The Power of Nations

Abstract

David A. Hollinger and I agree on many issues: that becoming American is best interpreted as involving both liberty and coercion; that from the 1930s and through the 1960s, American nationalism propelled forward various social movements; even, with some qualifications by Hollinger, that the repressions of the 1910s and 1920s helped shape the liberal nationalist progress of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. There is much that I admire in Postethnic America. A society of the sort he envisions, in which people are free to choose their identities, is one in which I would like to live if only we could figure out a way to get there. Our differences lie, first, in where to locate his work; second, in what measures will be required to resuscitate liberal nationalism; and, third, whether race is losing its significance as a defining principle of American nationality. My characterization of him is, in his judgment, unfair, for he belongs not among the voluntarists but among those, such as Roy Rosenzweig, Lizabeth Cohen, Michael Rogin, and myself, who seek to study the balance between invention and constraint in the shaping of American identity. Hollinger criticizes me for neglecting the distinction between his description of the past, which is laden with coercion and limitation, and his normative outline of the future, in which he imagines an America free of such constraints. But the confusion is not mine, but his; if the past has been so coercive, why should we expect the future to be different? His book offers no sustained examination of that crucial question. The question becomes even more pressing once Hollinger turns to liberal nationalism as the deus ex machina that will generate the tolerant community that America needs for postethnicity to flourish. Our history suggests that building a national community depends on repression and exclusion, hardly a happy prospect for any architect of postethnic America to contemplate. Hollinger now concedes this point and undertakes in his response the work that is missing from his book: conceiving of a nation-building program that will forestall the reappearance of the crude and repressive campaigns that disfigured nation building in the 1910s and 1920s. Hollinger, in a commendable analysis, insists that distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of state coercion can be drawn and maintained and that reasonable and just Americanization efforts can substitute for irrational and unjust ones. Liberal nationalists need precisely such a theory of legitimate state power if their program is ever going to succeed. But Hollinger needs to push his analysis further than he has, for even if reasonable distinctions about what a state should and should not demand of immigrants can