In sketching a model of nationhood, Renan adds to the forgetting of difference a kind of negative definition of national identity, carefully enumerating all the things that people might take to be a nation’s essence and dismissing each in turn: It isn’t to be found in religious belief, language, race, “ethnographic politics,” economics or even geography (“it is no more soil than it is race which makes a nation”). Once he has pared all that away, Renan leaves us with little but the first part of his “essence of a nation,” that its citizens have many things “in common,” meaning, to my mind, the kind of nondivisive secular ideals found in the United States Constitution such as universal suffrage, due process of law and a guarantee that the government will pass no legislation “respecting an establishment of religion.”

Can there be a new nationalism that squares with such ideals? Maybe, but the National Conservatism Conference, organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, showed how difficult it can be.

The organizers of that meeting set out to “reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought,” at the same time insisting that their project stood “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race,” an opposition articulated in part by appealing to a supposedly more benign political theory grounded in “culture.”

When they got into details, however, it was hard to separate that ground from race and religion. “Culture,” one speaker declared, always emerges from a specific time and place, his example being the famous sermon imaging the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city on a hill,” an inspirational text rooted in “a particular soil” and “a particular way of thinking.” The home soil would be England, of course, and the way of thinking the Puritan strain of the radically anti-Catholic Church of England — a culture, in short, markedly European, white and Protestant.

Other examples offered at the conference could never quite escape the disconnect between ideals and their details, the most egregious and off-script example coming from a speaker calling for an immigration policy that would take “cultural compatibility” into account, shamelessly adding that this would effectively mean “taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”

The new nationalism seems to be driven by a hunger for identity, for a solid sense of one’s presence in the world, joined to a style of self-knowing that operates by opposition: I’m British, not French; I’m American, not Mexican; I’m Christian, not Muslim; I’m white, not black. Given that point of departure, nationalism becomes a shorthand for the memory of all such oppositions.