https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-11-07/americas-original-identity-politics
The people who preceded the English settlers were either few and far between or benefitted from the arrival of these newcomers. There was “basically no one in California to have a popular will” when white pioneers arrived, Lowry writes [...]
The more “underhanded and brutish” episodes in U.S. history, such as the near eradication of Native Americans, were cosmically necessary, since they paved the way for the “stupendous boon” brought by continental expansion.
That is so stupidly ignorant of history, and in a racist way. Ethnic cleansing and genocide benefitted them? Not the world I live in.
The problem with nationalism, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, is that it requires too much belief in what isn’t so. Lowry’s claims rest on a maddening evasiveness when it comes to definitions. At times he uses the word “nation” to refer to a social group. At other times the word stands for a sovereign country
Few of Lowry’s statements would pass muster with historians who have been to an archive or tried to write about the past in ways that admit complexity. “Ancient Egypt constituted a unified state, ruling an ethnically homogeneous people with a distinct culture, for thousands of years,” he claims. “The same was true of China, Korea, and Japan.” Sweeping assertions like these are legion, and to any serious thinker they should be an embarrassment. A society might have an identifiable high culture, or a dominant language of trade or governance, or characteristic art forms in particular historical periods. But to claim homogeneity, much less “ethnic” sameness, for millennia is thoughtless sloganeering.
Women are almost entirely absent from Lowry’s national past and present. By my count, fewer than a dozen or so women merit a mention in his book: Queen Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc are among them, along with a bevy of current-day intellectuals such as Amy Gutmann and Martha Nussbaum, who are there to be argued against. When he uses the term “we,” it almost always refers to white people of Anglo-Saxon heritage, or at least people who are not Native Americans, Latinx, or recent immigrants.
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