There's a practical reason to support liberal nationalism: it's a more durable antidote to de-growth socialism than Trumpism. I like how you ground it in both principle and empirical reality, which makes it consistent with the “citizenism” many of us desire, where the primary purpose of government is to serve its citizens.
Thanks, Jeff. The durability point in most of the discussions on nationalism is very much underrated. And yes, only a government whose first job is to serve its own citizens, assuming it does relatively well, can be a durable one, and also the one that can afford to be generous.
I have struggled with the labels of nationalism and patriotism because of the negative connotations they have invoked. I enjoy the way you present the ideas here. It provides the ways in which to reflect on and understand the positive aspects of those words while acknowledging the problems of understanding them through the lens of exclusion.
Thanks! I struggled with the labels for years too, and, to be honest, I just gave up--no matter what you call it, what's important here is the substance of the political arrangement where individual rights are secured and the power is transitioning peacefully. And all of this absolutely requires people's loyalties to be in the right place.
It was a quote from Richard Rorty (coming from the left side of liberalism) that, in one blow, ended my naïve cosmopolitan anti-nationalism sentiments:
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.”
It also notably contains this eerily prescient warning:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.
“Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized, are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
“At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for; someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots […]
“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion […] All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
Really interesting and persuasive. I have one question if I may. In 16th century Ireland (where I'm from but most places are like this) it would have been easy to make an empirical argument that a national polity/identity is not possible because people's identity and 'groupishness' is very strongly related to their clan. So while it might be a nice dream to create an Irish nation it is simply not realistic because of people's innate ties to family/local geography based identities. This turned out not to be true, despite the fact had a political scientist existed at the time they could have found copious empirical evidence to support this view. Obviously a lot changed to make national polities/identities possible, including economic structures, technology, literacy and so forth.
My point is, there is a strong argument that currently nationalism provides the strongest grounding for political community and state legitimacy. But it is not so clear to me that 'the nature of human psychology' confines us to this form of organisation into the future.
As an aside, the argument here is quite similar to Wolfgang Streek's Taking Back Control
Good points! What I call nationalism here is certainly not ahistorical, though revisionists like Azar Gat argue that something like it held kingdoms and empires together for thousands of years before even literacy and railroads scaled it up. My thinking on this is that: if aliens attacked us tomorrow, I do think humanity would come together (which doesn’t seem to work for slower, inanimate calamities like climate change).
Even then, the resulting arrangement would have to be built very differently from today's UN, and simply encouraging people to feel more cosmopolitan would not get us there. But we do have precedents to build on (the ozone layer and nonproliferation), so I would not rule your future out. This all probably deserves its own post. And thanks for the Streeck pointer!
I eventually settled on the social identity theory... According to which, people will always identify as something in opposition to something else. We therefore don't need to create some unity (such as a nation), because ingroups will form anyways.
As a quote from the book Windrush said:
"I would say a third of the people in Britain still had imperialist ideas. People from the colonies should be planting bananas and chocolate and whatever it is. Another third, I would say, did not really matter as Arsenal win on Saturday. The other third, they were just nice, ordinary people."
Both terms are conceptually overstretched, but patriotism is more like a social norm or the personal emotion of being proud of your country, without necessarily implying any particular set of beliefs. Nationalism, at least the kind I'm defending here, is exactly that set of beliefs about who the political community is and what its government owes them.
Regarding the relationship between nationalism and immigration. What do you consider the maximum percentage of foreign born population and maximum annual population growth such that the popular support for immigration is not lost? How much, how fast? What framework should we be using to think about this?
I've written about this a bit before (https://goodauthority.org/news/can-trump-manage-immigration-effectively-not-just-reduce-it/), but in short: I don't think there is a magic number. What predicts backlash is the kind of immigration and the conditions under which folks are admitted. Where migration is tightly controlled and temporary, a majority of the population can be foreign, as the Gulf states show. For wealthy liberal democracies, Canada's and Australia's roughly 30% foreign-born with permanent inflows around 1-2% of population a year is probably the highest sustainable level tested so far (most countries, including the US, are still very far from that).
