Why US Nationalism is Essential after 250 Years
How I learned to love my country, and the future of Popular by Design
OK, folks, real talk. Just so that we’re all on the same page, I’m an American nationalist, too. Not just a patriot in the sense of being proud of America, but a nationalist. And today I’m finally doing something about it.
By nationalist, I mean that we, American citizens, are one unique people, that the people who govern and the people being governed should belong to the same community, and that the American government should serve the common interests of this community. When necessary, it should serve those interests over both narrower domestic interests and foreign interests. Yes, especially as an immigrant, I also think America is superior1 to other countries in the ways that matter most for human progress. And, yes, I can believe all of that while still valuing human beings everywhere, regardless of origin.
But long before I was a nationalist and started writing about immigration politics, I was writing about globalization and cosmopolitanism. In my undergraduate thesis, supervised by the late Ronald Inglehart, known for his ideas on postmaterialist values, I tried to measure how many people saw themselves as citizens of the world and why supranational identities varied across countries. I was young and naive enough, and living in Europe at the time, to think the future might be cosmopolitan (and even European). I was also eager enough to turn that hope into a dataset to prove globalization is good and inevitable.
That position still makes some moral sense to me. All humans are part of the same family, or at least close enough that any decent person, regardless of their religious beliefs, should feel the force of that idea. Borders are morally arbitrary in many ways, and the accident of birthplace remains the largest determinant of life chances in the world, more so than race, gender, or anything else. Much of my work on immigration still begins with that discomfort and with the fact that immigration empowers people to escape this unfortunate reality and contribute to this world.
Yet the more I studied public opinion and democratic politics, the harder it became to believe that cosmopolitanism (just like socialism) could do what its admirers wanted it to do. True, identifying with humanity as a whole can and probably should guide moral reflection for some people in positions of power. But no one has yet used it to build a durable democratic community, a welfare state, a public school system, or a legitimate and capable government that ordinary people feel belongs to them. In the end, most politics still runs through countries, whether we like it or not.
This is why I have gradually become more sympathetic to the idea of nationalism, or at least to American nationalism of the classical-liberal variety, certainly more than my younger self would have expected. Of course, we also know that nationalism, just like anything in large doses, can be dangerous and easily abused. But nationalism is also the political form through which modern democracy and equal citizenship have actually been built. In fact, liberal nationalism is arguably the most inclusive political identity that works at scale right now.
As for the something I’m finally doing about it: it comes at the end of the essay, where this newsletter becomes a bigger project and you get an invitation to become a part of it. But my argument on the virtues of US nationalism comes first, because the invitation depends on it.
What nationalism is and can do
Many folks I respect will still reject the label or even the idea itself. Alex Nowrasteh and Ilya Somin, for instance, have made a forceful case against nationalism, and they have good reasons for doing so. If nationalism means ethnic hierarchy, coercive cultural uniformity, trade protectionism, or a state empowered to decide who counts as a “real” American, I oppose it too.
If you wish, you can call the good parts liberalism, patriotism, or equal citizenship. But I care much less about the label than about the ideas underneath it. Alex has also argued that American identity is based on a broad creed, not religion or ancestry. That is pretty much what I and many others mean by American liberal nationalism, too, whether you like the label or not.
So, forget the meager defenses of nationalism by self-proclaimed white nationalists, right-wing populists, or self-styled dual national philosophers with obvious foreign policy agendas. My personal favorite conceptual and empirical account of nationalism comes from Andreas Wimmer because it starts with nationalism as a principle of political legitimacy. The nation-state provided the ideological basis for democracy and the provision of public goods because these institutions could be justified in the name of a people of equal citizens, held together by a shared purpose and mutual obligation.
Yael Tamir, whose work is among the best-known liberal defenses of nationalism, makes a related point in a more personal register. People need meaning and continuity alongside liberty and opportunity. Liberalism supplies rights and freedoms, while nationalism supplies belonging and obligation. A good, successful society needs both.
