions of the sorts of free, meaningful lives available to them.

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To focus on the responsibilities of particular governments and peoples is not to deny that, as Erskine and others observe, few persons have had their senses of self and purpose generated solely as a result of a single national government’s coercion. That reality does not belie the fact that many have been substantially shaped by the policies of powerful governments. When governing agencies define a particular range of educational systems, reli­ gious practices, economic activities, marital and familial structures, forms of expression, and processes of governance as permissible, while punishing those who act otherwise, they have a profound impact on the core values, affiliations, and senses of self of many, if not most, subject to those policies. We must expect that many of the people so constituted will feel they can best lead meaningful lives, or can only lead meaningful lives, if they pur­ sue cultural, economic, and political endeavors that reflect their socializa­ tion—­in some cases complying with its mandates, in some cases seeking to adapt or resist them, but in most cases seeking self-­realization through engagement with the political community whose government has done so much to make them who they are. The fourth and last step in the argument for special obligations to non­ citizens is to maintain that because these things are true, constitutional democracies ought to recognize that their own commitments point to an obligation to assist, and sometimes even to include as members, all persons whose identities and aspirations they have coercively shaped, to the extent that they have done so—­if and only if those persons desire to have some kind of assistance from, political association with, or membership in those con­ stitutional democracies. As Veit Bader has contended, building on work by Rainer Bauböck, “states have to recognize special obligations that reach be­ yond their own citizens and residents” toward populations with which they have had significant active involvement, including the “special relations” of “colonialism, imperialism, aggressive wars, etc.” (Bader 2005, 96). Since Mexico was never legally a colony of the United States, I reserve discussion of special obligations arising from overt colonialism for the next chapter. But readers will already be asking: why is it plausible to judge that the obligations flowing from this principle of coercive identities will be less expansive than those flowing from most formulations of the principle of affected interests or different kinds of coercion arguments? The first reason is that, as noted, the principle employs a reasonably bounded definition of coercion that focuses on the use of physical force and violence or the imminent threat of such force. Coercion means taking lands and lives, us­­ ing troops to occupy countries and impose leaders and laws. Broader defi­ nitions of coercion may be credible, but they are more arguable and often

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self-­defeating, because they propel advocacy down a slope so slippery that the whole notion that coercion creates obligations may be dismissed as impractical. Next, the principle is bounded because it requires us to make necessarily crude but credible empirical judgments about the degree to which different populations have been constituted by the coercive measures of a particular government. Many decisions of the US government undeniably affect New Zealanders and Australians, for example, in ways important to their inter­ ests. One might reasonably say that the United States has used its force to help create and sustain a global economic system in which these nations participate, in ways that are vital to the lives of all their members. According to the principle of affected interests, these populations might therefore have a claim to voice in many American policies. But the United States has not directly coerced Australia and New Zealand to participate in the global economic system, nor have the indirect impacts of its many uses of force on behalf of its economic interests shaped these countries much more than most others. So there is no credible argument from these indirect impacts for giving Australians and New Zealanders prior­ ity over others when determining American obligations. And because there is no real evidence that the United States has coercively constituted New Zealander and Australian identities, values, and aspirations in any other dis­ tinctive way, on the principle of coercively constituted identities, the United States has no special obligations to these Australasians, apart from treaty agreements. The differences in degrees to which persons and peoples have been coerced dictate differences in the weights of the claims they can ad­ vance against coercing regimes. The principle is also more bounded than other recent “coercion” argu­ ments, such as that of Arash Abizadeh (2008, 54–­56). To use the same ex­ amples, New Zealanders and Australians are as subject as anyone to US government coercion if they violate US immigration policies (even if those policies may be less vigorously enforced against them). Under Abizadeh’s view, Australians and New Zealanders wishing to immigrate to the United States therefore have as much a claim as any others to voice in US immi­ gration laws, and so a kind of quasi-­citizenship (Abizadeh 2008, 54–­56). I argue to the contrary that peoples the United States has directly coerced extensively, especially Filipinos, Mexicans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Do­­ minicans, have significantly greater claims to American aid than most “down under” applicants and so should receive priority in immigration and refugee policies. Whether or not Abizadeh’s argument is persuasive, then, the prin­ ciple of coercively constituted identities is less expansive.

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That is why the principle may prove more politically palatable to gov­ ernments and citizens of nations who regard any recognition of duties to noncitizens as a risky venture that can threaten their national interests. Admittedly, some moral philosophers regard considerations of political pal­ atability as irrelevant to ethical obligations. But once we conclude that vari­ ous obligations exist, it is not simply appropriate but necessary to consider whether there are plausible political routes to seeing them fulfilled. It is not unwise or unjust to focus on those obligations that have the best chance of becoming part of public considerations and prompting policies that are ef­ fective in realizing them.

The United States and Mexican Immigration The remainder of this chapter details an argument that the principle of coercively constituted identities and considerations of political feasibility and desirable policy consequences all give strong reasons for including in American policy debates a focus on special obligations to Mexicans. That focus is now almost wholly absent. Mexican immigrants are often stigma­ tized, sometimes praised, but rarely considered to be the bearers of special relationships to the United States that many of those immigrants feel them­ selves to be, for good historical reasons. The inattention of policy makers to these feelings of connection may suggest that few officials are likely to be receptive to arguments built upon the circumstances that have given rise to them. Perhaps so, but the aim here is to raise possibilities that are not currently getting attention. Moreover, demographic changes in the United States, especially the growing numbers of Latino voters, may mean that a larger share of the electorate will regard these connections as important in the future. In any case, at this writing and for many previous years, American national policy makers have been unable to reach agreement on any major immigration policies. The time may be ripe for new considerations. The particular ones advanced here were triggered by the long-­simmering controversies in America over Mexican immigration that reached high boil in the summer of 2010 and have largely stayed there since. Those disputes have involved tensions between proponents of different memberships poli­ cies and also champions of the prerogatives of different governments, repre­ senting the sort of overlapping but intertwined peoples that I have argued to be desirable. The case of Mexican American immigrants is therefore a perti­ nent test of my more general normative claims for moderate, multiple forms of peoplehood. Those claims are undermined whenever such arrangements

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appear incapable of resolving major policy conflicts peacefully and coop­ eratively. Here the disputes include clashes between the US government and the state of Arizona, and between both those governments and some county and municipal agencies. They also involve the relationship of the US government and the Mexican national government, as well as relationships among states and cities on both sides of the US-­Mexico border. America’s immigrant streams are remarkably diverse, but apart from concerns about Islamic terrorists, recent immigration battles have focused on Latino immigrants in general and Mexican immigrants in particular. Precise estimates vary, but most analysts agree that over half of the nation’s almost forty million foreign-­born residents in 2010 were born in Latin America or the Caribbean, including a little under twelve million (29 per­ cent of the total) born in Mexico (Grieco et al. 2010; Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-­Barrera 2012). Almost three-­fifths of the Mexico-­born residents were undocumented, some 6.5 to 6.9 million people, about 59 percent of the total unauthorized population. Between 2000 and 2011, this Mexican-­ born population increased by over two million, and the next leading source countries were also Latino—­El Salvador (660,000), Guatemala (520,000), and Honduras (380,800) (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2012; Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-­Barrera 2012). By 2012, however, demographers reported that the largest immigration wave in history from a single country to the United States had stopped and possibly reversed. This unexpected development seemed traceable to weak­ ened US employment prospects, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, long-­ term decline in Mexico’s birth rates, and economic conditions in Mexico (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-­Barrera 2012). Yet Americans remained deeply concerned with and divided over immigration policies, and the worries re­ mained chiefly anxieties about Latino and especially Mexican immigrants. As a contribution to the policy debates focused on those concerns, I have noted that the principle of coercively constituted identities implies that Mexicans are owed “special access to American residency and citizenship, ahead of the residents of the many countries less affected by US policies, and in ways that should justify leniency toward undocumented Mexican immigrants” (Smith 2010, 295). But I have also maintained that the federal government has unfulfilled obligations to the immigrant-­receiving states and municipalities, because its policies have constituted these communi­ ties in ways that make unauthorized immigrants appear threatening (Smith 2013a, 59–­60). These arguments obviously pose tensions: if the United States gives special access for residency and citizenship to Mexicans, then

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many white, Anglophone residents of immigrant-­receiving states, shaped to expect their cultural predominance and concerned about the political, social, and economic impacts of immigrants, are likely to feel betrayed, and resist. If the United States responds with more aid to immigrant-­receiving states, many taxpayers throughout the nation will resist accepting immi­ grants, perhaps especially poorer ones from Mexico. Especially since 2000, many state and local residents have in fact resisted national immigration policies more aggressively, albeit in different direc­ tions. Whereas proponents of immigration restriction once focused on per­ suading national policy makers, in the mid-­2000s they began using state and local government actions to transform American policies “from below,” as part of a strategy its proponents have called “attrition through enforce­ ment.” Their chief aim has been to reduce the unauthorized population by adopting state and local measures (and, when possible, national policies) that make life much harder for such immigrants—­in the expectation that many will decide to “self-­deport,” as Mitt Romney argued in 2012. But other locales have instead adopted “sanctuary city” policies, providing aid to un­ authorized immigrants and resisting strict national enforcement measures (Rodríguez 2008, 600–­604; Smith 2013a, 45). My interpretation of the implications of the principle of coercively con­ stituted identities, applied to the intertwined history of the United States, its southwest states, and the Mexican national and state governments and peoples, leads me on balance to oppose attrition through enforcement and to urge preferences for Mexicans in US immigration policies. But at the same time, the broader case for a democratic politics of multiple intertwined peo­ ples suggests that it is appropriate for states and localities to seek to push national policies in both more anti-­and more proimmigrant directions through such bottom-­up means. As divisive as recent American experience has been, the contentious politics of peoplehood involving different state, national, and ethnic communities with varying senses of identity retains real prospects for finding acceptable accommodations of their conflicting aspirations and obligations, and so remains worth pursuing.

The Recent Conflicts On April 23, 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1070, the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.” Its Section 1 stated: “the intent of this act is to make attrition through en­ forcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.”3 Its proponents argued that the bill would help insure that all

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Arizona governments actively contributed to enforcement of federal immi­ gration laws, rather than abstaining from or even obstructing enforcement. Among other provisions, the bill required all cities to collect and report information on immigrant statuses to federal agencies, and to request status information from federal immigration authorities. The law also added state penalties for violations of some federal immigration laws and immigration-­ related crimes. Most controversially, it authorized Arizona law officers to require proof of immigrant status on the basis of “reasonable suspicion” and to arrest immigration law violators without warrants, so long as police had “probable cause” to believe them guilty of such violations. The Obama Justice Department challenged the law on the grounds that it represented state interference with national policies concerning the enforcement of immigration laws, and because it might encourage stops, searches, and arrests that amounted to illegal racial profiling. The president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, and other Mexican officials also condemned the law, calling it a “violation of human rights” (Booth 2010). Arizona quickly enacted a further measure guaranteeing that state prosecutors would not investigate complaints based on “race, color, or national origin.” But on July 28, 2010, a day before SB 1070 was to go into effect, US district judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction against its authorizations to demand proof of status and to arrest without warrants, though she allowed most of the law to go into effect (Archibald 2010). A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld her ruling.4 On June 25, 2012, in Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court agreed with these lower federal courts that the law’s criminalization of failure to carry documentation, its ban on unauthorized aliens seeking employ­ ment, and its authorization for arrests without warrant were all preempted by federal laws, though it sustained the rest of the statute. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion indicated that the requirement for stops based on reasonable suspicion of unauthorized status might also be in jeopardy if it proved to foster invidious discrimination.5 The Justice Department chose not to pursue issues of racial profiling when arguing the case since the law had not yet been enforced. The question of how far SB 1070 would be sustained was urgent because in its wake other states began trying to outdo Arizona by enacting the most stringent anti-­immigrant laws in the nation. Georgia and Alabama quickly passed measures that went well beyond SB 1070, with Alabama making it a crime to give a ride or rent housing to anyone known to be an undocu­ mented alien (Altschuler 2011). In September 2011, an Alabama federal dis­ trict judge upheld most of that law (Robertson 2011). Less than a decade

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after its first articulation, attrition through enforcement did indeed appear to be an instance of state and local officials and voters seeking to shape national policies by concerted political action from below—­with some suc­ cesses, even if judicial support remained in doubt. Two related developments during the summer of 2010 merit notice. In May another Arizona statute banned school districts and charter schools from offering classes or courses that were “designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group” or that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”6 The state superintendent of public instruction indicated the bill was most concerned with the Chicano stud­ ies program in the Tucson schools (Cruz 2010a). The new ban furthered educational goals to which Arizona voters previously gave overwhelming approval in 2000 when they enacted Proposition 203, abolishing bilingual education (Meeks 2007, 244–­45; Cruz 2010b). Although many proponents of attrition through enforcement have contended that they wished to curb the presence of undocumented aliens whatever their ethnicity, the linking in Arizona and other states of anti-­immigrant measures with laws against Latino-­oriented public curriculum suggested that ethnocultural concerns also contributed to support for these initiatives (Campbell 2011, 1–­22). Furthermore, in 2010 many prominent Republican leaders including Florida senator Lindsey Graham and Utah senator Orrin Hatch endorsed either an amendment to the Fourteenth Amendment to deny automatic citizenship to children of undocumented aliens born on US soil, or legisla­ tion to achieve that end—­a step that a few scholars (including me) have argued to be permissible, whether or not it is desirable, under the Fourteenth Amendment (Dwyer and Karl 2010; Schuck and Smith 1985). Subsequently, a coalition of state legislators from Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Okla­ homa, and South Carolina, along with law professor Kris Kobach, soon to be secretary of state of Kansas and a leading architect of attrition through enforcement measures, proposed state laws denying that children of undoc­ umented aliens born in the United States were Fourteenth Amendment citi­ zens and requiring that they receive special birth certificates (Preston 2011, A16). Although the chances that the federal government would repudiate birthright citizenship for undocumented alien children were and are likely to remain nil, these proposals and many more since have kept immigration disputes near the forefront of American politics. They have never, however, gone uncontested, and after 2010, the immi­ gration restrictionist tide began to recede. In November 2011, Arizona voters ousted state senator Russell Pearce, the chief sponsor of SB 1070 and the ethnic studies ban, in a recall election. Arizona business leaders especially

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turned against Pearce, arguing that his anti-­immigration stance prompted boycotts that hurt the state’s economy (Lacey and Seelye 2011, A22). Many urged that the state adopt the “Utah Compact” promulgated by Utah attor­ ney general Mark Shurtleff, a Mormon Republican who argued for bringing unauthorized immigrants not guilty of other offenses into the economic and legal system (Preston 2012, A9). After Barack Obama won over 70 per­ cent of the Latino vote and reelection in 2012, many leading Republicans began announcing support for “comprehensive immigration reform” that would include status legalization and a difficult but traversable route to citizenship for many of the nation’s unauthorized immigrants (Hamby 2013). Although the Democratic majority in the Senate passed such a bill, Republicans in the House could not agree to it, and the nation remained mired in immigration policies that satisfied no one. Even as many American lawmakers have been worrying about undocu­ mented Mexican immigrants, the government of the United Mexican States has over the last two decades taken major steps to maintain its affiliation with its nationals who go abroad, particularly to the United States. Although such Mexicans have long been allowed to vote in Mexican elections if they returned to their home electoral districts, and in the 1920s Mexican presi­ dential candidate José Vasconcelos championed their political participa­ tion, most other Mexican leaders showed little interest in emigrants (Lafleur 2013, 51–­53). Then in 1996, even as the Mexican federal authorities ceded some immigration powers to state bodies, Mexico’s governments ratified several constitutional amendments that permitted Mexicans to hold both foreign citizenship and Mexican nationality. The amendments’ chief im­ pacts were to allow Mexicans living abroad to naturalize while still retain­ ing their rights to own land in Mexico, to own Mexican businesses, and to transmit their Mexican property to their heirs—­including children born abroad, who now automatically held Mexican nationality without having to renounce other citizenships (Gutierrez 1997). Mexican law maintained, however, a distinction between Mexican na­ tionality and citizenship, and it confined voting rights to citizens, while treating Mexicans resident in other countries simply as nationals. But Presi­ dent Vicente Fox Quesada, elected in 2000, strongly promoted emigrant enfranchisement (Lafleur 2013, 66–­69). In 2005, Mexico amended its con­ stitution again to permit Mexicans living abroad who had obtained voter registration cards in Mexico and who mailed in ballots to have their votes counted in presidential elections—­though efforts to permit Mexicans to reg­ ister to vote entirely outside the country and to vote by other means met resistance (Lafleur 2013, 70–­72). The attempts to expand the voting rights of

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nonresident Mexicans have since continued, particularly on behalf of Mexi­ cans resident in the United States. Even if these movements do not succeed, the Mexican national government has already shown great willingness to ac­ commodate people with Mexican origins who wish to be members of both the US and the Mexican economic, political, and cultural communities.

The Aspirations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans As numerous scholars in several disciplines have documented, such wishes to be economically, politically, and culturally both American and Mexican—­rather than simply US citizens—­have long been expressed by many, though by no means all, persons of Mexican descent born on both sides of the border. Alonso Perales, a founder of an early Mexican American civil rights group, the Order of the Sons of America, argued in 1923 that Mexican Americans were the proud “descendants of the Mexican revolu­ tionary Hidalgo and the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc” but also “one hun­ dred percent American,” part of “the people” valorized by Lincoln and American doctrines of popular sovereignty (Rivera 2006, 15). In 1985 histo­ rian Mario García noted that after the United States received much of what is now the American southwest from Mexico consequent to its victory in the Mexican-­American War, “nineteenth-­century Mexicans reacted in different ways. Some refused to submit to conquest and defended themselves against Anglo control. Others, however, accommodated themselves to the transfor­ mation. Nevertheless, both groups maintained a Mexican cultural, political, and economic presence until reinforced by extensive Mexican immigration” in the first third of the twentieth century (García 1985, 197). García then identified the conceptions of Mexican American identity ex­ pressed in three southern California Mexican American newspapers from the 1920s through the 1970s. La Opinión in the 1920s accepted the loss of Mexican lands to the United States but insisted that Mexicans in America remained “an organic part of Mexico” who should see themselves as serv­ ing their patria by learning skills and gaining income they could contribute upon returning home—­and who should therefore not become US citizens (García 1985, 198–­201). From the 1930s to the 1960s, El Espectador instead supported “a modified form of Mexican-­American nationalism . . . the in­ tegration of Mexicans into the mainstream of American society, but not at the expense of cultural heritage” (212). Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants should instead embrace “a type of dual cultural citizenship” (213). Then in the 1960s and 1970s, Sin Fronteras (Without Borders) argued

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that Mexicans both north and south of the border were victims of “Yankee political, economic, and cultural colonialism,” denounced immigration re­ strictions, and dreamed of establishing a “greater Mexican workers’ state” built from “Mexican workers on both sides of the border” (216, 220, 223). Despite their great differences, all three positions claimed legitimate resi­ dence for many persons of Mexican descent on US soil, while also insisting on the legitimacy of their identification with Mexicans south of the border. Subsequently, anthropologist Leo R. Chavez combined ethnographic ob­ servations, interviews, and regression analyses of opinion surveys to argue that undocumented Latino immigrants “can have multiple identities; they can imagine themselves to be part of their communities ‘back home,’ and they can also imagine places for themselves in their ‘new,’ or host, com­ munities” (Chavez 1994, 68). Chavez also contended that “history, social relationships, and economic structures” have expanded Mexicans’ concep­ tions of “where they may legitimately work. . . . Their possible labor mar­ ket includes places in the United States where they (or a relative or friend) have worked before. The political border between Mexico and the United States does not limit this expanded concept” (Chavez 1998, 42). And in 2003, political scientist William V. Flores insisted that even after the fading of the socialist Chicano radicalism of the late 1960s and 1970s represented by Sin Fronteras, both undocumented and legally resident Latinos in the United States were continuing to reject “the artificial boundaries established by the state to distinguish between citizens and noncitizens” through “a counteride­ ology that stresses Latino unity” and “cultural citizenship.” Flores main­ tained, however, that the society “the Latinos envision may be more like the ideal America than the America that exists,” in that it is “committed to values of democracy and social justice.” As a result, while “Latinos may not fully belong to America, their hopes and frustrations do” (Flores 2003, 96–­97). These widespread, albeit far from universal, aspirations of many of Mexican descent on both sides of the border to build lives that belong to, benefit from, and shape both the United States and Mexico are what the Mexican government has been seeking to facilitate. In many regards, they are also what the Arizona government has been seeking to obstruct. The fact that Arizona has legislated not only against what it views as illegitimate economic and political actions by undocumented aliens, but also against educational curricula designed to support “dual cultural citizenship,” shows that the concerns of the state’s officials and most of its voters extend beyond opposition to the presence of persons in violation of US immigration laws. The Arizona government is opposed to the kinds of intertwined economic,

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political, and cultural dual citizenship that the Mexican government is cau­ tiously encouraging and that many Mexican Americans as well as many Mexicans endorse. What, if any, are the obligations of the US government in relation to the opposed goals of these two governments—­one of which is one of its constituent states, the other its neighboring sovereign with whom it has a profoundly interconnected history? What are its obligations in rela­ tion to the Mexicans and Mexican Americans who favor these kinds of dual nationality, as well as other Americans who do not? There are no easy answers. But the principle of coercively constituted identities does have implications for the US government’s responsibilities to all the parties involved. Identifying them requires attention to how govern­ ments have in the past as well as the present contributed coercively to the identities, affiliations, hopes, and dreams of the populations involved in current immigration disputes. The result, however, is not an argument about how to rectify or make “reparations” for past policies. It is rather an effort to define how, given the current circumstances that past policies and other features of history have produced, governments committed to respecting and advancing human dignity, rights, and freedom in general, with special responsibilities to some, can best fulfill their principles, meet their duties, and realize their goals now and in the years ahead.

