I see four theories of American identity, none of which seem sustainable in the face of the developments I have been describing in previous posts.

The New Nativism: The new nativists sing the praises of an ethnic America, that is, a white one. Their platform hardly concedes the value of admitting any outsiders as immigrants, much less as citizens, for foreigners are taken to represent (for the most part) the dilution of this putative historical purity.

There’s a lot of historical support for this position (see Rogers Smith’s Civic Ideals) and it fits with the logic of citizenship. Like an exclusive club, the greater the barriers to entry the more valuable the membership. Insofar as citizens in a particular polity do share ethnic, religious, and linguistic roots, the more significant the resulting status is likely to be.

But the future this isn’t. According to the 2000 census, almost 25 percent of the those resident define themselves as something other than white, and more than 15 percent speak something other than English as their first language. New nativism has few takers among either policymakers or intellectuals. New nativism just wouldn’t work in today’s world, short of installing a limited circle of artificially privileged insiders. One can’t actually stop the flow of immigrants; new nativism would permanently subordinate these newcomers. The new nativist agenda would lead to something not so different from ancient Athens, in which a small group of individuals comprised the blood aristocracy of citizens, the rest relegated to legally lesser status.

In the end, the new nativism is finding its place somewhere other than the state. Consider the anti-statism of white militias. It's only through a kind of separatism that their conception of America can be vindicated. The new nativists are becoming contemptuous of the very institution of national citizenship, as embodying a different America than the one they seek.

Conservative Nationalism: Unlike the new nativists, conservative nationalists are accepting of newcomers so long as those newcomers accept the old assimilationist premise of American immigration. Conservative nationalists do not shy from asserting exclusive allegiance to an “American way of life,” and take the “Americanization” movement of the early twentieth century as the model of incorporation. Conservative nationalists take as self-evident the continuing primacy not only of the nation-state as the primary institution of governance, but also of the United States as enjoying primacy among them. Unlike the nativists, however, they allow that the American ideal can be successfully adopted by immigrants regardless of race or previous nationality. (See here, here, and here for book-length elaborations.)

But conservative nationalism can't withstand the pressures of globalization. Take dual citizenship. Conservative nationalists hew to such old world comparisons of the status to polygamy and the impossibility of “serving two masters.” But they can't explain exactly dual citizenship poses concrete harms in today’s world (especially as more of their friends and relatives acquire additional nationalities). Beyond vague suggestions that the renunciation oath actually be enforced, conservative nationalists don’t have a recipe for how the U.S. can police dual citizenship.

Conservative nationalists preach a thick assimilationism, one that welcomes newcomers but only insofar as they conform to putative American traditions. But conformity is so little a part of American society today, at least in any distinctively American way, as I explained in an earlier post. It is thus improbable that American citizenship will be revived on conservative nationalist terms; the clock can't be turned back.

Multiculturalism: Multiculturalism elevates diversity over unity, with “the politics of difference” as rallying call. In multiculturalism some forms of group membership qualify as identities, and some of these identities are said to entitle group members to differentiated treatment. That is, membership in some groups affords a legal status different from that held by non-members.

But as much as it centers groups, multiculturalism has been very much oriented to the state. Multiculturalism focuses on what group membership will get you by virtue of your national membership, what the nation owes the group. Like affirmative action.

In other words, multiculturalism depends on the existence of national community. But the perspective offers no rationale for the national community, nor can it survive its dissipation. Multiculturalism reifies the state, leaving its existence unexamined. It undermines the possibility of national community insofar as it locates primary identity somewhere other than the state and offers no substitute basis for its persistence, no commonality by which to bind its members.

Liberal nationalism: The liberal nationalists retreat to a more defensible perimeter, with a thin and inclusive articulation of American nationality centered in political values. This sets the liberal and conservative nationalists apart – where the conservatives would assert thick cultural parameters to American nationality, liberals would pose few if any. As Michael Walzer puts it, “If the manyness of America is cultural, its oneness is political.”

Liberal nationalists look to take the best qualities of the nation-state as a form of human association and put them to work in the advancement of liberal ideals. Liberal nationalists, as Bonnie Honig notes in Democracy and the Foreigner, “read democratic theory according to the genre conventions of a popular or modern roman, as a happy-ending love story.”

But liberal nationalism cannot reconcile its tenet of inclusiveness with the inherent exclusiveness of citizenship regimes. VC commenters may have an easy time deriding the inclusion of the democracy-affirming individual in Bangalore (intended as a thought experiment only!), but liberal nationalists have a harder time explaining his exclusion.

Nor can the pluralist strand of liberal nationalism process the new transnationalism of civil society. A core tenet of the pluralist ethic is that non-state memberships will be subordinated to membership in the state, which as an umbrella organization supplies the social glue. As Walzer observes, "A citizen, we might say, is a [person] whose largest or most inclusive group is the state."

But it doesn't work in a world of genuinely transnational affiliations. Many Americans now belong to organizations that are not exclusively or even primarily American in composition. Take an American who is also a member of the Catholic Church, the World Wildlife Fund, does volunteer work for Oxfam, is an executive at Toyota and a woman. For good measure, one might throw in an additional nationality, so that the individual is also a citizen of, say, Italy. That is not an exceptional profile, as parts of which the transnational elements are significant. Can we say of this person that her "largest and most inclusive group" remains America?

Yes, the United States remains the most inclusive of these groups in the sense that it will include anti-environmentalists and those for whom relief work is not important, members of other religions, employees of other companies, and men. But that is totally circular – these other groups are all more inclusive than the United States insofar as they are not limited to U.S. citizens. In other words, America is no longer the most inclusive group that many Americans belong to, or at least it is no more inclusive than many others groups of which we are members.

That brings citizenship down off its normative pedestal. In my final post tomorrow, I'll take up the "beyond" in Beyond Citizenship. What to do in the face of diminished identification with the state?