If conservatives carried revolvers, they’d probably reach for them at the sound of the word “nationalism.” Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t carry revolvers, since nationalism usually makes its appearance armed with considerably bigger guns. In the Europe of Metternich and Castlereagh, nationalism was the vehicle for the revolutionary destruction of dynastic and aristocratic regimes and the parent of all sorts of modern nastiness. “From the French Revolution,” wrote the conservative Anglo-Polish historian Sir Lewis Namier, “dates the active rise of modern nationalism with some of its most dangerous features: of a mass movement centralizing and levelling, dynamic and ruthless, akin in nature to the horde.”

American conservatives have never been much more enthusiastic about nationalism than their European counterparts. The opposition to ratification of the US Constitution was led by country gentlemen who knew very well that Alexander Hamilton’s national unification meant merely the consolidation of Northeastern dominance over the states and their distinctive subcultures. For the first seventy years of American history, the main political conflict revolved around whether the nationalists of the Northeast would succeed in impressing their thumbprints on the wax of the new republic. That, as Richard Weaver saw, was the issue in Daniel Webster’s debates with South Carolina’s Senator Robert Young Hayne, and the concrete meaning of Webster’s “Liberty and Union” speech was that the republic should be unified around the Northeastern goals of economic expansion and national power.

As every schoolboy knows (or used to know, back when teachers told schoolboys about Abraham Lincoln), those goals eventually triumphed, and the “equality” that Lincoln and his supporters preached with their terrible swift swords was largely a mask for an orgiastic ethic of producing and consuming, the Great Barbecue that culminated only in the present century. In Lincoln’s day and under his leadership. Northeastern financial and industrial centers finally gained enough material power and resources to crush their rivals. It was neither patriotism nor piety that ultimately made the unum prevail over the pluribus, but the acquisitive habits that Lincoln’s “equality of opportunity” rationalized and that modern advertising, credit instruments, mass media, and government-managed demand succeeded in creating.

Be all that as it may, the United States today is a unitary nation-state, as much as traditionalist conservatives may be loath to admit it. If you don’t believe this, travel to a city other than the one in which you live. You, will discover that just about any place you visit in the United States today looks almost exactly like the one you just left. Fast-food palaces, shopping malls, mammoth supermarkets, hotel chains, modern highway networks, office buildings, high-rises, and parking lots now define the public orthodoxy of the nation. If you visit bookstores, watch television, go to the movies, or listen to music or the news in any American city, what you read, see, or hear will be very much the same as in any other city. On a recent visit to Atlanta, I found that the local TV news was all about child abuse, drug busts, and local political corruption—exactly the same as in Washington. Only the street names were different.

National unification of the United States has meant the destruction of local and regional variations and their homogenization under a regime of centralized power—economic and cultural as well as political. But homogenization doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. The universalist and cosmopolitan formulas that justified national unification—equality of opportunity, human rights, economic growth, and material progress—don’t distinguish between one nation and another, and ultimately they demand the abolition of national distinctiveness and identity just as easily as they do the homogenization of subnational regional and cultural particularity. The forces that bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to Nebraska and Nevada, disseminate the political insights of Rivera and Donohue to housewives in Wyoming, and decide how small businessmen in Birmingham should provide for the safety and health of their workers also will export such progress to the rest of the world. Indeed, the logic of this century’s technological unification, and the interests of the elites that created and run it, dictate that the unity of the nation make way for the homogenization of the world.

The globalist dynamic is working itself out even now. The September issue of Scientific American was devoted to the topic of “Managing Planet Earth,” and the thesis of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that the United States is in a condition of decline, is routinely exploited to justify the management of decline so that the United States, in Professor Kennedy’s words, can “adjust sensibly to the newer world order.” Secretary of State James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev become almost weepy when they talk about the “transnational issues” that will fill the diplomatic platters of the future—arms control, conflict management, global environmental and economic policies, and, of course, drugs. American servicemen already are in South America to help its governments perform what ought to be entirely domestic law enforcement functions against the Medellin Cartel, itself a transnational corporate state. Global democratization is only one part of the effort to envelop the entire planet in a postindustrial web that will strangle local cultural, economic, and political autonomy.

Some Americans, especially the cosmo-conservatives in Manhattan and Washington, may fantasize that globalization will yield another “American Century,” with Yankee know-how tossing institutional and ideological candy bars to fetching senoritas in the Third World. But blue-collar workers in Detroit and construction men in Texas probably have a better grip on the realities of globalization as they watch their own jobs disappear before Asian competition and illegal immigrants. Globalization doesn’t mean that America will prevail, but that it will vanish among the electrons and laser beams by which the planet is to be held together, just as Midwestern small businesses and Southern family farms vanished into the financial and industrial grids of the 19th-century nationalists.

But compared to what globalism has in store for us, nationalism looks pretty good. If what remains of the Middle American nucleus of American culture is to survive, it will have to evolve a new nationalist consciousness capable of resisting the global managerial system and of challenging its domestic apologists. This means that the main instruments of globalization—the internationalization of domestic law and policy through gradual subordination to transnational organizations and treaties; the internationalization of the economy through free trade and investment; and the internalization of the historic American population itself through mass immigration and the delegitimation of the European roots of its culture—have to be decisively repudiated.

It also means a radical rejection of what historically has been the basis of American nationalism—the cult of economic growth, material acquisition, and universal “equality of opportunity”—and its reformulation in a new myth of the nation as a distinctive cultural and political force that cannot be universalized for the rest of the planet or digested by the globalist regime. Finally, it means that Middle America, for once, will have to get its act together to challenge the power of the ideological globalists who now prevail in the nation as both the “left” and the “right.”

“In every republic,” wrote Niccolo Machiavelli, “there are two parties, that of the nobles and that of the people.” The former “have a great desire to dominate, whilst the latter have only the wish not to be dominated, and consequently a greater desire to live in the enjoyment of liberty.” In the American republic, the “nobles” have corresponded to the forces that sought the unification of the country under their own formulas of egalitarian and acquisitive nationalism and who now beat the drum for global homogenization. The “people” have consisted of those groups and sections that have resisted unification, that wanted only to be left alone, and who sought, as Weaver described Hayne’s idea of freedom, “protection to enable him to enjoy things, not a force or power to enable him to do things.”

But the mere “wish not to be dominated,” as the anti-federalists, the Confederates, the agrarian populists, and, most recently, the grass roots adherents of the New Right wanted, has not sustained their independence and freedom or the integrity of their cultural institutions. If what remains of such forces are serious about resisting being swallowed by the new transnational colossus, they will have to recognize that they can do so only by dominating—that is, by becoming “nobles” themselves, by uniting in a new Middle American nationalism, and by putting aside the divisions and distractions that have turned them into the victims of fortune, instead of her master.