The Roles of Governments in Coercively Constituting Anglo-­Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive account of how the policies of the United States, the states along the US-­Mexico border, and the Mexican government have all contributed to the identities of the communities in­ volved in current controversies. Yet the most salient facts are not in serious dispute. With the Mexican government struggling to govern its more distant regions, and after US troops prompted a Mexican attack by seeking to oc­ cupy disputed territory, the US government declared war on Mexico in May 1846. Its decision was propelled in part by American expansionists who desired land and by slaveholders anxious about Mexico’s recent abolition of the institution. US military forces went on to defeat their Mexican coun­ terparts and occupy Mexico City, and on February 2, 1848, the war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It forfeited Mexico’s claim to Texas and, in return for $15 million, transferred northwest Mexico, including what is now California, Nevada and Utah and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming to the United States. Mexico gave up roughly half of its land, though these regions were thinly occupied by

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a small percentage of its population (see e.g., Rodriguez 2007, 89–­92, 98–­ 99; García Bedolla 2009, 36–­39). Apart from the indigenous tribes within America’s borders and the territories acquired in the Spanish-­American War, all of whose inhabitants have since been made US nationals or citizens by various statutes, there is no other society in the world that has been coer­ cively compelled to surrender so large a percentage of its territory to the United States. The treaty gave Mexican residents of the transferred lands who chose to remain the option of obtaining US citizenship, and virtually all the es­ timated 75,000 who stayed did so (Ngai 2004, 51). But as the nineteenth and then the early twentieth centuries proceeded, persons of Latino descent increasingly found themselves subjected to a wide range of discriminations by US territorial and then state governments in the region. Prior to the Civil War, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas adopted constitutions that confined voting rights and jury service to white men, though New Mexico permitted Pueblo Indians to vote until Congress changed the policy in 1853 (García Bedolla 2009, 42). Many Mexican Americans were of mixed race ancestry and were deemed nonwhite, especially poor farmers and labor­ ers. Most found themselves governed by legislators, policed by state and local enforcement officials, and tried by courts with limited commitments to equal treatment. Over time many Mexican Americans responded with forms of what scholars term “resistant adaptation”—­acceptance of certain forms of assimilation in return for economic opportunities and somewhat broader rights, while refusing to accept fully the identities and statuses im­ posed by the American territorial and then state governments upon most persons of Mexican descent (Meeks 2007, 4). And though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised that property rights of Mexicans in the transferred territories would be upheld, all claims had to be adjudicated in American courts. They often rejected the limited documentation many Mexicans could offer, even as state governments sometimes legislated in favor of squatter rights, actively encouraging whites to occupy Mexican-­owned lands (García Bedolla 2009, 44–­45). The result­ ing trends toward loss of Mexican lands gained powerful reinforcement from the late nineteenth-­century development policies of the Mexican gov­ ernment under the dictatorial President Porfirio Díaz, and the United States during its corporate-­dominated Gilded Age. Through various means, these governments took control of lands held by indigenous tribes, churches, and many small farmers in order to assist the expansion of largely US-­owned railroads and mining companies on both sides of the border, to whom Díaz gave special rights in return for their support (Powell 1921, 128). US

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agencies also created irrigation systems that made large-­scale commercial farms profitable in the Southwest (Powell 1921, 46–­48; Davids 1976, 173, 180–­89; Meeks 2007, 31, 36). The results were that by 1890, almost all Mexicans in the American south­ west had lost their land, along with innumerable small farmers through­ out Mexico. Many of those farmers moved to northern Mexico and then across the border seeking employment in the rapidly expanding railroads, mines, commercial farms, and in fast-­growing cities, especially El Paso, San Antonio, and Los Angeles, that the Mexican and American measures fos­ tered. Many eventually brought their families along—­though they often did so without any sense that they were forever leaving Mexico (Rodriguez 2007, 131–­36; Meeks 2007, 73–­75; García Bedolla 2009, 47–­51). The significance of this history is that the US government, American ter­ ritorial and state governments, and the Mexican government all used their coercive authority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in ways that displaced substantial populations from their former lands and homes and made them eager to gain better economic opportunities in the United States, even though they still felt strong links to and identifications with Mexico and its territories, language, and cultural traditions. The US and the southwestern state governments generally welcomed the labor of these im­ migrants, yet they also discriminated against, especially, poorer Mexican im­ migrants and Mexican Americans. In Arizona, in particular, the role of the US government was striking. In the early 1900s, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Albert Beveridge (the Indiana senator who celebrated the Spanish-­American War in terms of racial struggle) opposed statehood for New Mexico and Arizona due to their Mexican-­descended populations. The Fifteenth Amendment had abolished racial restrictions on the franchise in 1870. But to gain ad­ mission to the Union, the Arizona territorial assembly imposed a $2.50 poll tax and then an English literacy test for voting in the early 1900s, ef­ fectively disenfranchising poorer and less educated Mexican Americans. The Arizona state constitution then added a ban on voting by those “under guardianship,” which was used to disenfranchise many with both tribal and Hispanic origins. And in 1912, the state legislature required voters to be able to “read the Constitution of the United States in the English language” (Meeks 2007, 28, 42). The United States thus used its power over admission to the Union to prompt, if not indeed compel, “whiter” and more prosperous Arizonans to see themselves as the proper governors of their state because of their racial, cultural, and class identities and to act accordingly, or else remain territorial

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residents and so less than full citizens themselves. In the era when US gov­ ernment agencies and courts explicitly denied that the former Spanish colo­ nies acquired in the Spanish-­American War were racially and culturally fit to be fully “incorporated” into the United States, the northern European descended Americans in other states also felt authorized to enact similar restrictions on their residents with Mexican ancestry. In the first half of the twentieth century, most of the southwestern states then used various means—­sometimes explicit Jim Crow segregation laws, sometimes restrictive covenants, sometimes police harassment, sometimes deportation—­to impose segregated schooling, housing, and restricted eco­ nomic and political rights and opportunities on Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants who were deemed nonwhite. Predictably, many re­ sisted. Others responded by distancing themselves from African Americans and espousing the superiority of the white race and their membership within it—­thereby strengthening the beliefs of “whites” that they deserved their superior statuses. Some Mexican Americans in fact opposed further Mexican immigration, particularly unauthorized immigration, seeing it as a source of their own stigmatization (Meeks 2007, 109–­17; Rodriguez 2007, 159–­78; García Bedolla 2009, 51–­63). These circumstances helped make possible various guest worker initiatives, including the Bracero program be­ gun in 1942, through which US employers hired Mexican laborers when needed but subjected them to harsh discrimination. The United States then deported the laborers—­and often their American-­born children and other Mexican American citizens—­whenever job markets dried up (Tichenor 2002, 173–­74; Vargas 2011, 220, 263–­98). In the second half of the twentieth century, many consequences of these past governmental policies continued, including patterns of educational and residential segregation and economic discrimination even in more pros­ perous regions like northern California, and divisions continued among Mexican Americans, even as most still embraced both American and Mexican identities in one way or another (Vargas 2011; Pitti 2003, 173–­97; Stephen 2007, 63–­94). But eventually the triumphs of the modern African American civil rights movement, the forms of political and cultural consciousness stirred by the related Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, the ex­ panded protections against bars to voting affecting Mexican Americans pro­ vided by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and particularly its 1975 amendments, and the rise of modern multiculturalism, all worked to limit public and private discrimination against Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants and to encourage renewed, widespread senses of transnational Mexican American dual “cultural citizenships” (Meeks 2007, 180–­210; Rodriguez

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2007, 201–­61; García Bedolla 2009, 63–­92). Under pressure from civil rights and labor forces, Congress ended the Bracero program in 1963 (Tichenor 2002, 201–­11; García Bedolla 2009, 52–­53). The symbolic affirmations and public policies designed to promote equal rights and to facilitate many forms of cultural diversity that the US government and many state and local governments established in those decades are also important parts of the story of how American governments have used their power to constitute persons’ values and aspirations—­now in more inclusive ways. Yet after the 1965 Immigration Act, both documented and undocu­ mented Mexican immigration grew, planting the seeds of recent immigra­ tion controversies. A major effort at comprehensive immigration reform in 1986 that sought to stem the influx of undocumented immigrants while granting amnesty to millions already present in the United States, and modifications of those reforms in 1990, only increased legal immigra­ tion while failing to reduce undocumented entries, still overwhelmingly Mexican (Zolberg 2006, 382–­83; Stephen 2007, 76). Although policy ana­ lysts dispute the relative amounts, most agree that the costs of providing social services to immigrants, documented and undocumented, have since grown. These costs have fallen mostly on the state and local governments in the areas where immigrants are concentrated, while the federal government benefits most from their taxes and the national economy in general gains from immigrant labor (Zolberg 2006, 392–­93). The decisions of the US and Mexican governments as well as the Canadian government to join in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 only greatly accelerated the movement of persons as well as goods across, especially, the US-­Mexican border (Hing 2010, 7–­28). In the 1990s, some immigrant receiving states, particularly those in which “Anglo” majorities confront substantial minority populations, first began adopting their own measures to reduce immigration, but these measures too had little impact (Zolberg 2006, 385–­88). And as the decisions of the Arizona state legislators to require that all the state’s municipalities coop­ erate in immigration enforcement reveal, even within those states, some local governments and agencies resisted efforts to “crack down” on undocu­ mented immigrants, while others zealously cooperated. Then in 1996 the US government, whose modern policies had done so much to generate contemporary immigration and to combat various forms of discrimination, began instead to reduce immigrant rights once again, particularly social welfare entitlements and procedural protections against deportation, and to push states to do the same. In June of 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Among other

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changes, it sped up the timetable for deportation processes and made many immigration law offenses subject to the punitive measures authorized by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act (RICO). Its Sec­ tion 439 also authorized state and local officials to assist the federal gov­ ernment in these endeavors.7 In August, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, replac­ ing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grants to the states. The law also made immigrants arriving after its enactment ineligible for all federally funded means-­tested benefit programs like TANF and Medicaid for five years and denied new immigrants Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and food stamps altogether (Singer 2004, 23, 27–­28). In September, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in­ creased resources for immigration law enforcement, including detentions, and authorized heightened worksite investigations, among other mea­ sures. It specifically empowered states to play larger roles in immigration enforcement.8 Consequently, when after 2000 the Arizona legislature passed the vari­ ous measures leading up to SB 1070, its members could and did claim they were seeking to comply more fully with federal laws that were failing to achieve their objectives, not interfering with federal policies. Again, the fact the legislature also banned ethnic studies courses indicates that their con­ cerns went beyond removing illegal aliens from their state. At least in part, these policies were state decisions to perpetuate rather than repudiate their own complicity in past and present discriminatory, coercive policies toward persons of Mexican descent. Yet it must also be acknowledged that they were expressing ethnocultural notions of who should be an Arizonan and a US resident that the US government had actively fostered in the past and had arguably appeared recently to express again. As anthropologist Lynn Stephen has pointed out, Arizona and oth­ ers states have passed their attrition through enforcement measures over the opposition of a range of grassroots transborder organizations, such as Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the San Augustín Transborder Public Works Committee, Mujeres Luchadoras Progresistas, and others. These groups, some based in Mexico, some in the United States, many with affiliates in multiple states on both sides of the border, work “within two national contexts” to “establish legitimate forms of cultural citizenship” and to “move some parts of their cultural citizenship into the arena of legal citizenship as formal rights defined in the constitutions and legal codes” of state and national governments in the United States and Mexico (Stephen

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2007, 20, 236, 271, 316). Their activities confirm that aspirations for flexible forms of dual citizenship remain profoundly significant to many of Mexican descent whose lives have been pervasively shaped by American policies, lo­ cal, state, and national, past and present. Yet the opponents of dual citizen­ ship have also been pervasively constituted by American policies, in ways that make many feel they have as much or more at stake in limiting Mexican immigration as the immigrants do.

Toward Appropriate Policies and an Enabling Politics These relatively undisputed historical facts make a strong case for recog­ nizing that the US government has special obligations to Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a result of the ways it has coercively constituted their identities, values, and aspirations, even as it also has special obligations to other members of its constituent states, local governments, and citizenry. It is finding policies that can meet these obligations effectively, and build­ ing political support to enact them, that represent the real challenges. But quests to define those policies and win endorsements of them may be aided by recognition of the responsibilities they should seek to fulfill. To summarize the “special obligations” case: by taking half of Mexico’s land through conquest, the United States created a population in what was now its southwest who had no choice but to accept US authority and some form of membership in its community if they wished to continue to live their lives where they resided. The US and Mexican governments then both used their power to assist and often mandate forms of economic develop­ ment that cost many mestizo Mexicans and Mexican Americans their lands and left them with labor for US-­owned production, transportation, and ag­ ricultural enterprises, on both sides of the border, as their best economic opportunities. But the US territorial governments also adopted mandatory policies that provided these Mexican and Mexican American workers with restricted political, legal, residential, educational, and economic rights and opportunities, and, most strikingly in the case of Arizona, actively pres­ sured the “Anglo” citizens of those regions to create states that did the same. Those patterns persisted through much of the twentieth century, even as the national government began banning many forms of discrimination and encouraging various kinds of cultural accommodations, and even as its im­ migration and trade policies produced national revenues and economic benefits while generating social policy costs that fell heavily on the primary immigrant-­receiving states and locales. It is perfectly understandable, if it is not indeed inevitable, that these past

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and present policies have generated large numbers of persons who in various ways feel themselves to be dual nationals—­who value the economic oppor­ tunities available in the United States, who endorse many official American values of human rights, social mobility earned through work, and demo­ cratic self-­determination, but who also feel themselves to be part of Mexican cultural traditions and communities. Many see themselves as effectively compelled to seek homes and jobs in the United States and wish to be pro­ ductive, contributing residents, but they also wish to maintain as much of their Mexican identities and to maintain as close ties to their relatives and ancestral regions in Mexico as possible. And they see and feel in these ways in significant measure because that is how US policies, along with Mexican ones, have constructed their experiences in the world. In recent years the Mexican government, for reasons of perhaps enlightened self-­interest, has responded by making adoption of formal dual citizenship more feasible and by protesting US and American state actions against Mexican immigrants. There is a strong case that the US government is obligated to do the same. But at the same time, the US government has also used its power in the past and present to shape the identities, values, interests, and policies of the southwestern and western states and their officially “white” citizens. It long fostered beliefs that those states needed to be governed primarily by whites, even as its immigration and economic policies fostered (and continue to foster) the presence of many poorer Mexican and Mexican American labor­ ers in those states. The resulting political tensions and social policy burdens must be seen as in part things the US government has coercively imposed on these citizens and states, through the same actions that have produced Mexicans and Mexican Americans with aspirations for various forms of dual political, economic, and cultural citizenship. If the United States has obliga­ tions that point toward facilitating these dual citizenships, then, it also has obligations to its states and localities and their citizens to help them resolve the economic and political challenges that such facilitation involves. What policies might best respond to these conflicting imperatives? The United States, like most modern nations, has structured its immigration priorities overwhelmingly in terms of the perceived interests of its current citizens. Since 1965, American policy makers have understood that to mean giving priority to immediate family members, a criterion that has facilitated Mexican immigration, and to persons with economically valuable skills, a criterion that as applied has usually favored the highly educated and techni­ cally skilled, not most Mexican applicants for immigration. It is controver­ sial to privilege the interests of existing citizens in these ways, though there are strong arguments in favor of doing so. Yet few are likely to argue that

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special obligations to their own citizens are the only obligations, or even the only special obligations, which governments that profess commitments to human rights and dignity ever have. The arguments and evidence reviewed here are sufficient, I think, to es­ tablish that the United States has some special obligations to Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Without attempting to weigh them against all of the nation’s other obligations to other outsiders and the diverse array of its own inhabitants, let me note how the special obligations could be factors in American policy making and their implications. Because US policies have done so much to make Mexicans the most numerous sources of both legal and illegal immigrants to the United States, the United States has strong reasons to give explicit priority to Mexicans in the legal immigration queues, including undocumented Mexicans already in the United States, even if it decides that overall immigration levels have to be curbed. To give prefer­ ence in immigration policies to Mexicans who have entered illegally over applicants from other countries who have followed the legal processes, or even over undocumented aliens from other regions, would admittedly be far from perfectly fair. Yet doing so would bring the United States’ official immigration policies more in line with what its actual immigration poli­ cies have been and are likely to remain, in ways that would recognize the special status of Mexican applicants that the United States has coercively created. Similarly, the United States has a special obligation to facilitate the adoption of official and practical forms of dual Mexican American political, economic, and cultural citizenship, as the Mexican national government has done, since it has done so much to constitute populations who have trouble conceiving of themselves as otherwise having meaningful identities and lives. Giving weight to these priorities would, however, compound the eco­ nomic, political, and social pressures generated in the major immigrant-­ receiving states by Mexican immigration. The ways the United States has contributed to widely shared senses of proper economic, political, and cul­ tural ordering in those states, as well as the ways it has fostered Mexican im­ migration, are major sources of those pressures. The United States therefore has obligations to help alleviate them. It might do so in part by bearing a greater share of the costs of social benefit programs (thereby spreading the burden of those costs across the nation’s citizenry), rather than shift­ ing most of those burdens to the states or denying benefits altogether, as it did in 1996. It might also do so by requiring that immigrants receive wage and working conditions that match those provided to native workers,

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as proponents of comprehensive immigration reform have urged, while also trying to find more ways to foster greater economic opportunities and improved working conditions in Mexico. And it must resume policies that signal to non-­Mexican state citizens and leaders that the nation’s true prin­ ciples point toward extending opportunities without demanding sweeping cultural assimilation, contrary to the practices it has often fostered in the past. It might do so through programs providing multicultural assistance to immigrants, as Canada does (Bloemraad 2006). Are these suggestions politically utopian? Perhaps, yet there is much in place on which to build support for such policies. The Anglo-­authored 1986 country hit song invoked in the title of this chapter, “Living in the Promiseland,” is a reminder that many Americans of all backgrounds value the nation’s traditions of receptivity to immigrants. More prosaically, to­ day’s Latino organizations are more proimmigrant than their predecessors, and they work in closer alliance on many issues with a range of other civil rights organizations and those national and state government agencies that still support many of the forms of cultural recognition that Mexican Americans seek. And again, as a result of modern immigration policies and also anti-­immigrant movements that have sparked heightened rates of natu­ ralization and voting, Latinos represent the fastest-­growing demographic sector of the American electorate. They differ on many issues, but most op­ pose policies hostile to various forms of Mexican American dual citizenship. And as the politics of Russell Pearce’s Arizona recall election showed, many influential American employers and economic conservatives continue to re­ gard relatively unrestricted foreign labor as economically valuable, perhaps indispensable—­the main political reason why national policies sharply restrictive of such immigration have not been enacted. Despite the anti-­ immigrant fervor of the 2000s, it is therefore reasonable to believe that over time, a strong coalition will be built favoring immigration policies that give higher priority to legal admissions of Mexicans, including Mexicans work­ ing in the United States without authorization but also without any other illegal conduct. Do these arguments imply that the state-­and local-­level efforts to cre­ ate attrition through enforcement policies should simply be overridden by the sovereign American nation-­state—­despite my advocacy of interlocked but moderate and democratic forms of peoplehood? I believe those poli­ cies should be rejected, but not because of exclusive federal powers inher­ ent in American national sovereignty. As Cristina M. Rodríguez has argued, doctrines of exclusive federal authority over immigration have never been

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firmly grounded in the Constitution’s text. Instead, they emerged in the late nineteenth century from perceived needs for a unified sovereign authority in foreign affairs (Rodríguez 2008, 572). Rodríguez contends that in the twenty-­first century, functional needs have shifted. As on so many issues, cooperative national, state, and local efforts, public and private, are needed to help immigrants integrate fully into American economic, civic, and political life (581–­90). She accepts that a substantial state and local role in regard to immigrants implies nontrivial state and local powers to take “steps that resemble immigration controls” (571). She urges the development and adoption of a new theory of federal­ ism in relation to immigration, in which states and localities would be seen in law and in fact as partners in the development of viable immigration policies, with the federal government retaining primacy in decisions over admission and removal, but with states and localities having a constitution­ ally recognized voice in the ways, means, and terms of the integration of immigrants into their communities and into American life more broadly (572–­73, 609–­37). From the view of democratic processes of peoplehood defended here, it is worth stressing that American constitutional democracy is in fact meant to be not only constitutional but also democratic. Democratic commit­ ments have always meant that we cannot automatically dismiss as illegiti­ mate popular movements for change that do not operate primarily through conventional constitutional channels, such as Article V formal amendment processes, even if they represent major challenges to the substance of ex­ isting policies and constitutional understandings. Constitutional amend­ ments like women’s suffrage and Prohibition have emerged largely through the accumulation of state-­by-­state actions. If the Constitution itself may be changed by such means, then national immigration policies can be as well. Yet this recognition of the democratic legitimacy of efforts to try to adopt attrition through enforcement measures does not mean that these initiatives should in fact be embraced. Even though states and localities do and must play important roles in shaping the fate of immigrants within their bounds, it remains true that they can do so in ways that interfere with executive foreign policy strategies, as well as in ways that violate constitutional guar­ antees of equal protection and statutory civil rights mandates, among other federal laws (Rodríguez 2008, 572–­73). Variations in how state and local governments treat undocumented aliens can also create constantly churn­ ing uncertainties for all concerned, rather than the peaceful resolution of immigration controversies most Americans desire.

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The perspective of the principle of coercively constituted identities and the history reviewed here also indicate that American constitutional values of human dignity make it imperative for national, state, and local govern­ ments to cooperate only in ways that resist and reconstruct, rather than re­ iterate, impulses to subordinate and exclude persons of Mexican descent. Attrition through enforcement policies at the state and local levels fail to ac­ knowledge that those governments, too, have adopted coercive policies that have contributed to the presence and aspirations of those they now seek to drive away. The best response to the failure of the US government to estab­ lish coherent, effective national immigration policies is not to turn to dra­ conian, questionably effective, and ethnically discriminatory state and local measures. Still, the voices from the “bottom up” crying for such actions should be heard as evidence that new immigration strategies—­national, state, local, and also transnational—­must be pursued. This need for new US immigration policies also points to the broader significance of the attrition through enforcement movement for issues of multilevel, overlapping, democratic forms of peoplehood. The political struggles over these new state and local initiatives are occurring because the division of the world into separate national states, and the division of many large states into federated and layered parts, provide structures that can facil­ itate the achievement of many human aspirations, but that frustrate others. Historically, many residents of what became the United States of America and the United Mexican States felt they had to establish national indepen­ dence from their European imperial rulers if they were to have fulfilling lives. Recognition of regional differences and concerns about unduly cen­ tralized governmental power also drove support for federal systems in each new nation. Only very small minorities of the citizens of the United States and Mexico today could be expected to support abandoning either their distinctive national existences or their internal federal structures. However, the existence of federated structures inevitably means that the interests and aspirations of many members of particular states may clash with those of members of other states within the federal system and, even more, that the interests of citizens of some states can clash with the interests that the national government, claiming to speak for the citizens of the whole country, asserts the power to uphold. Similarly, for many reasons, includ­ ing the kinds of interwoven national histories reviewed here, there have al­ ways been many persons with “transborder lives,” in Lynn Stephen’s phrase, whose aspirations cannot be fulfilled by assimilating fully into standard forms of membership in one nation, much less one state or province. Many

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living within state and national structures are unlikely to see their interests and values fully aligned with those of “transborder” populations. Modern immigration controversies suggest that the answers to these tensions inher­ ent in the existence of multilevel and overlapping political memberships cannot be found simply by reasserting the allegedly unbridled sovereign prerogatives of national governments. They are also not likely to be found if national, state, or local governments or citizens dismiss the claims of others whose identities, affiliations, and interests exist largely because of what the governments and citizens in question have done in the past and present. Instead, officials and citizens of different but historically intertwined governments, arranged both vertically and horizontally, need to accept semi-­sovereign conceptions of their authority and moderate forms of politi­ cal peoplehood. Accepting that each government is at most semi-­sovereign means recognizing the necessity for cooperative (though still contested) development of policies in which different governments perform different but complementary functions according to their resources and capabili­ ties, much in the manner that Rodríguez advocates. Embracing moderate forms of peoplehood means tolerating, indeed often valorizing, multiple memberships, allegiances, and conceptions of identities, including national identities, so long as persons are willing to contribute to the collective well-­ being of each of the communities they inhabit. There will be times when finding policies on which officials and con­ stituents of different governments can agree will be very difficult, and when fulfilling obligations to one political community will make it hard, perhaps even impossible, to fulfill obligations to another. Yet America’s immigration past and present suggests that undocumented aliens are less of a threat to local, state, and national well-­being than many proponents of restrictive initiatives believe, and that current immigration problems cannot be solved through exclusive federal policy making, as many opponents of those ini­ tiatives insist. It is likely that if those who value multitiered governance with overlapping memberships accept more fully that this means valuing semi-­sovereign governments and moderate senses of membership, they will be better able to find ways to make the forms of political life they inhabit and esteem more effective in contributing to their lives and the lives of all concerned. The construction of such a politics would probably be aided by widespread acceptance that the United States has some special obliga­ tions to Mexicans and Mexican Americans to facilitate the forms of dual citizenship to which many of them aspire. The burden of this chapter has been to show that there is much to be said in favor of recognition of such obligations.

