Critical Race Theory & Constitutional Patriotism

The U.S. Department of Education recently walked back a proposal to prioritize federal education grants to K–12 public schools that promote Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and other similar curricula in America’s classrooms. Grant applicants were, among other things, to describe how their proposed American history and civics education projects took account of systematic racism in American history.

In response, nearly a dozen states had introduced legislation that restricted schools from teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT), with Idaho being the first state to sign such a bill into law. Republicans Senators also sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that expressed their concerns about the politicization of teaching American history where only the country’s faults and failures are emphasized at the expense of our shared virtues and accomplishments.

Faced with this public and political pushback, Cardona backed down and wrote on the department’s blog that curriculum decisions “are — and will continue to be — made at the local level.”  

At stake in this controversy is what it means to be an American: Who are we as a people? What are our aspirations? And how should we teach these ideals to the next generation? What should be the political religion — or civil theology — for this country? What does it mean to be a patriotic American today? Can one be simultaneously proud of our country’s past achievements and ashamed about the atrocities we have committed? These are the underlying questions that have been brought to the forefront by the recent controversy over CRT — the latest manifestation of the enduring issue of race, and specifically the treatment of African Americans, in our country.

A thinker who can clarify some of these questions is the Austrian-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), who had to flee Europe in 1938 because of his influential writings debunking the Nazi idea of race. Though written in and for a different time and place, Voeglin’s reflections on the dangers of racial thinking for how societies organize themselves can help us make sense of our present moment.

According to Voegelin in “The New Science of Politics,” societies organize themselves around certain ideas, images, and symbols. Race is one of the many ideask around which people sometimes organize themselves into a society. But Voegelin vehemently rejected race as the basis for social organization because it was reductive in its account of human nature and often defined itself against another racially-defined group that became a target of violence — as evidenced by the Nazi’s anti-Semitic Nordic ideal and its resulting political violence against Jews.

For Voegelin, there is no rational or scientific basis for the idea of race itself. To claim that race does have such a basis allows the individual person to delude him or herself that discrimination is a function of forces — “science,” “history,” or some other abstraction — beyond any person’s control, rather than a matter of freedom and responsibility. For Voegelin, to commit political violence against a particular “race” is a choice, for which persons are morally culpable.

However, Voegelin believed that a society does not have to organize itself around “body ideas” such as race. Another way to organize society is around non-reductive ideas that understands the community as universal (e.g., Christian corpus mysticum). In this type of society, different ethnic and cultural groups and subgroups may co-exist while retaining their unique identities even while sharing universal, organizing ideals. These societies are not only more open to different cultural grouping of people but, more importantly, show that reductive ideas such as race are not the only ones available for organizing a society.

This distinction between “body” and “universal” ideas helps make sense of another important distinction: between nationalism and patriotism. While both nationalism and patriotism initially spring forth from a desire for self-determination, nationalism is a “body idea” that demarcates those who are supposed to be authentic members of a political community from those who are deemed illegitimate. By contrast, patriotism is a universal ideal that, in America at least, expresses itself as loyalty to our constitutional democracy. Americans — regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and class — are loyal to the ideals and values of a shared constitutional order. If that order were to change — for instance, if the January 6th insurrection had been successful — then the constitutional basis that currently serves as citizen loyalty would itself change.

As a universal idea, constitutional patriotism allows different ethnic and other grouping of people to co-exist and share in citizenship. By contrast, body ideas, like race, are exclusionary and discriminatory. Although according to Voegelin, race has no objective basis, he conceded that many people nevertheless believed it to be a valid concept. For this reason, he was skeptical that societies could entirely eradicate such body ideas from society. The best one could do is to subordinate them to universal ones, such as the rule of law and natural rights.

One of the enduring problems with the American constitutional order is that it codified slavery, segregation, and discrimination against African Americans in its history and laws. From this vantage point, American constitutional patriotism is not as universal as it claims but inscribes within itself a body idea that threatens universal aspirations. CRT is the latest in a long history of criticism of America’s racial past.

Originating in the 1970s in the writings of legal scholars influenced by critical theory, CRT argues that racial inequities are due to societal structures and cultural assumptions more than individual factors. Some of the themes of CRT are “white privilege,” a set of social advantages and benefits that accrue to members of the white race; “internalization,” whereby victims of racism come to believe they are inferior to whites and white culture; and “institutional and systemic racism,” resulting in differential access to goods, services, and opportunities of society according to race. Unlike most academic theories, CRT has an activist agenda that seeks to unmask and counteract the impersonal forces said to give rise to these phenomena.

From Voegelin’s perspective, CRT points to a paradox: If society is structurally racist, then no one person is responsible for racism. Therefore, everyone must be made aware of these impersonal forces of discrimination — or become “woke” — in order to remove them. The paradox is that by renouncing our agency and responsibility for these structures, individuals are absolved from addressing racial injuries and inequities themselves. Anti-racism becomes a matter of virtue-signaling, a kind of grievance-insurance policy, rather than personal choice and responsibility.

Thus, while CRT is a powerful diagnostic tool for understanding America’s racial history, it is less clear how it can help the country address and atone for its past sins. With the absence of a universal idea to which all citizens must be held accountable, CRT merely offers perpetual racial conflict. It provides no common object of devotion and loyalty on the basis of which whites should give up their privilege in America. Although helpful retrospectively, in accounting for America’s racial past, CRT’s lack of a universal idea makes it divisive prospectively.

Seen in this light, both sides of the current debate over incorporating CRT in our schools are partially correct. CRT is one (among many) conceptual tools helpful for diagnosing and assessing American racial history. Yet, conservatives’ reservations about CRT as a way to resolve current racial inequities and injustice are partly justified, because CRT is unable to transcend the language of race and make appeal to something more universal. What is needed to break this stalemate is a patriotism that can both account for our country’s past mistakes and inspire us not to repeat them in the future.

Such a constitutional patriotism would articulate our universal values, ideals, and aspirations. It would acknowledge that we, as a nation, will always fall short of realizing these ideals, while nevertheless demanding that we continue to try. While CRT can play a role in helping us see where we have fallen short of our universal ideals, ultimately, it must be subordinated to them. Slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial discrimination are unjust precisely because they are contrary to the universal ideals to which the American experiment tries, however imperfectly, to give expression.

Lee Trepanier is a Professor of Political Science at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.