Courtesy of The Washington Post
As Donald Trump prepares to assume the office of the U.S. Presidency again in January 2025, buttressed by majorities in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, the leaders of the American far left are reeling, struggling mightily to assign blame wherever they can in the face of their monumental electoral losses earlier this month. Racism, sexism, misogyny, and related superficial abstractions are all getting big media play as the core reason for America’s electorate decisively rejecting the “progressive” (read Marxist) paradigm and the downstream policies of the O’Biden/Harris regime. That their overall ideology of open migration, enabling rampant crime without penalty, identity politics (CRT/DEI/ESG), moral and educational chaos (unfettered abortion, transgenderism, sexual indoctrination of minors, abjuring parents’ rights, historical revisionism in schools and colleges), wanton fiscal irresponsibility (both in spending and currency printing), and conscious abdication of America’s superpower roles was not widely embraced by the nation’s voters has come as an epochal shock to their exalted senses of moral and intellectual superiority. As a matter of history, elitism dies hard, especially when attended by amorality, high narcissism, and a good deal of hysteria. That the upset has taken place in the America of 2024 so dramatically and without any outbreak of open violence is a source of joy, pride, and great relief. Everyone sane and sober hopes that it stays that way throughout the upcoming new year.
The far Left in America hates the America conceived by the nation’s founders. They hate the constitutional republic that designs to limit the scope and extent of federal power and the actions of its minions, the free market economy that democratizes economic decision-making and wealth creation and accumulation, the moral motif holding the individual as sovereign in his/her life and the creation of families, the coherent system for the adjudication of legal guilt and civil accountability under public law, and the independent nation state with all of defined borders, a cohesive culture, a common language, and a consensual morality. In the far Left’s ideal world, a self-selected elite would rule a single unified global enterprise with centralized command authority over every element of human endeavor, be it social, educational, economic, fiscal, or political.
The antidote to this mad drive towards unilateral domination and control is centered in patriotic nationalism. Ideologues of the far Left hate any nationalism, whether patriotic or imperialistic. The very notion impinges – nay, shatters — their fantasy of a unified world where everyone is a “global citizen” imbued with a spirit of mutual altruism and humility, eschewing any contrasts of race, sex, creed, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. In a word, a world of obedient, complaisant, fungible organic drones – all submissive, faceless, characterless, largely taciturn, and phlegmatic. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy,” the wealthy German elitist Klaus Schwab has infamously intoned. His father owned factories in service to the Nazis during World War II.
Leftists who seek to end nation states often quote Albert Einstein, one the several true genii of the 20th century:
Nationalism is an infantile disease. As a citizen of Germany, I saw how excessive nationalism can spread like a disease, bringing tragedy to millions. I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult.
At the outset, it can be readily appreciated that Einstein’s anti-nationalism view was informed by his own experience of being disowned, denaturalized in, and functionally expelled from his native Germany on the basis of his Jewish ethnicity. However, nationalism need not perforce be invidious and rejectionist of people on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, or even religion, creed, or sexual preference; the experience of all of the premier nations of the Anglosphere (America, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand) attest to that fact. What makes American nationalism particularly precious is that it Is based on a foundational philosophy of life and governance that any man or woman can embrace and adhere to regardless of any of their immutable characteristics or even spiritual or lifestyle preferences. That not all of the rest of the world shares that fact, or even wants to, is what mandates the need for nationalism in the world. The many nations of the world effectively provide laboratories for the development of “best practices” for life and living in organized society, akin to the American founders’ notion of the role of the several states in the American Union (as per Louis Brandeis, an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court). America, starting in 1776 and progressing over time – admittedly by fits and starts, big and small – set a high bar for a shared civil government, civil society, and civil prosperity in one polity that has been remarkably durable for almost a quarter millennium. And this, despite the many ardent, cynical efforts by the authoritarian far Left over the last half century In America to cleave the nation’s aspirational unity along the fault lines of race, gender, and more recently, gender identification. The end of nationalism is a sworn objective because it forestalls their ultimate goal of global governance by one transnational but undifferentiated corps of elites.
Nationalism reflects the quintessential realities of human nature. People feel closest and most comfortable with those who share their core values, mores, language, culture, and worldview. Can any rational person suggest that any middle-class American living anywhere in our country has as much in common with a Muslim in Iran, a communist in China, or an animist in Sudan as he or she does with any other fellow, native-born American? The answer is self-evident. While an imperialist nationalism requires enemies outside that nation’s borders, patriotic nationalism – the love of one’s nation simply because it is near and dear – does not. This simple distinction is critical to the advocacy of nationalism as sane, rational, and most conducive to all of peace, internal stability, and prosperity. Universalism and globalism fly in the face of empirical human history over the course of many millennia. Utopian notions, as eternally seductive as they are, must be dismissed with prejudice in every generation.
But how can the sentiments of such a distinguished man as Albert Einstein — of so noble and universally acknowledged genius, sensitivity, and perspicacity — be dismissed so summarily? The calculus for this conclusion is actually quite as elegant and easy as the Theory of Relativity.
Einstein was a physicist and mathematician, with a mind finely attuned to engendering order, precision, and the formulation of absolute laws. While such a mindset is perfectly matched to investigating inanimate, non-sentient — i.e., lacking reasoning, emotions, feelings, imagination, and memory — matter and energy, it is wholly unsuited to dealing with the multiple qualitative complexities of human beings, particularly as and when interacting in organized societies. Such beings are not reducible by the abstract pretensions of those who would eagerly seek to create some new Socialist Man (and Woman), all effectively fungible – and ultimately expendable. In a phrase, all human beings instead have unique, intrinsic worth; paramecia, even frogs, do not.
This points up the fatal flaw of leftists quoting an Albert Einstein on the matter of nationalism — or anyone else not learned in the long political experience of people on planet Earth. In 1819, British writer and painter William Hazlitt coined a term for such temerity: Ultracrepidarianism. It is the practice of attributing an expertise to people with a recognized or advanced knowledge in one field to some other, unrelated field(s) of learning – simply by dint of their esteemed or estimable reputation in the former. This should not be at all startling: No one presumes world-class sculptors to be able to design sports-car engines, or Nobel Prize-winning economists to be able to diagnose and treat psychological conditions, or Superbowl-winning football players to be able to calculate ballistic-missile trajectories. And so, nor should we pay any mind to famous pioneer mathematician/quantum physicists who suggest how distinctive peoples should focus the national direction of their native societies.
To paraphrase a memorable adage: Let’s follow The Science™. A free society needs the spirit of a national patriotism in order to survive and thrive. The United States of America has had such a spirit from its very inception. And its future success demands that that continue without any abridgement. Political scientists call it: Nationalism.