On Feb. 28, 2018, the New York Times put out a five-minute “explainer” video of the concept of nationalism. “Nationality is weird,” the New York Times’s Max Fisher intones as the video starts, soon explaining that this is “because national identity is made up.” The thrust of the video is to set up the forces of 19th-century nationalism against a countervailing idea of a cosmopolitan community of values: “Today, we are fighting over whether to keep that kind of national identity,” Fisher says, before admitting that constructing an equally alluring alternative is proving to be challenging.

On the surface, Fisher’s argument seems to toe the line of the so-called modernist nationalism scholars, who argue that national identity has been “constructed” top-down and that this construction is mostly a product of economic development and industrialization. But it overlays that work with a kind of progressive optimism that badly distorts both the scholarship and our broader understanding of history. It concludes that since national identities are constructed, they are essentially superfluous. They may be alluring and deeply embedded in our psyches, but they can and should be overcome.