That is also exactly the part of nationalism that many of my cosmopolitan and libertarian friends underrate. The welfare state, or if you’re skeptical, state capacity more generally, does not run on universal benevolence or market mechanisms alone. Public schools and other services command support because people see other citizens as part of a shared project. This kind of solidarity is imperfect and morally partial, but it is also how large-scale generosity usually becomes politically durable.
My own empirical research pushed me in the same direction from a different angle. In my PhD dissertation and, later in In Our Interest, I show that most voters are closer to what I have called altruistic nationalists than to pure selfish homo economicus or principled humanitarians. They genuinely care about others, but they weigh the well-being of compatriots first when judging policy.
We know from most other research that people are pretty groupish. But even I was still surprised by how stark this was in the data. In both UK and US surveys I ran with an incentivized charity choice game, only 10 percent of respondents decided to donate money to global charities over domestic charities or their personal pocketbook. Importantly, this held even among left-wing voters often wrongly accused of being cosmopolitan.
That sounds limiting if you want universal solidarity, but it helps explain why democratic politics works at all. International cooperation is indispensable, but no global organization can command democratic legitimacy or popular loyalty. The nation-state remains the primary site where democratic accountability and public trust converge. Of course, I should be frank that this is a compromise for some of us: politics built on national solidarity will always do less for the world’s poorest than pure cosmopolitanism promises on paper. But a promise that cannot survive an election delivers even less.
The beauty of American nationalism
The American experiment is about to turn 250 years old. That is a long run for a constitutional republic built on the repeated expansion of citizenship across the continent. And this is all beautiful.
Some readers will cringe at that sentence. But the flag, the oath, the Declaration, and the stubborn idea that people from everywhere can become part of one political people are not empty words and rituals. They are part of what made my own American life and success possible. And I do not feel embarrassed to say that. And neither should you, dear reader.
Policies that ask people to trust one another, make sacrifices, and wait for results need a shared we behind them. Noah Smith recently argued that America needs liberal nationalism back. I think he is right because the more realistic choice is between better and worse forms of nationalism: a liberal nationalism that treats newcomers and minorities as potential co-authors of the national project, or a narrower nationalism that treats them as permanent threats. A country with no shared national story will usually become more fragmented and vulnerable to even narrower forms of identity politics and conflict.
The American version specifically has an unusual promise. The United States is not the only civic nation, and it doesn’t always live up to its own principles. Still, as an immigrant who has lived in several countries, I find it hard to avoid the emotional conclusion that there is no better country for human life and progress.
Yes, American institutions sometimes run badly. Our immigration system needs serious reform, housing policy fails in many places, and the country regularly makes its own advantages harder to use. These shortcomings are worth fixing precisely because they keep Americans from the opportunity the country already offers. But never underestimate how much is working: America still has the size, the markets, and, more unusually, a national identity that almost anyone can adopt. Those are all the right ingredients for renewal.
This is one reason American debates about progress have so much force. Americans expect the country to solve problems and get better. In many places I’ve lived, the failure to build enough housing or even ensure people are not dying from the heat can feel like ordinary decline. Here, it feels like an offense against the country’s promise. Jason Crawford’s distinction between progress and abundance is useful here: abundance starts with making it easier to build, while progress also depends on culture and ambition. A better liberal nationalism can acknowledge exclusion and broken promises while still insisting that the American project is worth fighting for. That better version is not automatic by any means, but it is still available if we choose it collectively.2
Immigration needs nationalism, and nationalism needs immigration
This brings me back to the argument that started Popular by Design. The original manifesto promised writing about immigration policies that work: policies that are evidence-based, demonstrably beneficial, and built to earn public support. A few years earlier, in one of the first public essays where I laid out the argument that became my book, I argued that immigration policy needs more enlightened nationalism. But now I see that the argument goes both ways.
Immigration needs nationalism because voters need to see a national benefit. Most voters will not support freer immigration because economists tell them it increases global welfare or because advocates tell them that borders are morally arbitrary. They support immigration when they can see how it serves the country they belong to: by filling real labor needs, strengthening universities, reuniting families under rules they trust, and making the country more dynamic.3 Pro-immigration politics that sound embarrassed by the national interest often fail because they ask voters to treat their attachment to compatriots as a moral defect. A more durable pro-immigration politics starts from the fact that voters care about their country and then shows how better immigration policy can serve their country.
