Prescriptions for a New National Democracy

Abstract

Americans tend to think of their history as one of unbroken continuity. The United States has been governed under the same federal constitution since the eighteenth century, and its borders have remained unchanged since the nineteenth century (with the exception of the admission to statehood of Alaska and Hawaii). This superficial continuity disguises the discontinuities between three successive American regimes or republics, each separated from its predecessor by a violent upheaval, each marked by a distinctive set of rules governing citizenship, race, and immigration. The First Republic of the United States, Anglo-America, lasted from the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787-1789 until the Civil War. Its successor, Euro-America, coalesced in the aftermath of the Civil War and lasted until the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The present American regime, Multicultural America, was assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Each republic of the United States to date has had its own political creed. The political creed of Anglo-America was federal republicanism; even before the Civil War inaugurated the Euro-American republic, this was giving way to federal democracy, as class-based restrictions on suffrage (at least among white men) were abolished. In Multicultural America, federal centralization has been combined with a cooptive system of racial preferences; in effect, territorial federalism has been overlaid by racial federalism. The idea of racial federalism is democracy within races, not democracy across races; its symbol is the racially gerrymandered majority-minority district. The philosophy of liberal nationalism offers an alternative to the multicultural conception of American society. Liberal nationalists reject the multicultural idea of the United States as a federation of half a dozen biologically-defined ethnocultural groups in favor of a conception of the American community as a concrete