Defining nationalism
An American nationalist loves his country, its democratic institutions and traditions. He, or she, wants the country to be its very best self and to live its ideals.
The other night, in Texas, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd: “A globalist is a person who wants the globe to do well. Frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know, we can’t have that …. You know what, I’m a nationalist. Use that word.”
Predictably, much of the left unloaded on the president. Critics said using the word “nationalist” was a not-so-subtle dog whistle to Trump’s racist, misogynistic “base” mostly made up of old white guys and their compliant (and probably oppressed) wives.
Nationalism, Trump’s critics say, harkens back to the fascist dictatorships in Europe in the middle of the 20th century; to Italy’s Mussolini and Germany’s Hitler, and to all the miserable things those two bad characters stood for, especially Hitler, with his bloodlust and mass exterminations.
According to liberals, “nationalism” is inexplicably linked to Trump’s “America First” credo. The phrase itself originated in the late 1930’s with Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and anti-Semite, who led millions of Americans in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s call to action against Hitler in the divisive days before Pearl Harbor.
Nationalism, this way of thinking goes, translates as conservatism with a mean streak, a bare-knuckle appeal to the very worst in the American character.
Now, that may be what Trump intends. As the most malignant president in history, he is entirely capable of the most abject uses of both language and manners. He is a menace.
And yet … it behooves the left not to fall into the Trumpian trap. There’s a self-defeating tendency among liberals to take everything Trump says and does and to turn it around. Thus, the mindset: If Trump is a nationalist, then we must be globalists.
But as F.H. Buckley recently wrote in Real Clear Politics, “The left needs it own nationalism.”
Noam Gidron made the case this way in Vox: “Throughout the 20th century, progressives mobilized for social justice most successfully when they spoke in the name of national solidarity rather than focusing … on class-based interests or on abstract notions of justice.”
Gidron, a scholar at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton, thinks liberals should elevate their game beyond narrow appeals to class, race and gender and speak to the self-interest of Americans as a whole. After all, a shift in emphasis could make a big difference when it comes to advocating on behalf of things like “health care for all” and gender and racial equality.
“Nationalism,” Buckley writes, “implies a sense of community and fellow feeling with other Americans.”
“If you’re an American nationalist, you’re … going to identify with the country’s liberal core…. The icons of American nationhood … are the principles in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
To associate nationalism with the far right, or even mainstream conservatism, is to turn history on its head. FDR’s New Deal was an explicit rejection of Herbert Hoover’s position that the Great Depression was a global phenomenon requiring a global solution.
Skip ahead 30 years and we find JFK was skeptical about supranational arrangements, especially the then-emerging European Common Market.
As for the difficulties of achieving European political unity, Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted JFK “did not think nationalism an altogether bad thing. He knew that the U.S. would not lightly abandon its own sovereignty.”
In a fundamental sense, President Trump is an anti-nationalist. His rejection of U.S. self-interest regarding Russian intervention in the 2016 and 2018 elections is a stunning act of national betrayal.
Indeed, it is impossible for Donald Trump and, sad to say, many of his leading critics, to be American nationalists. Nationalism encompasses more than a single tribe. Nationalism speaks and acts in the name of all the people.
“It is neither wise nor right for a nation to disregard its own needs,” Theodore Roosevelt argued.
There is a difference, however, between nationalism and national egomania, between a nationalism of exclusion and a nationalism of broad horizons.
True nationalism means looking out for the well-being of all; it is a way of thinking, speaking and acting that encompasses the entirety of the American family. In that spirit, in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt urged measures to make a “more American America.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.