But nationalism also needs immigration because a liberal nation that stops adding new members slowly becomes less liberal. Membership begins to look like ancestry. The more a country treats the national community as closed, the more its creed becomes decorative. America especially cannot defend a civic identity while treating newcomers as contaminants.
Days before the country's 250th birthday, the Supreme Court reaffirmed birthright citizenship, rejecting the idea that a child born on American soil could be denied membership because of their parents' immigration status. Indeed, a confident nation can afford to be generous because it expects to absorb newcomers and be improved by them, while an anxious one treats every arrival as a referendum on its survival. We absolutely can and should decide who can join us and under what conditions.4 But the phrase “nation of immigrants” is more than a sentimental slogan. It is a theory of national strength.
The same logic applies to other important issues
Immigration is the clearest case for me. The deeper principle is that good policy has to be built for imperfectly informed humans who care about their communities and judge policy by visible consequences. National interest is often the bridge between substantive merit and democratic legitimacy. People need to see how a policy makes their country more capable, more prosperous, more trustworthy, or more open to the people who can join and strengthen it.
Housing, not to mention newly controversial heating and cooling issues, is another useful example. For a long time, many supporters of new housing described opposition as the product of selfish homeowners or exclusionary racism. But housing politics also runs through people’s ideas about community, aesthetics, and whether change will make the place they live better or worse. Matthew Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas have been especially good in showing how local veto points turn ordinary family needs into a national housing problem. Recent work on the symbolic politics of housing and sociotropic aesthetic judgments points in this direction. If people can see housing growth as improving their communities, the politics can change.
Artificial intelligence is another case where the public argument is already too crude. I came to the AI debates almost by accident, after using the tools in my own research, and found a messier story than either panic or accelerationism allows. Dan Williams has made the interesting case that large language models may push public opinion toward more expert-aligned information, partly reversing the fragmentation of social media. Dean W. Ball’s approach to AI policy is useful here because he takes transformative possibilities seriously while keeping a high bar for policy claims made under uncertainty. I am less sure than either of them, but good AI politics will require institutions and publics capable of deciding what should be accelerated or constrained, especially as we weigh the more consequential aspects of AI, such as job disruption, alignment, and catastrophic misuse.
Population decline is the third case, and probably one of the biggest issues facing humanity alongside AI now. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso argue in After the Spike that the future challenge may be too few people to sustain the progress America and the world need. Fewer people means fewer workers, fewer caregivers, fewer ideas, and fewer chances for the lucky accidents that drive progress.
Immigration cannot solve global fertility decline by itself. Despite my weakness for housing theories of everything, permitting reform cannot solve it on its own, either. AI could offset some labor scarcity and help people do more with less, but a country that treats children and national membership as afterthoughts should not expect robots to rescue it from demographic and institutional decline. All these questions point back to the same political fact: progress depends on people who trust one another enough to build, adapt, welcome, and take risks together.
What Popular by Design is for: A new chapter
When I launched Popular by Design, I described it as a newsletter about immigration policies that work. Almost a year in, that remains true. Immigration and public opinion will stay at the center because they are the topics I know best and because immigration is the best test of the broader idea.
But the broader idea was always there. Good policy has to work substantively and politically. It has to account for trade-offs, limited information, group attachment, institutional incentives, and the fact that voters often judge policies by whether the benefits are visible to people like them.
Over the next year, I want Popular by Design to keep making that argument in a wider set of cases without becoming a generic politics newsletter. The center will remain migration, public opinion, and policy design. Around that center, I want to write more about population change, AI, housing, and the other areas where progress depends on turning good ideas into policies that ordinary people can understand and support. Behind the scenes, this newsletter is also becoming the public face of a research lab I’m starting at Notre Dame. More on that soon.
