Towards a New Nationalism
Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 4:18 am
Might be of interest to some here. For Xeno, I copied a bit more than my initial impulse limited me to. But not much more. 
https://reason.com/2020/02/24/against-t ... tionalism/
"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism," George Orwell wrote in 1945. "Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved."
In The Case for Nationalism (Broadside Books), Rich Lowry has decided, rather boldly, to go up against Orwell and stake out the inverse position: To be a nationalist, he says, is merely to feel a glow of pride in one's country, to recognize it as possessing a particular cultural character that differentiates its citizens from all others, and to insist on its sovereignty in the face of crusading outside forces. Nationalism and patriotism, in other words, are essentially interchangeable.
...
In fairness to America's new conservative nationalism, there's every reason to assume its proponents are mercantilists, not Nazis. Nonetheless, in both general outlook and specific policy prescriptions, it is decidedly not a simple synonym for patriotic pride.
The new nationalism is implicitly illiberal. It doesn't stop at resisting the push, regrettably fashionable on many college campuses, to divide society into mutually antagonistic identity subgroups or to rewrite history to cast the United States as an unredeemable villain in every tale. Instead, it spills over into efforts to preserve our cultural homogeneity (such as it exists) from the diluting influence of foreigners. And it doesn't stop at opposing what The American Conservative's Antle calls "sovereignty-shredding supranational organizations" (the European Union, for instance) but spills over into an anti-cosmopolitanism that seeks to throw up barriers to free markets and free trade.
This predilection was on display at last summer's National Conservatism Conference, an event at which Beltway journalists, professors from prestigious educational institutions, and at least one U.S. senator gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., to discuss how coastal elitism is ruining America. The lineup featured a parade of right-of-center intellectuals explaining what, practically speaking, nationalism means to them: higher tariffs ("economic nationalists must be willing to pay higher prices to protect our fellow citizens," said Christian activist David Brog), larger expenditures to support the American industrial sector ("we should have a National Institutes of Manufacturing just as we have a National Institutes of Health," said former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass), stricter immigration laws ("it doesn't make a darn bit of difference what the economic arguments are if our cohesion is shot," said Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony), and more aggressive efforts to legislate morality ("we should care about a whole host of public goods and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods," said Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance).
There can be no doubting that the nationalist project—not just in my telling but in the minds of the people undertaking it—involves a coercive imposition of national unity on the country. Consider the difference between encouraging people to "buy American" out of a sense of solidarity and enacting protectionist policies that raise prices for everyone, whether they like it or not.
In fact, many of the new nationalists are explicit that libertarian economics, and the classical liberal order more broadly, are diametric to their desires. Writer Daniel McCarthy, in a widely circulated March 2019 essay for First Things, warned that America is headed for "suicide by liberalism," with a nationalist program "the most effective and honorable way out of the dilemma we face." Fox News host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly blamed "libertarian ideologues" for the GOP's unwillingness to embrace a program of "economic patriotism" resembling the one put forward by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). And Hazony used the National Conservatism Conference to "declare our independence…from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing" that matters.
The list could go on. Too often these days, a nationalist is a person who thinks individual autonomy is the cause of all our problems and state autonomy is the solution. True, Lowry probably doesn't see himself in those terms—but as the story goes, the Soviets had a name for people who credulously dealt in an ideology without grasping the enormity of its goals: useful idiots.
https://reason.com/2020/02/24/against-t ... tionalism/
"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism," George Orwell wrote in 1945. "Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved."
In The Case for Nationalism (Broadside Books), Rich Lowry has decided, rather boldly, to go up against Orwell and stake out the inverse position: To be a nationalist, he says, is merely to feel a glow of pride in one's country, to recognize it as possessing a particular cultural character that differentiates its citizens from all others, and to insist on its sovereignty in the face of crusading outside forces. Nationalism and patriotism, in other words, are essentially interchangeable.
...
In fairness to America's new conservative nationalism, there's every reason to assume its proponents are mercantilists, not Nazis. Nonetheless, in both general outlook and specific policy prescriptions, it is decidedly not a simple synonym for patriotic pride.
The new nationalism is implicitly illiberal. It doesn't stop at resisting the push, regrettably fashionable on many college campuses, to divide society into mutually antagonistic identity subgroups or to rewrite history to cast the United States as an unredeemable villain in every tale. Instead, it spills over into efforts to preserve our cultural homogeneity (such as it exists) from the diluting influence of foreigners. And it doesn't stop at opposing what The American Conservative's Antle calls "sovereignty-shredding supranational organizations" (the European Union, for instance) but spills over into an anti-cosmopolitanism that seeks to throw up barriers to free markets and free trade.
This predilection was on display at last summer's National Conservatism Conference, an event at which Beltway journalists, professors from prestigious educational institutions, and at least one U.S. senator gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., to discuss how coastal elitism is ruining America. The lineup featured a parade of right-of-center intellectuals explaining what, practically speaking, nationalism means to them: higher tariffs ("economic nationalists must be willing to pay higher prices to protect our fellow citizens," said Christian activist David Brog), larger expenditures to support the American industrial sector ("we should have a National Institutes of Manufacturing just as we have a National Institutes of Health," said former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass), stricter immigration laws ("it doesn't make a darn bit of difference what the economic arguments are if our cohesion is shot," said Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony), and more aggressive efforts to legislate morality ("we should care about a whole host of public goods and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods," said Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance).
There can be no doubting that the nationalist project—not just in my telling but in the minds of the people undertaking it—involves a coercive imposition of national unity on the country. Consider the difference between encouraging people to "buy American" out of a sense of solidarity and enacting protectionist policies that raise prices for everyone, whether they like it or not.
In fact, many of the new nationalists are explicit that libertarian economics, and the classical liberal order more broadly, are diametric to their desires. Writer Daniel McCarthy, in a widely circulated March 2019 essay for First Things, warned that America is headed for "suicide by liberalism," with a nationalist program "the most effective and honorable way out of the dilemma we face." Fox News host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly blamed "libertarian ideologues" for the GOP's unwillingness to embrace a program of "economic patriotism" resembling the one put forward by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). And Hazony used the National Conservatism Conference to "declare our independence…from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism. From the set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual, as the only thing" that matters.
The list could go on. Too often these days, a nationalist is a person who thinks individual autonomy is the cause of all our problems and state autonomy is the solution. True, Lowry probably doesn't see himself in those terms—but as the story goes, the Soviets had a name for people who credulously dealt in an ideology without grasping the enormity of its goals: useful idiots.
