The renewed policing of “real” national identity in the United States (usually a White, Anglo Saxon, Protestant identity), especially among conservatives, is a return to an old strategy: when social and economic anxieties mount, elites reassert a narrow definition of the nation to discipline difference and consolidate power. The usual rebuttal, that the United States has always been a plural society, built by immigrants and internal diversity, is true, but it doesn't reach the heart of the matter. The deeper problem is nationalism itself: a modern political technology that manufactures a unitary “people,” simplifies history, and transforms cultural complexity into a liability rather than a social good.
I. “American” as a Mass Identity
For much of the nineteenth century, Americans did not resonate with a national identity; even less so with the term “American.” Loyalties were local, religious, sectional. The language of the time gave this away, as legal documents and journalism alternated between usage of “the United States are” and “the United States is,” representing a grammatical tug-of-war that tracked a real struggle over sovereignty. Corpus work on judicial prose shows that the singular form (“the United States is”) did not decisively crowd out the plural (“the United States are”) until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even then, the shift is gradual rather than sudden. In other words, language consolidated as politics consolidated, marking a shift from a federation of states to an imaged national subject. Why did this happen?
Between 1890 and 1919, more than eighteen million immigrants arrived in the United States, about 4 million more than in the previous fifty years, triggering a sprawling “Americanization” apparatus in schools, factories, settlement houses, and civic groups. The Pledge of Allegiance (1892) became a daily ritual for children, while textbooks and ceremonies were retooled to make “American” feel like a primary identity rather than a legal abstraction. In his 1894 article True Americanism, Theodore Roosevelt, who would become President of the United States in 1901, gave the doctrine its most prominent ideal:
It is not only necessary to Americanize the immigrants of foreign birth who settle among us, but it is even more necessary for those among us who are by birth and descent already Americans not to throw away our birthright, and, with incredible and contemptible folly, wander back to bow down before the alien gods whom our forefathers forsook. It is hard to believe that there is any necessity to warn Americans that, when they seek to model themselves on the lines of other civilizations, they make themselves the butts of all right-thinking men; and yet the necessity certainly exists to give this warning to many of our citizens who pride themselves on their standing in the world of art and letters, or, perchance, on what they would style their social leadership in the community.
To Roosevelt and many influential American politicians of the time, “Americanism” became a moral orthodoxy, and deviation, whether aesthetic, intellectual, or religious, becomes betrayal. The Progressive-era “American” was being manufactured. This rhetoric thickened because the state needed it to, especially in the wake of the first World War: a continental, industrial power wanted legibility, loyalty, and war-readiness, and a singular national “we” served those ends.
So why then? Nationalism, the ideology that establishes shared language, culture, and history the basis of political unity, solves problems of governance. It binds strangers into a unit that can be schooled, mobilized, and taxed, recasting difference as a threat to national cohesion. The United States engineered an “American” identity during the Progressive era for this purpose. But, if national identity can be engineered, the real questions are who does the engineering, by what institutions, and to what end.
II. The Theoretical and Pragmatic Need for Nationalism
Unlike earlier dynastic kingdoms with porous, overlapping frontiers, the annexations, partitions, and Napoleonic redrawings of the eighteenth century hardened European borders and bundled diverse peoples into single jurisdictions. These new jurisdictions were cemented by censuses, cadasters, and new cartography. However, the continuous conflicts and wars of the era forced these European states to keep standing armies and to fund them with regular taxation and expanding public credit. Because taxpayers and bondholders cannot be coerced with force indefinitely without revolt or ruinous costs, rulers sought popular consent for larger government via predictable law, more uniform administration, and greater infrastructure that made extraction feel reasonable and necessary. The problem, however, was how to make rule seem reasonable across newly aggregated, linguistically and ethnically diverse populations. In this setting, nationalism emerged as the cultural and political technology that translated tax and discipline into a story of common belonging.
Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony remains the clearest account for understanding the utility of nationalism in the western world. Before nationalism, complex European states merely reacted to systemic conflicts that emerged from weak governance over a diverse population, often with displays of force as a means of coercion. Gramsci referred to this as the “crisis of authority,” where the ruling class loses its mandate as the people become increasingly disillusioned with authority. Disgruntled citizens form new ideologies that challenge tradition, deepening the rift between the ruling class and the masses. The question becomes: how can the ruling class reconcile this rift if force only further entrenches dissent? Gramsci's answers in his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935):
But this reduction to economics and politics means precisely a reduction of the highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to the structure itself—in other words, the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture.
From a fascist prison in Rome, Gramsci argued that modern politics hinges on a party or entity capable of organizing diverse cultures, institutions, and affects so that a particular order feels natural to all citizens. He called this hegemony: leadership through a manufactured, dominant culture, achieved through the slow, everyday work of turning one social group's worldview into an objective reality for all groups. Hegemony operates in civil society (schools, press, churches, unions, charities, etc), where people learn habits, stories, and loyalties that make obedience feel like belonging. To Gramsci, this is how a ruling class resolves the crisis of authority: instead of leaning only on the police (force) or the price of bread (economics), it creates a new culture that binds strangers to the state's project. But if the population is diverse and already resisting the ruling bloc, why would they buy in to a new culture enforced by the same ruling bloc?