Nine

Multiple Citizenships and the Legacies of Imperialism

The Context of Increasing Multiple Citizenships Because the aim here is to elaborate implications of the principle of coercively constituted identities, I do not survey in detail the rich array of developments that are making a world of moderate, interlocked, flexible, and democratic forms of peoplehood more imaginable. But as context for the policy proposals I am suggesting, it is important to emphasize that this world is becoming more conceivable because in many ways it is already being created, and through relatively voluntary, consensual political processes. As previously noted, global political trends today display two linked, even if in some respects contradictory, features. The first is the proliferation of new forms of transnational political as well as economic federation, notably the European Union and, in aspiration if not so much in reality, the African Union and the Union of South American Nations (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, UNASUR). The second is increased acceptance of devolution, as in the heightened autonomy now possessed (with continuing controversies) by Catalonia in Spain, and by Wales and Scotland in Britain, with Scotland currently considering full independence (Benz and Papadopoulos ed. 1996; Greer 2007; Ishmael 2012; Maas 2013). Policies of multiculturalism in many countries, fostered in part by international treaties protecting minority rights, have also afforded a range of ethnic, religious, and indigenous groups greater cultural, legal, and in some cases political recognition, even as those groups are officially full and equal, albeit differentiated, citizens (e.g., Kymlicka 2007; Triadafilopoulos 2012). These developments show that transformations of the never fully realized Westphalian model of a world of internally relatively homogeneous and fully sovereign nation-­states into new global forms of political organization

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are well underway. Often they are occurring because many actors and interests within existing nations believe they can advance their economic, political, and cultural aspirations more fully through creating multilayered and at least putatively democratic federations of governments and peoples, with distinct but overlapping ways of life. When on November 30, 2012, the participants in the sixth UNASAR summit agreed in principle to advance “in a flexible and gradual manner towards the consolidation of the South American identity . . . with the aim of attaining a true South American citizenship as the backbone of an integrated South American space,” several national presidents stressed that seeking greater political unification was an effort to “collectively promote, strengthen, and defend democracy in the region” and to combat “poverty and injustice” (Ishmael 2012). Even if the pioneering modern example of the European Union shows that these efforts at greater continental-­wide political and economic unity are likely to struggle to realize their civic and economic equity goals, numerous other developments are working against the maintenance of discrete sovereign national peoples. Multiple nationalities have become more common; more than 2.5 billion people worldwide now live in countries that allow for dual nationalities, making citizenship increasingly “deterritorialized” and “more flexible, expansive, and variable in its payoff to holders” around the world, as David Cook-­Martín has observed (2013, 154–­55 160–­61; cf. Sejersen 2008). He traces this still-­burgeoning pattern of both “plural” and “multilevel” memberships chiefly to states’ competition for desirable workers of many types, to the influence of international economic agencies and corporations in favor of greater labor mobility, and to the demands of the “cosmopolitan few” who desire and can afford comfortable lifestyles in several national locations (2013, 159, 162–­64). Similarly, Jean-­Michel Lafleur, focusing on Italy and Mexico, has argued that “emigrant elites” in many parts of the world have with increasing success demanded “the right to vote in home-­country elections from abroad because they want to have a say in the polity of which they still consider themselves members,” despite long residencies abroad that they expect to continue indefinitely (Lafleur 2013, 133). Sometimes they have been able to do so because of their perceived economic value to their home countries, sometimes because of their political utility for certain candidates and officials. And sometimes they have met considerable resistance—­but Lafleur believes that on the whole, the rise of external voting has worked to promote “legislative cooperation” and “improved dialogue between diasporas, home societies, and receiving societies” (2013, 150–­54, 160). These trends toward transnational political and economic unions, en-

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hanced autonomy for regions and groups within existing national states, and accompanying increases in differentiated citizenships, including plural citizenships and external voting rights, all mean that large numbers of significant political actors and groups are displaying a willingness to create voluntarily more multiple, flexible, intertwined forms of peoplehood as urged here. At least some of these groups are likely to prove to be already-­influential constituencies for claims of transnational obligations. Because many of them have sought to facilitate multiple citizenships for self-­interested reasons, they cannot be counted on to support appeals made purely in the name of moral principles, especially unfamiliar ones. But just as in the case of Mexican immigration to the United States, there is ample evidence that in many locales, those appeals may be able to garner broad backing because they can gain support not only from those who agree with them normatively but also from others who decide that proposed reforms will prove beneficial to them in different ways.

The Obligations Incurred by Imperially Constituted Identities The last chapter suggested that ceteris paribus, those born and raised under extensive and recent colonial governance have a strong claim to full citizenship in the colonial power if they wish it, because of colonialism’s impacts on their political, economic, educational, cultural, religious, and marital and familial lives. The argument for this conclusion tracks the one advanced for the special obligations of the United States to Mexicans, but it is still more straightforward, so I will not elaborate it at length here. In brief, it applies whenever an imperial government has forced a current population or their recent ancestors to become its subjects, thereby shaping and limiting their constitutive experiences and prospects. If the once-­imperial regime now presents itself as a constitutional democracy committed to promoting free self-­realization by all insofar as it can, limited by special concern for its own people, then it has a special duty to open its civic doors to those who, due to its coercive actions, believe they can best achieve their aspirations as its citizens. To continue with the case of the United States, this imperative is particularly pertinent to Filipinos born under US domination during the twentieth century, especially Filipino Amerasians—­usually children of overseas American personnel who worked at the military bases the United States kept in the Philippines from 1898 to 1992. Because the United States conquered the Philippines during the Spanish-­American War, then ruled it as an American territory until 1946, and then maintained an intimidating

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military presence for nearly a half century thereafter, its coercive actions profoundly shaped the identities and aspirations of many who still reside there, as well as many Filipino immigrants to America. Today in the Philippines, Amerasians often “face relentless discrimination” and suffer disproportionately from “unemployment, poverty, domestic violence and sexual abuse,” partly because biologically and socially, they have been constituted as semi-­ American. Most of them “dream of coming” to the United States for a “better life” (Lapinig 2013). These facts make a strong case for granting Filipino Amerasians US citizenship if they desire it, and for granting all Filipinos special access to immigration and American citizenship. Military conquest and subsequent occupation of a territory and its population do not, however, create these sorts of obligations in all circumstances. When a national government has taken coercive actions only in defense of its citizens against unjust aggression, as in the United States’ response to the declarations of war against it by the Axis powers in December 1941, there is nothing in the principle of coercively constituted identities that implies that the nation has accepted special obligations to its attackers, beyond those defined by the international laws of war. But if and when that nation wins a military victory and, instead of simply ceasing hostilities and signing a peace treaty, occupies the attacking nation and imposes new political, economic, social, and cultural systems on it, some obligations on the part of the occupier may arise. Their extent depends in part on how far the new systems are seen by the inhabitants of the occupied nation as simply products of coercive impositions or as expressive of their own choices. For example, many Japanese see their postwar constitution as embodying values and traditions they cherish, though it was strongly shaped by US occupying forces. Others criticize it as either excessively or, ironically, insufficiently novel—­but for most it is part of their distinct Japanese history and identity, not a foreign implant that gives a basis to seek more from the United States (Koseki 1997). And while the results of an occupation can be legitimately criticized, the nation that was the original aggressor must recognize, as most Japanese do, that its government and citizens have obligations arising from their coercive actions, which may reasonably be understood to include adoption of a new, more just political regime that abides by international law. A former enemy’s role in that sort of transition does not foster obligations on its part. But the situation is different when a country has acquired colonies and occupied territories on its own initiative. If, according to the principle of coercively constituted identities, Mexicans and Filipinos have the strongest claims to be the beneficiaries of special obligations incurred by the United States through its policies of expansion,

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Mexico because of its massive land losses followed by US complicity in extensive economic coercion over the next century, the Philippines because of their more than four decades as a US territory followed by an extensive US military presence for another half century, then certain Caribbean and Central American nations, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, probably rank next, and in that order. Although none was ever officially a US colony, all endured years of US occupation as part of the prerogatives the United States claimed under the Monroe Doctrine (García Bedolla 2009, 11). In Haiti’s case US coercion began well before Monroe. After Toussaint Louverture’s slave-­aided uprising made Haiti the second republic in the Western Hemisphere, and the first black republic, President Thomas Jefferson imposed a ban on trade with the Haitians that severely hampered the new people’s economic development (Renda 2001, 29). After the Civil War US marines repeatedly landed in Haiti to protect American interests against perceived threats, and in July 1915, expressing fears that Haitian instability would endanger the United States amid the turmoil of World War I, Woodrow Wilson ordered US forces to occupy the country and install a compliant president. They also imposed a new constitution and a new marine-­like military, the Gendarmerie (10, 30–­31). But the occupation faced persistent resistance in Haiti and also criticism from the NAACP and others in the United States. In 1934 America withdrew its forces, though it oversaw Haiti’s economy until 1942 (31–­34). Haiti has never prospered, but the United States has since repeatedly resisted most efforts of Haitians to flee economic, security, and health crises and natural disasters by seeking refugee or immigrant status in America, overriding protests from US civil rights groups. The United States did not send troops again, however, until it restored Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-­Bertrand Aristide, to office in 1994 after he was displaced by a military coup (Zolberg 2006, 384). Whatever the merits of that action (Aristide never governed effectively), America’s long history of shaping and often obstructing Haitian economic and political development, combined with its nineteen-­year occupation from 1915 to 1934, mean that its coercive policies have created a special relationship with, and special responsibilities for, Haitians. This history supports claims that those responsibilities should be fulfilled through economic aid and/or preferable immigration treatment. Although the United States has impacted Nicaragua’s development somewhat less decisively than that of Mexico, the Philippines, and Haiti, and Nicaraguan immigration has never posed the same level of controversy,

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the history is nonetheless similar. After long encouraging Nicaraguans to believe the United States would support a trans-­isthmus canal there and after several prior military interventions, the United States occupied Nicaragua for a slightly longer period than Haiti, from 1912 to 1933, largely to prevent the creation of a canal rivaling the one the United States had finally built in Panama (García Bedolla 2009, 151). Michel Gobat has stressed the paradox that these interactions led many Nicaraguans to “embrace U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms,” even as they resisted US imperialism and sought not to emigrate but to build an independent Nicaragua (Gobat 2005, 2, 280). Then during the Reagan years, the CIA aided the Contra reb­ els’ military operations against the leftist Sandinista regime, producing turmoil that drove both political and economic refugees to the United States, the first substantial Nicaraguan inflow. For a few years American authorities welcomed anti-­Sandinista Nicaraguan asylum seekers (García 2006, 19–­ 20, 113–­18). Those policies ended in the Clinton years, but they planted immigrant communities that have attracted more Nicaraguans over time. Their numbers have never approached Mexican immigration, reflecting Nicaragua’s small size and also the reality that many Nicaraguans remain hostile to the United States, though they share many American values and institutions. It is likely that most would agree that America has special obligations to aid Nicaraguans as a result of its past coercive policies, but they would have those obligations fulfilled in ways other than privileged access to American immigration and citizenship. Again, the principle of coercively constituted identities implies only that their desires in these regards be given more weight in American policy making than those of most other outsiders. America has also repeatedly intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic and, promising to create peace and democratic institutions, occupied it for a briefer time, from 1916 to 1924 (Rana 2010, 288–­89). And the United States occupied Cuba for five years after the Spanish-­American War, permitting limited self-­rule under an American-­style constitution that asserted US authority over Cuban foreign and debt policies, while obtaining an endlessly renewable agreement to base American troops at Guantanamo Bay, insuring that the United States would be “intimately intertwined in the country’s economics and politics” (García Bedolla 2009, 121–­26). Both through its troops and its support for the United Fruit Company and other American private ventures, the United States has had substantial impact on many other Latin American nations as well, including Panama, factors that are certainly relevant in considering immigration and citizenship policies (García Bedolla 2009, 150–­51). Beyond Latin America, the United States has intervened militarily in re-

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cent decades in many other locations, notably Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where it played a major role in crafting a new and not very effective constitution. These interventions have not included long periods of direct governance by occupying US forces, and they have not been very successful in advancing American objectives. But they certainly create special obligations at least to residents in these countries who have allied with the United States, often making it hard for them to continue their lives in their native lands. The United States has sometimes been all too reluctant to offer aid and asylum to many of these allies (Smith 2010, 295–­96). All these histories are complex, so the priorities suggested by the principle of coercively constituted identities can reasonably be debated. Still, when the duration, range, and penetration of American coercive actions are weighed, it is tolerably clear that the impacts of coercive American policies on the development of Mexico and the Philippines, followed by Haiti, have been the most massive and enduring, and that Mexicans, followed by Filipinos, raise the policy issues that involve the largest populations and the greatest controversies, and so most need to be resolved. And because many other factors besides claims arising from coercively constituted identities deserve to be considered in policy making, it is prudent to be wary of numerous expansive claims for obligations arising from governmental coercive measures, and to establish priorities. That does not mean that other claims should be dismissed, only that they are more likely to be outweighed by conflicting legitimate concerns. One question that immediately arises is, given that the world’s history has been filled with violence that helped create most if not all of the communities we have now, how far back do obligations borne of coercive policies extend? How recent is “recent”? At some point the impacts of past coercive colonial measures on present noncitizen populations seem so remote as not to warrant any such duties. After more than 230 years of US independence, for instance, it does not make sense to suggest that Britain is obligated to offer special opportunities for UK citizenship to Americans, even though its coercive policies deeply shaped American identities, values, and aspirations in ways that undeniably persist today. The vast majority of Americans now neither want nor need British citizenship to lead meaningful lives, so any British obligations to the heirs of its former colonial subjects in the United States can and should be said to belong to the past. But in many other instances, a similar conclusion cannot hastily be reached. As Daniel Butt has argued, the generations that make up any enduring national political community overlap, and successors benefit from policies that perpetuate the consequences of past coercive actions of their

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governments (Butt 2006, 362–­64). As a rule of thumb, obligations should probably be traced back about three generations, roughly two-­thirds to three-­quarters of a century since the end of a colonial regime. Of the cases discussed so far, only the Philippines was still experiencing direct US occupation and territorial governance as late as 1940, though the United States has continued to hold the lands gained in the Mexican-­American War, to enforce restrictive policies especially toward Mexican and Haitian immigrants and refugees, to maintain its Guantanamo base, and to undertake military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. A “75 years since occupation” rule of thumb can help decide on priorities in determining obligations, but it should not erase all responsibilities arising from other recent coercive actions. Many others of today’s wealthy constitutional democracies, including the major European powers, openly practiced imperialism up through World War II and have taken coercive actions since, so they too can credibly be assigned obligations to assist their former colonies, in many cases including special access to their citizenship for those who desire it. That imperative is pertinent to, for example, the residents of the former African colonies that the French subjected to the assimilationist imperatives of their mission civilisatrice, and also to many residents of Britain’s former colonies whom it now deems “overseas” citizens, lacking rights to enter the United Kingdom (Howard 2009, 41, 159–­60). Whether imperial policies were defended by grand promises to bring true civilization and religion to less fortunate peoples or as endeavors to serve a home country’s economic and geopolitical interests, the fact that a nation has within memory coercively shaped the lives of colonized peoples through coercive rule makes a prima facie case that the nation has duties to aid its subjects to fulfill the aspirations they have formed as a result.

The Politics and Economics of Global Inequality The logic of the general normative case just made for certain kinds of special obligations to noncitizens demands that it be elaborated for each state contextually, through analysis of that state’s history of coercively constituting the identities and aspirations of persons it does not currently recognize as its own full and equal citizens. The special obligations of former imperial powers such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Japan, and many more to their various former colonies and protectorates, and the extent to which they are already recognizing

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and fulfilling those obligations, requires close case-­by-­case attention, of the sort the previous chapter sought to provide in regard to the United States and Mexico. Readers may be relieved to learn that it is not feasible for me to provide detailed studies of the historic relationships of other communities. My hope here is only to encourage others to pursue similar analyses of the many political communities and populations that have been shaped by modern imperialism. I also wish to call attention, however, to the fact that all those histories are part of a global context with certain relatively indisputable features that provide additional reasons why advocacy of the principle of constituted identities in relation to the legacies of modern colonialism may prove valuable today. As previously observed, in the twenty-­first century, the international realm is structured as a system of severe global economic inequalities. These inequalities are in significant measure due to imperial policies that stretch back over centuries. The inequality between the incomes of the world’s wealthiest countries and its poorer ones grew dramatically in the heyday of European imperialism, increasing steadily from 1800 on and five times between 1870 and today (Pritchett 2006, 16). Most of the world’s colonial systems were dismantled after World War II, especially those based in Europe and Japan. But that does not mean that they can be consigned to the dustbins of history. In ensuing decades, the economic advantages many industrialized former colonial nations possessed allowed for the continuing growth of global economic inequality. From 1960 to 1991, the global income share of the world’s twenty richest nations rose from 70 percent to 85 percent (Pieterse 2002, 1023). And while rapid economic growth in India and China has diminished global economic inequalities in some respects in the last two decades, for most countries the gap between their incomes and those of the wealthy nations has continued to increase (Firebaugh and Goesling 2004, 297–­99; Pritchett 2006, 17). Most scholars accept that policies that produced resource transfers from colonies to their imperial metropoles exacerbated global economic inequality during the decades of formal colonialism, and that measures fostering such transfers have persisted in the modern postcolonial era, even if metropole policies often contributed to educational and economic development for some colonized populations and sectors (Pieterse 2002, 1034). For all those who regard these levels of inequality as undesirable, a central question for twenty-­first-­century politics must be: what postimperialist policies hold promise for reducing them? In recent years, developmental economist Lant Pritchett has argued forcefully that perhaps the single most

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effective way to alleviate global poverty and to reduce severe global economic inequalities is to enhance labor mobility from poorer nations to richer ones (Pritchett 2006). Pritchett is not concerned with whether the richer countries in question have had any past coercive relationship with the poorer regions who might send labor to them, but his analysis recognizes that most of the world’s wealthiest nations are in fact former imperial powers (often with a few remnant colonies). He has noted that such economically prosperous countries were in the early twenty-­first century already transferring roughly $70 billion a year in overseas development assistance to poorer countries, even as they spent $17 billion a year to prevent unwanted immigrants—­a figure that has escalated rapidly since he wrote in 2006 and that promises to rise even further in the years ahead. But if in the first decade of the twenty-­first century those rich countries had permitted a 3 percent rise in their labor force through relaxing immigration restrictions, Pritchett contends, poor-­country citizens would have earned $300 billion, four and a half times what they received from foreign aid—­ while the economies of the wealthier countries would have gained a net benefit of $51 billion (Pritchett 2006, 3–­4). Pritchett’s estimates are disputable. But in a careful review of pertinent literature, Devesh Kapur and John McHale conclude that Pritchett and other scholars are right to argue that increases in labor flows “are likely to lead to large gains for the migrants without undue harm to individuals in the receiving countries, at least over the longer run.” They express concern only that wealthier countries will prefer skilled labor and coethnics, and that labor-­exporting countries might generate “rent-­seekers” exploiting the recruitment of poorer immigrants (Kapur and McHale 2006, 157, 167–­71). Those are realistic worries. But if the picture they and others draw is even roughly accurate, it is still unlikely that any existing or proposed initiatives by advanced industrial societies would do as much to address global poverty and inequality as the acceptance of greater unskilled labor mobility.

Special Obligations and Global Inequality But of course, whatever the economic benefits, the political reality is that opposition, not receptivity, to immigration has been increasing in many formerly imperial immigrant-­receiving states, including those of northern and Mediterranean Europe, the United States, and also Japan. The sources of political opposition include concerns that unskilled immigrants will depress wages, especially for those already worse off in the wealthier countries; fears that they will raise demands for social services paid for by taxpayers;

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and anxieties that they will contribute to rising crime rates, perhaps terrorist attacks (Pritchett 2006, 92–­99). Many also worry that rapid demographic change will cause social upheaval, undercutting the stability and solidarity needed to maintain the basic institutions of the wealthier societies, or at least sufficient to undermine civic trust and the willingness of better-­off citizens to sacrifice on behalf of their less fortunate compatriots (Macedo 2011, 303–­8). Whatever one thinks of the merits of any of these specific arguments against increased migration from poorer countries to wealthier ones, they indicate an undeniable reality. There are major political obstacles to winning support in most modern economically advanced nations for enhanced labor migration, particularly of unskilled labor. Those obstacles must be confronted if what Pritchett and others argue to be the most effective tool for reducing global economic inequalities is to be used to a significantly greater extent than it is now. It is here that attention to special obligations to some noncitizens whom governments have coercively shaped—­rather than focusing on the entire world’s poor or all of humanity more abstractly—­may prove politically beneficial. The task of changing the self-­focused policies of wealthier nations requires building coalitions within and beyond those nations’ borders that are as broad, as powerful, and as strongly motivated as possible. Appeals to the sorts of notions of moral obligation that are bound up with senses of shared identity may well have important roles to play in such coalition building, along with appeals to material interests and to more abstract conceptions of justice. And given how daunting the challenges are, change will require as many persons working together for many years, motivated by as many compelling reasons, as can be found. Unfamiliar as it may seem at first glance, the principle of coercive constituted identities may well have some political advantages over more expansively cosmopolitan arguments in winning support for enhanced immigration flows that can combat global inequality and poverty. The reality is that many wealthy countries with colonial pasts already recognize some special obligations to the populations of their former colonies, because as Marc Howard observes, their governments “imposed enduring—­ and largely negative, of course—­changes on the colonized” (Howard 2009, 42). Spain, for example, has adopted bilateral dual citizenship agreements with most Latin American countries as a way to acknowledge “a certain historical debt” to its former colonies (108). Portugal long gave immigration and naturalizations preferences to countries whose residents spoke Portuguese, generally due to their colonization, though a socialist government

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ended those policies in 2006 (89). France naturalized all Algerians in the 1960s and then gave automatic citizenship to children born in France to parents from former colonies, but not all children of other residents of France (151). These and other preferences that France has given to residents of its former colonies have enabled talented ex-­colonials like the Malian soccer player Seydou Keita to pursue national team memberships and employment opportunities as both a Frenchman and a Malian national—­though at this writing he is playing in Italy (Cook-­Martín 2013, 155). And while Great Britain’s 1981 Nationality Act did not grant full and equal citizenship to its former colonial subjects, it did create a variety of statuses that included privileges for them that persons never colonized by the United Kingdom do not possess (Cook-­Martín 2013, 159–­60). In 1983, Britain’s “Representation of the People Act” even granted voting rights to all “Commonwealth citizens,” including not just “British citizens” but also “British Overseas Citizens” and citizens of a list of Commonwealth countries (Lardy 1997, 77–­78). Many thus formally enfranchised were not entitled to enter Britain under provisions of the 1981 Nationality Act, but they were still included as eligible voters because they had a “special relationship with the United Kingdom” as a result of its “colonial history” (78–­79). On the other side of the world, though Japanese leaders have resisted recognizing any special obligations to the Koreans within and outside Japan affected by imperial Japan’s brutal policies, it has hardly been free from demands that Japan do so. These pressures have come from Korean spokesmen, proponents of international human rights doctrines, Japanese citizens of Korean descent, and many other Japanese who wish to rectify the injustices of their colonial past (Chung 2010). To claim that nations have obligations toward populations they have coerced, especially former colonies, is to make an argument that has many supporters in once-­imperial nations and often some expression in their policies. As the Japanese example also indicates, another source of potential political strength for recognition of special duties to formerly colonized noncitizens is that there are usually people residing within wealthier states who feel strong senses of affiliation to formerly colonized populations and so are willing to work politically on their behalf. This pattern is as clearly visible in the United States as in Japan. Many Americans with ancestry in the Philippines or in other parts of Southeast Asia affected by coercive American policies, such as Vietnamese and Cambodian Americans, identify with many who are suffering in those countries and support greater access for them to the United States. Many strongly agree that the United States has

