Abstract
Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article innovates, first, by examining an unusually broad set of measures (from the 2004 GSS) tapping national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans’ national self-understanding. Second, we use latent class analysis to explore heterogeneity, partitioning the sample into classes characterized by distinctive patterns of attitudes. Conventional distinctions between ethnocultural and civic nationalism describe just about half of the U.S. population and do not account for the unexpectedly low levels of national pride found among respondents who hold restrictive definitions of American nationhood. A subset of primarily younger and well-educated Americans lacks any strong form of patriotic sentiment; a larger class, primarily older and less well educated, embraces every form of nationalist sentiment. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and partisan identification, these classes vary significantly in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, immigration, and national sovereignty. Finally, using comparable data from 1996 and 2012, we find structural continuity and distributional change in national sentiments over a period marked by terrorist attacks, war, economic crisis, and political contention.
Highlights
American nationalism—the complex of ideas, sentiments, and representations by which Americans understand the United States and their relationship to it—has largely been the province of U.S historians and political psychologists.1 The former have primarily focused on moments when American statehood was problematic: the first years of the Republic and the period after the Civil War (Kohn 1957; Waldstreicher 1997)
After characterizing the attitudinal composition of the latent classes and analyzing the correlates of class assignment, we explore whether class membership is associated independently with attitudes toward minorities, immigration, national boundaries, and foreign policy, net of the impact of sociodemographic measures and partisan identification
Our analysis focuses on four aspects of American nationalism: national identification, criteria of national membership, national pride, and national hubris
Summary
Consistent with their support for civic definitions of a “true American” and their low values on hubris, the disengaged were much more likely than others to endorse the view that the government should “respect and protect the rights of minorities” and that it is better if minorities “maintain their distinctive customs and traditions.” Despite their inclusive views of the criteria for national membership, creedal nationalists did not differ significantly from ardent nationalists in their responses to either item tapping attitudes toward multiculturalism. Given that we find heightened levels of ardent nationalism three years after the 9/11 attacks, major shocks to the nation, if reinforced by state action, may reconfigure shared understandings of the nation for relatively long periods of time.
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