In the aftermath of the death of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) there are a number of articles out about the difference between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad).
In The American Spectator Ralph Benko, after Adam Gopnik, defines patriotism vs. nationalism thus:
So let us try to understand what is going on, from my point of view.
The basic fact is that humans are tribal: we are social animals. We protect ourselves from the rest of the world by defending our patch of land from pirates and plunderers, and we do that by banding together in tribes. From time immemorial this tribe has been a tribe of the kindred, of people fairly closely related by blood, defended from the world by the armed might of their men.
But certainly since the dawn of agriculture, things have been more complicated than that, because the first thing that happened, with the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East, was the agricultural empire. The empire could not really be a tribe of the kindred, so we humans started to fake the tribal thing.
We started to develop the notion that the Pharaoh or the King, or even God, was the Father of us all. So we were not a bunch of warring clans, but really children united into the greater family of the abstract Father. Not the tribe of blood relationship but the abstract notion of relationship, as children of the king, or children of God, created a new sense of belonging.
I tell you what I think of that. I think it is brilliant. Fake tribes! Who would have thought it!
In the feudal era we have the notion that the feudal lord was the father of his vassals. And there was a certain fatherly duty that the lord owed his vassals and his serfs, one of which was to defend them against other feudal lords.
But then came the end of the feudal era in Europe, and the rise of the absolute monarchs, so a new sense of belonging and membership was needed. Enter the nation state, the notion that the basic unit of human membership was not the feudal principality but the kingdom, with its king, its language, its people, its history, and its sacred land.
Of course, the idea that Britain or France was a single nation with sacred borders and a divine right of kings was a bunch of made-up baloney, a new notion of membership that was needed because if you were not a strong nation in the Europe of 500 years ago you got stomped on.
For instance Germany, in the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. In those days Germany was a collection of smaller states headed by princes and counts and bishops. So the nations of Sweden and France felt free to march all over Germany and strip the German peasants of their food. About a third of Germans died in the war. You can imagine that the Germans really fell in love with the national idea after being tromped on for thirty years by the lovely French, but it look them 200 years and the genius of Bismarck to actually make them into a nation.
Or Austria in 1900. Suppose you were a German speaker in Austria. Austria was a multicultural empire, presided over by the German-speaking Hapsburgs, but it had slowly given more and more autonomy to the various nationalities: Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs. If you were a chap like the young Adolf Hitler, the outlook for German speakers looked pretty bleak. So why not have a Greater Germany, a Großdeutschland, of all the German speakers?
Cool idea, Adolf, except that where would you stop? At the Austrian Anschluss? At the annexation of German-speaking Czechoslovakia? The German speakers in Poland? Hey, what about western Russia, which had been importing good German farmers for centuries? You can cook up a reason to invade just about anywhere, if you have an army and a mind to do so.
Obviously, the national idea, for all its genius in promoting the idea of all Brits or all Germans or all Americans as one tribe, all in it together, can get out of hand.
Anyway, starting in the mid 19th century a new notion of fake tribal membership began, with the idea of all the workers of the world belonging to an imagined international community of workers. In this formulation, the workers were "we" and the bourgeoisie was "they." Workers of the World Unite!
Cool idea, except that in World War I the various workers of the world fought for their nations, and not for the workers of the world. Plus, we have learned in the decades since, the idea of a workers' state is a bad one, that leads to starvation, mass murder, and secular religious wars.
Meanwhile a new form of membership was growing up with the rise of global capitalism. Lots of people started working for large corporations, and when not angered by layoffs and wage-cuts during recessions and depressions, seemed to like the neo-feudal community of the big corporation. Here is a piece about the relative contentment of Amazon workers.
Meanwhile, the left, that invented the idea of worker solidarity, found it necessary to invent a new form of membership: race and gender solidarity, what we now call identity politics.
In my view it makes sense. The left does not like nation states, because colonialism and imperialism and aggressive nationalism and fascism. But if you are not going to organize politically around the nation, then what? The answer is to organize around sub-national groupings, such as race and gender, what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes.
The problem is, I suggest, that setting all the non-whites against the whites, and all the women and non-hetero-males against toxic white masculinity, means that the defining membership idea is not longer the nation, but the sub-national tribal identity. The assumption of the left is that they can manage all the disputes among their Coalition of the Fringes, especially if it can keep them united against the eevil white heterosexual male. But if you ask me identity politics leads straight to civil war.
Enter Donald Trump. He is proposing to reestablish the nation as the basic membership unit, as in Make America Great Again. But there is a problem. Do you see what it is?
