For rational discourse to be a pragmatic thing, that is, a thing that moves matters forward with common purpose, a speech situation depends on shared meaning of the words in use. I have written about this a great deal recently on Freedom and Reason with regards to the words “gender” and “sex,” pointing out that the word “gender” has only recently come to exclusively mean behaviors, expectations, identities, roles, and typifications (stereotypes) that societies attribute to individuals based on (other or self) perceptions of femininity and masculinity. In earlier essays on this platform, I have written about the words “ethnicity,” “nation,” and “race,” and the way these words are manipulated for ideological purposes. Considering the recent controversy over immigration, I want to return to these words and clarify them once more to help bring the discourse back to a rational foundation.
But before getting to that, it may be useful to summarize my point about the gender-sex distinction, as I intend to make a point later on that references it. The exclusive notion of gender holds that it is a cultural and social construct that varies across time and space, encompassing identities beyond the binary of female and male; this repurposing of the word is found among intellectuals concentrated in academic institutions, as well as the DEI departments of corporations and governments that find that distinction strategic, and a type of activist seeking to disrupt ordinary understandings of gender to normalize paraphilias. In this minority view, sex, in contrast to gender, is strictly a biological classification based on physical attributes such as chromosomes, gametes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy, typically classified as female and male, or (rarely) intersex. However, even here we find proponents of gender as a social construct disconnected from sex, arguing that sex is also a social construct—and that the science that reifies it is ideological system organized by oppressive power. (Postmodernism has successfully colonized our sense-making institutions, which explains why these institutions no longer make sense.)
A common objection I have encountered in socializing this point is that “words change,” an obvious and trivial observation. It’s similar to the command that “one shalt not kill.” Killing describes an action or an event. The actual command is that one shalt not murder. This is because one is interested in why someone kills. What was the reason? The relevant questions are seek to determine justification and motive. Words indeed change; the pertinent question is why they change. More to the point: who is changing them and what do they gain by changing them. It ought to be obvious that those who can change the meaning of works have the power to do so. Thus determining who is changing the meaning of words tells us a lot about who possesses power. How they are changing the meaning of words tells us a lot about what they are up to. Resisting the meanings they give to words is a crucial part of keeping discourse rooted in the universal and not in narrow group interests where words have self-serving value.
The artificial distinction between “gender” and “sex” was manufactured in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in anthropological, psychological, and sociological scholarship, which highlighted how gender roles are learned and socially enforced. Obviously gender roles are culturally and historically variable. However, as I have shown, gender and sex are synonyms and the terms “gender roles” and “sex roles” are interchangeable. One can thus make the observation that sex roles are culturally and historically variable—and that one possesses a “sex identity.” To put this another way, there is no gender role outside of the physical anthropological reality of gender, which is based on chromosomes, gametes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy, with gametes being the basic differentiation, binary and immutable. To say that the same is true of sex is to say that the words are synonyms. Therefore, the distinction between the words is in point of fact ideological.
Today, many authoritative voices tells us that race as a social construct used to categorize and divide people based on physical characteristics, such as facial features, hair texture, and skin color. According to this account, racial distinctions mostly rely on perceived biological differences, or phenotype, though its advocates will tell you—anthropologists, (some) psychologists, and sociologists primarily—that race has no significant genetic basis and is instead a product of social consciousness and historical contexts. So is race to postmodernist eyes analogous to gender? It’s assigned at birth. No, it is not analogous to gender, for while I am whatever gender I say I am (and I can change that whenever I want), I am not entitled to the race of another. Never mind that there is no reason behind the double standard.
Crucially, the concept of race emerged in the seventeenth century with the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science. It comes from the Italian word razza meaning “kind,” “breed,” or “lineage. Given that the physical characteristics identified above, which comprise phenotypes, exists independent of consciousness, and, moreover, are grouped (which can be demonstrated empirically with factor analysis), the notion that these are social constructs in the typical meaning of that concept—an idea or practice created and maintained by society, rather than being inherently natural or biologically determined—is fallacious.
Like gender, race does not exist because people collectively agree to give it meaning and significance thus shaping how individuals interact and perceive the world; race exists because it is a biological reality. Offspring look like their parents and, given geographical distribution, groups have emerged from the process of natural selection with significant differences between groups, to be sure distributions that do not negate the significant variability of attributes within groups, but that also do not negate the reality of phenotype. We may therefore describe race as geographically differentiated ancestry, what some anthropologists would like to define as “clines” to convey the gradual variation in certain biological or genetic traits across geographic regions or populations.
Ethnicity, in distinction to race, refers to shared cultural practices, language, traditions, and values associated with a group of people. The word comes from the Greek word ethnos, which means “people” or “nation.” Unlike race, ethnicity emphasizes cultural identity rather than physical characteristics. Cultural identity is sometimes associated with religious identity. In ancient and medieval periods in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, ethnicity often centered on Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. During the formation of nation-states, ethnicities became more organized around national identity, such as English, French, German, Irish, Swedish, etc. Ethnicity does sometimes include a racial component, since shared cultural practices are associated with common ancestry and therefore ethnic differences intersect with racial differences. however, the one is irreducible to the other.
Unlike the distinction between gender and sex, the distinction between ethnicity and race is not manufactured, but real. Culture is not an expression of genetics, but a sociohistorical development. In fact, culture can drive natural history, as human beings just in the normal course of living collectively change their physical environments. In the case of ethnicity and race, it is the conflation of the terms that has in back of it an ideological motive. We see this in the accusation of racism when one criticizes culture, for example in the furor over Donald Trump and JD Vance drawing attention to the problem of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio (see A Case of Superexploitation: Racism and the Split Labor Market in Springfield, Ohio).