Interesting. Australia is 32% and Canada 23% (as of 2021). In the linked article you say Canada’s “backlash” has been much more about speed, housing, and temporary flows than about crime or ethnic identity. I think we are seeing the exact same backlash in Australia now. I would be interested in your take on the situation in Australia. I mentioned this previously, but take a look at Joe Walker's podcast. He has interviewed 4 former bureaucratics intimately involved in the design and administration of Australia's program. Some fascinating insights.
Great piece. The fundamental error people make when trying to critique nationalism as an idea is a lack of game-mechanical understanding of the drivers. A state is the largest unit at which a system of values can be systemized into policy and operationalized into governance. Borders etc etc - often thought of as the boundaries individuals have to cross to seek something - are more relevant as the threshold past which values no longer have teeth.
Thanks, Zac. "The threshold past which values no longer have teeth" is perhaps a perfect one-line summary of my cosmopolitanism section. It's true that you can hold values for all of humanity, but you can only enforce them where there is a demos and a government that answers to it.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized and pluralized system that had legal and regulatory variability, policy variability, an intentionally diffused and pluralized private sector, and local fiscal dominance. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, genuinely participatory governance structures even for very serious policy matters by serving as an organizational interface and coordinating mesh for a wide array of organizational linked publicly accessible decision making bodies that spanned economy-schooling/training-culture-science-government, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, after WW2 a long multi decadal transformation began due to the dirty deeds of a convergence of several interests and an assortment of powerful special interest groups, and then our parties were transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they don't offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
Thanks. Totally agree we need more academics who are explicitly patriotic. Far too often, our profession has come to be dominated by doomerism and naysaying. It is at total odds with the masses, who love these kinds of patriotic displays.
There are several from last week and this week. I found the one from last week most interesting “AI models’ values are very different from most people’s” Makes a lot of sense.
There is some overlap with my Nationalist Internationalism essay. Also, for more on the ideals American Civic Nationalism should be founded on, see my essay on The Legacy of 1776
There's a practical reason to support liberal nationalism: it's a more durable antidote to de-growth socialism than Trumpism. I like how you ground it in both principle and empirical reality, which makes it consistent with the “citizenism” many of us desire, where the primary purpose of government is to serve its citizens.
Thanks, Jeff. The durability point in most of the discussions on nationalism is very much underrated. And yes, only a government whose first job is to serve its own citizens, assuming it does relatively well, can be a durable one, and also the one that can afford to be generous.
I have struggled with the labels of nationalism and patriotism because of the negative connotations they have invoked. I enjoy the way you present the ideas here. It provides the ways in which to reflect on and understand the positive aspects of those words while acknowledging the problems of understanding them through the lens of exclusion.
Thanks! I struggled with the labels for years too, and, to be honest, I just gave up--no matter what you call it, what's important here is the substance of the political arrangement where individual rights are secured and the power is transitioning peacefully. And all of this absolutely requires people's loyalties to be in the right place.
It was a quote from Richard Rorty (coming from the left side of liberalism) that, in one blow, ended my naïve cosmopolitan anti-nationalism sentiments:
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.”
I’m usually quite suspicious of the individual-group analogies, but this sounds about right. I should probably read Rorty more now :)
The quote is from Achieving Our Country. I think you’d like a lot of it. I highly recommend Rorty-maxxing! 🫡
It also notably contains this eerily prescient warning:
“Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.
“Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers, themselves desperately afraid of being downsized, are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
“At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for; someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots […]
“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion […] All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
Really interesting and persuasive. I have one question if I may. In 16th century Ireland (where I'm from but most places are like this) it would have been easy to make an empirical argument that a national polity/identity is not possible because people's identity and 'groupishness' is very strongly related to their clan. So while it might be a nice dream to create an Irish nation it is simply not realistic because of people's innate ties to family/local geography based identities. This turned out not to be true, despite the fact had a political scientist existed at the time they could have found copious empirical evidence to support this view. Obviously a lot changed to make national polities/identities possible, including economic structures, technology, literacy and so forth.
My point is, there is a strong argument that currently nationalism provides the strongest grounding for political community and state legitimacy. But it is not so clear to me that 'the nature of human psychology' confines us to this form of organisation into the future.
As an aside, the argument here is quite similar to Wolfgang Streek's Taking Back Control
Good points! What I call nationalism here is certainly not ahistorical, though revisionists like Azar Gat argue that something like it held kingdoms and empires together for thousands of years before even literacy and railroads scaled it up. My thinking on this is that: if aliens attacked us tomorrow, I do think humanity would come together (which doesn’t seem to work for slower, inanimate calamities like climate change).