The problem is that politics is division; if there is an "us" then there must be a "them" to unite the "us." In the old nation state this was, for the Brits, the French; and for the French, the Germans. And for the US, since World War II, the Soviets. And latterly the Islamofascists. So there must be an enemy, otherwise politics is not needed.
So Donald Trump came up with the brilliant idea to blame everything on multinational trade deals and immigration. Other countries, or international bureaucrats, were stiffing the American worker. But Trump would fight for the American worker, by renegotiating trade deals, Oh, and on immigrants that were taking jobs away from American workers.
Do you see the genius in this? It unites all Americans, male, female, white, black, Latino, and Asian into one community, of Americans that want to Make America Great Again. And it doesn't propose waging actual war on Mexico or Canada or China in order to do so.
Really, the only people that might be opposed to this agenda would be the international educated elite that can always get a visa to work abroad as visiting professor, or working for an international agency, or getting transferred to a foreign subsidiary of a global corporation. Because the current system runs as though it were designed to benefit people like them.
My point is this. There is always going to be tribalism. The only question is: which one? The old tribalism of the blood kindred is dead and buried. And, believe me, we won't have world government until we detect the Martians coming to attack us. So we humans have to devise a workable abstract tribalism based on some principle other than kinship. So we invent fake kinship.
Personally I believe that nationalism is the best thing going, the idea of a people, living in a sacred space, joined together by some fake national myth. Not because nationalism is so great, but because every other -ism is so stupid.
But the worst thing going is the identity politics of the left, the idea that, after two centuries of the Great Enrichment from $3 per person per day to $150 per person per day, that this group or that group is horribly oppressed and exploited and has nothing in common with the average white middle-class married, patriotic family man.
In The American Spectator Ralph Benko, after Adam Gopnik, defines patriotism vs. nationalism thus:
The patriot loves his place and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies; the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for... but channels his obsessive grievances into acts of ethnic vengeance.Then Jonah Goldberg calls John McCain a patriot (good) and President Trump a nationalist (bad). Actually, it is not too clear to me how Jonah defines patriotism, beyond that
McCain's worldview was, properly speaking, patriotic, not nationalistic, in that it was credal, bound up in democratic principles.For John McCain wanted to form an international organization:
[I]n 2007, for instance, McCain proposed creating a League of Democracies to counter the influence of the United Nations and other organizations that do not really care about democratic values.Here's National Review's Jim Geraghty on America as a war against identity politics.
Identity politics in the American context almost inevitably carries an undercurrent of “we, in this group, are the good Americans; those, in that group, are the bad Americans.” Whether we like to admit it or not, that’s a near-dominant theme in our modern politics and our arguments on social media.But America was supposed to be different.
The point of the American experiment, fueled in large part by Europeans fleeing a continent full of rigid class roles, limited opportunities, political and religious repression, was to create a country where you could be whatever you wanted to be, and your group identity didn’t matter.Well, I'm sorry. This is all so much special pleading for the author's own preferred mode of tribalism, the principle on which the "we" and the "they" is defined.
So let us try to understand what is going on, from my point of view.
The basic fact is that humans are tribal: we are social animals. We protect ourselves from the rest of the world by defending our patch of land from pirates and plunderers, and we do that by banding together in tribes. From time immemorial this tribe has been a tribe of the kindred, of people fairly closely related by blood, defended from the world by the armed might of their men.
But certainly since the dawn of agriculture, things have been more complicated than that, because the first thing that happened, with the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East, was the agricultural empire. The empire could not really be a tribe of the kindred, so we humans started to fake the tribal thing.
We started to develop the notion that the Pharaoh or the King, or even God, was the Father of us all. So we were not a bunch of warring clans, but really children united into the greater family of the abstract Father. Not the tribe of blood relationship but the abstract notion of relationship, as children of the king, or children of God, created a new sense of belonging.
I tell you what I think of that. I think it is brilliant. Fake tribes! Who would have thought it!
In the feudal era we have the notion that the feudal lord was the father of his vassals. And there was a certain fatherly duty that the lord owed his vassals and his serfs, one of which was to defend them against other feudal lords.
But then came the end of the feudal era in Europe, and the rise of the absolute monarchs, so a new sense of belonging and membership was needed. Enter the nation state, the notion that the basic unit of human membership was not the feudal principality but the kingdom, with its king, its language, its people, its history, and its sacred land.
Of course, the idea that Britain or France was a single nation with sacred borders and a divine right of kings was a bunch of made-up baloney, a new notion of membership that was needed because if you were not a strong nation in the Europe of 500 years ago you got stomped on.