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special obligations to the people in those regions it has profoundly shaped through its coercive actions. Often these Asian Americans see it as part of their own self-­realization to work politically in concert with members of their countries of origin for American policies that can aid people in need in those countries. That is why many Filipino, Chinese, and Korean organizations participated in the 2006 immigration demonstrations that, although focused on Mexican immigration, sought to work for policies benefiting immigrants from their Asian home countries as well (Cordero-­Guzmán et al. 2008, 601–­2). Coalitions built on such senses of shared identity, devoted to advocating special national obligations to include and assist certain others, may have the potential to provide the kinds of sustained, broad mobilizations on behalf of measures to mitigate particular global inequalities that are likely to prove essential to achieving broader change. And again, they may have success because they appear less threatening than more purely cosmopolitan positions. To grasp the potential of such advocacy for special obligations to poor noncitizens who can claim to have been coercively constituted by specific wealthy states, consider in contrast Ayelet Shachar’s recent suggestions for how advocates of greater global equality might build on “the wider tradition of envisioning new instruments and methods to secure funding for international development projects, addressing structural inequalities, and creating conditions under which people are more likely to find security and opportunity wherever they are born” (Shachar 2009, 106). She proposes that wealthy nations agree to the creation of a “Birthright Privilege Levy,” in which those born into more prosperous states (and into better-­off economic statuses in those states) would pay a one-­time contribution in cash or in service to social projects benefiting the members of less prosperous states. Shachar calls attention to a number of cognate proposals, notably James Tobin’s “currency-­exchange transaction tax” or the “Tobin tax,” first proposed to reduce speculation-­induced volatility in currency trading but recently considered by governments and activists as a way to provide funding to reach the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (Shachar 2009, 100, 106–­7). Shachar suggests that there are political winds blowing already that might carry the Birthright Privilege Levy down from the theoretical stratosphere to earthly reality. If so, I certainly favor seeking to ride those breezes. But the proposals Shachar lists are mostly proffered by academics and do not appear to have great chances of being enacted. A tax on currency exchange transactions,

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which most citizens in affluent countries would pay rarely and which many might not even be conscious of paying, also seems politically a very different kettle of fish than a levy visibly imposed on all members of affluent nations (with exemptions, to be sure, for the less advantaged within those nations), even if the latter is imposed only once in a lifetime (Shachar 2009, 99). The first exacts a fee for transactions that are generally voluntarily undertaken, often for profit. The second imposes one on a status involuntarily acquired. It requires broad acceptance that the fortunate accident of being born into a wealthier society by itself generates obligations to assist those in poorer ones. Although many might agree that the current structure of the world is unjust, many might also balk at the notion that this means they personally have a duty to pay to make it better. It is, after all, a world they never made, and one that even their national governments played a relatively limited role in creating. But such protests are less available when it comes to their country’s histories of coercively governing and, in part, constituting the identities and aspirations of specific noncitizen populations—­populations that, again, often already have highly motivated allies among their own fellow citizens. It may therefore be politically more feasible, albeit admittedly more indirect and gradual, to move against global economic inequalities through a variety of more particularistic initiatives. Some of Shachar’s arguments point in that direction. Like Erskine and others, she correctly notes that while national memberships remain centrally important to billions of people, many people also share in “embedded or overlapping membership affiliations to more than one locus of citizenship” (Shachar 2009, 62). She agrees that there are in fact “transnational ties and identities . . . coexisting with (rather than replacing) our belonging to one or more political communities” that may “constantly help to reshape and refocus each other” (65, 68). To be sure, many of these ties are between residents of more affluent countries, not richer and poorer nations. But again, in many cases it is instead policies and practices coercively imposed by wealthier countries on poorer ones that have created these webs of economic, kinship, social, and humanitarian as well as political relationships. The associations often continue in the postcolonial world. Witness, for example, the large number of Filipino nurses and domestic workers that come to the United States, despite the absence of any special provisions for them to do so, as a result of economic and cultural push/pull factors, reinforced by the nations’ historical relationship (Guevarra 2009, 10–­12, 25–­27, 111–­14). Those senses of special connections may help persuade governmental leaders and important constituencies in more affluent countries to accept that it is in their

Multiple Citizenships and the Legacies of Imperialism  /  261

interest, as well as just, to seek especially to improve conditions in the nations with which they are intertwined, largely through their own coercive measures. Given these sorts of special ties, the goals served by a Birthright Privilege Levy might be more fruitfully pursued in the form of a set of “privileged partners” obligations involving former colonial powers and their colonies. These partnerships might help to establish over time a new international norm holding that insofar as a richer nation has coercively interacted with poorer ones in one or more ways, then it should recognize special duties of assistance to those nations that might include the cash or in-­kind assistance to service projects in the communities of its poorer partners that Shachar defends. Again, many former colonial powers already are doing so to some extent. But governments should also weigh heavily the fact that, if Pritchett is right, such duties might be most successfully discharged not with assistance programs but through greater opportunities for inhabitants of poorer countries to migrate to the higher-­paying jobs the economies of wealthier nations afford. Were they to proliferate, the sum of such partnerships and resulting labor flows might add up to something like the global Birthright Privilege Levy Shachar envisions—­while doing even more to alleviate global poverty and inequality. These partnerships might also transform the political landscape in wealthier nations and around the world in ways that would make further initiatives to address global injustices more feasible. For although the focus here has been on immigration, the argument of special duties to some noncitizens can, again, be fulfilled in various ways. The principle of coercively constituted identities therefore also points to further possibilities for political and economic transformation that merit exploration, including the restructuring of forms of political membership to promote more appropriately and fully intertwined egalitarian citizenships. In light of the dual trends toward transnational political and economic federations and devolution within existing nation-­states we have seen, I believe that one of the central political challenges of the twenty-­first century is to continue to pursue the creation of beneficial types of formal federation, linking existing nation-­states politically in equitable ways, while also permitting considerable self-­governing powers to various sorts of regional and culturally and historically distinctive communities within and often across those nation-­ states. Complex and conflictual as they are, these transformative political efforts can go hand in hand; the more prosperous and powerful and the less advantaged communities contemplating such federated arrangements

262 / Chapter Nine

may find them more acceptable if each is permitted considerable autonomy within a broadly democratic federal framework. Why should political actors who hold leading positions in existing regimes see such power-­sharing arrangements as desirable? Often there are both economic and national security reasons for even rich and powerful nations to do so, especially when other parts of the world are achieving greater regional economic and military strength through federation. And it seems likely that leaders in poorer communities would be more attracted to such federated arrangements if they not only received substantial autonomy but also an economically “privileged partner” status in relation to the wealthier societies in the federation, a status that might include increased opportunities for lucrative labor mobility and other sorts of economic benefits. In Europe and in South America, efforts to build political federations, even common citizenship, have followed on, reinforced, and been reinforced by the initial creation of common markets. In contemporary Europe, of course, this has led to demands that wealthier EU nations assist poorer ones. Such demands are never popular. But wealthier societies may be willing to pay such prices for the economic, security, and political benefits they receive from federation—­including, for former colonial powers, the lessening of internal domestic political agitation tied to the legacies of their colonial pasts—­so long as they otherwise retain significant autonomy to pursue their comfortable ways of life. As with immigration policy, using arguments of special obligations to some noncitizens as a means to build support for the construction of various forms of transnational economic and political federation may prove to be a path toward a world with reduced global inequalities that is more politically and economically effective and traversable than seeking to expand current forms of foreign aid.

Conclusion The arguments in this chapter have been motivated by two convictions: that around the world as in the United States, normative debates over immigration focus too heavily on a contrast between “special” duties to citizens and “general” duties to all humanity, without adequate attention to arguments for recognizing some “special” rights to noncitizens, especially residents of former colonies; and an acceptance that enhanced labor immigration might be dramatically more effective in reducing global poverty and economic inequalities than the options currently on most political agendas. Combining the two concerns leads to the contentions that wealthier nations who have coercively constituted the identities and aspirations of poorer ones should

Multiple Citizenships and the Legacies of Imperialism  /  263

recognize special obligations to those populations, and that one desirable way of fulfilling those obligations is to provide increased access for labor immigration to the wealthier nations for those in coercively shaped poorer nations who desire those opportunities—­and, if the immigrants wish it, increased opportunities for citizenship as well. More is needed than this brief discussion to make these arguments widely convincing. Again, their own terms demand that they be worked out in different ways in different national contexts. Forms and degrees of coercion have varied widely; there are also other credible arguments for special obligations to noncitizens that must be considered; they may be modified by claims for more general obligations; and any obligations that governments and citizens decide to recognize might be fulfilled in many ways other than immigration and citizenship policies. At the same time, any advantages that may come to richer and poorer countries from increased migrant flows, which obviously are attended by economic and political challenges as well, are not dependent on those flows going only from poorer countries to the specific rich countries that have coercively shaped them. I will be content if these arguments are seen as doing more to reinforce the rising attention to claims of special obligations to noncitizens, and to claims for the global economic desirability of enhanced immigration flows, than they do to make a definitive case for the immigration policies implied by the principle of coercively constituted identities. Nonetheless, there are strong reasons to give those implications serious consideration. Consider the claims that are the opposites of those advanced here: “governments and citizens who have coerced others in ways that are massively consequential for those others’ lives have no responsibilities arising from their actions.” And “it is morally irrelevant that labor flows would reduce global poverty and inequality while aiding the economies of most wealthy countries.” Neither claim is credible. Many of us are, in all likelihood, simply daunted by the implications of taking the arguments advanced here seriously. They suggest controversial changes in current policies and institutions, indeed in the boundaries of national economies and political communities. As I have argued throughout this work, resistance to such change is not only understandable—­there is often much to be said for it. The opposition arises because persons’ sense of their interests and obligations are shaped by the forms of peoplehood in which their identities have emerged, usually in ways that can make substantial transformations appear psychologically and materially threatening, if not indeed morally illicit. Because people have such deeply entrenched conceptions of their identities, interests, and obligations, we must pause before insisting to them that they should not

264 / Chapter Nine

perpetuate their often-­cherished political, social, and economic institutions. At least we must do so if we genuinely wish to respect their dignity and their decisions about what their values are and how they can best be fulfilled. And even if we are confident of our critical normative judgments in the abstract, we also must recognize that it is very difficult to know whether alternative ways of life and institutions would really work out better, given the costs of the conflicts that are likely to arise from efforts to persuade people and peoples to change who and what they now are. But it is also a fundamental lesson of this book that however disruptive and troubling contests over prevailing forms of peoplehood are, sooner or later they will prove unavoidable. To varying degrees they can in fact be seen to be going on virtually everywhere and virtually all the time. The only choices we really have are about how we are going to pursue this conflictual and enormously consequential politics—­how we can make our engagements in it, and it with us, more constructive as we seek to create and sustain institutions, policies, and communities that can contribute to human flourishing. One feature of our collective ride along the spiral of politics is that as long as we live, it is impossible to get off. And as Marx noted long ago, we do not choose the circumstances under which we find ourselves part of that spiral—­including the narratives that give us our senses of who and where we are and what we may become. Yet by exploring those stories and their roles in our lives more fully, we can reasonably hope to enhance our capacities to judge how we can best carry them forward—­thereby finding, if we are fortunate, a satisfying place among the many authors, known and unknown, of the larger human and natural stories in which we are fated to play roles.

Epilogue

This book began by noting that my youth, like everyone’s youth, appears in memory as a process of growing awareness of different but intertwined memberships and narratives that provided me with senses of who I was, could be, and should be. But identities never cease to evolve. Six weeks after I sent this manuscript to the press, my daughter Virginia made me a grandfather. Although my new granddaughter Violet seemed just perfect, at one month she was found to have heart malformations that immediately threatened her life and required a series of major surgeries, with one still pending. Since then, for me all stories have paled in significance compared to that of the cheerful, beautiful baby girl we call the Mighty Violet—­who has overcome all challenges so far, and looks ready for all to come. While revising these chapters and thinking about Violet, it has been impossible not to reflect on what her young life reveals about the stories and issues of peoplehood explored here. Because those issues are so difficult and their answers so uncertain, it is worth noting how many positive developments her story represents. We have reviewed how the politics of peoplehood involves building coalitions around the exclusion or subordination of those disdained by core coalition members, as well as the inclusion of those who can help realize a shared vision of political community and its economic, political power, and constitutive themes. We have seen how in America, national narratives began by valorizing inspiring notions of universal equal rights and by presenting true Americans as a “brotherhood of European Christians,” in ways that long relegated most of those who were not male, not European descended, and not Christian to second-­class or alien status. And we have seen how leaders across the American political spectrum have long featured exceptionalist and providentialist themes framed in organicist, teleological narrative structures that, though adaptable

266 / Epilogue

to extensions of rights to more people over time, have also been useful for resisting greater inclusiveness, and even for imposing new forms of domination and exclusion on colonized and occupied populations. These patterns raise doubts about whether the more moderate, flexible, multiple forms of democratic peoplehood recommended in part III are truly desirable or feasible, especially in America. It is likely that my novel recommendations for immigration policies, expressive of the principle of coercively constituted identities built on the view of the politics of peoplehood advanced here, have for many readers only strengthened those doubts. But consider Violet. One pair of her grandparents divorced, so one of her parents was raised in a joint custody arrangement, something American laws and social practices traditionally discouraged. But this arrangement soon came to be deeply valued by all concerned. As a result, Violet now has six grandparents, one a naturalized US citizen. All have cooperated gladly in supporting her and her parents through her medical crises. The grandparents are of English, Irish, Scottish, German, and Italian descent—­all identities that have at times been intense rivals in Europe and in America, including recently in Britain. These inherited identities are not, however, sources of division in Violet’s family or most of twenty-­first-­century America. The grandparents hold a range of political views, from moderate Republican to liberal Democratic to positions further left, especially on economic issues. Some have business backgrounds, some labor, and some professional. Their religious origins are Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic. Some remain deeply religious, others decidedly not. Violet’s mother is a freelance journalist writing chiefly on women’s issues in a wide range of publications, from political opinion journals to news and fashion magazines—­a profession that very few women could hope to pursue when any of Violet’s grandparents were born. Because one of those grandparents was born an English subject, Violet’s mother grew up with US, English, and EU citizenships, an experience impossible in the America of the 1950s. Violet’s father works for a nonprofit environmental activism group, of a sort that also barely existed then. He and his brother give more priority to their involvements with the natural world, especially mountain climbing around the globe, than they do to their American political identities; the brother has moved first to Chile and then to Thailand. Some of Violet’s third cousins are African American, others are Latino, with parents who wed in states that banned interracial marriages before the Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling. One of Violet’s great uncles is gay and has lived with his legal husband in the Caribbean as well as Rhode Island, though they have always faithfully followed Violet’s progress on Facebook—­all things

Epilogue / 267

unimaginable until recently. Another of Violet’s uncles is autistic but doing well at college, having benefited from legally required special needs educational programs unknown to previous generations. Violet is also benefiting from such programs for her feeding, speech and language, and physical therapies. And Violet’s life was saved because of the availability in modern America of extraordinary new medical procedures, and the skill of her primary surgeon, an immigrant from Canada with South Asian origins. These facts dramatize a vital lesson: with all its many struggles, pendulum swings, and continuing conflicts, America now is a political society in which persons of different national, ethnic, and social origins, different political and religious views, different sexual, marital, and familial preferences, and different conceptions of the importance of American peoplehood itself, all lead fulfilling lives. Today’s America is already far more inclusive in those it regards as full citizens, more expansive in the rights they possess, and more flexible toward multiple political memberships and altered political memberships, than the nation in which my first memories were formed. The story of Violet offers good reasons to believe that efforts in America and elsewhere to make political memberships more egalitarian, flexible, and welcoming toward a greater variety of people and ways of life are not utopian. They have some powerful currents of history running in their favor. Perhaps as Violet grows, those currents will grow still stronger. Perhaps. But the scholar’s cardinal virtue of intellectual honesty requires acknowledgment that the lessons of Violet’s life are not all favorable toward the normative views advanced here. Violet’s exceptional medical care is being paid for through health insurance that is still not affordable for all Americans, and her many related expenses are manageable only because some in her family circle occupy relatively high places on America’s lengthening ladder of economic inequality. And though there is some ethnic, religious, and class diversity in her background, in truth most members still fit comfortably into that brotherhood of propertied European Christians that has always been, if not the “real” American people, the most privileged among them. Despite those economic privileges, Violet’s one naturalized grandparent, who ended up being deeply moved by her naturalization ceremony that included persons from dozens of nations on every continent, still chose to become a US citizen only because federal laws in the 1990s were reducing rights for all resident aliens. Persisting class inequalities and exclusionary impulses, then, are also part of Violet’s background. And though Violet’s family is not unusual, it is far from representative of the full range of Americans in the twenty-­first century. She has only a few relations who are nonwhite or poor, and only a few more who are very conservative

268 / Epilogue

Republicans that deplore many changes in America that most in Violet’s immediate family embrace. We should not overstate how open and inclusive her story shows America to be, or how closely her circumstances resemble those of many Americans today. So inspiring as Violet’s story may be, it cannot answer fully the most decisive question confronting those of us who wish to defend notions of semi-­ sovereign, intertwined, democratic political communities. That is the issue of “the ties that bind,” the basis for the allegiance and willingness to aid others that every society, every political people, needs if it is to survive and flourish, the allegiance and willingness that are inspired and maintained by compelling stories of peoplehood, and especially by their constitutive themes. I have long contended and have here reiterated that given the dangers of such stories, the most desirable accounts are ones that highlight the actual histories of persons and peoples, helping them to decide on what in their heritage they wish to celebrate and continue, and what they wish instead to improve, or simply to leave behind. Many thoughtful respondents have disagreed, arguing that if histories are not simply to be deceptive myths, they are bound to be too complex, too filled with disturbing episodes, and too subject to endless dispute to serve as sources of unity and inspiration for political peoples. And I have to concede that if many people deny that an approach can be a basis of unity, it is not likely to be one. So, given pause but unable to find a better alternative, I have written and compiled here essays and further explorations that do not pretend to announce final answers. Even so, in reflecting on how the American story has made possible the story of Violet, I have been strengthened in one closing conviction. By promoting economic opportunities, scientific innovations, and republican institutions, but also egalitarian inclusiveness and a growing acceptance of cultural diversity that extends to many ways of life and multiple political memberships, America has made the life of Violet and Violet’s family possible. And that is good. It is something for which all of us in the family owe gratitude to the United States of America and to our fellow Americans, whatever our differing levels of patriotism and our criticisms of aspects of our common lives. And Violet’s story justifies faith that if we choose to build on these aspects of American experience—­its extension of broad economic opportunities and political rights, its embrace of many kinds of innovations, its growing acceptance of a more egalitarian diversity at home and abroad—­we can hope here and in other parts of the world to build forms of political peoplehood in which not just one Mighty Violet, but billions of other flowers may bloom.

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

If an academic is fortunate enough to be active for several decades, it becomes impossible to write adequate acknowledgments. Too many debts have been incurred to too many people on too many occasions to be accurately reported. That is especially true of this book, since most of its chapters are substantially revised from conference papers and articles presented, often more than once, in many locations, and read and commented on in many iterations by many readers. With the hopes that the very large number of fellow scholars whose ideas have been invaluable will not feel slighted, I will not list all their names here. Many appear in the book’s citations, but lengthy as those are, they do not begin to include all from whom I have learned. If you suspect that you said or wrote something useful to me, you are surely more right than you know, and you have my profound gratitude. Still, some names should be listed. Meral Ugur Cinar not only coauthored a chapter, she also served first as a research assistant, then as a superb commentator for the whole manuscript. Several undergraduate research assistants, Victoria Koc, Gabriel Nathans, and Reed Smith, enabled me to bring many of the chapters up to date. At informal lunches, my fellow denizens of 3440 Market Street, especially Ian Lustick, Brendan O’Leary, Anne Norton, and Adolph Reed, all helped me reflect on issues addressed here. Joseph Carens and Jason Frank provided extraordinarily helpful reader reports, and John Tryneski was as always a great editor and friend. And as will be evident from this book’s beginning and end, my family is my alpha and omega. They make thinking, writing, and living all worthwhile. Everything I nonetheless have done wrong is of course my own damn fault.

Notes

Introduction

1. This definition of “political” differs from political theorist Sheldon Wolin’s in­ fluential formulation of “the political” as “the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote the wellbeing of the collectivity” (Wolin 1994, 11). Such moments of commonality may occur in the lives of political peoples, but my usage is closer to what Wolin calls “politics”—­“public contesta­ tion” over offices, policies, and resources that is “continuous, ceaseless, and end­ less” (1994, 11). Yet because Wolin’s account features contestation within a “free society,” my terminology resembles still more the German theorist Carl Schmitt’s definition of “the political” as resting on the distinction “between friend and en­ emy,” with the “political enemy” understood as “existentially something different and alien, so that in extreme cases conflicts with him are possible” (Schmitt 2007 [1996], 26–­27). In my terms, insofar as groups are “political peoples,” they claim the allegiance of their members against conflicting demands, and so clashes with other groups that can escalate to coercive force are always possibilities, as Schmitt avers. But in this work the “political” is constituted by the existence of contesta­ tion over allegiances and legitimate authority, not, as in Schmitt, the existence of a sovereign’s decision on who counts as friends or enemies (cf. Schmitt 2007 [1996], 45). 2. Rogers Brubaker (2004) makes this case forcefully and similarly urges analyzing the politics of “group-­making,” though like Lie he focuses on the categories of “ethnicity, race, and nationhood” (11–­13). 3. In so arguing, I part company not just with many political scientists but also dis­ course analysts such as James Paul Gee, who defines politics as “human social in­ teractions and relationships” that have “implications for how ‘social goods’ are or ought to be distributed” (Gee 1999, 2). I am, again, closer to Schmitt’s conception of politics as turning on disputes over who has authority and power to decide in cases of conflict, even though my focus is on the disputes, not the existence, of a sovereign decider. I agree with Gee and other discourse analysts, however, that their work is vital to understanding how social identities and affiliations are constructed and how social activities are performed (Gee 1999, 1).

