On Our Chauvinism

Some off-the-cuff post-Fourth of July thoughts on the most American of traditions

If somehow everyone kind enough to read this Substack/listen to the History Impossible podcast (or support my work!) doesn’t know, I’m an American (though I suppose you’d only mistake me as a Canadian, based on my relatively non-regional accent; thank my Ohio-born parents for casting a dialectical protection spell on me, saving me from the horrors of a oh-you-betcha Minnesota drawl). It helps inform a lot of my worldview, as most frequently made apparent during my frequent conversations with my friend Kristaps Andrejsons. My “American optimism” comes up a lot; I don’t see it, but given what I’ve heard from Kristaps and what I know about Chinese culture thanks to my extended family, I think it’s safe to say that even the most cynical among us Americans probably scores pretty high on the life/existence outlook curve.

It’s also worth mentioning that my immediate family has not had a living immigrant to this country in over a century and a half, so I’m probably, mostly, what they would call “old stock.” The most recent transplant to these shores was on my father’s side in 1871, a German Jew who shared my name (and who clearly was bullshitting the guys at Castle Garden with whom he registered, since “von Sternberg” denotes a royalty that does not exist). Beyond that, my family’s existence in America goes back—if Ancestry dot com is to be believed (yes, yes I know, they now have my data)—to around 1750, with German, English, and broadly Celtic transplants dotting the Ohio River Valley, parts of the East Coast, and eventually California. In other words, I’m about as American as they come: an ethnic mutt with nearly three centuries of ancestors (land thieves?) to show for it and thus, very little reason—like most Americans of my stock—to consider what it actually means to be a citizen of the United States and participant in its culture.

Anyway, all this is to say that despite this (and because of the influence of my extended family and international friends) I am constantly trying to challenge my own American perspective so I don’t take my perspective for granted. How successful I am at doing so is most definitely up for debate—I wouldn’t give myself too much credit—but the point is that I am always trying to keep things in check, especially when I’m learning about (and especially when I’m talking about) history. Not everything, I try to remind myself, is about me (that is, an American) and my perspective as an American. I can provide that context to highlight my own bias and let my listeners/readers make their own conclusions, and obviously everything I think is just my own perspective, but in the end, history is not just about me or my biases. In other words, I strive not to ruin history as a discipline with my observations about it (despite what I’m sure some people might think).

A lot of things can ruin history as a discipline. Often times, it’s usually framed as revisionism, but revisionism is arguably what keeps history alive. The American historian James M. Banner has even made the argument that all history is revisionist history. While “revisionism” has certainly become a good codeword for people looking to sanitize their performative skepticism—especially about things such as the Holocaust—I don’t think that it’s fair to throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to revisionism. Some of the best historical works I’ve read and historians who I follow engage in different types of revisionism. Niall Ferguson is the master of thought-provoking revisionism, especially with The Pity of War and War of the World, which frame the First World War’s outcome through a deeply critical consequentialist lens, and both World Wars as part of a continuous conflict with a two decade armistice in the middle, respectively. Timothy Snyder’s masterful work Bloodlands provides another perspective on the meat grinder that became the Eastern Front of World War II that frames it as less about unhinged Nazi aggression or calculated Soviet genocide (though it certainly acknowledges these things), and more about how such bloodletting was the natural consequence of being stuck between two totalitarian empires. So as I see it, it’s not revisionism, or even conspiratorial rewriting, or any of the other less savory elements of history that hurts the field. It’s chauvinism that is the real poison of history.

Chauvinism is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica website as “excessive and unreasonable patriotism,” and, “any kind of ultranationalism and was used generally to connote an undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs.” This is a pretty obvious definition at this point with some pretty obvious examples that can be highlighted, including in the United States. The best examples of this positive chauvinism could be seen in recent years during the height of the War on Terror (remember “god told me to end the tyranny in Iraq”?), but also in past proclamations like Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and our favorite 19th century justification for continental imperialism, Manifest Destiny. In short, the United States is no stranger to chauvinism, which has colored both present justifications, as well as past interpretations, with a wide array of historians over the years making various claims in favor of America’s more chauvinistic actions either for presentist, “own-the-libs” lines of reasoning, or simply because of their own chauvinistic attitude toward the United States; we’re all vulnerable to love of country, after all.