For instance Germany, in the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. In those days Germany was a collection of smaller states headed by princes and counts and bishops. So the nations of Sweden and France felt free to march all over Germany and strip the German peasants of their food. About a third of Germans died in the war. You can imagine that the Germans really fell in love with the national idea after being tromped on for thirty years by the lovely French, but it look them 200 years and the genius of Bismarck to actually make them into a nation.
Or Austria in 1900. Suppose you were a German speaker in Austria. Austria was a multicultural empire, presided over by the German-speaking Hapsburgs, but it had slowly given more and more autonomy to the various nationalities: Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs. If you were a chap like the young Adolf Hitler, the outlook for German speakers looked pretty bleak. So why not have a Greater Germany, a Großdeutschland, of all the German speakers?
Cool idea, Adolf, except that where would you stop? At the Austrian Anschluss? At the annexation of German-speaking Czechoslovakia? The German speakers in Poland? Hey, what about western Russia, which had been importing good German farmers for centuries? You can cook up a reason to invade just about anywhere, if you have an army and a mind to do so.
Obviously, the national idea, for all its genius in promoting the idea of all Brits or all Germans or all Americans as one tribe, all in it together, can get out of hand.
Anyway, starting in the mid 19th century a new notion of fake tribal membership began, with the idea of all the workers of the world belonging to an imagined international community of workers. In this formulation, the workers were "we" and the bourgeoisie was "they." Workers of the World Unite!
Cool idea, except that in World War I the various workers of the world fought for their nations, and not for the workers of the world. Plus, we have learned in the decades since, the idea of a workers' state is a bad one, that leads to starvation, mass murder, and secular religious wars.
Meanwhile a new form of membership was growing up with the rise of global capitalism. Lots of people started working for large corporations, and when not angered by layoffs and wage-cuts during recessions and depressions, seemed to like the neo-feudal community of the big corporation. Here is a piece about the relative contentment of Amazon workers.
Meanwhile, the left, that invented the idea of worker solidarity, found it necessary to invent a new form of membership: race and gender solidarity, what we now call identity politics.
In my view it makes sense. The left does not like nation states, because colonialism and imperialism and aggressive nationalism and fascism. But if you are not going to organize politically around the nation, then what? The answer is to organize around sub-national groupings, such as race and gender, what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes.
The problem is, I suggest, that setting all the non-whites against the whites, and all the women and non-hetero-males against toxic white masculinity, means that the defining membership idea is not longer the nation, but the sub-national tribal identity. The assumption of the left is that they can manage all the disputes among their Coalition of the Fringes, especially if it can keep them united against the eevil white heterosexual male. But if you ask me identity politics leads straight to civil war.
Enter Donald Trump. He is proposing to reestablish the nation as the basic membership unit, as in Make America Great Again. But there is a problem. Do you see what it is?
The problem is that politics is division; if there is an "us" then there must be a "them" to unite the "us." In the old nation state this was, for the Brits, the French; and for the French, the Germans. And for the US, since World War II, the Soviets. And latterly the Islamofascists. So there must be an enemy, otherwise politics is not needed.
So Donald Trump came up with the brilliant idea to blame everything on multinational trade deals and immigration. Other countries, or international bureaucrats, were stiffing the American worker. But Trump would fight for the American worker, by renegotiating trade deals, Oh, and on immigrants that were taking jobs away from American workers.
Do you see the genius in this? It unites all Americans, male, female, white, black, Latino, and Asian into one community, of Americans that want to Make America Great Again. And it doesn't propose waging actual war on Mexico or Canada or China in order to do so.
Really, the only people that might be opposed to this agenda would be the international educated elite that can always get a visa to work abroad as visiting professor, or working for an international agency, or getting transferred to a foreign subsidiary of a global corporation. Because the current system runs as though it were designed to benefit people like them.
My point is this. There is always going to be tribalism. The only question is: which one? The old tribalism of the blood kindred is dead and buried. And, believe me, we won't have world government until we detect the Martians coming to attack us. So we humans have to devise a workable abstract tribalism based on some principle other than kinship. So we invent fake kinship.
Personally I believe that nationalism is the best thing going, the idea of a people, living in a sacred space, joined together by some fake national myth. Not because nationalism is so great, but because every other -ism is so stupid.
But the worst thing going is the identity politics of the left, the idea that, after two centuries of the Great Enrichment from $3 per person per day to $150 per person per day, that this group or that group is horribly oppressed and exploited and has nothing in common with the average white middle-class married, patriotic family man.
No comments:
Post a Comment