Why Nationalism?
The world is not as good as it could be. Even worse, the world is not nearly as good as it ought to be. Despite the rich history, unprecedented wealth, and technological achievements of Western Civilization, happiness in America, the ostensible leader of the free world, is at record lows[1]. Uncoincidentally, dissatisfaction with our government is at record highs[2], as is relative poverty[3]. It is not an overstatement to say that America is in miserable condition. And where America goes, the broader West seems to follow.
Paralyzed by postmodern self-doubt, the Western world must diagnose the root ideological causes of these problems. The West does not need merely to reform the ideas and practices that got us here. We need new ones. A positive form of uniquely American nationalism can answer this high calling. If we on the political right are honest with ourselves, we are not winning. The left's ideas dominate the media, academia, and public policy. The right ought to be tired of coping with our failure, but too few of us have the honesty to face facts. The right grovels for pitiful compromises from the left, which effectively runs both of America's liberal, corporatist political parties. But it does not have to be this way. As patriots, this is our country. We can take it back.
A new path requires new ideas. To the limited extent that our political leaders bother to have any ideas, America's current political philosophies have outlived their usefulness. Postwar conservatism was doomed to fail the moment it submitted to William F. Buckley's definition of conservatism as "standing athwart history yelling stop!" By "history" Buckley meant more than just the current events of the past. History in this sense refers to the Hegelian dialectical process by which a nation realizes its destiny. Buckley and his followers thus cast conservatism as the hapless antagonist to triumphant liberal history-making. The sum of these defeats is the postmodern American nightmare we now suffer.
Conservatism never has been terribly compelling to young people, but now that the neo-Marxist march through the institutions is complete, liberalism ironically has become "the establishment," and now it has lost its cachet with many young people. Liberals find themselves in the awkward position of defending the very system they pledged to destroy a generation ago. The moral hideousness and failures of liberalism are self-evident to right-thinking people. Western Civilization is dead. Conservatives are pulling for the corpse, and liberals are pulling for the maggots.
In search of alternative political ideas, a sizable minority are drawn to libertarianism. However, libertarianism is even weaker than conservatism, though. Libertarianism is an economic philosophy masquerading as a system of ethics. Economic analysis is very useful for purely economic questions, but it lacks any true ethos. Ethical priors must be brought to libertarian economic analysis, not the other way around. Further, libertarianism is rooted in liberalism, which offends the conservative temperament of approximately half the population, so it is doomed to political irrelevance on the national scale. Thankfully for them, libertarians appear to be unbothered by their irrelevance, and each individual libertarian is perfectly content to reign an ideologically pure kingdom of one.
America desperately needs to outgrow these failed ideologies, but it cannot do so until new ideas arise to replace them. The left-right divide ultimately serves globalist, neoliberal crony capitalism, which is embraced by political elites on both sides. Our rootless, technocratic monoculture claims to value diversity, but in practice it eradicates true diversity, destroys local community, and abhors any inkling of national pride. Against these dark forces, only nationalism can reassert America's identity without apology, as a Western European nation with a culture, ethical norms, and traditions seeped in Christianity. A patriotic nationalist America would be a paragon of the West. It is not yet too late to save our great civilization, but dusk is spreading on the horizon. We must act. This new political philosophy seeks to stir a movement of the spirit in America and the broader West, to reassert our traditional character, and to rediscover who we really, truly are. This is our highest calling as a people.
Born of authentic love for our motherland and its people, American nationalism cannot tolerate the moral and political compromises that define mainstream conservatism. American nationalism can rise to meet a massive and unrealized demand in the marketplace of ideas. Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign revealed a deep unconscious desire for nationalism in America, but Trump failed to deliver on his campaign promises, due in large part to his personal shortcomings and the recalcitrance of the Republican Party. A new philosophy of nationalism would satisfy the unmet need that Trump identified. It quickly could surpass libertarianism in popularity and even replace conservatism over time. Conservatism deserves to be replaced. A dilute form of conservatism is still the dominant ideology of the right, but enthusiasm for its ideas peaked in the 1980s, during the administration of Ronald Reagan. Lacking any real self-confidence and any meaningful political success for the last thirty years, it is not clear that conservatism would even fight back if it were challenged seriously from the right.
Within nationalism lies the dormant seed of a mass movement. Nationalism could be far more compelling than conservatism because it has a vision for what society ought to be, in positive terms, and Buckleyite conservatism is defined primarily in negative terms by its opposition to the left. As a reactionary philosophy, conservatism measures its success by its ability to negotiate compromises with its dominant partner, leftism. Nationalism, instead, discovers the organic principles of a coherent people group and advances them because they are right, not only because the opposition is wrong. It is far more inspiring to fight for a positive vision of a society that is truly one's own than it is to caterwaul about the left.
The political future of a potential nationalist movement could be very bright. As the ideas of nationalism gain popular support and begin to influence the public policy process, the American right would no longer be defined by compromise and failure. Nationalist political operatives would be of a different breed than the self-serving swamp creatures that haunt our capital today. Nationalism is focused on the community rather than the individual, and therefore it would be able to call on its followers to give more and sacrifice more of themselves on behalf of a nobler vision. The dedication of even a small minority of nationalists could form a base of considerable political power, and we would have a much happier and healthier country as a result.