272  /  Notes to Chapter One C h a p t e r On e

1. This chapter adapts Smith 2014. 2. For example, Theda Skocpol, a founder of historical institutionalism, reported in 1995 that she focused on “institutions” understood as “actual patterns of com­ munication and activity,” rather than “as values, norms, ideas.” Such institutions “grounded” the “goals and capacities and conflicts” of political actors. Skocpol also objected to interpretivist scholarship that “just” explored “how people talk or think” rather than finding “patterns in what they do,” and added that she saw “group identi­ ties” not as “primarily systems of meaning or normative frameworks,” but as defined by “organizational linkages, access to resources, and some sense of ‘success’ over time in political undertakings” (1995, 105). For an overview of historical institutionalism more generally, see Pierson and Skocpol 2002. 3. For some useful overviews of the range of discourse analyses with emphases on the politics of discourses, see, e.g., Gee 1999 and Fairclough 2003. Some scholars prefer to avoid the term ideas in such analyses because they think of ideas and values as things inside our heads and hearts that we never actually see or hear, unlike discourses or narratives. But here ideas means discernibly visible and audible ex­ pressions of human conceptions, always analyzed through fallible processes of inter­ pretation. Use of the terms ideas and ideational indicates only a belief that the same basic conceptions, such as Protestant identity, can appear in different discourses, such as multiculturalism and Christian fundamentalism. 4. For an alternate account of these ideational developments, see King and Smith 2014. 5. The United States Army Command General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a graduate school for American and international military officers and in­ teragency representatives, has in recent years used Stories of Peoplehood along with other scholarly works in its “Local Dynamics of War” program. 6. Hayward 2013 argues that, though stories play the roles in building coalitions that create institutions and deploy policies as I describe here, the results can be human environments that foster senses of identity and interest even without any active nar­ ration of those identities. She has in mind how institutions and policies fostering racially and economically segregated residential patterns can generate “lived experi­ ences” of distance and difference between those who reside in different locations, making them see themselves as different peoples even without any pronounced sto­ ries of distinct peoplehood. Although I think this view may overstate how much “lived experience” operates without reference to the political stories that generated those policies and residential patterns, it is indeed likely that the experience of living under such arrangements provides fertile ground for the propagation of different stories of personal and group identities. Somewhat similarly, Bateman 2013 contends that “stories of peoplehood” often comprise contextual background factors that act as more general constraints on the kinds of particular policies and coalitions actors might otherwise pursue. He accepts, however, that political actors may work to revise the prevailing overarching stories of peoplehood that constrain them, as well as seeking to build coalitions, institutions, and policies that they can be said to authorize. 7. These points reflect useful advice from David Bateman. C h a p t e r Tw o

1. This chapter builds on but modifies Smith 2001 and the lengthier discussion in Smith 2003, 19–­125.

Notes to Chapter Two  /  273 2. Smith 2003 refers to these as “ethically constitutive” stories in order to highlight their normative character. That phrasing can convey the impression that other themes in stories of peoplehood are not presented as normatively desirable, however, so I return here to my original formulation. The distinctive character of constitutive themes is that they present membership in communities as expressive of something normatively valuable in persons’ core identities. 3. This framework bears a potentially misleading resemblance to that of Civic Ideals (Smith 1997), where I argue that up until the Progressive Era, American political ac­ tors primarily advanced conceptions of citizenship that blended what scholars have labeled “liberal” and “republican” conceptions with “ascriptive” notions of “natural” racial and gender statuses (among others). Early Americans most often understood “republicanism” as concerned with the appropriate structuring of political power; many of the views academics now label “liberal” emphasized economic themes of property rights designed to facilitate commercial market economies; and many nineteenth-­century American ascriptive narratives conveyed normative “constitutive” messages of the rectitude of racial and gender civic hierarchies. But most Americans advancing republican, liberal, and ascriptive ideas have addressed economic and po­ litical power issues while also defending views of their nation’s true or best consti­ tutive identity, so there is no one-­to-­one correspondence of the elements of these frameworks. Another comparison between the two may help forestall misunderstandings. Because Civic Ideals contended that republican, liberal, and ascriptive ideologies of membership are analytically distinguishable at the level of explicit ideas, many read­ ers have felt it presents these ideologies as operating in wholly independent and unchanging fashion in American experience. The book sought instead to show how nineteenth-­century American political actors, parties, and movements repeatedly combined and recombined, and often reformulated and repositioned these con­ ceptual ingredients while composing views of American identity and purpose that they could present as compelling in their changing contexts. Similarly, the stories of peoplehood that political actors advance are claimed here always to have eco­ nomic, political power and constitutive themes—­but their content, combinations, and relative prominence vary among different actors, and actors also often change their stories over time. Many critics have also argued that, in particular, liberal ideas should never be deemed analytically distinct from ascriptive ones, because those formulating doc­ trines of rights have always had background assumptions about who could really be bearers of rights. But I take it that all political ideas (probably all ideas) articulated at any time inevitably carry with them some background assumptions reflective of their contexts—­not just liberal ideas. This fact of human consciousness does not render all ideas that carry most of the same background assumptions identical to each other in all respects, nor does it demonstrate that ideas are inseparably linked to their original accompanying assumptions for all time. My critics are right, however, to insist that it is important to surface the assumptions associated with political ideas in particular contexts, along with the ways that different ideas are expressly intertwined in the ideologies of political actors and movements. This lesson emphatically applies to the economic, political power and constitutive themes in stories of peoplehood, if we wish to understand those stories, their political roles, and their limitations fully. The discussions here seek to explicate the most important such assumptions and interconnections.

274  /  Notes to Chapter Two 4. A theme implicit in this chapter, deliberately submerged, because it risks burden­ ing the reader with academic quibbling, is that many scholarly debates on these topics center on false dichotomies. Two are relevant here. Like others including Eric Hobsbawm (1990), Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), and Rogers Brubaker (2004), I see political identities and communities as products of projects and processes in which aspirants to power and leadership play prominent roles. But since those aspirants must always build extensively on preexisting senses of identities and interests, and they must find formulations that others find persuasive, I see sharp contrasts between “top-­down” and “bottom-­up,” “elite,” and “popular” formations of such identities as misleading. All senses of peoplehood are to some degree always both, in ways we can and should investigate, analyze, and categorize. 5. For a compelling analysis of how even mass publics as “spectators” can influence leaders, see democratic theorist Jeffrey Green’s The Eyes of the People (2010). 6. I therefore resist the strong economic determinism toward which some neo-­Marxist analyses, including Balibar and Wallerstein’s (1991), tend, and also the related sug­ gestion that some see in the work of Ernest Gellner (1965; 1983). He is often un­ derstood to argue that the spread of modern economic systems makes large-­scale, relatively uniform educational systems necessary, and hence these systems demand something like the nation-­state. There are indeed powerful pressures in that direc­ tion, but they could be and to some degree were long met via multinational empires, and other arrangements now appear possible. 7. This second element was left implicit in earlier formulations of this assumption (e.g., Smith 2003, 36–­37). 8. Again I find it difficult to take sides at the theoretical level in the debate long waged between writers including Anthony Smith, on the one hand, and Gellner and Hob­ sbawm, on the other. These scholars have differed over whether modern nationalities are fundamentally constructed and novel or whether they are built on long-­enduring traditions, ethnic ties, and myths in ways that involve considerable continuity with older forms of political community (for a fair-­minded overview, see Smith 1999, 3–­19). Yet useful answers to this question come only from determining what in each context is constructed and novel in specific stories of peoplehood, and what is instead inherited and maintained due to the enduring appeal of the elements in question. At the general theoretical level, the answer is surely that both construction and maintenance are always present, but in different degrees in different cases. Still, in fairness to these debates, they may prompt us over time to work out what circum­ stances are conducive to the prominence of each. 9. Available at http://coral.bucknell.edu/departments/russian/const/18cons01.html. 10. I remain enough of a political liberal to believe that there are many fewer such per­ sons than many democratic and republican theorists inspired by Hannah Arendt and others would like to think. 11. Available at http://www.europeaninternet.com/china/constit/. 12. This is true even though, as Bonnie Honig instructively details, myths of found­ ing and refounding often feature foreigners, like the Bible’s Ruth and the Russian founder Riurik (Honig 2001, 3–­7, 41–­72). Very special foreigners can be portrayed as divine agents and as sources of reinvigoration for a lineage, as Ruth has been. If they are not so depicted, either their foreignness or their founding role may be disputed, as in the case of Riurik. Sometimes, moreover, foreign founders may be made the scapegoat for the violence involved in the people’s founding, as in Thomas

Notes to Chapter Three  /  275 Jefferson’s effort to assign the British responsibility for slavery in the first draft of his Declaration of Independence (Beeman 2013, 425–­36). 13. Cott notes: “Typically, founders of new political societies in the Western tradition have inaugurated their regimes with marriage regulations, to foster households con­ ducive to their aims and to symbolize a new era—­whether in colonial Virginia, revo­ lutionary France, the breakaway republic of Texas, or the unprecedented Bolshevik system in the Soviet Union” (6). I would go further and say that it is not simply in the Western tradition but in virtually all societies, and not in regard simply to mar­ riage laws but to policies defining gender roles more generally, that changes are often instituted as part of the founding of new political peoples. Chapter Three

1. This chapter adapts Cinar and Smith, 2014. Antonio Gramsci stressed the political processes of ideological promulgation in ways that inform our analysis here (Smith 2003). On the central role of narratives in human beings’ understanding, evaluation, and communication of social phenomena see, for instance, Ricoeur 1980, 169–­90; MacIntyre 2007 [1981]; Taylor 1989; Bruner 1991, 1–­21; Balibar 1991, 86; Somers 1994, 605–­49; Brockmeier 2002, 15–­43. Much of the recent attention to ideas and discourses by (primarily) comparative politics scholars is also highly pertinent (Béland and Cox 2011). 2. For a general introduction see Gillis 1994. On the role of memory in forming African American identity see Eyerman 2004, 159–­69. On its role in ethnic conflict, see Bet-­El 2002, 206–­22; Bar-­Tal 2001, 601–­27; Tint 2010, 139–­256. 3. Our focus on dominant historical narratives is in parallel with Yael Zerubavel’s no­ tion of “master commemorative narrative,” which is “a broader view of history, a basic ‘story line’ that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of the past” (Zerubavel 1995, 6). 4. As Ernst Bruckmüller argues, national historical myths often tell the story of the world’s origins (cosmogony) tied directly to the story of the origins of the individ­ ual group (ethnogeny) (Bruckmüller 2003, 15). In Metahistory, Hayden White ap­ plied Pepper’s categories to the works of historians and historical theorists of the nineteenth century, developing a typology of politically significant literary forms—­ metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony—­that represents an important related frame for exploring the issues we examine (White 1975). We find Pepper’s catego­ ries more helpful in analyzing national historical narratives and broader projects of people building and identity formation. But we strongly affirm White’s argu­ ments that politics is in part “a struggle for the imagination,” and that narratives “dramatize” political processes “by endowing them with the aspect of the domi­ nant meaning-­producing systems in a given community or group” (White 2011, 162, 164). 5. As a result of these differing characteristics, Pepper argues that contextualism has a horizontal cosmology, while mechanism and organicism, have a more vertical cos­ mology. One either tries to get to the “bottom of things” (as it is the case in mecha­ nism, where one tries to find the underlying law), or to the “top of things” (as it is the case in organicism, where one tries to reach the culminating telos, or the greater whole in the story). Contextualism treats the relationship between different units horizontally in the sense that their relationship is interactive and reciprocal, and all relevant units have agency (Pepper 1942).

276  /  Notes to Chapter Four 6.

Leaders’ stories of nationality or peoplehood can be dissected into elements that most express their own interests and values and those that most express those of their constituents, but we will not pursue this important refinement here (Smith 2003, 53–­54, 61–­71). 7. One of the most striking points in Austrian politics is that even the ultranationalis­ tic Freedom Party presented its views on Austrian history in the general contextual­ ist setting, and even they could not advocate exclusionist policies toward historical minorities. 8. See for instance the cartoon book called Sagen aus Wien (Legends from Vienna) (FPÖ 2010), prepared and distributed by the FPÖ in 2010 for the Vienna mayoral elections. 9. For the speeches of Walter Posch (SPÖ), Matthias Ellmauer (ÖVP), Terezija Stoisits (Greens), and Harald Ofner (FPÖ) on the constitutional amendment, see NCRA Stenographic Minutes 2000, 59, 59–­60, 62–­64, 60. For the speeches of Ursula Plassnik (ÖVP), Josef Bucher (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich [Alliance for the Future of Austria], the party Haider found after leaving FPÖ), and Werner Faymann (SPÖ) on dual language signs, see NCRA Stenographic Minutes 2011, 112, 24: 59, 65–­ 66, 68. 10. For example, see the parliamentary debate on the 1992 Residence Act between Terezija Stoisits (Greens) and Madeleine Petrovic (Greens) and Helga Moser (FPÖ) and Helene Partik-­Pablé (FPÖ) (NCRA Stenographic Minutes 1992, 76, 18: 8307–­9, 8313–­14, 8325). 11. The website translates “Eretz Israel” as the “Land of Israel, Palestine.” On the use of the Jewish past to justify the necessity for a Jewish homeland in the form of the state of Israel, see Firer 2004, 21–­96; Mayer 2005, 3–­34; Aronoff 1991, 175–­92. 12. Some scholars suggest that a sense of the failure of non-­Jews to achieve much in Israel was sometimes conveyed by the controversial slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” first advanced by nineteenth-­century Christian support­ ers of Jews and advanced as a Zionist slogan by Israel Zangwill. Others contend that the phrase has subsequently most often been invoked in efforts to discredit Zionism (Muir 2008, 55–­62). 13. A pogrom (Russian: “devastation,” or “riot”) refers to “a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries” (Encyclopædia Britannica Online). 14. The plot structure that Zerubavel identifies in antiquity and the modern national revival is “few against many” (Zerubavel 1995, 217). 15. James Wertsch also points at the prevalence of what he calls “narrative templates” (Wertsch 2008, 150–­51). Chapter Four

1. These claims are appropriate for empirical evaluation via content analysis, but this chapter seeks only to elaborate further the elements of the theory of the politics of peoplehood proposed here, via evidence that illustrates rather than tests its empirical implications. 2. As previously noted, leaders’ challenges concerning promoting trust actually have two dimensions. Leaders must foster not only a sense in their constituents that the leaders can be trusted to pursue their story of peoplehood effectively; they must also persuade diverse constituents that they can trust each other to join in the proposed

Notes to Chapter Five  /  277 common endeavors (Smith 2003, 59). I do not pursue the promotion of trust be­ tween fellow community members here. 3. Sidonie Smith, a leading scholar of biographical stories, has instead analyzed these candidates’ autobiographies and campaign biographies. Her characterizations of them track those advanced here (S. Smith 2010, v–­vii). 4. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/old-­web/20071010 220455/http://www.johnmccain.com/About/johnmccain.htm. 5. Ibid. 6. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20081103005049 /http://www.johnmccain.com/Undecided/WhyMcCain.htm. 7. Sidonie Smith finds the same theme dominating the five books that McCain has published during his political career (S. Smith 2010, vii). 8. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20081103005049 /http://www.johnmccain.com/Undecided/WhyMcCain.htm. 9. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20080116195104 /http://www.hillaryclinton.com/about/. 10. Ibid. 11. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20080116203935 /http://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/. 12. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-­dyn/articles/A19751–­2004Jul27.html. 13. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20080130195956 /http://www.barackobama.com/learn/meet_barack.php. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Stefanie Hammer analyzes Obama’s rhetoric in similar terms, placing still greater stress on how his speeches emphasize the “unum” over the “pluribus,” unity and not diversity (2010, 282–­85). 17. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20120107175343 /http://www.barackobama.com/about/barack-­obama?source=primary-­nav. Since his reelection, the “about” page on the Obama-­Biden website has been further modified, but it retains the same basic structure and content: http://www.barackobama.com /about/barack-­obama. 18. During the 2012 campaign and up through his second inauguration, this has been the culminating sentence in Obama’s website biography. 19. The Internet Wayback Machine link is http://web.archive.org/web/20120107175343 /http://www.barackobama.com/about/barack-­obama?source=primary-­nav. 20. The Internet Wayback Machine site is http://web.archive.org/web/20120301200953 /http://www.mittromney.com/learn/mitt. 21. Ibid. C h a p t e r F iv e

1. This chapter draws on Smith 2007. Many scholars refer to all accounts holding that the purpose of government is to secure individual rights as forms of “liberalism,” as I have done in earlier works. But eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Americans did not use that term, so in this book I reserve it chiefly for political actors and writers who have done so since early in the twentieth century. It is true that the views of self-­proclaimed twentieth-­century proponents of “liberalism” have many historical antecedents. But it is questionable whether there have been unchanging defining

278  /  Notes to Chapter Six features of “liberalism” shared by all in a distinct tradition of writers from John Locke through John Rawls, as some scholars including me have previously suggested. The figures commonly placed in the “liberal tradition” are more complex and varied than many, including both the defenders and critics of “liberalism,” tend to suggest. They display “family resemblances” but not a fixed essentialist core. C h a p t e r Si x

1. This chapter draws chiefly on Smith 2001; Smith 2009c; and Smith 2011a. Chapter Seven

1.

For discussion of both the agreements and disagreements of this normative view with various contemporary versions of liberal and democratic theory, such as those of Rawls, Habermas, Taylor, Young, Connolly, and more, see Smith 2003, especially 135–­58. This chapter also draws on Smith 2008a; 2008c 2009a; 2011a. 2. As Joseph Hamburger stressed, Mill himself was very concerned to encourage peo­ ple to subordinate their selfish interests to “the collective interests of mankind” (Hamburger 2001, 133, 166). 3. I am grateful to Martin Heisler for illuminating discussions of the ideas in this section. 4. Prior to finding the Coe and Domke study, I asked two student researchers to count and code religious references in all presidential inaugurals, State of the Union ad­ dresses, and nomination acceptance speeches from George Washington through George W. Bush using an archive now available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu. Their work had a slightly lower level of intercoder reliability, so I rely on the pub­ lished Coe and Domke results here. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that even in­ cluding nominating speeches, the patterns identified in these researchers’ counts of presidential religious references tracked those found by Coe and Domke very closely. In both studies, all presidents examined had the same relative rankings in terms of numbers of references, with virtually the same counts for references per speech (even adding nominating speeches). Our research confirmed that George W. Bush, followed by Reagan, made more religious and more specifically providentialist refer­ ences per major speech than any twentieth-­century president, and they were rivaled historically only by James Buchanan, John Quincy Adams, and the single inaugural address of William Henry Harrison (research memorandum and tables by Stefan Heumann, on file with Rogers M. Smith). C h a p t e r Eig h t

1. This chapter derives chiefly from Smith 2008b, 2011b, and 2013a. The title refer­ ence is to the song “Living in the Promiseland,” a country song that Texan Willie Nelson sang and produced as a #1 hit in 1986, the same year Congress enacted its last major (unsuccessful) effort at comprehensive immigration reform legisla­ tion, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). The song, written by Arkansas songwriter David Lynn Jones, has as its first four verses: Give us your tired and weak And we will make them strong Bring us your foreign songs And we will sing along Leave us your broken dreams We’ll give them time to mend

Notes to Chapter Eight  /  279 There’s still a lot of love Living in the Promiseland Living in the Promiseland Our dreams are made of steel The prayer of every man Is to know how freedom feels There is a winding road Across the shifting sand And room for everyone Living in the Promiseland http://www.lyrics007.com/Willie%20Nelson%20Lyrics/Living%20In%20The%20 Promiseland%20Lyrics.html. 2. I place “special” and “general” in quotes because, although these usages are com­ mon, and indeed many scholars go further and treat obligations to all humanity as “universal,” others have long pointed out that preferring humanity over other entities should be seen as granting human beings “special” status. Many scholars en­ dorse “special” responsibilities to families and subnational communities, but fewer consider “special” responsibilities to noncitizens who are not family members, my main focus here. 3. The text of the bill can be found at http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills /sb1070s.pdf. 4. United States v. State of Arizona, D.C. No. 2:10-­cv-­01413-­SRB, 2011 U.S. App. (9th Cir. Apr 11, 2011), http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2011/04/11/10–­16645 _opinion.pdf. 5. Arizona et al. v. United States, U.S. Supreme Court Docket #11–­082 (June 25, 2012), http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11–­182b5e1.pdf. 6. The full text of the bill is at http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf. 7. See bill at http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/96–­499.htm. 8. See summary at http://uscis.gov/graphics/shared/aboutus/statistics/LegisHist /act142.htm.

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Index

Abizadeh, Arash, 225 abolitionists, 135, 138–­39, 140, 162, 209, 234 abortions, 142 Adams, John, 125, 126, 146–­47 Adams, John Quincy, 278n4 Adams, Samuel, 126 Addams, Jane, 167, 171–­72 “affected interests” arguments, 220, 224–­ 25, 227 Afghanistan, 26, 111, 208, 253 African Americans: candidates’ stories (2008/2012) and, 96–­97, 107, 108, 110, 113, 117; consumer themes and, 175–­ 76; integration and, 178; intellectual inferiority and, 181; memory and identity and, 275n2; plutocracy and, 170; political peoplehood and, 184; providentialism and, 158; rights talk and, 57, 137, 139, 142, 158–­59, 163–­65, 167; US Revolutionary period and, 57, 152, 155; US antebellum period and, 157–­59, 161, 162; US late 19th century and, 139, 163–­65, 166–­67; US early 20th century and, 167, 168, 170, 171; US 1929–­1970 and, 142, 174, 175–­76, 178; US 1970–­2010 and, 96–­97, 107, 108, 110, 113, 117, 181, 184; women’s suffrage advocates and, 136, 162, 171; working class labor and, 157–­59. See also civil rights (US); minority issues; Obama, Barack; race issues (US); slavery (US); voting rights (enfranchisement); and other African Americans

African colonies, 254 African Union, 202, 247 Agbaria, Ayman, 26 agency, human: G. W. Bush and, 208; contextualism and, 275n5; ideas and, 31, 34; moral, 197, 198; novel stories and, 28–­29; providentialism and, 208, 209; range of, 34. See also political actors Alabama (US), 229 Algerians, 258 Alien and Seditions Acts (US) (1798), 154 allegiances: coalitions and, 34, 49; conquest and, 43; constitutive themes and, 61–­63; founding themes and, 77; moderate peoplehood and, 210, 268; nation-­ states and, 7–­8; political leaders’ stories and, 44–­45, 68; political peoplehood and, 2, 3, 271nn1–­3; ranges of peoplehood and, 39–­41; religious themes and, 149, 190, 205, 209; self-­fulfillment and, 198; stories of peoplehood and, 268; US Revolutionary period and, 149; US 1970–­2010 and, 192, 209; US future and, 268; US exceptionalism and, 80, 192. See also members and membership (constituents); nation-­states; trust; worth American colonies, 147–­50 Anderson, Benedict, 38, 39, 48 Anthony, Susan B., 131 anti-­Semitism, 88 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (US) (1996), 238–­39 Arabs, 26, 64, 81, 88, 89, 213

304 / Index Arendt, Hannah, 274n10 Arizona (US), 227–­31, 233–­38, 239, 240, 243 ascriptive ideologies, 273n3. See also essentialism Asian Americans, 155, 167, 258–­59. See also Chinese exclusion Asians, 181 assimilation: Austria and, 85; education and, 80; France and, 254; immigration and, 177; Mexican Americans/immigrants and, 235, 243; Native Americans and, 158; progressives and, 168; teleological organicist forms and, 75; Turkey and, 82; US and, 80, 177. See also immigration issues; minority issues; pluralism “attrition through enforcement,” 228–­30, 239, 243–­44, 244–­45 Austria, 8, 83–­87, 276nn7–­10 authority and legitimacy: allegiances/multiple memberships and, 190, 194, 271n1; blended stories and, 147, 149–­50; can­didates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 96, 97, 98, 117; change and, 21–­22; coalitions and, 147; democracies and, 94; globalization and, 203; official documents and, 70, 128; political peoplehood and, 2, 6, 12, 39, 185; religious themes and, 151, 154; rights talk and, 129, 130–­31, 137, 139, 140, 145, 156; stories of peoplehood and, 25. See also normative values; power themes; sovereignty Axel Foley, 131 Bader, Veit, 224 Bahçeli, Devlet, 83 Baldwin, James, 42 Balibar, Étiennee, 274n4, 274n6 “Bank War” (US) (1830s), 156 Barreto, Matt, 182 Barthes, Roland, 68 Bateman, David A., 272nn6–­7 “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (US), 161 Bauböck, Rainer, 224 Belgium, 254 Bell, Duncan, 26 Bennett, William, 191 Berns, Walter, 191 Beveridge, Albert, 79, 166, 167, 236 Bilbo, Theodore, 174

