Why nationalism won’t go away

Sanders cut him off. “Open borders?” He scoffed. “No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.”

“Really?” Klein asked.

“Of course,” Sanders said. “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.”

“It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?” Klein said.

“It would make everybody in America poorer,” Sanders responded. “You’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or U.K. or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people.”

He went on, “What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.”

In hindsight, it’s an astounding exchange. In just four years, something akin to open borders, which Klein viewed as “out of political bounds,” has become the rallying cry of nearly all Democratic candidates for president. Sanders can no longer call open borders “a Koch brothers proposal”; abolish ICE is a major platform item of his left-wing base. Meanwhile, Republicans chant “Build the wall!”

When we talk about the changes President Trump has wrought on us in his 30 months in office, we may think mostly of his effects on the Republican Party. But his influence goes much deeper than that. He has transformed the Right, but the Left has transformed itself in response to him.

To attend this month’s conference on National Conservatism in Washington, D.C., you first had to prove you were not a white nationalist. “I remember when I filled out the application to come here, I was very surprised,” recalled a college professor who attended the conference. “It asked who I was. There was enough information that they could do a search, to see if I had posted anything online that was racist I guess.” Then there was a waiting period. “I never applied for a conference before and had to wait,” he laughed.

The professor was not a white nationalist and his registration was accepted. Others were not so lucky; six people received letters denying their requests to attend.

“Dear Patrick Casey,” read one to the head of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group involved in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally at which a woman was murdered and men wielding tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us.” “Thank you for your interest in participating in the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism Conference. After discussing this matter with the conference presidium, we have concluded that we will be unable to honor your request to register for this event. This determination is based on professional associations that are incompatible with national conservatism as we understand it.”

The letter was signed by Yoram Hazony, a prominent Israeli political theorist and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, who founded The Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosted the conference, and David Brog, another one of the organizers and a former executive at Christians United for Israel. (Disclosure: I have visited Hazony at his home, where we discussed nationalism at great length.)

“If racism and race theories are your thing, I’m sure there are lots of other conferences where you’ll feel more at home,” Hazony tweeted, after a furious Casey shared the letter publicly.

The distinction between nationalism and racism was a recurring one throughout the conference. “We are nationalists, not white nationalists!” Brog declared during the conference’s opening remarks. “But no screening system is perfect. So if there is anyone here tonight who believes that being an American has anything whatsoever to do with the color of someone’s skin, there is the door. Please leave. Your ideas are not welcome here.”

Brog’s remarks acknowledged the stakes of the nascent movement. The new nationalists seek to reintroduce nationalism without the racism with which it has sometimes historically been associated, and are doing so at a time when nationalism’s most public avatar, the U.S. president, calls himself a nationalist and also has a penchant for racist statements. The day that the conference began, Trump told four congresswomen of color that they should “go back” to the countries they were “originally” from. All four are U.S. citizens, and only one is an immigrant.

But the new nationalism is about far more than immigration, and some of it would be entirely familiar to liberals. For new nationalists also oppose free markets and Wall Street’s influence on politics, and are deeply concerned about the poor, broken communities falling prey to the opioid epidemic, and the abandonment of workers by both major political parties. I can’t recall the threat of socialism being mentioned at the three-day conference. On the contrary, much of it would not have sounded out of place in a campaign speech by Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

In fact, Tucker Carlson, one of the keynote speakers, called Warren’s book, The Two Income Trap, one of the best books he’d ever read on economics. His message that identity politics is a distraction while elites pick your pocket echoed things Bernie Sanders said on the campaign trail in 2016. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me’,” Sanders said in 2016. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industries.”

Sanders does not say those things now and Warren would never embrace Carlson back. Past comments about how the working class is threatened by cheap immigrant labor are left unsaid in 2019. The idea that America’s most vulnerable should come before those of other countries is not only heterodox; it’s considered downright racist.

National conservatives hope to provide intellectual heft and backbone to Trumpism so avoids being an ephemeral phenomenon. Can they?

In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony defines a nation as “a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises.” As a conglomerate of tribes, rather than a unified entity with a singular ethnic or racial makeup that requires protection, a nation is always heterogeneous, and thus never based on race, writes Hazony. It’s not biological homogeneity that ties the members of a tribe together, but rather what Hazony calls “bonds of mutual loyalty” that create a unit from diverse clans and tribes, operating as the glue that binds the nation together.