“Yes, that’s exactly right!” many may want to exclaim, before rattling off their own examples of American chauvinism having a human toll in the past, gleeful in providing their high-brow, well-informed proof of America’s villainy. But chauvinism, people like this don’t seem to realize, is a two-way street. I recently came across Noah Smith’s excellent pseudo-obituary of Noam Chomsky and his “America bad” ideology, in which he explains that “[Chomsky] views the American people as naifs — tricked by their media, their corporations, and their plutocratic leaders into ravaging the world,” is one rooted in a fundamental elitism and one that simply inverts the chauvinism we’d recognize from previous centuries of American history. “If Americans were to stay forever within their borders,” summarizes Smith, “the rest of the world would be at peace.” This is nothing if not one of the many ways one can place the United States at the center of everyone’s mind; to make us the main character of an obvious ensemble cast. This is not, as best I can tell, meaningfully different than the neoconservative/Wilsonian progressive mission of “making the world safe for democracy.”

This is, to put it bluntly, a form of masochism. I’m borrowing my framing from one of my favorite recent philosophers (and History Impossible guest!) Goran Adamson, whose 2021 book Masochistic Nationalism updated the George Orwell formulations of negative and transferred nationalisms and gave it a psychological edge by characterizing the self-flagellating tendency of leftist Chomskyites and their paleoconservative coreligionists as one of masochism, i.e. pleasure in receiving, as nationalists, pain. Goran’s writing focused more on the controversial phenomenon of multi-culturalism (which, at least as best I can tell, is really only worth calling controversial outside the United States; there goes my chauvinism I guess!), so in piggy-backing off his concept, I’ve taken to referring to the phenomenon I’m discussing as masochistic chauvinism. I didn’t use the term, but I did discuss this with Goran during our conversation, and he saw wisdom in the idea that placing America at the center of all the world’s ills was little different than placing it at the center of all its triumphs. If we’re to hate one version, why not hate both?

Well, because to hate both would require something that chauvinists—positive and masochistic—can’t handle: a complex, and largely amoral world, in which protagonists and antagonists are not fixed and in which all actions—noble or otherwise—have trade-offs. These are things that don’t make for a good story unless you know how to navigate amorality in a narrative context; I don’t claim that I have a particular skill at doing that—that’s up for listeners and readers to decide—but it’s definitely the goal in these here parts! If Star Wars is the guide to our moral compass, then truly, insanely, complex things like the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is pretty easy to navigate. If it’s Game of Thrones (at least its first six seasons) or, say, The Last of Us Part II (which I only use as an example because it likely was inspired by the conflict!), then, well, not so much. Am I deploying the age-old condescending trope of saying the focus of my criticism—chauvinists in this case—simply can’t handle nuance and complexity and just need their baby stories with easily loved heroes and easily hated villains?

Well. Yes. Yes I am. (Only kidding. Kind of).

Maybe I’ll do a deeper dive into this phenomenon—particularly that of masochistic chauvinism—one day, because it most certainly relates to a lot of modern conflicts. But because this is indeed a bit off the cuff and simply inspired by conflicted patriotism I feel every Fourth of July (maybe a “rueful gratitude” is a good way to describe it), I think I’ll leave my analysis at that. I also want to make clear that despite my condescending pseudo-joke above, I don’t think people shouldn’t be chauvinists of either stripe, not if they’re just regular people. I think it’s only natural to love your country or hate it; but in order to understand history and participate in historical, political, and otherwise serious conceptual conversations, I think chauvinism of all types needs to be checked at the door.