A new nationalist movement will fail, though, if it allows itself to be defined negatively by its opponents. The left paints nationalism as inherently hateful, and some of the previous torchbearers of nationalism have assumed that mantle dutifully. Our more positive form of patriotic nationalism will be of an entirely different character, defining itself by whom it loves rather than whom it hates. It begins with an earnest introspection that allows the individual to discover his own highest spiritual calling and extends it in love to the discovery of the same within his family, broader kin group, community, city, state, region, and nation. Each level of abstraction generates similar but unique experiences of the spiritual bonds that unite. This spirit of unity and benevolence toward self and community is what drives our positive new nationalism.
At its best, nationalism offers a radically positive vision of a more cohesive and loving society. Whereas the postmodern world offers absolute individualism, technocracy, materialism, depravity, and economic chaos, nationalism offers authentic communitarianism, true democratization, spiritualism, moral encouragement, and economic stability. To achieve this vision, a truly nationalist society would eliminate the subtle modes of control that have been used for millennia to dominate and divide the population against each other and therefore against itself.
Hidden methods of psychological conditioning have become far more sophisticated in the last hundred or so years, but the primary mode of control is financial. Its roots extent to ancient Babylon, perhaps even farther. This usurious monetary system of fiat money and debt is the subtlest and most effective system of control ever devised, far more effective than raw government power. To be free from such control, we must rethink what money really is. Our global monetary system is based on debt, and America's consumerist economy runs on it. Those who control the distribution of debt control the debtors. In this system, the common people passively accept a soft form of slavery by incurring public and private debt.
The debt-based monetary system runs on mere bookkeeping entries that only matter because we all behave as if they do. In a certain sense, it is all smoke and mirrors but smoke and mirrors that are violently enforced. Only if this system is replaced by one in which money returns to its original role as a store of earned value can people reclaim lives of real meaning. An honest monetary system would distribute wealth according to value creation, democratizing its power among those who have earned it, rather than those who best navigate the con. Power thus would be distributed fairly. Such a democratization of power would spell doom for the world's true ruling class, the owners of the monetary system, who will stop at nothing to prevent the realization of true nationalism. Ending usury may be the most important policy objective of a nationalist movement, but it is far from the only one.
Life would be dramatically different in a nationalist society. The state would be far less intrusive but significantly more powerful and just. Crime would drop precipitously. Families would be much larger and closer. Beauty would be restored to architecture and all forms of art. The appreciation for distinctions between different nationalities and cultures would heighten. It would be possible to raise a family and own property on a single, moderate income because there would be no artificial monetary inflation. Savings rates would increase as the inflationary disincentive to save evaporates. Private charity would blossom in an environment of greater social cohesion and broader distribution of true wealth, as a store of earned value. Extreme wealth would be eliminated because it depends on the financial booms and busts of the business cycle, which would cease to exist without fiat money.
The elimination of extreme wealth appeals to many people because they believe there should not be a ruling class, but such a radical departure from tradition would have an unclear future. No known advanced civilization has existed without an insular ruling class. In eliminating the oligarchy, this form of nationalism would be a gamble that bets our future on the average man. However, to the nationalist, it is not actually a bet on the average man but a bet on the beneficent power of the spirit of the nation and that nation's God. In order to align with the will of our true God, the people must be free to live lives of real meaning, which compels the destruction of society's lesser gods. The lesser gods we are made to worship are fame, money, and power. The attainment of each of these things is dependent upon tightly controlled, top-down incentive structures, managed by an opaque elite. Being outsiders to this system, we cannot know the true motivations of those at the top, but we can infer them from the fruits of the system they run. If you are reading this, you will probably agree that the fruits of this system are not good. In fact, they can be described as truly evil from the perspective of a spiritually attuned nationalist. Our success means their destruction.
The term "nationalism" is admittedly controversial, but even moderately conservative Senator Marco Rubio publicly called for "a new nationalism" during the Trump administration. It should not be controversial for the American people to openly care for our own and organize to defend our own interests. However, relentless propaganda against nationalism has psychologically conditioned the public to associate it with the orgiastic violence of the two world wars, perhaps the darkest imagery in recent memory. Opponents of nationalism rely on these historically inaccurate tropes to caricaturize it because they fear its compelling spiritual power. It therefore requires an act of will to maintain an open mind and consider the appeal of nationalism on its merits. It is not necessary to agree with the nationalist approach to every policy issue in order to support the overall project. Anyone who agrees with most of these ideas is already on the side of American nationalism, at least in spirit.
The mainstream aversion to nationalism regrettably prevents us from exploring a powerful potential solution to America's broadly lamented political polarization. Only nationalism can unite the authentic patriotism of the right with the altruistic communitarianism of the left. Guided by a distinct political philosophy, nationalism alone is willing to engage state apparatuses to defend the original vision of the country and expand the traditional rights and culture our founding demography. This nationalism embarks on this mission out of love for who we are and not the imperialistic jingoism it is accused of. This nationalism does not "go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of democracy," as John Quincy Adams admonished. Nationalism is the path to a happier and healthier America, where men and women are free to live lives of authentic meaning and purpose, to raise children in safety, and to attain true financial independence for their families. A true nationalist society is a family of families, passing down the wisdom, traditions, and values of one generation onto the next, in an unbroken chain that spans millennia of shared history.
What follows in this essay is a very brief overview of the history of nationhood in the West, an explication of a new philosophy of nationalism, and finally prescriptive applications of this philosophy to America's most urgent public policy problems.
Next: Why the Right Needs a New Philosophy
[1] Gallup Poll Social Series: Mood of the Nation, 2022
[2] Ibid.