Even then, the resulting arrangement would have to be built very differently from today's UN, and simply encouraging people to feel more cosmopolitan would not get us there. But we do have precedents to build on (the ozone layer and nonproliferation), so I would not rule your future out. This all probably deserves its own post. And thanks for the Streeck pointer!
I eventually settled on the social identity theory... According to which, people will always identify as something in opposition to something else. We therefore don't need to create some unity (such as a nation), because ingroups will form anyways.
As a quote from the book Windrush said:
"I would say a third of the people in Britain still had imperialist ideas. People from the colonies should be planting bananas and chocolate and whatever it is. Another third, I would say, did not really matter as Arsenal win on Saturday. The other third, they were just nice, ordinary people."
I can explain in more detail should anyone care.
Why nationalism over patriotism?
Both terms are conceptually overstretched, but patriotism is more like a social norm or the personal emotion of being proud of your country, without necessarily implying any particular set of beliefs. Nationalism, at least the kind I'm defending here, is exactly that set of beliefs about who the political community is and what its government owes them.
I’ll allow it. As a liberal, this is something to chew on!
Regarding the relationship between nationalism and immigration. What do you consider the maximum percentage of foreign born population and maximum annual population growth such that the popular support for immigration is not lost? How much, how fast? What framework should we be using to think about this?
I've written about this a bit before (https://goodauthority.org/news/can-trump-manage-immigration-effectively-not-just-reduce-it/), but in short: I don't think there is a magic number. What predicts backlash is the kind of immigration and the conditions under which folks are admitted. Where migration is tightly controlled and temporary, a majority of the population can be foreign, as the Gulf states show. For wealthy liberal democracies, Canada's and Australia's roughly 30% foreign-born with permanent inflows around 1-2% of population a year is probably the highest sustainable level tested so far (most countries, including the US, are still very far from that).
Interesting. Australia is 32% and Canada 23% (as of 2021). In the linked article you say Canada’s “backlash” has been much more about speed, housing, and temporary flows than about crime or ethnic identity. I think we are seeing the exact same backlash in Australia now. I would be interested in your take on the situation in Australia. I mentioned this previously, but take a look at Joe Walker's podcast. He has interviewed 4 former bureaucratics intimately involved in the design and administration of Australia's program. Some fascinating insights.
Great piece. The fundamental error people make when trying to critique nationalism as an idea is a lack of game-mechanical understanding of the drivers. A state is the largest unit at which a system of values can be systemized into policy and operationalized into governance. Borders etc etc - often thought of as the boundaries individuals have to cross to seek something - are more relevant as the threshold past which values no longer have teeth.
Thanks, Zac. "The threshold past which values no longer have teeth" is perhaps a perfect one-line summary of my cosmopolitanism section. It's true that you can hold values for all of humanity, but you can only enforce them where there is a demos and a government that answers to it.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized and pluralized system that had legal and regulatory variability, policy variability, an intentionally diffused and pluralized private sector, and local fiscal dominance. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, genuinely participatory governance structures even for very serious policy matters by serving as an organizational interface and coordinating mesh for a wide array of organizational linked publicly accessible decision making bodies that spanned economy-schooling/training-culture-science-government, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, after WW2 a long multi decadal transformation began due to the dirty deeds of a convergence of several interests and an assortment of powerful special interest groups, and then our parties were transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they don't offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
Thanks. Totally agree we need more academics who are explicitly patriotic. Far too often, our profession has come to be dominated by doomerism and naysaying. It is at total odds with the masses, who love these kinds of patriotic displays.
I conveyed my views on Semiquincentennial over at College Towns if interested: https://www.collegetowns.org/p/world-cup-visitors-remind-americans-to-celebrat-our-semiquincentennial
Thanks, I'll check it out!
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.
Nope, but I'll check it out, thanks!
There are several from last week and this week. I found the one from last week most interesting “AI models’ values are very different from most people’s” Makes a lot of sense.
There is some overlap with my Nationalist Internationalism essay. Also, for more on the ideals American Civic Nationalism should be founded on, see my essay on The Legacy of 1776