Gramsci also examined the terms on which people accept hegemony. In nationalist politics, consent holds when interest is bound to identity. Governments make that bond by tying material security to the national project, oftentimes having employment, contracts, welfare, and administrative favors distributed through party, municipality, union, and parish, so that support appears prudent rather than ideological. At the same time, they saturate public life with a narrative of worth: the citizen belongs to a great people with a singular, glorious past and a threatened destiny. The former offers predictability, while the latter offers dignity. Together, they relocate private anxiety about economic precarity and personal disappointments into a collective drama in which fulfillment comes through national ascent. National anxiety is explained by the ruling bloc as a product of foreign obstacles, such as foreign powers, as well as ethnic minorities and other “internal enemies.” Nationalist-populist policy and propaganda provide material and existential relief for disillusioned people experiencing difficult times, while simultaneously providing the government legitimacy and public consent they can manage socially, economically, and politically.
Therefore, nationalism endures because it aligns popular hope and resentment with the directives of the ruling class. That alignment explains why nationalist projects can acquire a plebiscitary mandate before coercion closes the system, and why, once installed in institutions, they prove so difficult to dislodge. Antonio Gramsci's largest inspiration came from his experience with the nationalist movement that imprisoned him in 1926: Benito Mussolini's fascismo.
III. The Italian Game: How Governments Weaponize Nationalism
Italy unified late (1861) and unevenly. The newly formed Kingdom of Italy began as a liberal state that expanded conscription, courts, rail and post, and enacted school laws to spread literacy in standardized Italian. This was an attempt to build a common civic culture and address estimates suggesting just 2.5-10% of people spoke standard Italian at unification. But regional divides and low literacy left many Italians remaining loyal to local ties. After World War I, the situation turned combustible as Italy suffered from heavy casualties, growing inflation and unemployment, veterans' frustration, the “mutilated victory” grievance over postwar settlements. Civil unrest followed with strikes, factory occupations, and peasant mobilization. Especially after the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Italian elites feared the rise of socialism. In this environment, Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party rose to prominence by promising order and national renewal within a capitalist framework.
Mussolini's movement offered national unity, social peace, anti-socialism, and a state that would complete the unfinished work of nation-making, by force if needed. The March on Rome (1922) put him in office and by the 1924 election, marred by intimidation, Mussolini delivered the nationalist party a supermajority. This advantage was used to pass the Leggi Fascistissime (1925-26), which dismantled parties and the free press, giving Mussolini control over all aspects of governance in the Kingdom of Italy.
Mussolini's Italy demonstrated hegemony in action. While Italian fascism did not invent the Italiano, the government did much to codify and militarize a national identity. The Gentile reform centralized schools; the Opera Nazionale Balilla enrolled boys in paramilitary and ideological youth programs; the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro organized adult leisure; radio and mass spectacle (the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista) staged italianità as Italy's destiny. These routines turned nation-making into daily life, narrowing a broad civic project into a hierarchical template of belonging. Because fascist italianità rested on a closed, hierarchical identity, not all could be admitted. The regime's answer to those outside the mold was administrative and penal. After all, plural identities threaten the central narrative, making them a challenge to the regime's legitimacy.
The Lateran Accords (1929) yoked Catholic symbolism to the nation; linguistic “Italianization” targeted borderlands and suppressed the use of German, Slovene, and Croatian in schools and public life. Empire became pedagogy with Libya's “pacification” and the Ethiopian war (which saw the use of forbidden chemical weapons) framing colonial violence as national renewal. The 1938 Racial Laws expelled Jews from schools, professions, and public life, converting the myth of a singular people into segregation and dispossession. Under the banner of national renewal, fascism converted belonging into a test and expelled those who failed it. Popular support for fascism, cultivated and managed by the regime, held through the 1930s, only to collapse as military failures mounted from 1940 to 1945.
Fascist Italy demonstrated that nationalism was the cultural technology an authoritarian government could wield to organize and win consent even for radically regressive programs. This analysis matters because nationalism travels and endures. The specific institutions differ across regimes, but the nationalist logic, erasing nuance to produce a governable subject, is remarkably portable.
IV. Republican Monolingualism: How France Manufactured “French”
It may become tempting to attribute nationalist rhetoric to authoritarian and fascist governments, but the reality is that nationalism has found its way into diverse modern political projects. The French Republic that established liberal democracy in the aftermath of the French Revolution is a textbook example.
In 1794, Abbé Henri Grégoire presented to the National Convention his Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois, or On the Necessity and Means of Annihilating the Patois (regional languages). He conducted a survey in 1790 and attached numbers that puncture the myth of a timeless, unified France: in a country of roughly 28 million, at least six million people, “especially in the countryside,” did not know French at all; another six million were “almost incapable” of sustained conversation; those who spoke it “purely” were around three million. In other words, only 10.7% of people in “France” spoke French as their first language. The remaining 89.3% spoke Breton, Occitan/Provençal, Basque, Alsatian, Catalan, Burgundian varieties, and dozens of mutually unintelligible languages that mapped to local cultures. Grégoire and the Jacobins determined that if the French republic was to survive, it needed unification in language and identity.