Bill of Rights (US), 52, 127, 133, 141, 142 biological kinship, 55 “Birthright Privilege Levy,” 259–­60, 261 Bjerk, Paul, 26 Black Power (Carmichael & Hamilton), 178 Blackstone, William, 136 Bloemraad, Irene, 80 Bolton, Susan, 229 Bostdorff, Denise M., 208 Boston Town Meeting (1772), 126 Boston Trades’ Union, 133–­34 Botts, John M., 160 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20, 23 Bourne, Randolph, 167, 170, 172, 178 Bracero program (US) (1942), 237, 238 Braithwaite, Valerie, 47 Brandeis, Louis, 168 Brewer, Jan, 228–­29 Brimelow, Peter, 181 British constitution, 126–­29 Brown, John, 131 Brubaker, Rogers, 48, 271n2, 274n4 Bruckmüller, Ernst, 275n4 Buchanan, James, 278n4 Bush, George H. W., 194 Bush, George W., 10, 79, 179–­80, 181, 206–­9, 212–­13, 278n4. See also Iraq war Butt, Daniel, 253–­54 Byrd, Robert, 177 Calderón, Felipe, 229 California (US), 234, 235, 236 Cambodians, 258 Canada, 80, 238, 243 candidates’ personal and communal stories (US): constraints on, 93–­96; democratic representation and, 14–­15; individualism and, 121; political leaders and, 45; S. Smith on, 277n3, 277n7; successful, 95–­96, 98–­101; US presidential candidates and, 96–­98, 101–­18 Canovan, Margaret, 54 Caribbean, 227, 254 Carmichael, Stokely, 178 Carter, Jimmy, 206 Cass, Lewis, 158 Catalonians, 7, 25, 247 Catholic Church, 204 Central America, 254 change: blended stories and, 49; coalitions and, 58; constitutive themes and, 65;

Index / 305 explanations of, 70–­74; institutions and, 21–­23; moderate peoplehood and, 199–­200; political peoplehood and, 263–­64; themes and forms and, 76 Chase, Salmon, 27 Chavez, Leo R., 233 Chicanos, 178, 233 Chicano studies program (Tucson), 230 Chief Joseph, 163 China, 255 Chinese Americans, 259 Chinese constitution (1982), 52, 54, 55 Chinese exclusion, 139, 164–­65, 166–­67 Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), 153–­55 Christianity: candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 96, 97, 108; civil rights and, 176; Debs and, 171; EU and, 73, 210; Europe and, 65, 212; Israel and, 88, 276n12; Native Americans and, 163; the “people” and, 53, 155–­56, 161, 185, 212, 265, 267; populism and, 163; rights talk and, 176; Robertson and, 180–­81; Stanton and, 159; Tanzanian nationalism and, 26; Tea Party and, 182; US Revolutionary period and, 147; US antebellum period and, 155–­56, 158; US late 19th century and, 163; US 1970–­2010 and, 180–­81, 182; US conservatives and, 180–­81; Winthrop and, 148–­50. See also Catholic Church; providentialism (US) Christian Right (US), 40 Cinar, Meral Ugur, 14, 67, 269 citizenship: Austria and, 85, 86; Czech Republic and, 58; deterritorialized, 248; differentiated, 216, 247; France and, 63; Israel and, 89, 213; moderate peoplehood and, 216; Soviet Union and, 54; special obligations and, 263; Turkish, 83; UAE and, 64. See also citizenships, multiple; coercively constituted identities and special obligations; members and membership (constituents); nation-­states; naturalization; rights talk; transnationalism; voting rights (enfranchisement) citizenship (US): African Americans and, 28, 139, 162; G. W. Bush and, 181; colonialism and, 249–­54; exceptionalism and, 80; Fourteenth Amendment and, 230; “liberal”/”republican” concep-

tions and, 273n3; Mexican immigrants and, 231, 232, 235, 237, 239–­40, 241; Native Americans and, 163; Obama and, 183; quasi-­, 225; undocumented aliens born on US soil and, 230; US Revolutionary period and, 57, 97, 130, 154; US antebellum period and, 159, 162; US early 20th century and, 169, 273n3; US 1970–­2010 and, 181, 183, 230. See also consumers’ democracy (US); “people,” the (US); voting rights (enfranchisement) citizenships, multiple: allegiances and, 40–­ 41; coercively constituted identities and, 249–­54; elites and, 61; global inequality and, 254–­62; globalization and, 247–­ 49; Mexican/American, 231–­33, 239–­ 46; number of countries permitting, 201; special obligations and, 257; 21st century and, 257–­64. See also nation-­ states; political peoplehood, overlapping and intertwined; transnationalism Civic Ideals (R. Smith), 273n3 “civilized,” 197 civil principles, 66 civil rights (US): Civil War and, 28; cultural recognition and, 243; economic themes and, 175–­76, 180; equality and, 146; Haitians and, 251; immigration policy and, 177; Mexican Americans/immigrants and, 232, 237–­38, 243, 244; Obama and, 96, 108, 109, 110; privileges and, 215; providentialism and, 209; race consciousness and, 23; Reagan and, 180; religion and, 178; women’s rights and, 177; World War II and, 141, 142. See also African Americans Civil Rights Act (US) (1866), 162 Civil Rights Act (US) (1964), 142, 177 Civil War, US, 21–­22, 28 Clark, Abraham, 129 class structure, 134, 138, 139, 162, 171. See also elites; poverty and “the poor”; workers (labor) Clay, Henry, 158 Cleveland, Grover, 165–­66 climate change, 31 Clinton, Bill, 182–­83, 239, 252 Clinton, Hillary, 96–­98, 105–­8, 115, 116 coalitions: blended stories and, 48–­49, 56–­57, 147; candidates’ stories (US)

306 / Index coalitions (cont.) (2008/2012) and, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98–­99, 101, 103, 107; Chinese, 54; exclusions and, 46, 165, 180–­81; formation of, 30; globalization and, 204–­5, 217, 257, 259; ideas and, 34; immigration (US) and, 259; individual rights and, 122; institutions and, 21–­22, 23, 30; Mexican immigration and, 230, 243; moderate peoplehood and, 200–­201; Obama and, 184; the “people” and, 146, 155, 156, 170; personal identities and, 93–­94; race and, 174, 179; religious themes and, 207; rights talk and, 122–­23, 138, 144; slavery and, 21–­22, 28; spiral of politics and, 24, 30–­35; stories of peoplehood and, 28, 29–­30, 38, 44, 48–­49, 56–­58, 272n6; story themes and, 69, 75, 147; US Revolutionary period and, 122–­23, 155, 156; US antebellum period and, 21–­22, 28, 123; US late 19th century and, 162, 163, 165; US early 20th century and, 170; US 1929–­ 1970 and, 174; US 1970–­2010 and, 179, 180–­81, 184, 207, 259; US future and, 200–­201, 204; women’s suffrage and, 162. See also members and membership (constituents) Coe, Kevin, 206, 208, 278n4 coercion (force; violence), 5, 8, 37, 43, 44–­ 45, 208, 224–­25, 271n1, 274n12. See also coercively constituted identities and special obligations; power coercively constituted identities and spe­ cial obligations, 219–­28, 234–­46, 247, 279n2; citizenship and, 220, 222, 224; colonialism and, 249–­55; global immigration and, 219–­21, 257–­62; Mexicans and, 227, 250–­51; perpetuation of consequences and, 253–­54, 257; US early 20th century and, 249–­50 Cohen, Lizabeth, 173 Cold War, 141 collective memory, 69, 85. See also founding stories; historical narratives (national narratives) colonialism and imperialism: Austria and, 87; exceptionalism and, 193–­94; global inequality and, 255, 256, 257–­62; harm principle and, 197; mechanistic forms and, 79; Mexicans and, 233, 245, 249; political peoplehood and, 190;

providentialism and, 209; race and, 65, 79, 164, 166; rights talk and, 126, 150; special obligations and, 224, 249–­55; US Revolutionary period and, 126, 150; US late 19th century and, 164, 166, 167, 209. See also coercively constituted identities and special obligations; empires “Common Sense” (Paine), 51, 125, 150 communal identities. See political peoplehood “communicative discourse,” 29–­30, 34 Communists, 40, 55. See also People’s Republic of China constitution (1982); Soviet Union Conestoga Wood Specialties, 214 Connolly, 278n1 (chap. 7) consent, 220–­21 conservatism (US): candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 96, 102, 103–­4, 113, 115; economic themes and, 175, 243; elitism and, 172; exceptionalism and, 191; naturalization and, 154; religious themes and, 179, 207, 214; revival of, 179–­84; rights talk and, 124, 140, 143; teleological themes and, 123; US Revolutionary period and, 123, 124, 154; US early 20th century and, 172; US 1929–­ 1970 and, 175, 179; US 1970–­2010 and, 96, 102, 103, 113, 179–­84, 191, 207, 214, 243. See also Scalia, Antonin; and other conservatives Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (US), 29, 103–­4 constituents. See members and membership (constituents) constitutive themes: candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 99, 100–­101, 106, 111, 115; coercively constituted iden­ tities and, 222–­23; communal identity and, 146; economic/power factors and, 147; enduringness of, 63–­66; features of, 60–­63; importance of, 37–­38; in­ clusion and, 55; Israeli founding stories and, 87; liberal, republican, and ascriptive ideas and, 273n3; overlapping, 63; policy making and, 76–­90; polit­ ical role of, 60–­66; rights talk and, 66, 69, 138, 143; story forms and, 74; Turkey and, 81; US Revolutionary period and, 57–­58, 129–­30, 131; US future and, 184–­85; US presidential campaigns

Index / 307 and, 98. See also candidates’ personal and communal stories (US); cultural identities; ethnicity; founding stories; historical narratives (national narratives); normative values; “people,” the (US); race; religious themes; rights talk; story themes, blended and intertwined consumers’ democracy (US): diversity and, 178, 185; economic/power themes and, 173, 179, 182, 185; inclusion and, 170, 172, 173, 174; mobilization of, 170–­ 71; rights talk and, 141, 142, 173, 175–­ 76; F. Roosevelt and, 173–­74; US late 19th century and, 170–­71; US 1929–­ 1970 and, 172, 173–­74; workers and, 172 contexts, specific, 21, 24–­28, 30–­31, 32–­33, 273n3. See also economic factors; power contexts, structural, 38 contextual forms, 71–­76, 81, 83–­87, 275n5, 276n7 contraceptive coverage (health insurance), 214 Converse, Philip, 25 Cook-­Martín, David, 201, 248 “coordinative discourses,” 29 cosmopolitanism, 5, 193, 201, 220, 223, 248 Cott, Nancy, 55, 275n13 Cox, Harvey, 178–­79 “creative synthesis,” 25 Crèvecœur, Hector St. John, 151–­52 Croly, Herbert, 168 Cuba, 251, 252 cultural identities: allegiances and, 61–­62; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 117; civil rights and, 243; Mexican immigration and, 239–­40; multiple, 232–­34, 240–­41; nationalist ideologies and, 4; personal identities and, 197–­ 98; themes of stories and, 53–­54; US Revolutionary period and, 154. See also African Americans; Chinese exclusion; constitutive themes; diversity; pluralism; and other identities currency-­exchange transaction tax, 259–­60 Czech Republic constitution, 58–­59 Dahl, Robert, 193, 196 Dark Knight, 131 Darwinianism, 79 Dayaks, 25–­26

Debs, Eugene, 167, 171 Declaration of Independence (US) (1776): communal identity and, 183; constitutive themes and, 53, 124; economic themes and, 51, 139; empire and, 166; immigration and, 160; naturalization and, 151; power of the “people” and, 145; providentialism and, 151, 207; race and, 142, 159; religious themes and, 130; rights talk and, 127, 130, 133–­39, 142, 145, 159, 161, 192; slavery and, 135, 161, 275n12; teleological organic forms and, 137, 160; trust and worth and, 51, 52; “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and, 141; US antebellum period and, 159, 160, 161; US late 19th century and, 165, 166; US exceptionalism and, 192; women’s rights movements and, 135–­36, 156, 165; working class rights and, 133–­34, 139 “Declaration of Rights” (US) (1774), 127 “Declaration of Sentiments” (Stanton), 135–­36 “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms” (US) (1775), 127 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948), 87, 89 Delanty, Gerard, 203 Demirel, Süleyman, 83 democracy: blended themes and, 66; constitutional, 244; constitutive themes and, 60, 223; dissent and, 212; global, 193, 196–­97, 201–­3, 205–­6; immigration and, 177; individualism and, 176; Israel and, 90, 213; Jacksonian, 156, 160; moderate peoplehood and, 193, 195, 216; nation-­state boundaries and, 196; overlapping identities and, 211; the “people” and, 185; people building and, 216; public debate and, 221; reason and, 213; religion and, 210–­14; “special” obligations and, 224; US antebellum period and, 156, 157, 160; US early 20th century and, 168, 169; US 1929–­1970 and, 176, 177, 179; US 1970–­2010, 185. See also authority and legitimacy; coercively constituted identities and special obligations; consumers’ democracy (US); egalitarianism; federalism and federations; moderate peoplehood; multiculturalism; representative self-­governance

308 / Index Democratic Party (US): coalition with Republicans and, 165; ethnicity and, 173; immigration and, 159–­60, 231; southern, 138, 165–­66, 174; teleological themes and, 104; US antebellum period and, 159–­60; US Civil War and, 138; US late 19th century and, 165, 166–­67; US early 20th century and, 167, 173; US 1929–­1970 and, 174; white ethnics and, 172–­73. See also Clinton, Hillary; liberalism (US); New Deal (US); and other Democrats Democratic-­Republican societies, 155–­56 Denmark, 54–­55, 254 Depression, Great, 172 Dewey, John, 140, 167, 169–­70, 172, 178 Díaz, Porfirio, 235 dignity, 197, 223, 234, 245, 264 Dinur, Ben Zion, 87 Dirty Harry, 131, 143 “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” (J. Adams), 125 diversity: accommodation and, 216; can­ didates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 115; commonality and, 271n1; iden­ tities and, 223; moderate peoplehood and, 202, 213–­17; Obama and, 108, 109–­10, 111, 114, 183–­84; Paine and, 150; religious themes and, 210–­16; US 1929–­1970 and, 238; US 1970–­2010 and, 183–­84; US 21st century and, 185–­86, 201–­2. See also minority issues; multiculturalism; pluralism Django, 143 Dominican Republic, 251, 252 Domke, David, 206, 208, 278n4 Dorr, Thomas, 157 Douglas, Stephen, 28, 29, 34, 137, 138, 159, 160–­61, 162 Douglass, Frederick, 27, 28, 29, 42, 159 Dred Scott decision (US) (1857), 162 D’Souza, Dinesh, 191 Duane, James, 126, 127 Du Bois, W. E. B., 158, 167, 169, 172 Dunn, John, 47 Ecevit, Bülent, 83 economic determinism, 33, 274n6 economic factors: education and, 274n6; emigrant elites and, 248–­49; global federalism and, 262; global immigra-

tion and, 263; global inequality and, 195–­96; ideas and, 21; Latin America and, 252; Mexican Americans/immigrants and, 235–­36, 241; moderate peoplehood and, 194; nation-­states and, 248; people building and, 37, 43; “political” peoples and, 8; “special” obligations and, 225; UNASAR and, 248; US conservatism and, 179–­80; US exceptionalism and, 189, 191–­92; US 21st century and, 267, 268; worth and, 48. See also class structure economic themes: allegiances and, 61, 62; characterized, 50–­51; constitutive themes and, 37, 60–­66, 146; founding stories and, 75, 77; globalization and, 204, 205; mechanistic accounts and, 74; spiral of politics and, 24. See also consumers’ democracy (US); poverty and “the poor”; property rights; story themes, blended and intertwined; workers (labor) economic themes (US): candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 98, 99–­100, 111, 115, 116, 117; H. Clinton and, 106, 107; immigration and, 231, 240; McCain and, 102, 103, 104; New Deal and, 174–­75; Obama and, 108, 110–­11, 111–­12; Paine and, 57–­58, 150; the “people” and, 147, 151–­52; race issues and, 174; religious themes and, 179–­80; rights talk and, 139–­40, 141, 143, 151; Romney and, 97, 112–­14; Tea Party and, 182; US Revolutionary period and, 129–­ 30, 132, 143, 147, 151; US antebellum period and, 156–­58; US late 19th century and, 163, 164, 166; US early 20th century and, 167, 168, 170–­71, 172; US 1970–­2010 and, 173, 182 economic worth, 48 economists, 13 Edelman, Murray, 48 education (US): ethnicity and, 230; found­­ ing stories and, 78, 80; Mexican Amer­ icans and, 237, 239; Mexican immigrants and, 233; New Deal (US) and, 175; Obama and, 110; the “people” and, 154; race issues and, 178; US exceptionalism and, 191 education and textbooks: coercively constituted identities and, 224; colonialism

Index / 309 and, 255; disparities in, 196; founding narratives and, 90; globalization and, 202; Israeli founding stories and, 88; moderate peoplehood and, 200; nation-­ states and, 274n6; religious themes and, 206; Turkish, 81, 83. See also education (US) egalitarianism: coercively constituted identities and, 261; constitutive themes and, 56; empire builders and, 65; evolutionary theory and, 164; globalization and, 196; Israeli founding stories and, 89; Lincoln and, 159; national narratives and, 4, 76; Obama and, 109, 184; providentialism and, 80, 150; race-­conscious measures and, 23; religious themes and, 150, 179, 184, 196; rights talk and, 122, 124, 140, 141, 143; US Revolutionary period and, 122, 123, 124, 134, 146–­47, 150; US late 19th century and, 139, 140, 164; US 1929–­1970 and, 141, 143, 176–­79, ; US 1970–­2010 and, 109, 184; US future and, 196, 267; workers and, 134. See also equality and equal rights; individual rights and individualism (US); inequality; multiculturalism; pluralism; rights talk Egypt, 42 Eisenhower, Dwight, 101 elites: allegiances of, 61; democracy and, 95; economic themes and, 30, 61; emigrant, 248–­49; founding stories and, 90; identity formation and, 274n4; rights talk and, 140, 156; 21st century allegiances of, 61; US Revolutionary period and, 132, 134; US antebellum period and, 156, 157–­58; US late 19th century and, 163–­64; US 1970–­2010 and, 30; workers and, 134. See also egalitarianism El Salvador, 227 Elson, Ruth, 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 197 emotional discourse, 59 empires, 166, 274n6. See also colonialism and imperialism empirical beliefs, 24 empirical data, 38–­39, 51, 276n1 empirical versus normative questions, 3–­15 enemies, political, 52, 82–­85, 103, 104, 271n1. See also rivals, political energy, 202, 205

enfranchisement. See voting rights (enfranchisement) Englishmen’s rights, 124, 125–­28 Enlightenment, 197 environment, 202, 204, 205, 266 environmental activists, 7, 40 equality and equal rights, 144, 146, 159, 221; elites and, 57–­58; US Revolutionary period and, 57–­58, 144. See also democracy; egalitarianism; inequality; multiculturalism; rights talk Equal Rights Amendment (US), 172, 179 Erdoğan, Recep, 83 Ermacora, Felix, 86 Erskine, Toni, 223, 224, 260 Espejo, Paulina Ochoa, 216 essentialism, 4, 72, 83, 85. See also ethnicity; historical narratives (national narratives); “natural”/“primordial” peoplehood; race ethics of public discourse, 202–­17, 221 ethnicity: allegiances and, 61–­62; blended themes and, 66; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 117; education and, 230; Israeli founding stories and, 89; mechanistic accounts and, 72; moderate peoplehood and, 194–­95; modern peoplehood and, 4; national narratives and, 39, 59, 81; New Deal (US) and, 174; political peoplehood and, 40; themes of stories and, 53–­54, 55; trust and, 53; US Revolutionary period and, 154; US conservatives and, 181. See also constitutive themes; diversity; minority issues; race Eugen, Prince, 84 Europe, 26, 53, 212, 215–­16, 256 European Union (EU), 7, 65, 73, 83, 210, 247, 248, 262 Evans, George Henry, 133, 134 evolutionary theories, 164, 167 Evren, Kenan, 83 exceptionalism (US), 80, 189–­205. See also teleological organicist forms (US) Expatriation Act (US) (1868), 138 Fairclough, Norman, 272n3 falsehoods, 12, 38, 47, 139 Fearon, James, 47, 53 federalism and federations, 5, 40–­41, 244, 245–­46, 248, 261–­62

310 / Index Federalist Papers (Jay), 153 Federalists (US), 153–­55 feminism, 7, 40, 131, 178. See also women’s rights Field, Stephen, 139 Fifth All-­Russia Congress of Soviets, 51 Filipino Amerasians, 249–­50, 258–­59 Filipinos, 260 Fischer, Ernst, 83 Flores, William V., 233 Foner, Eric, 167 foreign aid, 256, 262 formalist hypotheses, 70, 72, 73 Foucault, Michel, 20 founding stories: constitutive themes and, 63–­64, 67–­69, 75; foreigners and, 274n12; gender and, 275n13; official histories and, 69–­70; policy making and, 76–­90. See also historical narratives (national narratives) Fourth of July, 131, 133 “Fourth of July” speech (Douglass), 27 France, 63, 254, 258, 275n13 Francis I, 204 Frank, Jason, 145, 269 Franklin, Benjamin, 126 free Africans (US), 57, 158. See also African Americans Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 158 French Revolution, 52, 152 Friedan, Betty, 177 Fukuyama, Francis, 47 Fundamental Law for the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (1918), 51 Galloway, Joseph, 126, 127 García, Mario, 232 Garrison, William Lloyd, 27, 28, 135, 158 gay men, 7, 266. See also gender identities gay rights, 142, 178 Gaza Strip, 89 Gee, James Paul, 271n3, 272n3 Gellner, Ernest, 48, 277n6, 277n8 gender. See LGBT (sexual orientation); women’s rights gender identities, 4, 5, 55. See also gay rights genealogical membership, 55 “general” obligations, 219 Georgia (US), 229, 230 Germany, 254 Giddens, Anthony, 47 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 167

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 214 global discourse, 203–­4 globalization: inequality and, 195–­96, 254–­63; nation-­states and, 4, 192–­93, 217, 247–­48; political peoplehood and, 192–­217; stories of peoplehood and, 40. See also moderate peoplehood goals of history. See teleological organicist forms Gobat, Michel, 252 good, the. See normative values Goodin, Robert, 196 Graf, Robert, 86 Graham, Lindsey, 230 Gramsci, Antonio, 275n1 Grant, Ulysses, 101 Great Britain, 258. See also Englishmen’s rights; United Kingdom Green, Jeffrey, 274n5 Greenfeld, Liah, 48 Grimmer, Justin, 10 group rights, 76–­77. See also minority issues; pluralism groups: historical institutionalism and, 272n2; nation-­states and, 7–­8, 197; political peoples versus, 39–­40; politics and, 7; self-­fulfillment and, 169–­70, 197–­98; spiral of politics and, 26. See also members and membership (constituents); political peoplehood (communal identities) Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), 252, 254 Guatemala, 227 Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (Southeast Anatolia Project) (GAP), 83 Guthrie, Woody, 42 Guyatt, Nicholas, 158 Habermas, Jürgen, 20, 211, 278n1 (chap. 7) Haider, Jörg, 85 Haitians, 251, 253, 254 Hallett, Benjamin Franklin, 157 Hamburger, Joseph, 278n2 Hamilton, Charles, 178 Hammer, Stefanie, 277n16 Hamowy, Ronald, 127–­28 Hardin, Russell, 47 harm principal (Millian maxim), 197–­99, 202, 203, 205, 214 Harrison, William Henry, 278n4 Hatch, Orrin, 230 Hayward, Clarissa, 272n6

Index / 311 Heisler, Martin, 278n3 Held, David, 201 “heresthetics,” 25 Herrnstein, Richard, 181 Hickok, “Wild Bill,” 131 hierarchies, 4, 56 Higham, John, 154 Hill, Joe, 131 historical entities, 72–­73, 84, 87–­88 historical institutionalism, 19, 20–­23, 30, 272n2. See also Lieberman, Robert; Orren, Karen; Skowronek, Stephen historical materialism, 167 historical narratives (national narratives): analyses of, 275nn3–­4; Austrian, 8, 83–­87; ethnicity and, 39, 59, 81; long-­ term legacies and, 90; moderate peoplehood and, 211–­12; US 21st century and, 268; world hypotheses and, 70–­74. See also founding stories Hoar, George, 166 Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 40, 41 Hobby Lobby, 214 Hobsbawm, Eric, 48, 274n4, 274n8 Honduras, 227 Honig, Bonnie, 274n12 horizontal/vertical cosmologies, 275n5 hostilities, 6 Howard, Marc, 257 humanity, (general) obligations to, 219, 262, 263, 279n2 human rights: coercively constituted identities and, 223, 234, 242, 258; constitutive themes and, 211; Czech Republic and, 58–­59; dignity and, 223; disagreements about, 204; exclusion and, 66; globalization and, 201; harm principle and, 197; immigration and, 229; Mexican immigrants and, 229; natural rights and, 140–­44; religion and, 210, 213–­15; special obligations and, 240; stories of peoplehood and, 66 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 197 Hunt, Robert, 85 ideas: background assumptions and, 273n3; historical institutionalism and, 272n2; institutions and, 21, 22–­23, 29, 30; political actors and, 24–­25, 34–­35; political discourses and, 29, 272n3, 275n1; qualitative analysis and, 35; spiral of politics and, 23–­25, 29, 31.

