But the idea that there’s no connection between nativism and assimilationism seems … strange. Consider, for instance, the way the debate over Catholic immigration to the United States played out. Yes, you did have nativists who thought that the Irish (and Italians, and Slavs) were too racially inferior to ever become Americans. But the anti-Catholic case was ideological and cultural (think “rum, romanism and rebellion”) as often as it was racist, and assimilationist as often as it was strictly exclusionist, and the two tendencies consistently overlapped. Many nativists moved back and forth between arguing that Catholic immigrants would have particular difficulty adapting to American norms because they’d been brought up in an inherently despotic religious culture, and arguing that Catholic immigrants would make excellent Americans — but only once they escaped the malign influence of priests and nuns and popes. The great Catholic-versus-nativist flashpoint in the late 19th century was public education: Whether it should be explicitly Protestant, whether public dollars should flow to Catholic schools, etc. And most of the rhetorical and intellectual work that American Catholics did to reconcile their faith with American democracy — which would eventually produce the hyper-patriotism of the mid-20th century American church — was an explicit response to the nativist-but-also-assimilationist demand that Catholics either Americanize or depart.
(It’s also important to note that the ideological critique of Catholic immigration wasn’t necessarily crazy. The 19th-century Vatican really did have a very public problem with liberalism and democracy, and it wasn’t unreasonable for Protestant Americans to worry about Catholicism’s ability to conform itself to democratic pluralism. The parallel to the debate over Islam today should be obvious: It’s foolish and bigoted to suggest that Muslims can’t be good Americans, but it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that American Muslim leaders, like Catholic prelates before them, have a particular obligation to embrace the separation of church and state, to distance themselves from Islamist currents overseas — rather than, say, endorsing the basic premises of the Iranian theocracy — and so on.)
Where's the Southern perspective to act as a corrective? Was there more to American nativism than history books might suggest? Were there vested interests backing it? The problem with Mr. Douthat's analysis here is that he looks at generalizations and reifies them, instead of looking at the moral and political principles involved, and to present an overview of the different contemporary viewpoints on the matter. While granting that "obviously no columnist’s conceit is going to capture all of the complexities of American history," Douthat still strains to establish that there is a connection between nativism and assimilationism. If supporters of certain laws or policies have different reasons for supporting those laws then does it make any sense to lump them all together into one movement and claim that the movement has different tendencies? Even if this might be acceptable within limits for the sake of history, does it tell us how to proceed with respect to the Muslim question? Not at all, unless you already share his liberal assumptions that govern his analysis and answer.
There’s been a lot of criticism of my column’s suggestion that the idea of America as a distinctive culture — English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon and/or Western, Protestant and then “Judeo-Christian” — has driven both a positive assimilationism and a darker nativism over the years, and indeed that these two impulses are often intertwined.
In that previous column he contrasts the a "traditional" conception of the United States, one that is founded upon its culture, with the conception of the proposition nation. (And to limit the proposition nation viewpoint simply to allegiance to the Constitution might be too narrow, I think. Moreover, how is the Constitution understood?) I suspect traditional conservatives (and antebellum Southerners) have notion of assimilation that differs from the Yankee nativism of the 19th century. Mr. Douthat is doing traditional conservatism no favors when he claims, "But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success," but fails to offer a better account of what Americans believed about their culture and identity. Lumping different groups of conservatives who voice a negative opinion about Islam or Muslim immigration together with the nativists is the sort of simplistic and ultimately useless gloss one should expect from a MSM source, but Mr. Douthat should know better, especially if he prides himself on being "conservative." Or is it more important to continue churning out these all-too-brief columns for the sake of keeping his living and position at the NY Times? It may even seem to be more of an appeal to his readers to accept that he is the principled "conservative" while other conservatives are just bigots. Self-absorbed shaming of others, rather than a thorough inquiry into the moral questions. One would think that liberals who bother to read his column would feel justified in dismissing cultural/social conservatism after reading his latest.
(Did democratic pluralism really exist in the late 19th and early 20th century? Or was it already subordinated to a national identity that had its purpose the preservation of a certain kind of political economy? And might it be that some were already aware that Catholicism was not opposed to its adherents coexisting in a pluralistic society, but that it offered objections to the justice of that political economy?)
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