"Whatever its faults, middle-class nationalism provided a common ground, common standards, a common frame of reference, without which society dissolves into nothing more than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers of America understood so well—a war of all against all."
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...and then discovering what the world had really become when I entered the wider world, a nation of smug elites masquerading as meritocrats that had given up any notion of a Jeffersonian democracy. It was quite the shock. Not least of all, because I was decidedly *not* an elite.
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Oh, and since people will likely freak out at the positive use of 'nationalism', note that Lasch was writing in 1995, where that hadn't yet come to represent a completely negative thing ('jingoism' was more the word then). This is another big change between now and then.
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By 'nationalism' he meant a sense of common and unifying identity and purpose (even in the midst of the always pluralistic and motley American polity), not necessarily the overweening rah-rah jingoism of our Trumpian present, and all that darkly suggests for the future.
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