See also political discourses; stories of peoplehood “ideational” processes, 34–­35 identities: Arab, 26; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 93–­94, 98–­99, 102; coalitions and, 29–­30, 93–­94; constitutive themes and, 65; democracies and, 94; diversity and, 223; evolution of, 265; Israel and, 26, 90; minorities and, 198; multiple, 198, 211, 233; political actors and, 24; politics and, 6–­7; pre-­existing, 45–­46; stories of peoplehood and, 8–­9; studies of, 69; themes of stories and, 53–­54; Turkish minorities and, 82; US presidential campaigns and, 97–­98. See also allegiances; coercively constituted identities and special obligations; cultural identities; national peoplehood (nationalities); personhood (personal identity); political peoplehood (communal identities) ideologies. See ideas Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (US) (1996), 239 Immigration Act (US) (1965), 177, 238 immigration issues: Austrian stories and, 86; constitutive themes and, 77; explanation of differences and, 69; global, 205, 256–­62, 263; historical narratives and, 91; Israeli founding stories and, 89; moderate peoplehood and, 201–­2; special/general obligations and, 219–­21. See also assimilation; coercively constituted identities and special obligations immigration issues (US): Asian Americans and, 259; B. Clinton/Obama and, 182–­ 83; conservatives and, 180–­81; diversity and, 182–­83; economic themes and, 164, 170, 180; Jefferson and, 152; moderate peoplehood and, 201–­2, 214, 219–­20; New Deal (US) and, 174; Nicaraguans and, 252; the “people” and, 168–­69; race and, 164, 166–­67, 168, 177; religious themes and, 159–­60; rights talk and, 139, 140, 142, 146, 177; Romney and, 113, 116; US colonials and, 149–­50; US Revolutionary period and, 154; US antebellum period and, 159–­60; US late 19th century and, 164, 166–­67; US early 20th century and, 168–­69; US 1929–­1970 and, 174, 177; US 1970–­2010 and, 180–­81, 182–­83,

312 / Index immigration issues (US) (cont.) 237, 238–­39; US 21st century and, 219–­ 46; US Congress and, 139, 278n1 (chap. 8); US destiny/exceptionalism and, 79–­80, 154, 160, 191; Winthrop and, 149–­50; women suffrage advocates and, 136. See also Chinese exclusion; Haitians; Mexican Americans and immigrants Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), 278n1 (chap. 8) imperialism. See colonialism and imperialism India, 255 indigenous tribal members, 53. See also Native Americans individual rights and individualism (US): communalism versus, 121–­22; contemporary rights talk and, 140–­44; democracy and, 176; economic themes and, 140–­41; Obama and, 111, 183; the “people” (US) and, 121–­44, 151; rebirth of, 133–­40; universal rights and, 122–­25, 143; US Revolutionary period and, 124, 125–­33; US 1929–­1970 and, 140–­43, 176. See also Bill of Rights (US); natural rights; outlaw law enforcers; rights talk (US); self-­development (self-­fulfillment; self-­realization) Indonesia, 25–­26 inequality, 122–­23, 142, 195–­96, 254–­62. See also equality and equal rights injustice, 47 institutionalism, historical, 19, 20–­23, 30, 272n2. See also Lieberman, Robert; Orren, Karen; Skowronek, Stephen institutionalization of stories: founding stories and, 67–­68, 77, 78, 90; historical narratives and, 69–­70; US individual rights doctrine and, 124–­25 institutions: ideas and, 21, 22–­23, 29, 30; religious themes and, 213; spiral of politics and, 24; stories of peoplehood and, 29; US antebellum period and, 21–­22; US Civil War and, 21–­22; US early 20th century and, 169 intercurrence, 22, 31 international development projects, 259 internationalism, 40, 170, 171, 172, 202–­3. See also transnationalism international law, 40 international politics, 69

international security, 205 interpretation, 3, 10–­11, 38, 49, 54, 76, 85. See also empirical data; qualitative/ quantitative analysis Iraq, 26, 253 Iraq war, 102, 106, 109, 111, 116, 181, 191, 192, 194, 206, 214, 253 Islamic militants, 181 Islamic minorities, 210 Israel, 6, 8, 26, 53, 68, 70, 87–­90, 213, 215–­ 16, 276nn11–­12. See also Jewish identity Italy, 248, 258 Japan, 64, 250, 254, 256, 258 Jay, John, 126, 127, 153–­55 Jefferson, Thomas, 152–­55, 251. See also Declaration of Independence (US) (1776); “Summary View of the Rights of British America” (Jefferson) Jennings, Francis, 124 Jewish identity, 6, 276n11, 276n13. See also Israel Johnson, Albert, 168, 178 Johnson, Andrew, 22 Johnson, Lyndon, 177 Jones, Calvert, 64 Jones, David Lynn, 278n1 (chap. 8) Kagan, Robert, 191 Kallen, Horace, 167, 168–­69, 172, 178 Kammen, Michael, 121 Kane, John, 94, 100 Kansas (US), 230 Kapaun, Heinz, 86 Kapur, Devesh, 256 Katrina (hurricane), 31 Kedourie, Elie, 48 Keenan, Alan, 211, 216 Keita, Seydou, 258 Kelley, Florence, 167, 170–­71, 172 Kennedy, Anthony, 229 Kennedy, John F., 175 Kerry, John, 101 “keywords” in American politics, 11 Kimmerling, Baruch, 88 King, Billie Jean, 42 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 131, 142–­43, 176, 178, 180 Kılıçdaroğlu, Kemal, 83 Klamer, Arjo, 13, 51 Knowles, Ella, 163

Index / 313 Kobach, Kris, 230 Kohn, Hans, 48 Koreans, 258 Kurdish minority, 82–­83 Kydd, Andrew, 47 Kymlicka, Will, 48, 197–­98, 223 labor. See workers (labor) Lafieur, Jean-­Michel, 248 Laitin, David, 47, 53 language. See ideas; political discourses Latin America, 39, 227, 252 Latinos, 167, 181, 226, 231, 233, 243. See also Chicanos; Mexican Americans and immigrants laws of history, 70–­71, 130. See also mechanistic forms leaders. See political leaders Lectures on Law (Wilson), 155 Lee, Richard Henry, 126 Leggett, William, 156 legitimacy. See authority and legitimacy LeMay, Curtis, 101 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (King), 176 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecœur), 151–­52 Levi, Margaret, 47 Lewelling, Lorenzo Dow, 163 LGBT (sexual orientation), 55–­56, 142, 146, 178 liberalism, 66, 191–­92, 197, 199, 221, 278n1 (chap. 7). See also Rawls, John; self-­development (self-­fulfillment; self-­ realization); and other liberals liberalism (US): consumer democracy and, 182; defined, 277n1; gender and race and, 273n3; Obama on, 183; religion and, 214; teleological forms and, 123–­24; US colonials and, 273n3; US Revolutionary period and, 124; US 1970–­2010 and, 179, 183 Lie, John, 3–­4, 55 Lieberman, Robert, 20, 22–­23 Lincoln, Abraham: G. W. Bush and, 209; coalitions and, 28, 29, 34; immigration and, 160; Mexican Americans and, 232; Obama and, 108, 183; qualitative methods example and, 35; race and, 159; religious themes and, 161–­62; rights talk and, 27, 133, 137, 159, 167; slavery and, 138, 162; teleological organicist

forms and, 79; US founding stories and, 27, 34, 35, 79, 133, 159; US early 20th century and, 167; US 1970–­2010 and, 108, 183, 209 Lippmann, Walter, 172 literary theory, 8, 14, 275n4 lived experience, 272n6 Living History (Clinton), 106 “Living in the Promiseland” (Nelson), 243, 278n1 (chap. 8) Locke, John, 279n1 Lone Ranger, 131 Louverture, Toussaint, 251 Loveman, Mara, 38–­39 Loyalists, 150 Madurese migrants, 25–­26 Maier, Pauline, 129 Malays, 25–­26 Mali, 258 malleability, 72–­73 Mandela, Winnie, 40 Mandela United Football Club, 40 marriage laws, 55 Marx, Karl, 264 Marxist scholars, 48, 274n6 Mason, George, 127, 141 Masquerier, Lewis, 156–­57 mass culture, 42, 198 mass publics, 274n5 Mayhew, David, 31 McCain, John, 96–­98, 102–­3, 115, 116, 277n7 McHale, John, 256 mechanistic forms: Austrian minorities and, 86; Austrian stories and, 84; characterized, 70–­71, 72, 73–­74; Israeli founding stories and, 87–­89, 90; policy making and, 76; US stories and, 79, 81; vertical cosmology and, 275n5 members and membership (constituents): agency and, 43, 44; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 99; common descent and, 55; communal identity and, 145–­46; constitutive themes and, 56, 60–­61, 65–­66; constraints on, 43; elites and, 43; exclusion and, 46; moderate peoplehood and, 190; multiple, 190, 194, 197–­99, 245–­46, 271n1; persons and, 197; political peoples and, 39; stories of peoplehood and, 4–­5. See also

314 / Index members and membership (cont.) allegiances; citizenship; political actors; political peoplehood, overlapping and intertwined; trust; worth “Memory of the Holocaust and Heroism Law” (Israel), 87 metanarrative forms, 69 Mexican Americans and immigrants: Asian immigrants and, 259; coercive constituted identities and, 220, 225, 226–­32, 234–­46, 250–­51, 253; emigrant elites and, 248–­49; stories of peoplehood and, 7; US late 19th century and, 235–­ 36; US early 20th century and, 236, 237; US 1929–­1970 and, 232–­33; US future and, 219–­46. See also voting rights (enfranchisement) Mexican-­American War, 232, 234–­35, 254 Mexican government, 231–­32, 233, 235, 236, 238, 240, 241 military factors: G. W. Bush’s providentialism and, 209, 212; coercively constituted identities and, 250, 251; global federalism and, 262; moderate peoplehood and, 194; stories of peoplehood and, 26; transnationalism and, 202; US exceptionalism and, 189, 192 Mill, John Stuart, 197, 198–­99, 202, 278n2. See also harm principal (Millian maxim) Millennium Development Goals (UN), 259 Miller, David, 193 Miller, John, 80, 164–­65 minority issues: Austrian contextual forms and, 83–­87, 85–­86; blended themes and, 59; contextual forms and, 75–­76; group identities and, 197–­98; historical narratives and, 90, 91; international treaties and, 247; Israel and, 89; Kurds and, 82–­83; privileges and, 215; story themes and forms and, 69, 79; Turkish founding stories and, 81–­83; US Revolutionary period and, 154; US narratives and, 79. See also African Americans; assimilation; diversity; immigration issues; multiculturalism; voting rights (enfranchisement); and other minorities “Model of Christian Charity, A” (Winthrop), 148–­49 moderate peoplehood: coalitions for, 200–­205; desirability/feasibility of, 190,

217; exceptionalism and, 189, 191–­95; Mexican Americans and immigrants and, 226–­46; multiple citizenship/ imperialism and, 247–­64; nation-­states and, 195–­200; noncitizens and, 219–­26; providentialism and, 190, 205–­16; semi-­sovereignty and, 246; US 21st cen­ tury and, 189–­217 Monroe Doctrine (US), 251 Moore, William, 164–­65 moral questions. See normative values Morgan, John F., 165 Mormon women, 166 Morse, Samuel F. B., 160 Mossallam, Alia, 42 Mujeres Luchadoras Progresistas, 239 multiculturalism: Canada and, 80; globalization and, 247; Mexican immigrants to US and, 237, 243; Obama and, 114, 183, 184; US 1960s–­70s and, 178, 237. See also assimilation; cultural identities; diversity; pluralism multinational corporations, 61 multinational empires, 274n6 Murray, Charles, 181 Murray, Pauli, 177 Muslims, 64, 65, 85 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) (US) (1992), 238 narratives. See stories of peoplehood narrative templates, 276n15 Nasser, 42 National Consumers League (NCL), 171, 175 Nationality Act (Great Britain) (1981), 258 National Organization of  Women, 177 national peoplehood (nationalities): construction and maintenance of, 274n8; ethnicity and, 59; intertwined, 84; moderate peoplehood and, 195–­201, 246; modern peoplehood and, 4; multiple, 201, 248; political peoplehood versus, 5; religious themes and, 54. See also citizenship; historical narratives (national narratives); nation-­states; “people,” the (US) national security: candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 97, 99, 103–­4, 105, 106, 111, 116, 117; Israel and, 87, 89; moderate peoplehood and, 194; trust

Index / 315 and, 52; US Revolutionary period and, 52. See also military factors National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), 139, 165 nation-­states: allegiances and, 7–­8; ancient/ modern dichotomy and, 4; arguments against, 195–­200; borders of, 223, 233; decline of, 7, 40; equal rights and, 146; future and, 186, 216; globalization and, 4, 192–­93, 217, 247–­48; self-­fulfillment and, 245–­46; “special” obligations and, 224; stories of peoplehood and, 25–­26; strong and wide peoplehood and, 40; US exceptionalism and, 193–­94. See also citizenship; federalism and federations; founding stories; historical narratives (national narratives); Israel; national peoplehood (nationalities); separation of church and state; transnationalism; and other nation-­states Native Americans: Declaration of Independence and, 53; exclusion and, 152; the “people” and, 151, 155; providentialism and, 209; religious themes and, 159; rights talk and, 57, 163; US Revolutionary period and, 53, 57, 122, 124, 150–­51; US antebellum period and, 158, 160; US 19th century and, 162–­63; US pluralism and, 178; voting rights and, 236 nativism, 154 NATO, 202 natural events, 31, 139–­40, 205 naturalization: common descent and, 55, 151; exceptionalism and, 154; France and, 258; Mexican Americans and, 231; the “people” and, 162; Portugal and, 257–­58; US Revolutionary period and, 151, 154, 155; US late 19th century and, 162; US policies and, 80, 267. See also coercively constituted identities and special obligations Naturalization Act (US) (1790), 155 “natural”/“primordial” peoplehood, 5–­6, 27, 41, 55, 157, 179, 210, 273n3. See also essentialism; natural rights natural rights: human rights and, 140–­ 44; individual rights and, 122–­44; Lincoln and, 137–­38, 159, 160, 161, 167; the “people” (US) and, 151, 156, 185; progressives and, 167–­68, 185;

Slovakia and, 59; subversive possibilities and, 125, 158; trust and, 122; US antebellum period and, 133–­38; US Civil War and, 138–­39; US progressives and, 167–­68, 185; US 20th century and, 140–­45. See also naturalization; “natural”/“primordial” peoplehood; rights talk Nazism, 83, 88, 141 Nedelsky, Nadya, 58 Nelson, Willie, 278n1 (chap. 8) Neufeldt, Reina, 26 New Deal (US), 139, 141, 174–­75 New Democracy, The (Weyl), 170 New Mexico (US), 234, 235, 236 New Orleans, 31 Nicaragua, 251–­52 Noel, Hans, 25 noncitizenship, 262 normative values: G. W. Bush’s providentialism and, 212; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 48, 93, 98, 99, 100–­101, 105–­6, 106–­7, 115–­16; coercively constituted identities and, 222–­23; constitutive themes and, 60–­ 64, 273n2; democratic leadership and, 94; distinctiveness of leaders and, 117; exceptionalism/providentialism and, 190; formalist accounts and, 73; global coalitions and, 257; Israel and, 87, 88, 90; McCain and, 103–­4; multiple citizenship and, 249; Obama and, 108, 111; people building and, 44; political leaders and, 276n6; religious themes and, 209–­10; rights talk and, 123, 136, 139–­ 40; spiral of politics and, 24; stories of peoplehood and, 11–­14, 52–­54; trust and, 49; US founding stories and, 78; US Revolutionary period and, 130; US antebellum period and, 156; US early 20th century and, 170; US future and, 3, 15; US presidential campaigns and, 98. See also ethics of public discourse normative versus empirical questions, 3–­15 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (US) (1992), 238 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 152 Obama, Barack: candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 96–­98, 108–­12, 114, 115, 116, 117, 183–­84, 277n18;

316 / Index Obama, Barack (cont.) communal identity and, 109, 183, 277n16; immigration and, 229, 231; military issues and, 191; religious themes and, 150, 182, 183; US destiny/ exceptionalism/providentialism and, 192, 207–­8 obligations, “general,” “special,” and “universal,” 279n2. See also humanity, (general) obligations to official documents, 125–­26, 128, 132–­33, 138. See also Declaration of Indepen­ dence (US) (1776); and other official documents official histories, 69–­70, 73–­74, 84, 85 Oklahoma (US), 230 Order of the Sons of America, 232 organicist forms. See teleological organicist forms Orren, Karen, 20–­22, 23 “other.” See immigration issues; minority issues Otis, James, 125–­26 Ottokar, Przemysl, 84 Ottomans, 85 outlaw law enforcers, 131, 143 Paine, Thomas: “brotherhood of European Christians” and, 97, 150–­51; Debs and, 171; economic themes and, 51; power themes and, 52; providentialism of, 63, 150, 151; rights talk and, 57–­58, 125, 131; trust/worth and, 53 Palestinians, 25, 88, 276n11 pan-­African identities, 40 Panama, 252 Pansi, Herbert, 86 pan-­Slavic identities, 40 Parker, Christopher, 182 Parks, Rosa, 131 parliamentary systems, 95 Patapan, Haig, 94, 100 patriarchies, 55–­56, 57, 122 Paul, Alice, 131 Pearce, Russell, 230–­31, 243 Pennsylvania (US), 230 “people,” the (US): diversity and, 183; economic/power themes and, 150–­ 62, 173–­75, 178, 179, 180–­81, 182; exclusion and, 145–­47; gender/race and, 162–­67, 175–­78, 179, 181, 182; historical overview, 184–­86; immigra-

tion/civil rights and, 177, 180–­81, 182–­ 83; individualism and, 122; moderate peoplehood and, 189–­217; progressives and, 167–­72; religious themes and, 147–­50, 153–­54, 179–­80, 182, 183; US colonials and, 147–­50; US Revolutionary period and, 146–­47, 150–­55; US antebellum period and, 42, 155–­62; US late 19th century and, 162–­67, 273n3; US early 20th century and, 166–­72; US 1929–­1970 and, 172–­79; US 1970–­ 2010 and, 179–­84; US future and, 184–­86. See also candidates’ personal and communal stories (US); democracy; diversity; rights talk people building: assumptions about, 41–­ 44; coercion and, 37, 44–­45; constitu­ tive themes and, 37–­38; economic themes and, 37; ideas and, 4–­5; indi­ vidual rights and, 124–­25; maintenance and modification and, 45–­46, 274n8; moderate peoplehood and, 216, 217; structural features, 44–­47; trust and worth and, 47–­50. See also coalitions; “people,” the (US); stories of peoplehood peoplehood. See political peoplehood (communal identities) People’s Parties (US), 163 People’s Republic of China constitution (1982), 52, 54, 55 Pepper, Stephen, 69, 70, 275nn4–­5 Perales, Alonso, 232 personal and communal stories. See can­ didates’ personal and communal sto­­ ries (US) Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (US) (1996), 239 personal security, 51, 52, 58, 98, 99, 103, 132, 133. See also power themes personhood (personal identity): change and, 65; communal stories and, 98–­99; constitutive themes and, 53; economic themes and, 157; historical narratives and, 68; rights talk and, 143, 160; stories of peoplehood and, 8–­9, 10; “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and, 141; US founders and, 138, 146, 149, 151, 155. See also allegiances; candidates’ personal and communal stories (US); individual rights and indi-

Index / 317 vidualism (US); members and membership (constituents); personal security; self-­development (self-­fulfillment; self-­realization) petitionary discourse, 206, 212 Philip Marlowe, 131 Philippines, 249–­50, 253, 254, 258 physical environment, 24, 31 Pinckney, Charles, 26–­27, 28 Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, 239 Pitkin, Hanna, 94 place of birth, 222 pluralism: egalitarianism and, 178; globalization and, 204; historical narratives and, 86–­87, 90; Turkey and, 82; US late 19th century and, 169–­70; US early 20th century and, 169–­70, 172. See also assimilation; diversity; multiculturalism plutocrats, 170 Podeh, Elie, 88 pogroms, 88, 276n13 policy making: candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 99, 115; constitutive themes and, 76–­90; contexts and, 30–­ 31; formalist accounts and, 73; founding stories and, 79, 89; global democracy and, 196–­97, 202–­4; historical narratives and, 90; ideas and, 23; mechanistic accounts and, 76; stories of peoplehood and, 4–­5, 13, 49, 75, 77, 90; US providentialism and, 209; US 21st century and, 15. See also immigration issues; and other policy issues political actors: agency of, 34, 44; contexts and, 24–­25, 28; globalization and, 202–­4; ideas and, 23, 24–­25, 34–­35; spiral of politics and, 24–­25; stories of peoplehood and, 28–­29, 38, 74–­77, 273n3; success of, 37. See also historical narratives (national narratives); members and membership (constituents); political leaders; religious leaders political discourses: coalitions and, 29–­30; historical institutionalism and, 20–­23, 272n2; inherited contexts and, 23–­25. See also historical narratives (national narratives); ideas; political actors; reason and rationalistic discourses; stories of peoplehood political leaders: agency of, 43; defined, 42; distinctiveness of, 102–­3, 106, 108, 109,

