These all are manifestations of what is commonly called the identity crisis of the West, but might better be termed the West’s struggle with the sacred. By “sacred”, I mean that which endures beyond our lifetime and beyond the lifetime of our children, the enduring characteristics that make us unique and will continue to distinguish us from the other peoples of the world, and which cannot be violated without destroying our sense of who we are. The sacred is what a country’s soldiers are willing to die to protect; unless there is something for which we are willing to die, we will find nothing for which we are willing to live.

Tradition surely is part of this, but not every part of our tradition is sacred to us: we find within tradition elements that have prevailed through the ages and which we expect to prevail, if our present existence is to have a purpose, beyond our lifetimes. These elements of tradition cannot exist except through a nation: contrary to Hillary Clinton, it takes not a village but a nation to embody the language, customs and ethos that found our identity. The invariant feature of the various expressions of nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic is an attempt to recapture the past in order to envision a future. “Identity” as a concept is meaningless except as it is rooted in the past and pointed toward the future. Who we are at the moment depends on where we came from and where we expect to go. Our present, as Augustine argued in Confessions XI, is a composite of memory and anticipation.

Augustine (in City of God XXIV) famously took issue with Cicero’s definition of a res publica as an association founded on common interest, arguing instead that it was founded on a common love. It might be more accurate to say that it is founded on a common sense of the sacred, for the sacred embodies not only love but also awe and fear, specifically the fear that by violating the elements of tradition that define us we will lose ourselves.

The New Nationalism arose in opposition to the prevailing social philosophy of modern liberalism, namely the assertion that every individual should invent his identity. Existence precedes essence, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s cartoonish existentialism, which for him meant that we can invent our own essence. Many septic currents converged to create what we might term the postmodern notion of identity: Rousseau’s New Man, Nietzsche’s nihilism, Heidegger’s historicism, Ibsen’s assault on bourgeois society, Freud’s conjuring of the unconscious, and of course Sartre. Everything, including the most fundamental determinant of nature, namely gender, has now become a social construct; tradition has become a black museum of past instances of racism, misogyny and colonialism; and self-invention has become the universal and exclusive sacrament of a new secular religion. We mean many things by the term globalism, but the psychic content of globalisation is to leave not one stone of our past atop another so that the ground may be cleared for the arbitrary assertion of individual identity. In the United States, this has been enshrined in law, in Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion to sweep away barriers to same-sex marriage. According to Kennedy, “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”