For Hazony, it is loyalty, rather than biology, that lies at the heart of nationalism. He balks at the biological determinism involved in reducing politics to genetics.

Still, it is a proudly conservative theory. It’s based on values such as loyalty and obligation, tradition and even scripture, rather than John Locke’s classical liberal values of consent, choice, and contracts. The new nationalists do embrace the idea that there is one main culture that determines the destiny of a nation. “What is needed for the establishment of a stable and free state is a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile,” Hazony writes.

Hazony concedes that this has sometimes led to the oppression of minorities. “Americans expressed their national freedom and self-determination while tolerating slavery and odious race laws for much of their history,” Hazony writes. He believes it essential that the majority culture protect minorities, for both moral and strategic purposes. When these obligations to protect minority tribes are not met, “anarchy and empire follows.”

This focus on the majority culture is hard to swallow. For the new nationalists, America’s dominant culture is a Christian one. Religious minorities are peripheral, and at least for some, diversity is not an objective good to be pursued or even cherished.

“It isn’t something we should try to engineer,” Rusty Reno, another one of the conference organizers and the editor of First Things, told me. “We should try to seek the common good of a society and promote the well-being of American citizens, and if for some reason, I don’t know, if for some reason, everyone wants to become Catholic, I wouldn’t say this is a bad thing.”

Wouldn’t he think it was a tragedy if there were no more Jews in America?

“No. What if everybody makes Aliyah?” He replied, using the Hebrew word for immigrating to Israel.

“I think that would be really bad for America, and really sad,” I said.

“I don’t know. Yes and no. You try to do what’s best for the commonweal,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to socially engineer a society to keep it the way it is.”

But there’s a difference between socially engineering it and having an emotional attachment to certain minorities, I countered.

“Depends where you’re from,” he said. “New York wouldn’t be New York without its Jews. There would be a sense of loss, even as a gentile in New York. That’s part of the landscape of the city. It seems to me that’s a beautiful thing and of course you would naturally cherish that. But if you grew up in Cedar City, Utah, if it became more diverse, you would lose the place you grew up in. And you’d feel a sense of loss for that. So it just depends … For the country as a whole, I think yeah, Americans do cherish our heterogeneity. Too much homogeneity would cause people to feel like, hey wait a minute, that’s not really our country.”

What is “our country” is placing a premium on tradition, family, church, and independence; the new nationalists really like Brexit.

The list of things they dislike is longer. It begins with identity politics, an “endless distraction factory” according to Peter Thiel, a keynote speaker, or “an obsession with the atomized self,” as Mary Eberstadt would have it, or “a never-ending fight of dominant versus oppressed groups” per Mike Gonzalez, or, for Hazony, because it reduces politics to biology.

But they are also deeply suspicious of what they see as libertarianism’s excesses. Eberstadt quipped that libertarianism is like moonshine: If you’re healthy, it might help you overcome some trifling malady, but if anything is wrong with you, it can kill you. They are far more suspicious of war, big business, and Silicon Valley than is a typical cross-section of conservatives. And they really hate “Imagine,” by John Lennon.

The new nationalism has thus found itself sitting astride what have been traditionally liberal and conservative agendas, making targets of both left-wing ideologies and right-wing sacred cows. Take Tucker Carlson’s idea that “the main threat to live your life as you wish doesn’t come from the government anymore but from the private sector.”

Like the insistent and repeated condemnations of racism that reoccurred throughout the conference, these are not the sentiments one is used to hearing from conservatives but from the Left. The idea that free trade, massive corporations, rising inequality, and endless war are bad for America used to be fundamental pillars of the Democratic Party.

But they’ve been creeping into conservative discourse. The Tea Party united fiscal and social conservatives who pushed back against Bush-era “compassionate conservatism,” which they viewed as big government conservatism. The Bush-era approach to foreign affairs is being reassessed as well. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, of Florida, recently declared, “Freedom cannot be America’s gift to the world, purchased with the blood of U.S. service members alone.”

Increasingly, Republicans have been speaking about big tech companies as monopolies, joining Democrats in criticizing their lack of regulation. “I don’t trust you guys,” Republican Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona said recently at a hearing about Facebook. “Instead of cleaning up your house, now you’re launching into another business model.”