111, 114–­16, 117; exclusion and, 47; goals of, 100–­101, 102; male, 55; mass publics and, 274n5; normative values and, 276n6; rights talk and, 144; stories of peoplehood and, 42–­43, 45–­46, 47, 56–­60; success of, 49–­50; trust and, 47–­ 48, 276n2. See also candidates’ personal and communal stories (US); enemies, political; Obama, Barack; political actors; rivals, political; trust; worth; and other leaders political peoplehood (communal identities): change and, 263–­64; coercive force and, 44; dangers of, 190; defined, 2–­6, 39–­40, 271nn1–­3; globalization and, 203, 217; as human creation, 41–­ 42; indeterminacy of , 5–­6, 43, 271n2; normative features of, 11–­12, 44, 190; strong-­weak/wide-­narrow, 39–­40; top-­ down and bottom-­up creation of, 42–­ 43, 274n4; US future and, 184–­86. See also identities; moderate peoplehood; “natural”/“primordial” peoplehood; “people,” the (US); people building; political peoplehood, overlapping and intertwined; stories of peoplehood political peoplehood, overlapping and in­­ tertwined: coercively constituted identities and, 223, 253–­54; democratic decision making and, 196; globalization and, 201, 249; immigration and, 219, 226, 245, 246; spiral of politics and, 30. See also members and membership (constituents): multiple; moderate peoplehood politics: defined, 2–­6, 39, 271nn1–­3; ideas and, 23–­24, 31; identities and, 6–­7; institutions and, 21–­22; spiral of, 19–­20, 23–­35, 58, 264; stories of peoplehood and, 4, 8–­9, 14–­15, 23–­30, 275n4; story themes and, 60–­63; structural features of, 44–­47. See also political actors “poor, the.” See poverty and “the poor” Popular Front writers (US), 174 populism (US), 162–­63, 166, 172, 173 Portugal, 254, 257–­58 poverty and “the poor”: allegiances and, 23, 61; blended themes and, 57; evolutionary theories and, 164; globalization and, 195–­96, 254–­63; Mexican Americans and immigration and, 228, 235, 236, 241; New Deal (US) and, 175; progressives

318 / Index poverty and “the poor” (cont.) and, 168; religious themes and, 148; Romney and, 117; F. Roosevelt and, 174; US colonials and, 148; US late 19th cen­­ tury and, 164; US early 20th century and, 168; US 1929–­1970 and, 174, 175 power, 6, 7, 8, 20, 33, 44, 50, 145, 192. See also agency, human; authority and legitimacy; coalitions; coercion (force; violence); military factors; political leaders; voting rights (enfranchisement) power themes: allegiances and, 62; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 98–­99, 99–­100, 115, 117; characterized, 50, 51–­52; coalitions and, 29; constitutive themes and, 37, 54, 60, 63–­65, 146, 273n3; consumer democracy and, 182; cultural minorities and, 198; founding stories and, 75, 76–­77, 90; mechanistic accounts and, 74; membership and, 68; Mill and, 197, 199; Paine and, 150; the “people” and, 146, 147, 151–­52; story forms and, 74; US Revolutionary period and, 52, 57–­58, 129–­30, 132, 150–­52, 154, 155, 156, 157; US antebellum period and, 156, 157, 160; US late 19th century and, 163, 165, 166, 167–­68; US early 20th century and, 168; US 1929–­1970 and, 173, 176; US 1970–­2010 and, 182, 185; US slavery and, 26–­27; working class and, 173. See also elites; national security; personal security; religious themes; representative self-­governance; rights talk; sovereignty; story themes, blended and intertwined presidential systems, 95, 96–­97 Primus, Richard, 125 Pritchett, Lant, 255–­56, 257, 261 privacy, right of, 142 progressives (US), 139, 140–­41, 167–­72, 178, 180–­81 Prohibition (US), 172 property rights, 142, 167, 231, 235–­36, 273n3 prophetic discourse, 206, 208, 212, 214, 220–­21 providentialism (US): G. W. Bush and, 10, 79, 179–­80, 181, 206–­9, 212–­13, 278n4; ethics of public discourse and, 205–­11, 216; founding stories and, 78, 153–­54; individualism and, 123;

moderate peoplehood and, 189–­90, 205–­13, 265–­66; Paine and, 53, 63, 150–­51; race and, 158, 160, 164, 168–­ 69, 172; Reagan and, 179–­80, 278n4; sovereignty of the “people” and, 156; US Revolutionary period and, 209; US antebellum period and, 158, 160, 161; US late 19th century and, 164, 168–­69; US early 20th century and, 168–­69, 172; Winthrop and, 148–­49; women’s rights movements (US) and, 162; working class and, 157. See also teleological organicist forms Puerto Ricans, 50 Putnam, Robert, 47 qualitative/quantitative analysis, 10–­11, 19, 33, 35. See also empirical data; interpretation Quesada, Vicente Fox, 231 Rabkin, Jeremy, 193 race: immigration and, 229; Latin America and, 39; mechanistic accounts and, 79; naturalization and, 55; Spanish-­ American War and, 237; transnational peoplehood and, 26 race issues (US): conservatives and, 181; economic themes and, 174; Mexican Americans and, 237; Spanish-­American War and, 236, 237; US Revolutionary period and, 154; US late 19th century and, 22, 166–­67, 168, 236, 237; US early 20th century and, 167; US 1970–­2010 and, 179; US narratives and, 79–­80; voting rights and, 235. See also African Americans; Mexican Americans and immigrants racial profiling, 229 Racketeer Infiuenced and Corrupt Organizations act (RICO), 239 rational choice, 25, 47. See also reason and rationalistic discourses rational choice models, 33 Rawls, John, 202, 211, 278n1 (chap. 7), 279n1 Rayner, John, 163 Reagan, Ronald, 30, 80, 179–­80, 206–­7, 252, 278n4 reason and rationalistic discourses: imperialism and, 197; “public” (Rawls),

Index / 319 202; religious themes and, 135, 212–­13; stories of peoplehood and, 8–­9, 38, 59, 211. See also falsehoods; truth regionalism, 5 Reid, John Phillip, 124, 125–­26, 128–­29, 131 reinterpretation, 76 religious leaders, 40. See also King, Martin Luther, Jr.; and other religious leaders Religious Right (US), 179 religious rights, 213 religious themes: allegiances and, 61–­62; blended themes and, 53, 54–­55, 66; globalization and, 204, 205–­6; harm principle and, 205; Israeli stories and, 87, 89, 90; moderate peoplehood and, 210–­17; nation-­states and, 4; overlapping peoplehood and, 149, 205, 211; political peoples and, 5 religious themes (US): G. W. Bush and, 209–­10; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 96, 98, 104, 109, 110, 113–­14, 117, 183; conservatives and, 179–­80; diversity and, 210–­16; empire builders and, 65; Garrison and, 135; immigration and, 149; Native Americans and, 158, 163; normative values and, 209–­10; the “people” (US) and, 147–­50, 153–­54; pluralism and, 178; presidential inaugurals and, 278n4; public discourse and, 211, 216; reason and, 212–­13; rights talk and, 139–­40, 142, 153, 210, 213–­15; US colonials and, 147–­50; US founding stories and, 78, 79; US Revolutionary period and, 53, 122, 130, 131, 132, 150; US antebellum period and, 158, 159, 160; US Civil War and, 161–­62; US late 19th century and, 163, 166; US 20th century and, 171, 172, 206–­7; US civil rights era and, 178–­79. See also Christianity; Jewish identity; providentialism (US); and other religious identities “Representation of the People Act” (Britain) (1983), 258 representative self-­governance, 14–­15, 52, 69, 94–­95, 115–­17, 193, 261, 274n10. See also democracy; power themes reproduction, biological and cultural, 55–­56 republicanism (US), 167, 273n3

Republican Party (US): coalition with Democrats, 165; immigration and, 152, 160, 164–­65, 168, 231; Jeffersonian, 154–­55; race and, 22, 164, 166–­67; rights talk and, 138; US late 19th century and, 165; US early 20th century and, 167. See also Bush, George W.; conservatism (US); and other Republicans “republican” societies, 66 “resistant adaptation,” 235 Riell, Henry E., 160 right of privacy, 142 rights talk: ascriptive ideas and, 273n3; China and, 54; cultural identities and, 239–­40; globalization and, 204; Israel and, 89; liberal/democratic theory and, 278n1 (chap. 7); moderate peoplehood and, 199. See also citizenship; coercively constituted identities and special obligations; human rights; minority issues; property rights; voting rights (enfranchisement) rights talk (US): coalitions and, 122–­23, 138, 144; economic themes and, 173–­ 76; exceptionalism and, 192; exclusion/ inclusion and, 163–­64; legitimacy and, 137, 145, 156; Mexican Americans/immigrants and, 237–­38, 243–­44; Native Americans and, 163; the “people” and, 145, 146, 185; people building and, 124–­25; providentialism and, 210; rebirth of, 133–­40; religion and, 139–­40, 142, 143, 153, 213–­15; US founding through Great Society and, 185; US Revolutionary period and, 57, 122–­33, 143, 146, 151, 153–­54, 158; US antebellum period and, 133–­38, 156, 158–­59, 161; US Civil War and, 28, 138–­39; US late 19th century and, 163–­68; US 20th century and, 140–­44, 167–­68; US 1970–­2010 and, 182; US future and, 268. See also African Americans; civil rights (US); immigration issues (US); individual rights and individualism (US); Mexican Americans and immigrants; natural rights; women’s rights Riker, William, 25 Riswold, Caryn, 208, 212–­13 Riurik (Russian founder), 274n12 rivals, political, 45–­47, 59, 68, 69, 147, 203. See also enemies, political

320 / Index Robbins, Bruce, 201–­2 Robertson, Pat, 180–­81 Robinson, Frederick, 157 Rodgers, Daniel, 11, 125, 126, 127–­28, 129, 131, 132–­33, 140 Rodríguez, Cristina M., 243–­44, 246 Romney, Mitt, 96–­97, 112–­14, 116, 117, 228 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 140–­41, 173–­74, 206. See also New Deal (US) Roosevelt, Theodore, 79, 170 Rush, Benjamin, 78 Russia, 254, 274n12 Russian Mennonite communities, 7, 26 Ruth (Bible’s), 274n12 Rutledge, John, 126, 127 Sam Spade, 131 San Augustín Transborder Public Works Committee, 239 “sanctuary city” policies, 228 Sanford, Nathan, 156 Santería religion, 73 Scalia, Antonin, 214 Schlafiy, Phyllis, 179 Schmidt, Vivien, 19, 20, 29 Schmitt, Carl, 271n1, 271n3 Schurz, Carl, 79 science, 65, 70, 141, 159, 164, 168, 204, 268. See also evolutionary theories Scotland, 25, 247 secularism, 211 security. See national security; personal security Sedgwick, Theodore, 154 self-­development (self-­fulfillment; self-­ realization), 197–­99, 224, 245–­46, 249. See also harm principal (Millian maxim) semi-­sovereignty, 5 Seneca Falls Convention (1848), 135, 159, 192 separation of church and state, 210, 211, 213–­16 September 11, 2001, attacks, 103, 181, 191, 208. See also terrorism sexual orientation (LGBT), 55–­56, 142, 146, 178 Shachar, Ayelet, 193, 196, 259, 260, 261 Shapiro, Ian, 196 Shohat, Ella, 88 Shurtleff, Mark, 231 Skocpol, Theda, 272n2

Skowronek, Stephen, 20–­22, 23 Slaughter-­House Cases (US) (1873), 139 slavery (US): coalitions and, 21–­22, 28; Constitution and, 35, 137, 161, 162; contexts and, 26–­28; corporate, 171; economic themes and, 57; Jefferson and, 151, 275n12; Mexican American War and, 234; nativism and, 154; outlaw law enforcers and, 143; Paine and, 150–­51; the “people” and, 155; providentialism and, 161–­62, 209; religious themes and, 65; Republican Party and, 160; rights talk and, 27, 124, 135, 138, 159; spiral of politics and, 26–­28, 31; US Revolutionary period and, 35, 57, 122, 124, 150–­51, 154, 155, 275n12; US antebellum period and, 21–­22, 26–­28, 135, 137, 138, 156, 157, 160, 162; US Civil War and, 161–­62; US early 20th century and, 171; voters and, 138, 159. See also abolitionists; African Americans; race issues (US) Slovakia, 59 Smith, Adam, 48 Smith, Anthony D., 48, 62–­63, 274n8 Smith, Kimberly K., 26 Smith, Sidonie, 95, 106, 277n3, 277n7 socialism, 167, 171, 175, 257–­58 Socialist Party of America, 173 social justice, 143 Social Party of America, 173 social sciences, 37–­38 Social Security (US), 215, 239 social services (welfare), 238, 239, 240, 242, 256–­57, 259 solidarity, 221, 222, 257 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 42 Song, Sarah, 220, 221–­22 South America, 248, 262 South Carolina (US), 230 Southeast Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP), 83 sovereignty: G. W. Bush and, 207; Israeli founding stories and, 87–­89, 90; limits to, 194; multiple memberships and, 199, 243–­44, 246; political peoplehood and, 40–­41; US antebellum period and, 156; US 21st century and, 268; US exceptionalism and, 193. See also allegiances; authority and legitimacy; nation-­states

Index / 321 Soviet Union, 51, 54, 175, 275n13 Spain, 254, 257. See also Catalonians Spanish-­American War (1898), 166, 209, 236, 237, 249 special obligations. See coercively constituted identities and special obligations special partnerships, 260–­61, 262 spectators, 274n5 spiral of politics, 19–­20, 23–­35, 58, 264 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 135–­36, 162 states’ rights (US), 142 Stephen, Lynn, 239, 245 Stephens, Alexander, 27 Stewart, Brandon, 10 stories of peoplehood: analysis of, 9–­12, 273n3; characterized, 2, 38–­39; goals of, 45, 47–­50, 79; identities and, 8–­9; investigative methodology of, 3–­15; nation building and, 68–­69; normative arguments and, 11–­14; overlapping, 46, 48–­49; political leaders and, 42, 45; political peoplehood without stories, 272n6; politics and, 4, 7–­9, 14–­15, 23–­ 30, 275n4; rivals and, 45; social science and, 37–­38; structures of, 67–­91; 21st century, 7–­8, 15; US military historians and, 272n5; US slavery and, 26–­27; violence and, 25–­26. See also ideas; institutionalization of stories; political discourses; political peoplehood (communal identities); qualitative/quantitative analysis; story forms; story themes story forms: constraints and, 80; founding stories and, 77, 78–­79; political actors and, 73–­74; story themes and, 67–­68, 74–­76. See also contextual forms; mechanistic forms; teleological organicist forms story plots, 68, 276n14 story themes: nation building and, 68–­69; political actors and, 76–­77; story forms and, 67–­68, 74–­76; typology of, 50–­66. See also candidates’ personal and communal stories (US); constitutive themes; economic themes; power themes; story themes, blended and intertwined story themes, blended and intertwined: candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 116–­17; coalitions and, 147; “ethnic” versus “civic” nations and, 66; politics and, 56–­60; restrictions on,

74–­76; successful narratives and, 68–­69; US Revolutionary period and, 53–­54, 57–­58, 150–­52 Strong, Josiah, 79 structural conditions, 42 subnationalism, 4, 5, 7 “Summary View of the Rights of British America” (Jefferson), 125 “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” (Kagan), 191–­92 “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” (SB 1070) (Arizona) (2010), 228–­29, 230, 239 supranationalism, 7, 26, 84 Swift Boat ads, 101 Taft-­Hartley Act (US) (1947), 175 Taiwan, 54 Tanzanian Lutheran youth choir, 26 Tarantino, Quentin, 143 Taylor, Charles, 48, 278n1 (chap. 7) Tea Party (US), 182 teleological organicist forms: historical narratives and, 73–­74; integration into larger wholes and, 71, 72–­73; Turkish, 81, 82; vertical cosmology and, 275n5 teleological organicist forms (US): B. Clinton/Obama and, 182–­83; economic/ power themes and, 112, 151–­52; empire and, 166; future and, 200; immigration/ minority rights and, 75, 79–­80, 154, 160–­61, 164–­65, 182, 191, 265–­66; religious themes and, 98, 104, 131, 148–­49, 176, 190–­91, 209; slavery and, 123–­24; US Revolutionary period and, 131; US antebellum period and, 160–­61; US late 19th century and, 164–­65, 166; US 1970–­2010 and, 104; US 21st century and, 98, 112, 182, 209; US future and, 200, 265–­66. See also exceptionalism (US); providentialism (US) Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), 239 terrorism, 103, 104, 114, 227, 238, 257. See also September 11, 2001, attacks Texas (US), 234, 235, 236, 275n13 textbooks. See education and textbooks Thanksgiving (US), 148 Thomas Dorr’s rebellion, 157 Tilly, Charles, 47 Tobin, James, 259

322 / Index Tocqueville, Alexis de, 121 “transborder lives,” 245–­46 transnationalism: citizenship and, 40; essentialism and, 4; global politics and, 247; identities and, 260; intertwined peoplehood and, 248–­49; normative commitments and, 223; organizations and, 202; policy making and, 204; race and, 26; special obligations and, 262; US early 20th century and, 170. See also citizenships, multiple; internationalism Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 234–­36 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 195 Trotsky, Leon, 40 Truman, Harry, 104 trust: blended themes and, 58, 59–­60, 61; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 94–­96, 100, 101, 104, 106, 109, 112, 114, 115–­17; characterized, 47–­50; labor immigration and, 257; political community and, 193; political leaders and, 47–­48, 94, 276n2; political peoplehood and, 59, 193; 21st century and, 202; US Revolutionary period and, 52, 126–­27; Winthrop and, 149 truth, 12, 51. See also falsehoods Ture, Kwame, 178 Turks, 8, 80–­83, 84–­85, 86 Turner, Nat, 131 Tyack, David, 78 Union of South American Nations (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas) (UNASUR), 247, 248 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 64 United Kingdom, 253, 254, 258. See also Great Britain United Nations, 141, 202, 259 United States Army Command General Staff College, 272n5 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (United Nations), 141 universal rights. See human rights; individual rights and individualism (US); rights talk US Congress: empire and, 166; immigration and, 139, 278n1 (chap. 8); Mexican immigration and, 238–­39; Native Americans and, 135; naturalization and, 154, 155; Obama’s economic themes and, 112; race and, 166; rights talk and,

141, 142, 175, 238; slavery and, 21, 22, 137; trust and worth and, 50 US Constitution (1787): Amendment, Eleventh, 155; Amendment, Thirteenth, 162; Amendment, Fourteenth, 139, 162, 230; Amendment, Fifteenth, 236; amendment processes and, 244; coercively constituted identities and, 245, 249; economic themes and, 173; empire and, 166; immigration and, 243–­44; Lincoln and, 137, 161; the “people” and, 145, 154, 159, 171; religious themes and, 153; rights talk and, 125, 132–­33, 137, 138, 142, 161, 239; slavery and, 28–­29, 35, 162; working class and, 134–­35. See also Bill of Rights (US) US courts, 22, 52, 134–­35, 138, 139–­40, 142, 153–­55. See also US Supreme Court US military, 26 US presidency, 21, 22 US presidential campaigns, 14–­15, 93–­98, 101–­18 US presidents, 206–­9, 278n4. See also Obama, Barack; and other presidents US Supreme Court, 139, 141, 142, 154, 166, 229, 266 Utah, 231, 234 Vasconcelos, José, 231 Vane, Henry, 149–­50 vertical/horizontal cosmologies, 275n5 Vietnam, 253, 258 violence. See coercion (force; violence) Virginia Declaration of Rights (US) (1776), 127 voting rights (enfranchisement): “affected interest” arguments and, 221–­22; Afri­­ can Americans and, 162, 167, 168; Britain and, 258; emigrant elites and, 248–­49; exceptionalism and, 191; harm principle and, 198; Mexican Americans/ immigration and, 167, 226, 231–­33, 235, 236; Mexico and, 231; multiple citizenship and, 231–­33; US Revolutionary period and, 157; US antebellum period and, 235; US early 20th century and, 167; women and, 157, 162, 165–­ 66, 171–­72, 244; working class and, 135, 157 Voting Rights Act (US) (1965), 142, 177, 237 Vroom, Peter, 158–­59

Index / 323 Wales, 247 Wallace, George, 101 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 48, 274n4, 274n6 Walzer, Michael, 48 war on terror, 206 Warren, Mark, 47 wars. See coercion (force; violence); Mexican-­American War; and other wars Washington, George, 101, 152, 155 Watson, Tom, 163 Wayne, John, 42 Weaver, James Baird, 163 Welsh Society of Pennsylvania, 194–­95, 198 Wertsch, James, 276n15 West, Thomas, 123–­24 West Bank, 89 West Kalimantan province (Indonesia), 25–­26 Weyl, Walter, 167, 170, 172 Whigs (US), 27, 28, 137, 157, 159, 160 White, Hayden, 68, 275n4 whites, 157–­58 Wills, Garry, 137 Wilson, James, 153–­55 Wilson, Joan Hoff, 124 Wilson, Woodrow, 171, 251 Winthrop, John, 148–­50, 152, 179–­80 Wolin, Sheldon, 271n1 women’s rights: abolitionists and, 162, 164; J. Adams on, 146; African Amer­ icans and, 136, 162, 171; blended themes and, 170–­71; H. Clinton and, 96–­97, 105, 106–­7; founding stories and, 275n13; Obama and, 111; Paine and, 150; populism and, 164; providentialism and, 209; rights talk and, 135–­ 36, 137, 138–­39, 142, 159, 162; sexual conduct and, 55–­56; US colonials and, 152; US Revolutionary period and, 57, 122, 124, 151, 154, 155; US antebellum period and, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161; US late 19th century and, 138–­39,

159, 162, 163–­64, 165–­66; US early 20th century and, 140, 167, 171–­72; US 1929–­1970 and, 177; US 1970–­2010 and, 179. See also feminism; National Organization of Women; voting rights (enfranchisement) workers (labor): Chinese peoplehood and, 54; consumers and, 170–­71, 172; Depression and, 172–­74; Equal Rights Amendment and, 172; global inequality and, 256, 261, 262; immigration and, 256–­57; Mexican immigration and, 237, 238, 240, 242–­43; multiple citizenships and, 201, 248; providentialism and, 209; rights talk and, 133–­36, 138–­ 39, 140, 141, 173–­74; Taft Hartley Act (US) (1947) and, 175; transnational, 7; US Revolutionary period and, 134–­ 35; US antebellum period and, 156–­58; US 1929–­1970 and, 172–­76, 173 “Working Men’s Declaration of Indepen­ dence, The” (Evans), 133 World Affairs Council (US), 104 world hypotheses, 69, 70 World Trade Organization, 7 World War I, 171, 251 World War II, 141, 250 worth: blended themes and, 58, 59–­60, 61; candidates’ stories (US) (2008/2012) and, 94, 96, 98, 114, 115–­16; characterized, 47–­50; constitutive themes and, 62; formalist accounts and, 73; of human beings, 223; Obama and, 109, 112; psychological, 48; success and, 49–­50; US colonials and, 149; US Revolutionary War and, 126–­27; working class and, 135 Yad Vashem Law (Israel), 87 Young, 278n1 (chap. 7) Zangwill, Israel, 276n12 Zerubavel, Yael, 89, 275n3, 276n14