If Popular by Design is doing its job right, readers should come away with a better map of politics: where voters are wiser than elites think, where voters are wrong, where experts are useful, and where policy design can change the incentives so good ideas survive contact with democratic consent. Liberal nationalism fits the project because it lets us be ambitious without pretending that politics can float above membership, trust, and country.
So today, I am turning on paid memberships for Popular by Design. As I promised, every essay and all other substantive content will always remain free. That is central to the project because the point is to influence the public conversation, not to hide the core argument from people who cannot pay.
By now, you should have a clearer sense of what I am trying to do here. Popular by Design will remain rooted in immigration, but the community around it is for people who think politics works better when ideals are attached to institutions, national interest is treated as a democratic constraint rather than an embarrassment, and policy claims are judged by their consequences. If that way of understanding politics is useful to you and you want to be part of our community, paid membership is the way to help make it sustainable.
Popular by Design is now almost a year old, and it grew during my sabbatical, when I had more time to write, edit, and build the audience. Next month, I am getting back into the normal life of teaching, research, and university service obligations. If the newsletter is going to stay serious, publish regularly, and host useful conversations, it needs a base of recurring support.
There are two tiers at launch. Supporters contribute $15/month or $120/year. They help keep the essays free and receive invitations to reader meet-ups online and in person, where thoughtful folks can trade ideas and build connections around immigration, public opinion, and policy design.
Founding Members contribute $1,000/year, recurring annually. They join a smaller circle that gets two hour-long conversations with me each membership year, helps shape topics, and gives the project an informal kitchen cabinet. If your institution would benefit from a deeper engagement with these ideas through a book talk, workshop, or consulting engagement, reach out directly.
The money funds continuity: editing, guest posts, occasional reader events, and the time required to keep doing this well, while I have a full-time job. I am asking readers who care about this pragmatic policy community to help keep it open and improve it. I’ll be honest, though: giving folks the version they’d rather not hear has come at a price, from Bluesky curses and public calls to fire me to a few genuine death threats, ugly enough to end up in the news. I have thick skin and a steady job, so I can take it, but knowing there are real people behind this work, and not only the loud ones telling me to shut up, is a big part of what keeps me doing it.
If you want a public conversation where immigration is treated as a policy problem instead of a tribal signal, where patriotism is open enough to welcome newcomers, where AI and population are discussed with curiosity and discipline, and where progress is judged by whether policies actually work, I hope you will become a paid member. If money is genuinely a constraint, email me. I want students, early-career researchers, practitioners outside the United States, and thoughtful readers who cannot pay to stay in the conversation.
The United States of America, the country I became part of, is still the best bet for human progress. But no country keeps that status by inertia. It needs better policies, better institutions, and, yes, a better nationalism: confident enough to love what America is, honest enough to improve it, and open enough to keep adding the people who will make it stronger.
Huge thanks to all the folks who read and commented on this essay: Andrew Burleson, Emma McAleavy, Mike Riggs, Grant Mulligan, Tina Marsh Dalton, Jeff Fong, and Venkatesh V Ranjan.
When folks say their country is “superior,” the meaning depends on which country they are talking about. If you say it in Norway, Switzerland, or, yes, the United States, you have plenty of evidence to work with: freedom, prosperity, innovation, and so on. If you say it in Russia or North Korea, that is probably doing more work as cope or misinformation.
Rogers Smith's classic work on American political development helps explain why none of this is automatic. The United States has never had a single national tradition: liberal and republican traditions have long competed with ascriptive traditions that restricted full membership by race, gender, religion, and ancestry. American nationalism becomes liberal only when citizens and institutions empower the tradition that says people can become American by joining the country's political project.
Canada is the cleanest demonstration of this dynamic: for decades it built majority support for high immigration by tying admissions to visible national benefits, and when that link weakened, support promptly sank.
Matt Burgess made a similar case for an immigration politics that respects immigrants, takes integration seriously, and recognizes citizens’ right to decide immigration policy.
Have you seen the articles about AI in last week’s edition of The Economist? Interesting what their analysis about bias in each AI system reveals.