Does Ethnonationalism Constitute a Form of Racism?

The president nominated Steven Menashi to the New York-based Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. In 2010, Menashi (a Jewish American) published a law review article entitled Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy, which can be downloaded here. His article includes this:

“The sociologist Robert Putnam has concluded that greater ethnic diversity weakens social solidarity, fosters social isolation, and inhibits social capital: ‘[I]nhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.’ These findings confirm that the solidarity underlying democratic polities rests in large part on ethnic identification.

Surely, it does not serve the cause of liberal democracy to ignore this reality. .... The trouble, however, is that ‘the democratic principle does not define the framework within which it operates.’ Because it embraces a principle of universalistic human equality, modern democratic thinking cannot justify the particularistic national context in which liberal democracy was nurtured and continues to thrive. The difficulty with the modern attitude is that it assumes human equality exists prior to political society and that liberal democracy springs logically from this preexisting fact. But this gets the chronology wrong. ‘We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights,’ writes Arendt. ‘Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice.’

People face the reality of difference; there are not only the distinctions of ethnicity, sex, religion, and so on, but also each individual’s particular attributes. People become equal through a mutual decision to disregard such differences in the distribution of political rights. In this way, human equality is the product of liberal democracy rather than its source.”

It is important to recognize equality “as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights” because otherwise equality “will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is ‘normal’ if he is like everybody else and ‘abnormal’ if he happens to be different.” A political order may insist that certain human differences are irrelevant while people themselves regard those differences as meaningful and are consequently reluctant to recognize others as their equals. Where the political order does not account for differences which correspond to deeply felt allegiances, the fact of difference becomes a threat to the political order. “The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity—which are identical with the limitations of human equality. Thus, the Weimar Republic saw no difference between Jews and Gentiles while a majority of Germans found the difference all too meaningful—and their insistence upon difference found horrific violent expression.

Sometimes, then, differences must be openly acknowledged in the political sphere so that equality can be established on the basis of our differences rather than in denial of them. National rights—and national governments—serve this role.”

Rachael Maddow aired a segment characterizing the article as an argument that ethnic purity is an important aspect of liberal democracy.

 

Several sources characterized Maddow's segment as a smear job that mischaracterized what Menashi was saying in his article. Mensahi rebutted Maddow's piece, with one source (The Daily Signal, a radical right source) citing portions of his response: “I take seriously the role of the United States as a nation of immigrants and of Israel as a home for the Jewish people, both of which are important because of suffering that has been caused by ethnic nationalism. ..... Carrie Severino, general counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network [a radical right source], tweeted about Maddow: ‘Had she actually read his law-review article, she would know that Menashi says the exact opposite of what Maddow claims. Intentional distortion?’”

Law and Crime, a factually reliable center-left source, wrote: “Writing for the National Review, attorney Ed Whelan argued that Maddow’s segment was rife with false claims and grossly distorted the article’s scope and purpose: Menashi’s argument about national identity is clearly not about ‘racial purity’ or a ‘unifying race.’ Indeed, the fact that Israelis from Ethiopia are black makes it impossible to take seriously the claim that Menashi is making a case for “racial purity.” Menashi further states that it ‘is not even clear … that Israel’s national identity can even be described as ‘ethnic’” (in a narrow sense of that concept), as Israeli Jews come from ‘Argentina, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen.’”

To provide some context, a 2018 research article (downloadable here), Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust. A Critical Review of the Literature and Suggestions for a Research Agenda, commented: “In this chapter we critically review the empirical evidence for a negative relationship between contextual ethnic diversity (measured locally within countries) and social trust. We cautiously conclude that there are indications of a negative relationship, although with important variations across study characteristics including national setting, context unit analyzed, and conditioning on moderating influences.” The authors go on to propose additional research to advance understanding of possible relationships between ethnic diversity and social trust.

What is going on here?: Is Menashi a racist? Is he arguing for a white ethnic nation and against ethnic or racial diversity? Or, as the Daily Signal writes do Maddow and MSNBC “need to apologize for this anti-Semitic attack” which some call a racial smear?