Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 16

you?” with Ward Connerly’s passionate affirmation of
his national identity. They instead articulated subnational racial, ethnic, or gender identities, as the Times
reporter clearly expected.
Transnational Identities. In 1996 Ralph Nader
wrote to the chief executive officers of one hundred
of the largest American corporations pointing to the
substantial tax benefits and other subsidies (estimated
at $65 billion a year by the Cato Institute) they received
from the federal government and urging them to show
their support for “the country that bred them, built
them, subsidized them, and defended them” by having
their directors open their annual stockholders meeting
by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and the
republic for which it stands. One corporation (Federated
Department Stores) responded favorably; half of the corporations never responded; others rejected it brusquely.
The respondent for Ford explicitly claimed transnational
identity: “As a multinational . . . Ford in its largest sense is
an Australian country [company] in Australia, a British
company in the United Kingdom, a German company
in Germany.” Aetna’s CEO called Nader’s idea “contrary
to the principles on which our democracy was founded.”
Motorola’s respondent condemned its “political and nationalistic overtones.” Price Costco’s CEO asked, “What
do you propose next—personal loyalty oaths?” And
Kimberly-Clark’s executive asserted that it was “a grim
reminder of the loyalty oaths of the 1950s.”7
Undoubtedly the vociferous reaction of American
corporate leaders was in part because Nader had been
hounding them for years and they could not resist
the opportunity to castigate him as a latter-day Joe
McCarthy. Yet they were not alone among American
elites in downgrading or disavowing identification with
their country. Prominent intellectuals and scholars
attacked nationalism, warned of the dangers of inculcating national pride and commitment to America
in students, and argued that a national identity was
undesirable. Statements like these reflected the extent to which some people in American elite groups,
business, financial, intellectual, professional, and even
governmental, were becoming denationalized and
developing transnational and cosmopolitan identities
superseding their national ones. This was not true of
the American public, and a gap consequently emerged
between the primacy of national identity for most
Americans and the growth of transnational identities
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among the controllers of power, wealth, and knowledge
in American society.
September 11 drastically reduced the salience of
these other identities and sent Old Glory back to the
top of the national flag pole. Will it stay there? The
seventeen flags on Charles Street declined to twelve in
November, nine in December, seven in January, and five
in March, and were down to four by the first anniversary
of the attacks, four times the number pre-September
11 but also one-fourth of those displayed immediately
afterward. As an index of the salience of national identity, did this represent a modified post-September 11
normalcy, a slightly revised pre-September 11 normalcy,
or a new, post-post-September 11 normalcy? Does it
take an Osama bin laden, as it did for Rachel Newman,
to make us realize that we are Americans? If we do not
experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return
to the fragmentation and eroded Americanism before
September 11? Or will we find a revitalized national
identity that is not dependent on calamitous threats
from abroad and that provides the unity lacking in the
last decades of the twentieth century?

Substance: Who Are We?
The post-September 11 flags symbolized America,
but they did not c onvey any meaning of America. Some
national flags, such as the tricolor, the Union Jack, or
Pakistan’s green flag with its star and crescent, say something significant about the identity of the country they
represent. The explicit visual message of the Stars and
Strips is simply that America is a country that originally
had thirteen and currently has fifty states. Beyond that,
Americans, and others, can read into the flag any meaning they want. The post-September 11 proliferation of
flags may well evidence not only the intensified salience
of national identity to Americans but also their uncertainty as to the substance of that identity. While the
salience of national identity may vary sharply with the
intensity of external threats, the substance of national
identity is shaped slowly and more fundamentally by a
wide variety of long-term, often conflicting social, economic, and political trends. The crucial issues concerning
the substance of American identity on September 10 did
not disappear the following day.
“We Americans” face a substantive problem of national identity epitomized by the subject of this sentence.
Are we a “we,” one people or several? If we are a “we,”
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW