In 1975, eight years before the birth of the Internet, the late sociologist Robert Bellah wrote that “only a new, imaginative, religious, moral, and social context for science and technology will make it possible to weather the storms that seem to be closing in on us.” Bellah assumed that any “coherent and viable society” requires a shared set of moral judgments, and a shared picture of the cosmos wherein those judgments make sense, attributes he considered sorely lacking in the America of 1975. He feared that in the absence of such a shared vision, the continued dominance of capitalism, scientism, and utilitarianism would “rapidly lead to the destruction of American society, or possibly in an effort to stave off destruction, to a technical tyranny of the ‘brave new world’ variety.”
Almost a half century later, we have no new civil religion. We are left with a handful of unifying enemies (communism, Islamism) shrinking in the rearview mirror and a growing sense that the American center, whatever it ever was, cannot hold. This is the big context of After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, Samuel Goldman’s smart, serious, admirably compact new book. Goldman’s is largely a demythologizing mission; in a crisp 125 pages, he cruises through various historical attempts to set a synoptic vision of who we Americans are, what we believe and love together, and what we must do. He has chapters on the Covenant model, which captures the self-understanding of early Anglo colonists; the melting pot model; various solidarities of the trenches; and attempts to reinterpret American history in ways that might furnish a sense of communal lineage and mission. In each case, Goldman’s main work is to show how these ostensible Edens of cohesion and belonging were actually far more fraught, fragile, and partial than their respective hymners like to admit.
Goldman, a political science professor at George Washington University, makes his case through extensive use of historical documents. In the example of the Covenant model, he quotes Benjamin Franklin’s pre-revolutionary worries that English-founded Pennsylvania was already being overrun by German immigrants, making it a “colony of Aliens” who would never adopt proper English “Language or Customs.” Some contemporary observers of the Revolutionary War surveyed the American scene and concluded, as did the Welsh economist Josiah Tucker, that “the Americans will have no Center of Union among them, and Common Interest to pursue, when the Power and Government of England are finally removed.” Even at our most homogenous and united, that is to say, we weren’t really that homogenous or united.