Liah Greenfeld writes in this 2019 book:
* [W]hen it comes to our core ideals of equality and respect owed to every human being, a mere suggestion that these ideals may be denied arouses our wrath. We firmly believe that the purpose of humanity is to realize these ideals, we measure other societies by how well their institutions accord with these ideals, and we constantly demand of our own institutions a more perfect accordance with them, never satisfied with the current state of affairs. But in 1776, the declaration that “all men are created equal” was revolutionary; it would have appeared absurd, preposterous to the vast majority of people then alive. Even today, the reason why three billion people in Southeast Asia do not find this declaration strange is only because it has become a cultural trope, thanks to a world hegemony of Western nations that has lasted for a quarter of a millennium. A cultural trope, however, is not a value or even a belief: it is simply a statement that has been repeated without question so often that it
arouses no reaction whatsoever.* The value of equality—the cornerstone of the American system of beliefs—is the essential value of nationalism. Nationalism transformed Western societies into nations, and in doing so made equality a core Western value. Even among Western societies, the American society is unique, indeed exceptional, because its population was national from its earliest origins. This can be said of no other society: populations of other societies went through numerous social (cultural) permutations before becoming populations of nations.
* The society of orders, as mentioned, was based on the presupposition that the upper and lower orders were different species of humanity, utterly unlike each other even to the color of blood in their veins. They coexisted but were no more compatible than chickens and horses. Now that the blue-blooded order had been physically exterminated, the red-blooded sons of butchers (such as Cardinal Wolsey) and of smiths (such as Thomas Cromwell) ascended to positions and were treated in ways that were as difficult to justify as riding a chicken or expecting eggs from a horse. Yet the new Henrician aristocracy needed to justify these positions and treatment. Instead of claiming that all of the new aristocracy were lost children of dead princes, they declared that the English people was a nation. Not only did this make the bewildering situation of the new aristocracy understandable and legitimate, it also reinforced the originating trend from which it resulted, normalizing social mobility, and reconstructed the previously hierarchical society on the basis of equality. How could an equation of two terms, people and nation, a linguistic event, produce so powerful a social transformation?
* Once the people and the elite shared a common identity, families were no longer bound to their current place in the social hierarchy, which appeared temporary and accidental. Social stratification became fluid: depending on will, ability, and chance, individuals could move up and down society as if on a ladder. This was a revolution in the imagination, in consciousness.
* The presupposition of fundamental equality in the inclusive community—of shared identity, implied in the definition of the people as a nation—had several vital implications. It is hard to rank them in order of significance. We may start with the one that was to shape the American experience: individual freedom. One was no longer born into a social position or personal identity but had the right to (in fact, had to) choose one for oneself. The decision no longer belonged to God; one became one’s own maker. With this notion, appreciation for the individual human being, human creativity, increased tremendously. There was dignity in simply being human; one could take pride in one’s humanity. The modern idea of the individual as an autonomous agent emerged from this mindset. (Émile Durkheim, therefore, was right when he claimed that the individual was created by modern society, that, in other words, societies had existed for millennia without individuals.)2 Simultaneously and necessarily, God became much less important, and the world of living experience came to occupy a far greater place in human concerns than ever before. The process of secularization was set in motion, reinforcing the appreciation for the individual and, specifically, greatly increasing the value of human life. The authority of the nation, as an elite, to make decisions regarding the political and religious positions of the population for which it was responsible was now presumed to belong to the population in its entirety. As God gradually assumed less importance in people’s lives, this authority soon was regarded as supreme authority, or sovereignty.. To be a member of the people was itself an honor.
* And in their right to communicate with God directly, all Englishmen were now equal.
The Reformation also helped establish the principle of national sovereignty.
* This national dignity was expressed, above all, in international prestige—the relative standing of one’s nation among other nations, and their regard for it—which made national consciousness (nationalism) inherently competitive. From their earliest days, nations have engaged in a never-ending race for respect. England was the first nation. In the sixteenth century, national consciousness existed nowhere else, no other society was a nation, and no other people cared how foreigners regarded the societies of orders in which the people were a despised, expendable rabble. But the English did not know that. Their conversion to nationalism was, like any inner conversion, a total replacement of one faith by another. They no longer could see and experience reality but through the lens of national consciousness, and therefore they imagined they were surrounded by other nations, and thus by competitors.
