Celebrating Our Nation State

AS WE MARK another anniversary of our great Declaration of Independence in joyous celebration let us also celebrate the importance of the nation state.

It is important for conservatives to do this because for upwards of a century the fashionables have been sneering at the nation state. They look forward to a global, pan-human society, led by themselves.

The future global society, when it comes about, and assuming it can actually succeed, will doubtless be a glorious thing. But we must never forget the remarkable achievement of the nation state.

Before the nation state, people could only imagine political institutions based on blood. They could not imagine trusting people who were not of their own kin.

The nation state, on the other hand, is a political unit based on the abstract ties of language and culture. In the nation state we transcend the limits of blood and kinship and learn to associate with and trust people who share much less in common than the physical ties of clan and tribe.

The day may come when we will consign the nation state to the dust heap of history; but that day is not yet. Indeed, the likelihood is that we have many lessons to learn before we can imagine, let alone build, trans-national political institutions that actually work.

Indeed, the appetite in our educated elites for divisive national politics and for political programs that utterly ignore the lessons of the past indicate that we ought to stick pretty close to our present democratic, federal, nation state.

So let�s hear it for the last best hope of manking: The good old U. S. of A.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

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Liberal Coercion

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Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
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Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Living Law

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German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

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