Three new books help us understand how Trump’s spat with Democrats over a 10th of one percent of the federal budget came to be so weighted with meaning

As I write, the federal government sits in partial shutdown, ostensibly over a measly $3.7bn difference in funding, less than a 10th of 1% of the 2019 federal budget, for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border.

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Three books can help us understand how nationalist passions and the nationalization of campaign communications and media coverage led to this point. Nationalism and nationalization warp the practice of American politics. World history is replete with examples of how nationalism has debased democratic preferences, corrupted republican values such as liberty and the rule of law, and provoked violence and war. The shutdown – the third in one year and the second over immigration – is an ill omen for the “exceptional” nation.

In The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization, John Judis, a respected Washington analyst, defines nationalism as a social psychology instead of an ideological “ism”. Unlike those who prefer to restrict the word to its negative connotations and use “patriotism” for positive references to love of country, Judis writes that nationalism underwrites both xenophobia and helping fellow citizens in need. He quotes psychologist Joshua Searle-White: “Nationalism provides us with a way … [sic] to feel moral, right, and just. It gives us a way to join with others in a heroic struggle. It gives a sense of purpose and meaning to our lives, and even our deaths.”

Judis contends that we are all paying a price for the failure of recent political leaders, Bill Clinton above all, to take the depths of nationalist passion into sufficient account while promoting globalization, which he deftly summarizes as being for free trade, mobile capital, floating exchange rates and unskilled immigration. Judis shows how policy errors and economic pressures combined to elicit reactionary movements in western democracies; he is particularly good on nationalist surges in Germany, Hungary and Poland. In those countries and the US, nationalist leaders have fanned popular feelings of economic abandonment, cultural degradation and abject terror through rhetoric that also stresses love of and pride in country.

Hopkins and Judis share a shortcoming: each underplays the inflammatory ingredient of racism

Daniel Hopkins is a rising-star political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. In The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, he shows how and why the politics of the US has been nationalized in two ways. First, the electoral relevance of state and local issues has receded in voters’ minds. Second, voter (and, crucially, donor) participation has been spurred mainly through the promulgation of nationwide party agendas. American voters have told pollsters they believe more gets done that affects their lives at the sub-national levels of government – yet they remain fixated on who the president is and what he says and does with respect to Congress and the supreme court.

This is a political science text, but Hopkins keeps the jargon to a minimum and has a knack for literary quotations. He shows how votes for president and governor have become more aligned since the 1970s, and how local contexts have minimal impact on voters and poll respondents on issue after issue. For example, people living near nuclear power plants have not voted all that differently on funding new ones from those who live far away. The same goes for military spending and living near military bases. The book does not look at immigration, although the author has done so in a previous article and found that “native-born white and black Americans adopt more anti-immigration views in response to an influx of immigrants only when immigration is a nationally salient issue” – ie, when the president and media are talking about it.

The Hopkins and Judis books share a shortcoming: each underplays the inflammatory ingredient of racism. Judis notes how the election of Barack Obama challenged the “Euro-American prototype” at the core of many Americans’ conception of their personal-partisan-national identity. Yet he limited his interviews to six white working-class men in Ohio who voted for Donald Trump. Hopkins treats race, ethnicity and religion as variables without paying special attention to them.

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To judge from their bibliographies as well as their arguments, neither Hopkins nor Judis consulted Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, which was first published in 2001 and had a second edition 16 years later. It is a superb interpretation of American cultural and political history. Gerstle, who teaches at Princeton, depicts a central tension between two traditional conceptions of the US as a nation. “Civic nationalists” have seen America as unified by an aspirational and foundational creed that people from around the world should embrace and, once melted into the pot, uphold in their politics. “Racial nationalists” have regarded the founders as Wasps, and strive to preserve a code and ethos to which immigrants must pledge allegiance.

As Gerstle tells it, Clinton and George W Bush professed a hybrid “soft multiculturalism” that Obama embodied in his lineage. These three presidents faced a growing reaction to decades of non-white immigration as permitted by the 1965 and 1986 immigration laws. Birthers began assailing Obama’s foreignness in 2008 and Trump picked up the charge in 2011. The “madrassa/secret Muslim” attacks on Obama imported post-9/11 emotions. By 2015, nearly a third of Americans and almost half of Republicans believed their president was Muslim. This became nationalist kindling wood for Trump’s Muslim ban proposal after the San Bernardino shooting at the end of that year.

Coded attacks on his origins and “political correctness” put Obama on the defensive. Stymied by Congress, he turned to executive orders (notably Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which elicited cries of “tyrant”. What kind of civic nationalist skirted the law like this, asked racial nationalists, rhetorically.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A group of Central American migrants look for a spot to cross the US-Mexico border fence. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images

“It is possible to discern in [Trump],” Gerstle concluded, “a belief that America’s Christian white majority ought to resume its role as the country’s gatekeeper, and to set the terms by which nonwhites and non-Christians would be accepted into American life.”

This nationalist duality has intensified the battle over the border wall. The conflict is not really about the barrier’s physical composition, length or cost. Rather, it is about which conception of the nation will prevail. To civic nationalists, locking out migrants betrays the creed they hold dear. Racial nationalists are convinced that people of color and Muslim faith are invaders bent on subverting their America, abetted by cosmopolitan elitists. These attitudes have been rolled into already polarized party identities. And because American voters are fixated on the national narrative, candidates, officials and mediated voices in every state must attend to the issue.

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Since border concerns have exploded out of proportion, a compromise such as that sketched by Judis seems beyond attainment. He prescribes a path to citizenship for those undocumented migrants already in the country, stiff penalties on those who employ them and lowered admission quotas for legals while shifting the criteria away from family reunification toward needed skills. As Judis admits, that’s a long shot. Just this month Trump (who may have employed undocumented migrants at his New Jersey golf club) threatened to close the entire border while blaming Democrats for the deaths of two children apprehended there.

The British political philosopher Bernard Crick, writing in 1962 in another book uncited by Hopkins and Judis, In Defense of Politics, argues that the best known antidote to the ill effects of nationalism rests “not [in] how best and most elegantly to deplore it, but how to work with it so that it can be politicized”. In other words, national leaders should drain their invocations of American Dreams of racial and religious connotations, and perhaps of talk about the border altogether for a while.

We should watch for this as candidates for 2020 take the stage. What kind of America will they dream out loud, in what words and images? In her “pre-announcement” video, Senator Elizabeth Warren focused on economic fairness. As reactions to her formation of an exploratory committee wash across the nationalized communications grid, we will be able to discern how high the nationalist tide is running.

Michael Cornfield is an associate professor of political management at the George Washington University

• This article was amended on 10 January 2019. An earlier version referred to the $3.7bn difference in funding as been 1,000th of 1% of the federal budget. It is more like a 10th of 1%. This has been corrected.