* To protect their national dignity, the English began to compete. They challenged their European neighbors to combat in every area in which comparisons were possible, and these neighbors, bewildered by the strange behavior of a kingdom that until recently had seemed to be a normal European feudal community, had to engage with them. But none of these neighbors had the competitive motivation that actuated the English. Instead of competing, they could only watch in amazement as the little England of 1500—a peripheral European principality, exhausted by internecine fighting, rough in manners, and as poor in natural resources as it was in learning, emerged as a great leading power, the center of attention and an object of emulation for other great powers, in the span of a century.
* At the beginning of the sixteenth century, according to Erasmus, there were five or six erudite people in London; according to John Leland, there was one “slender” library. A few decades later, England was emerging as a cultural powerhouse… To accept the authority of the ancients would mean admitting England’s cultural inferiority. Unwilling to do so, the English espoused a primitive cultural relativism, arguing that what was good for one period and society was not necessarily good for another.
* Science was a modern, new, activity: apart from the few practicing scientists, it had not been of interest to anyone before. With so few achievements to date, a culturally
backward England could compete in it effectively. Science’s ability to contribute to the dignity of the nation—which none of England’s neighbors at the time cared to consider—prompted England to throw behind it the might of general social approbation.* [S]cience became the measure of native intelligence, and it was impossible to claim national dignity without excelling in it.
* Nationalism…implies democracy. The fundamental principles of democracy are the principles of popular sovereignty and of the fundamental equality of membership (or
fraternity) in the community. Nationalism made them the moral and political canon of the modern world, so much so that we believe them today to be natural, hard-wired into the human brain, and their increasing implementation around the globe an inevitable feature of human progress. Every nation—a community based on the principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental equality of membership—is a democracy by definition.* As implementations of individualistic nationalism—specifically, of the concept of the nation as a voluntary association of individuals— liberal democracies by logical necessity are majoritarian. The choices, and thus the will and the interests, of the nation are those of the numerical majority of its constituent individuals. By contrast, collectivistic nationalisms—which conceive of the nation as an indivisible collective individual, reified and personified as a higher being with a will and interests of its own, independent of those of the human individuals composing it—require a specially designated elite, presumably of intelligence or virtue, capable of divining the will and interests of the nation. The authority of such elites reflects their innate characteristics. It can be recognized by acclamation, but does not result from election. Indeed, the rank and file of the nation are not qualified to elect national leaders; they can only acclaim them.. Individualistic nationalisms see the nation as an association of individual autonomous agents, and collectivistic nationalisms see it as a collective individual.
* Because the sphere of their activity as intellectuals was essentially defined by language, the romantics insisted that communities of language were true moral individuals and fundamental units of humanity. But language, they held, had a material basis. It was determined by blood ties—or, as these ties were later to be called, race.
* Jews were defined as a separate race, rather than a part of the German nation. The French had attempted to emancipate them, and therefore they were seen as the beneficiaries of German humiliation. For these reasons, the Jews came to personify Western liberalism, individualism, and capitalism. Their allegedly vile nature, in accordance with the principles of romantic philosophy, was seen as a reflection of their blood or biological constitution, not their religion; thus there was no hope that they would ever change for the better.
* after World War II, nationalism in general was identified with resistance to change, conservatism, reaction, a hankering for the imaginary good old days—in short, with the right, and therefore as evil.
…The intelligentsia blamed acquiescence to the Holocaust on classical liberalism, with its stress on individual freedom, which implied the right to be indifferent to the suffering of others and the right to use one’s strengths to outcompete the weaker. …in the United States, this response dramatically increased the appeal of Marxism, socialism, communism, and anticapitalism in general, prompting leading sectors of the intelligentsia to self-identify as the left. At the same time, nationalism as such (that is, not a particular type of nationalism) was associated with gore and brutal primeval instincts, and defined as the opposite of the progressive direction of history.
For some forty years, nationalism was banished from discourse (among others, academic) and considered completely irrelevant to the life of nations. History equaled progress and was perceived by the majority of intellectuals as leftward oriented…transnationalism.
* Paradoxically, inside the United States, this shift in mentality coincided with growing concern with the rights of ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other groups underrepresented in the elites—women above all—which had been classed by their physical or genetic characteristics. These groups were presumed to be separate (in this sense, exclusive) but inclusive (that is, cutting through lines of status and class) communities of natural identity, parallel to the ways in which exclusive, ethnic nations were imagined in the framework of collectivistic-ethnic nationalisms, such as German and Russian. They all were presumed to be opposed to and suffering under the privileged or majority group, another naturally (biologically) constituted inclusive community of identity—that of white heterosexual males.