Compact's respectable nationalism
Compact rejects some of nationalism's cultural trappings, but full-throatedly defends its material basis in capitalism.
I always avoided saying “slava Ukraini” when I lived in Kyiv. The opportunity came up a lot — usually at bars — and contrary to what a lot of the contemporary left seems to think, it has never just been a catchphrase for fascists and militant racists. The literal translation of “slava Ukraini” is just “glory to Ukraine.” Some might say it with the Banderites in mind, but for others it’s just what they say now instead of “slava CCCR” or “God bless America.” Every country in the world has some default expression of patriotism that you say when clinking shot glasses or ending a political speech, and for most Ukrainians that’s all it’s ever been.
Still, there’s another reason one might avoid saying things like “slava Ukraini” or “God bless America”: a lot of socialists think that patriotism is reactionary, too. If your entire politics revolve around Marx’s call to unite the workers of the world then it makes zero sense to affirm these artificial national categories we’ve grouped them into and fetishize some special fondness or connection with one of them in particular.1 If moreover you accept standard Marxist accounts of fascism, then you know that the difference between patriotism and fascism is mostly just a matter of economic circumstance. Everything that seems innocent and benign about patriotism — the construction of national (and foreign) identities, the line-drawing around a “homeland”, the romanticization of your group’s history — inevitably shows its shadow side as soon as the capitalist order begins to break down.
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So we arrive at the latest installment of Compact’s weekly newsletter. In Blood and Soil for Liberals, Sohrab Ahmari rails against both Ukrainian nationalism and the American liberals who indulge in it. And a lot of it hits the mark: for example, where he flags Snyder’s bizarre argument that Ukraine should take out the Kerch Bridge since it “is urged by the Ukrainian-Kievan-Viking mystic chords of memory”. It’s a damning indictment of the infiltration of nationalism into ostensibly liberal politics — but then, we get this incredible kicker:
Is this man in favor of closed borders or not? Is this man willing to tolerate reactionary rhetoric for the sake of shutting down bridges or not? Because here’s what Ahmari has said about Donald Trump on immigration:
There’s so much that still makes my skin crawl — any given tweet on any given day… Maybe it took a Queens vulgarian to clear some of the deadwood of the past away.
One moment, he rightly decries the liberal collaboration with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi fringe in their fight to close Ukraine’s border; but the next, he announces without a hint of self-consciousness that he will be joining notorious white supremacist Anne Coulter in their fight to close America’s border.
The first irony of this piece is that Sohrab rejects Ukrainian ethnonationalism not because it is ethnonationalism, but because it is Ukrainian. There is no universe in which he would chide someone for displaying an American flag; he complains of liberals that a “Ukrainian flag in their Twitter bios became de rigeur” not because they are nationalist but because they are rooting for the wrong team. It’s the same double-standard we so often see with “slava Ukraini” and “God bless America”; both have their reactionary histories and connotations,2 but in the US one is viewed with way more suspicion than the other.
The second irony is similar: Sohrab may reject open-borders liberalism, but only because of the open borders. The liberalism he is fine with. Sohrab may position himself as an ally of the working class, but he cannot bring himself to oppose the capitalist system that enslaves them. So he finds himself playing games of triage and damage control with borders, trying “to protect working-class wages” by imprisoning millions of workers behind Trump’s wall.
That, of course, is why we have nationalism in the first place: a capitalist order that constantly divides workers against themselves. That’s the order that Sohrab desperately wants to defend. Sohrab begins his essay by declaring that the “fraught symbiosis between liberalism and nationalism is one of Compact’s central intellectual and journalistic interests”; but in his ongoing opposition to socialism and alliance with figures like Coulter and Trump, it’s not just an interest. It’s an agenda.
Defenses of patriotism often romanticize this “connection” we have with our country in nearly mystical terms, but I am often struck by how often this rhetoric actually uproots us from our history. I love the beauty of the Appalachian mountains that I grew up in, and for much of my life I often thought of this as loving something about America. Sometimes I’ve found myself talking about it like my departed grandmother used to talk about the Scottish Highlands where our ancestors were from. Something about the altitude and the landscape made her feel at home. A few years after her death, however, I learned something that I wish I had known while she was alive: the Appalachians and the Scottish Highlands were both a part of the same Central Pangean Mountain range until the Atlantic opened up between them. It’s pure sentimentality, of course, to think that our family has some special connection to some particular collision of tectonic plates; but I still think she would have enjoyed learning about.
Did you know that the most famous rendition of God Bless America was recorded by Kate Smith — who also gave us gems like “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” and “Pickaninny Heaven”? Remember when it became the go-to anthem of warhawks to drown out protesters during the Vietnam War? Remember a few years ago when vandals painted over a Black Lives Matter mural with “God Bless America”? Anyone who thinks that slava Ukraini has uniquely reactionary connotations in a way that God bless America does not should be quickly disabused of that notion with just a cursory look at the scholarship.