The “populist moment” began with the UK Independence Party, Danish People’s Party, and Front National in France attaining nearly 30% of their countries’ vote in the 2014 European elections. With Brexit and Trump following soon after, and the surge in support for the AfD in Germany and for Sweden Democrats, and later their equivalents in Italy, Spain, and even Portugal, the rise of national populism has rightly produced an explosion of research.
Much qualitative work draws on the populism or fascism research traditions. Quantitative papers often start from conflict theory, assessing competing materialist or psychological versions. For the latter versions, the field tends to lean on political psychology workhorses such as right-wing authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, racial resentment, or, more recently, white identity. What is often missing is an engagement with the nationalism literature, specifically the historical-sociological research tradition of ethnosymbolism associated with Anthony Smith, John Armstrong, John Hutchinson, and Adrian Hastings, among others. Although researchers acknowledge that the new populism tends to take place in a national rather than religious or elitist register, they often do not focus on nationalism.
Ethnosymbolism theory pays close attention to the content of nationalist messaging, particularly how current symbols flagged by nationalists resonate with existing affective attachments in a population. This typically entails tracing how nations’ myth-symbol complexes connect to those used in the past and how symbols and meanings persist over time, even as they gradually evolve. In addition, Anthony Smith stresses the centrality of “ethnic cores” that gave rise to modern nations, creating an umbilical attachment between dominant ethnic groups and “their” nation-states. The role of ethnic majorities—preponderant communities that believe themselves to have shared ancestry—thereby becomes an important part of the story.
The New Nationalism in America and Beyond, by Robert Schertzer and Eric Taylor Woods, represents a bold attempt to bridge the ethnosymbolism tradition in nationalism studies with a historical sociology of American nativism and an empirical analysis of the rise of Trump, Brexit, and Marine Le Pen. Schertzer and Woods, both of whom studied under John Hutchinson, Smith’s first student, at the London School of Economics, are in an ideal position to perform this task.
The authors begin by examining the points of overlap between the populism and nationalism research strands and how they map onto empirical work in political science and nationalism studies. They note that it is important to get behind the simple psychometric indicators used in empirical studies to examine which of many possible symbolic configurations “resonate” and why (p. 12). Ethnosymbolism is less concerned with deeper elements of evolutionary psychology and more with the idea that current symbolic constructions will only tend to mobilize people if they accord with preexisting symbolic attachments. This is a cultural rather than sociobiological account.
The United States, on the authors’ reading, is no mere “ideal nation” of immigrants defined only by liberal democratic ideals. America is not just an idea; to the adherents of “New Nationalism” it represents a particular people, much like the European nations it has long compared itself to. At the heart of American nationhood since independence stands the white Anglo-American ethnic majority group. Initially restricted to Protestants, this was the community of descent that, in Smithian terms, comprised the “ethnic core” of the new nation, much as occurred in Europe and Asia.
The book traverses the history of the United States since its founding, tracing the development of five ethnosymbolic dimensions: people, religion, homeland, history, and ethos. America’s people were initially conceived of by founders like Jefferson to be Anglo-Saxons escaping the British yoke to rediscover their ancient liberties free of Norman influence. This subsequently evolved into the idea of Anglo-Americans as English-speaking whites bearing the Protestant religion. This ethnic group has come to view its destiny as intertwined with that of a providentially gifted homeland of rural communities. The history of the nation is that of a westward expanding country whose settlers, in Teddy Roosevelt’s imagining (and those of many before him), were carrying on the work of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain. The American ideal of liberty and democracy rounds out this set of myths and symbols but cannot be simply abstracted away from the more “ethnic” aspects of American identity.
For its brand of New Nationalist adherents, France, despite its attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution, likewise possesses an ethnic core based on myths of ancestry from the Gauls, Catholicism, and white physical appearance. The country has a proud and heroic history stretching well before 1789: the rural France profonde is the authentic heart of the nation. In Britain, the heart of the Brexit movement is an English ethnonationalism rooted in an evolving sense of history—initially Anglo-Saxonist and Whig, later that of stout defenders of an island nation against outsiders—and in a Protestantism that has since softened into a generic Christian or lapsed-Christian nationalism, as well as the rural idyll of the “green and pleasant land.” Although the religious edges of ethnosymbols in these three western societies have blurred, Islam is considered a foreign creed in all three and has played an important part as a symbol of otherness for the ethnic majority, especially in France and Britain.
The empirical foundations of the book are thousands of tweets from the accounts of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the two main British campaigns to leave the European Union. These are not crunched quantitatively using sentiment analysis or network analysis but rather have been painstakingly scrutinized: “At least two people personally read each of the 15,000 tweets.” This is a classic case of small-N techniques being applied to large-N data.
Some have interpreted Trump’s border wall and tough rhetoric about immigrants as un-American. In fact, from the point of view of the more ethnic tradition of American nationhood, his messaging made perfect sense. The othering of those with a “foreign” religion (i.e., Syrian refugees), name (Barack Obama, possibly a Muslim!), and territorial origin (Mexicans) is in keeping with the authors’ four ethnosymbolic registers of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism-cum-Christianity. The authors note Trump’s nod to the founders and his defense of General Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville. Trump also saluted those who settled the West and on Columbus Day lauded the European contribution to the nation as a “transformative event” (pp. 91–93).
So too in France, where Marine Le Pen expresses repeated hostility to Islam and invokes France’s Christian and Greco-Roman heritage. Her competitor Éric Zemmour, who arrived on the scene after the book’s research, is even more explicit about France’s ethnic provenance. Although the Brexit campaign did not specifically mention race and focused on European immigrants, a number of tweets from Leave accounts alluded to Britain’s exposure to the migrant crisis of mainly Muslim asylum seekers to Europe, along with the potential for further inflows if Turkey became a member of the EU. These tweets referenced the ethnically inflected silent majority of people outside the polyglot cities as closer to the authentic spirit of the country.
Critics could argue that the focus on religious and ethnic others, notably Muslims and Mexicans, does not necessarily indicate the presence of resonant ethnosymbols that stretch back over generations. They might argue that border control is a security issue and political Islam a challenge to liberal democracy and the rights of gays, Jews, and women. The case against this being a robust civic nationalism cannot be fully dispelled by much of this qualitative evidence. When, during his Mount Rushmore speech, Trump received much louder applause for mentioning the F-150 Ford truck than for extolling the virtues of the presidents etched into its rock face, this hinted at the possibility that everyday nationalism may be more resonant than deep-rooted myths and symbols. Even so, the implicit ethnicity encoded in a rural and somewhat white symbol like a truck may still furnish proof of the theory.
All told, this is an extremely important book that deserves to be read by any political scientist with an interest in the nationalism and populism that are roiling the modern West.
