The Return of the Native: Can Liberalism Safeguard Us Against Nativism? by Jan Willem Duyvendak

Author:Jan Willem Duyvendak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Nation, the People, and the Ordinary Man

If populist nativism’s main feature is constructing the national elite as a monolithic entity that is regarded both as foreign and as a threat to the nation, what is then the nation that should be protected from this threat? Nativism in its populist variation not only invokes the nation as a cultural and ethnic community but also adds a “vertical,” class dimension to this: “the people.” In nativism, the people are not a part of the nation; the people are the nation. The notion “the nation-is-the-people” acquires meaning in five closely related and mutually reinforcing ways in which this trope is used: opposition, conflation, typification, spatialization, and racialization.

First, opposition refers to the often implicit invocation of the ordinary people in contradistinction to horizontal (immigrants) and vertical (elite) others. The elite

are seen not only as comfortably insulated from the economic struggles of ordinary people, but also as differing in their culture, values, and way of life. They are seen as culturally as well as economically mobile—in effect, as rootless cosmopolitans, indifferent to the bounded solidarities of community and nation. Their affective and cultural as well as economic investments are seen as moving easily across national boundaries, their moral self-understanding, cultural identity, and economic fate as de-linked from those of “the people.” (Brubaker 2017b, 363)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.