Perhaps no one represents this new conservative path better than Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. In June, he proposed a bill that would tighten federal scrutiny of social media companies with the threat of curtailing their ability to moderate their platforms according to their own terms of service. It received a thumbs-down from David French at National Review, who warned it would “enable public censorship,” and from Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason, who called it “Orwellian.” At the Federalist, however, law professor Adam Candeub and tech writer Jeremy Carl argued that the bill “will stop major internet firms from targeting conservatives.”

“The great divide of our time is not between Trump supporters and Trump opponents, or between suburban voters and rural ones, or between Red America and Blue America,” Hawley said at the conference. “No, the great divide of our time is between the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society.”

“Defending the vulnerable, protecting the weak” should be the goal, Hawley argued.

Elizabeth Warren is running for president on the Democratic side for the same reason. “Every person in America should be able to work hard, play by the same set of rules, & take care of themselves & the people they love,” she tweeted when launching her campaign. “America’s middle class is under attack.” By who? “Billionaires and big corporations.” Then last week, Warren released a trade plan that would give unions and green groups more sway over deals and echoed protectionist rhetoric increasingly common on the right. The plan, Politico noted, is “closer to Donald Trump’s agenda than Barack Obama’s.”

It comes back to the elephant in the room, which is immigration. There was a time recently when the fact that immigrants drive down the wages of poor Americans concerned the party that is supposed to represent the poor and working class. Not anymore. Most Democrats running for president, including Warren, have called for decriminalizing crossing the border illegally and for expanding immigration, the result of pressure from Latino activists, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and a backlash against Trump’s draconian measures on the border.

The Left’s common reaction to Trump is to equate all nationalism with white nationalism. As if to prove their point, one of the speakers at the conference did veer into racist language when discussing immigrants. Amy Wax, a law professor at University of Pennsylvania, made the case for restricting immigrants from Third World countries because of their cultural distance from America. “Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites, and fewer non-whites. Well, that is the result, anyway,” she said. The theory doesn’t rely on race, Wax argued, because correlation is not causation, but these “racial dimensions,” as she preferred to call them, spook conservatives.

But Wax was the exception that proved the rule. Her remarks stood out because they were so out of step with those of other speakers. The vast majority stressed the importance of fighting racism and whose calls for less immigration came in the context of a call to focus on vulnerable Americans.

It is this version of nationalism that the Left must engage with.

What might a liberal nationalism look like?

In her book Why Nationalism, published this year, former Israeli parliamentarian Yael “Yuli” Tamir, like Hazony, takes issue with the liberal order. Liberalism granted us real, necessary freedoms, Tamir argues, but it left us with a thin, impoverished politics that failed to provide for a crucial human desire: the need for recognition, and the pride one takes in belonging to something larger than oneself. This Tamir calls “the emotional and moral bias grounded in membership.”

Like Hazony and the new nationalists, Tamir believes that xenophobia is not an inherent component of nationalism. While in-group favoritism is a human constant, out-group hostility comes from a feeling of unfairness or felt injustice: “Humanity bears Cain’s mark; individuals cannot be envy-free, neither can they ignore the anger invoked by injustice.”

That sense of injustice flooded the United States thanks to globalization, writes Tamir. She calls it globalism, which I will refrain from doing, because many view it as an anti-Semitic dog-whistle. Tamir, obviously, does not mean it that way. Nationalism is a rational response. In this telling, embracing nationalism can be the cure for 21st century racism and ethnocentrism because it digs out one of the primary causes, inequality, by its roots.

Like Hazony, Tamir calls us to accept the body politic as we find it. Rather than fighting against human nature or seeking to circumvent it, we must accept that people require recognition, and feel powerful forces of envy and destruction when left behind, ignored, and made to feel invisible.

It’s a crucial message, and not just for anyone interested in winning an election in the near future. We have obligations to our fellow citizens, beginning with taking the body politic as we find it. Our democracy, even the concept of democracy, depends on it.

As Tamir aptly puts it, “the legitimacy of a democratic regime depends on the support it gathers among its citizens. The question of who is a member thus gains special importance.”

This idea, that democracy requires a national border and a meaningful texture to bind its citizens to each other, was clear to Sanders just four years ago. Now, it’s an idea that could get you branded a racist, in large part thanks to an all-encompassing #Resistance to Trump, whose racial provocations make it easy to blur the line between nationalism and white nationalism.

But the Left should resist that conflation. Failing to engage nationalism seriously risks ceding the intellectual playing field to conservatives for a generation on an issue that won’t go away just because it is ignored.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of the Forward.