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NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: David Brooks has been a columnist for the New York Times since 2003. He is the author of The Road to Character and the forthcoming book The Committed Life: When You Give Up.
Here is a question: at which layer of society do you feel most attached: your neighborhood, city, county, state, nation or humanity as a whole?
I asked this question to a lot of people. About 5% say they feel most connected to humanity as a whole. A vast majority of others say that their strongest attachment is the local – their neighborhood or their city.
I understand that. Although we have moved a lot, my family has a clear foundation. If you start at East 15th Street in Lower Manhattan and walk south, you will pass by my great-grandfather who had his butcher shop, where my maternal grandfather exercised the right, where my father lived at high school, elementary school and where my youngest son now attends college.
It's five generations out of two miles. I feel a magical attachment to this neighborhood. Blocks and street names enchant me.
And yet, I must say that my strongest attachment is to the nation, the United States. You could get New York out of my identity and I'd be kind of like that. If you removed America from my identity, I would be unrecognizable to myself.
What does this national attachment look like? It looks a bit like any other type of love – a romantic love or a love between friends. It's not something you like but the confluence of a hundred things. Yes, that 's the beauty of the Rockies, but it' s not just the land. It's the declaration of independence, but not just the belief. It's the victory of the Second World War and Silicon Valley, but it's not just achievements. It's madness, diversity, our brand of particular madness.
Ernest Renan, a nineteenth century French philosopher, claimed that "a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle": "These are the essential conditions for being a people: to have common glories in the past and a willingness to to maintain in the present; have done great things together and want to do them again. We love proportionally to the sacrifices we have made and to the troubles we have suffered. "
When I think of the great American nationalists, I think of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph and Walt Whitman, of course, but also the crazy confusion that seizes millions of people to sacrifice them, sometimes opposite, common good: Gloria Steinem as much as Phyllis Schlafly, those who defend the hymn and those who kneel.
Love for the nation is an expanding love because it is love for all people. It is a love that ennobles because it stems from the desire to receive and share what you love and want to make more love by extending it to others.
In the soul of the nationalist, Yoram Hazony writes in his book "The Virtue of Nationalism": There is a gratifying tension between a person's intense loyalty to his inherited traditions and the realization that There are many other traditions, of equal beauty, but it is not his.
In a family, one can feel when love is stretched and broken. And you can feel the same in the country. Today, when bombs are sent and vitriol comes on, our common American nationalism, our mutual loyalty, is put to the test.
He is threatened by extreme individualism – people who put the needs of the individual ahead of those of the community. It is threatened by the globalists – people whose hearts have been whitened by the particular love of the place. The biggest threats come from those who claim to be nationalists but who are the opposite.
Donald Trump says he is a nationalist, but you can not be a nationalist if you despise half of the nation – nor can you be a good father if you despise half of your children. You can not be a nationalist if you think that groups in the nation are in conflict with one another and that they are in zero conflict: class against class, race against race, tribe against tribe.
You can not be a nationalist if you despise diversity. America is diversity; if you do not like diversity, you are not an American nationalist.
"We have chased metaphysical and theological abstractions from politics. What's left now? Asked Renan. People stay. People with the same old need for belonging. People who are the same age must devote their lives to something, but with the great unifying object of love – the nation – removed.
If you stop the love songs in America, remove the celebration of America from public life, you leave people spiritually devoid of, dispossessed of great devotion. The results are what you see – loss of connection, tendency to disaster, feelings of anger, isolation and helplessness. People are beginning to feel that the injustices in American society are global and that there is no hope of redemption. They have the urge to burn everything.
American nationalism has been one of the great joys, comfort and motivation of my life. I do not know how one can live without.
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