I deeply appreciate Professor Pears’s careful reading of my book. Just as she raises deeply interesting questions in her own book, she raises interesting questions about mine.

As Pears correctly notes, my book withholds judgment on whether constitutional nationalism is better than alternative varieties of nationalism. My primary point instead is to show that constitutional nationalism is often little different from other forms of nationalism. It can lead to hatred, exclusion, and violence, just like all kinds of nationalism. The history I explore undermines the conventional wisdom that devotion to the constitution will save us from authoritarianism. When tyranny has come to America it has usually come wrapped in a constitutional ribbon. While ethno- and religious nationalism pose obvious dangers of hatred, exclusion, and violence, the dangers from constitutional nationalism arise precisely because its universalistic rhetoric camouflages its capacity to express conceptions of national identity based on race, ethnicity, and religion, and to justify violence, hatred, and exclusion.

Pears also correctly points out that the movements I study often have a shallow understanding of the constitution and speak in generalities, without engaging much with the Constitution’s text. This reflects the way that the Constitution is often invoked in public discourse, not as a text to be parsed but as the embodiment of national values. To be sure, all of the movements I study engage with the text and make some lawyerly arguments. For instance, several Christian nationalists have produced extensive work that parses the meaning of the Constitution’s Religious Clauses to support their belief that the Constitution was written for a Christian nation. The Tea Party too produced some textual exegesis. Even the Klan has produced some work that has lawyerly qualities. There are books and articles out there that argue that the Tea Party, Christian nationalists, and nativists get the meaning of the Constitution wrong, but for better or worse I chose not to delve too deeply into these issues in my book but to focus on their invocation of the constitution as the embodiment of national identity.

Pears also wishes I had spent some time comparing the uses of constitutional rhetoric by groups on the other side of the ones I focus on, to examine, for instance, the constitutional rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement along with that of the Klan. While the book includes some comparison of the constitutional rhetoric by competing movements, I agree that deeper engagement with these comparisons would be illuminating. What I believe a more comparative study would show is that the use of constitutional rhetoric to express conceptions of American national identity is more prevalent and carries more weight among reactionary movement than progressive ones. Since they perceive of themselves as prototypically American, members of groups that have long enjoyed power in the United States perceive challenges to their power and status as anti-American, and they express the fear of losing power in constitutional terms, that the Constitution itself is under attack. In contrast, groups seeking to make change often employ constitutional rhetoric to establish that the changes they seek fall within our constitutional tradition but not as a primary source of their claims.

A subject I hope to tackle in future work is the rhetoric of progressive and radical groups who reject the Constitution and disdain constitutional rhetoric. This can be seen prominently among the Black Panthers, who forcefully argued that the Constitution was never meant to protect them and whose rhetoric often points to the Constitution as the source of their concerns and criticism of the United States, and not the path to national redemption.