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17 chapter two Political Imagination in the United States Toward the end of his life, Founding Father John Adams reflected on the formation of the United States and advised that despite appearances to the contrary, the American Revolution should not be confused with the War for Independence. “The Revolution,” he wrote, “was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments[,] of their duties and obligations .” Although “[t]he people of America had been educated in an habitual affection for England, as their mother country” and “thought of her as a kind and tender parent,” when their petitions for equality revealed England “willing like Lady Macbeth to ‘dash their brains out’ . . . their filial affections ceased and were changed into indignation and horror. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution” (qtd. in Ahlstrom 262). Adams supported armed struggle when it came, and went on to serve as a diplomat, vice president, and president for the newly independent United States. But his characterization of the real Revolution highlights the need to think of politics existing not only in legislative assemblies and bureaucratic chambers but in the more mysterious, subjective realm of what he calls “minds and hearts,” where people tie their everyday sympathies to what they consider ultimately good, beautiful, and true. In all places and at all times, the eminent pragmatism of politics is accompanied by what seems to be superfluous decoration: where there is budgeting, there will be bunting. The reason for this lies in the contrived and somewhat arbitrary basis of society. Language, holidays, and so forth 18 • Chapter 2 have no natural validity, nor is any human being genetically programmed to recognize them. What fills concepts like religions and nations with ontological force is that their constituents believe themselves to share certain traits that both bind them together and distinguish them from others. But since cultural practices are invented, the bedlam of infinite innovation forever encroaches on the domain of order. Therefore, in order to endure, every way of life must seem more appealing or necessary than the endless number of alternatives. Cultures obscure their inventedness so as to appear natural and even sacred, which hinders the development of alternatives and ensures some measure of consensus and day-to-day continuity. Since collective identity is based on culture, not chromosomes, Benedict Anderson has argued that any societies larger than face-to-face relations should be understood as “imagined communities” because even though the members may never know each other, “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). Though the standard covers philanthropies , alumni associations, trade unions, and many other groups, Anderson is primarily concerned with nationalism, which he calls “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (3). That is, one may belong to many imagined communities at a given moment, but around the world, nationalism, in the form of the modern nation-state, is the imagined community that trumps all others. Anderson means no insult by the word “imagined,” and he is not trying to pejoratively separate communities that are false from communities that are genuine. Rather, his aim is to open investigation into “the style in which they are imagined” (6). Once we think of communities as imagined, we can consider how the imagining is done, and how this cultural work produces hierarchies of loyalty and commitment that interlock with actual forms of statecraft. Furthermore, what is imagined can be reimagined and transformed. Throughout US history, social actors have quarreled over where the lines of imagined community should be drawn, variously using secular and religious rhetorical appeals to justify their efforts. Some call for the boundaries to be widened, others for them to be narrowed, others for them to be maintained as is; regardless, the disputes reveal that membership in the nation-state is not a given. Neither, for that matter, is the nation-state itself a given. Just because one form of political community reigns at a given moment does not mean it always will, and if nationalism has become the key to sovereign power in modern times, its supremacy over attachments born of other forms of imagination is not definitive. The rise of institutions and networks that are not just international but arguably global has prompted speculation that the credibility of the nation-state may be in [3.22.51.241] Project...

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