The revolutionary and republican answer was uniformity through schooling, passing a succession of laws that either promoted French or restricted other languages. In October 1793 the French government declared that only French could be used for instruction in schools and each school needed to employ teachers who could teach in French. This would mark the beginning of the “Francization” of all peoples within the French Republic's borders.
Over the nineteenth century, and decisively with the Jules Ferry laws of 1881-82, the state built a primary school system whose language of instruction was standard French with a surrounding cultural practice of humiliation: across Brittany, Occitania and elsewhere, pupils caught speaking home languages were shamed or punished by being forced to wear the infamous symbole, a wooden clog or slate (among other possibilities) which gave your peers the liberty to shame and laugh at you. In addition to public shaming, these students often experienced corporeal punishment and were given more homework than their peers. This was the social pedagogy of a national republican project.
Only in 1951 did the Loi Deixonne partially relent, allowing Breton, Basque, Catalan, and Occitan as optional subjects, typically one hour a week. Later circulars opened the door a bit wider, but the architecture of monolingual citizenship endured. As Malcolm Offord's Reader in French Sociolinguistics makes clear, this was a deliberate policy of cultural centralization by a republican state. The “French identity” we know today was made by law and by lesson.
The French case shows how a historically romanticized democracy has also wielded hegemony through schools, courts, and maps with the same mechanism as fascists: a protected national template that defines the terms of respectability and trims diversity to fit. When nationalist hegemony is coupled to reforms that reflect administrative tolerance of diversity (as opposed to a reimagining of identity), liberalism can manage dissent without ever dislodging the hierarchy that produced it. That leaves politics on a hinge: in hard times the same institutions that teach the nation as common sense can be retooled toward exclusion, giving fascist tendencies ready-made grammar and legitimacy. In other words, so long as the nation's cultural monopoly persists, reform at the margins will remain underwhelming, and the pendulum will always be able to swing back toward coercion in the name of unity.
V. Belonging After the Myth
Today the United States, Italy, France (and much of the West) are again witnessing a conspicuous surge of far-right, nationalist politics. Online skirmishes pit self-styled fascists against liberals who plead for reason and leave convinced that “you can't debate people like this.” The instinct is understandable, but the conclusion is incomplete. The impasse is structural. These arguments replay earlier crises, when national myths, mass media, and party machines organized consent for radically regressive programs. To understand why debate fails, we must treat politics as a struggle over hegemony: institutions, routines, and stories that make a particular worldview into law.
Hegemony is not a unique feature of fascism; liberalism has also developed nationalist myths and continues to administer them to this day. So, too, have most strains of political “-isms” (libertarianism, communism, etc.) that campaigned as national projects. Each promises reform or redemption within the frame of a singular people, thereby renewing the very “common sense” that later enables exclusion. The cycle is familiar across international lines: the ruling class develops a structure of uniformity for the nation, crisis arrives and then symbols and institutions are rekeyed toward uniformity and purge. When all major ideologies defend the nation as the non-negotiable horizon, the pendulum between liberal reform and authoritarian consolidation is a prominent feature of that society.
True progress requires moving beyond a uniform national identity, adopting a political architecture where belonging is pluralist rather than singular: residency-based citizenship, robust language rights, municipal and regional self-government, proportional representation that rewards coalition, and welfare guarantees decoupled from cultural conformity. In such an order, schools, media, and law would normalize layered identities as the baseline of public life. Only then does the nationalist hegemony lose its monopoly.
The paradox is that while multicultural societies consistently prove to be economic engines (immigration replenishes labor forces, generates entrepreneurship, and expands demand), the politics of multiculturalism struggles to command the same political authority as the nationalist myth. Why, then, does multiculturalism consistently underperform politically even when it powers economies and seems to break the cycle that leads to fascism?
Part of the answer is institutional: nationalism has had two centuries to build a world of schools, calendars, ceremonies, and media that make sameness feel safe. No one alive can remember nor truly comprehend a world absent of modern nation states with defined borders and national identities. Asking people to consider borders as imaginary and the concept of “Italian” or “French” as arbitrary is socially unacceptable, even branded as ignorant. The other part of it is existential. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, freedom is heavy; it tempts us to trade the anxiety of choice for the comfort of a prefabricated role. Nationalism excels at this: it offers a home that demands obedience, not care. Multicultural politics asks more of us. It asks for belonging that is made rather than inherited, for institutions that teach people to live with layered identities instead of treating complexity as a problem to be solved.
If we want a democratic future that resists this constant drift toward fascist rhetoric, we will need to retire the romance of the seamless nation and build institutions and community that can govern complexity without crushing it. That means bilingual classrooms that dignify origin languages while delivering full civic fluency, public media that treats complexity as a public good, as well as associational life and national service that braid communities across class and origin. We cannot truly defeat fascism if we continue to believe in the stories that enable it.