National Review

• Published in: American conservative (Arlington, Va.) Vol. 19; no. 1; pp. 44 - 46
• Main Author: Deneen, Patrick J
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Arlington The American Conservative LLC 01.01.2020; American Conservative LLC
• Subjects: Endorsements; Holidays & special occasions; Independence Day; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Nationalism; Native North Americans; President of the United States; Progressivism; Religion; Roosevelt, Theodore; Roosevelt, Theodore (1858-1919); Warranties
• ISSN: 1540-966X

While he claims that a defining feature of a nation is a common and shared language-countries like Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and Ireland notwithstanding-during the period Lowry acknowledges as a high-water mark of American nationalism, America was a multilingual and genuinely multicultural nation. What of St. Patrick's Day, Columbus Day (at least once upon a time), Cinco de Mayo, and the enlarged calendar of religious and ethnic holidays that have been a legacy of the variety of Americans who have populated the nation? A nationalism that asks us to have as our primary and even sole devotion the abstract reverence toward the flag, the American eagle, and a national history that leaves aside all the various particular histories of America's many places asks us to love something too abstract, too distant, and too artificial. Lowry quite clearly endorses this dimension of nationalism: in praising England as the nation par excellence worthy of our admiration and emulation, he takes the side of Henry VIII against St. Thomas More, whom, he writes, "represented a worldview that considered nationality as an accidental division and an incidental loyalty, a perspective that would steadily lose ground." At various points throughout his book Lowry acknowledges the sins of America- foremost, slavery, but also treatment of Native Americans, Catholics, Mexicans, its imperialism and, today, white nationalism-and regards them in each and every instance as regrettable, but occasionally necessary (the decimation of the Native Americans for their backward economic order), and finally not an essential expression of American nationalism.