Down through history, different ethnic groups have sometimes assimilated with other nations producing greater cultural homogeneity in the context of empires and nation-states. The paradigm of assimilation in the modern period is the United States. However, since the twentieth century, with the emergence of cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism, advanced by cosmopolitan elites in the service of corporate power, diverse ethnic groups are encouraged to keep their cultural particularities intact, while assimilation has become characterized as a racist desire—even though ethnicity and race refer to different things.
A nation is a large group of people united by shared cultural, historical, linguistic, or political ties, often inhabiting a specific territory. It can also refer to a political entity—a sovereign state or a country. In the first sense, nation and ethnicity are synonyms, in that both ethnicity and nation refer to a people. Early nations, like Egypt or Mesopotamia, were bound by centralized governance, geography, and language. In the ancient period, such as the Roman Empire, and then during the Middle Ages, a period of decentralized governance, the concept of a “nation” came to be used to refer to groups sharing cultural, linguistic, and religious ties. The modern idea of a nation was shaped by Enlightenment, as well as Romantic notions emphasizing shared identity and self-determination.
The concept of the nation-state—political entities defined by shared nationality—emerged from the latter notions, especially in Europe, with these notions organizing the world with the expansion of the capitalist world-system. The period of decolonization following the fall of Western empires (also a result of the expansion of the capitalist world-system) redefined nations, as many newly independent states created cohesive national identities among diverse populations.
The system of nations are today fraught, as the struggle between national sovereignty and the transnationalization of capitalist production with the rise of corporate governance have generated an ongoing debate about nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, with the latter advocating multiculturalism and smearing the former as “nativists” and “racists.”
What the cosmopolitan type desires has an historical analog. During the Middle Ages, economic systems operated through decentralized networks, distinct from the centralized model of nation-states where capital flows were constrained by the rule of law in some fashion answerable to the people. Bourges, a city in central France, served as a significant medieval hub for trade and culture, exemplifying the autonomy of city-states. Bourges, alongside Genoa, Hanseatic League, and Venice, thrived by participating in trade networks that bypassed larger feudal structures. We can thus draw a parallel between these historical examples and modern global economic systems, where digital platforms, financial institutions, and multinational corporations operate through decentralized networks, challenging the authority and structure of nation-states.
Understanding the meaning of these words is crucial to avoid misspecifying the dynamic that is presently undermining the modern nation-state, which has historically been based on shared culture, language, etc.
In light of this, we can conceptualize the modern nation-state to be of three sorts. The first, the ethno-state, where citizenship is based on ethnicity. Here we often find this status based on the principle jus sanguinis, a Latin term that means “right of blood,” i.e., establishing citizenship on the basis of that of the parents. A Swede, for example, is a citizen of Sweden because she was born to Swedes, who comprise an ethnic group. Thus this practice is also known as the principle of descent.
The second sort of nation-state is one based on civic nationalism, often found exercising the principle of jus soli, a Latin phrase meaning “right of the soil,” referring to the principle that a person’s citizenship is determined by their place of birth, commonly known as “birthright citizenship.” In this way of reckoning citizenship, one’s political identity is built not around culture or ethnicity as much, but more on a national creed and type of government citizens pledge to uphold. Historically, this has been the practice in the United States, justified by an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment (the same article used to rationalize corporate personhood).
The third type of nation, which is the one sought by the cosmopolitan type, is really a simulation, which is to say that it is no nation at all, but an artificial construct designed to serve the interests of global elites who define and redefine national boundaries as it suits them. This notion of nation is associated with multiculturalism, an ideology manufactured by organic intellectuals to justify the effective erasure of national identity, becoming the prevailing sensibility in sense-making and governing institutions. While ethnonationalism and civil nationalism are not mutually exclusive, the latter compatible with jus sanguinis (which ought to be the principle by which all citizenship is determined), the transnationalist concept is antithetical to nationalism, which ought to be obvious by the structure of the word itself; just as the praxis of transgenderism means to erase the gender boundaries, transnationalism means to erase national boundaries.
Transnationalists desire a world seen only in terms of economic relations, thus negating the concept of the nation as homeland. By effectively erasing borders, it seeks to uproot people from their culture and make them not servants of themselves but instruments for producing wealth and privilege for those who control the means of production. Without borders, the rule of law is determined by technocrats whose only allegiance is to transnational corporate power, not citizens. This is the desire for a high-tech feudal estate system. Thus the accusation of “nativism” is a derogatory term invented by multiculturalists to smear native Americans who advocate for national sovereignty and collective self-determination, all of which depend of cultural integrity, i.e., ethnicity or the nation.
We thus hear in advocacy for the H-1B visa program, which enjoys the support of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump, transnationalist sympathies that are at odds with the populist-nationalism expressed by these three and many others during the 2024 campaign. They argue that we need this (and other) programs so corporations have access to talent around the world. This is not what is really sought by Musk and other capitalists; what is sought is cheap labor for the reasons explained in my previous essay, The H-1B visa Controversy: The Tech Bros Make Their Move.
But even if there were true, it would reflect imperialist desire rather than nationalism. As history has made clear, the emergence of empire is a sign of civilizational decay amid cultural disintegration. America as a civilization cannot survive the disintegration of its culture caused by the present pace of immigration. People are culture-bearers, and whatever economic contribution new arrivals might make, the cultures many of them bear are antithetical to ours, and without any determined plan to assimilate those who are amenable to it, the American Creed cannot survive the practice. We are great because of our creed. Our creed is the spirit of our republic. We cannot keep our republic if we lose it.
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