The Virtue of Nationalism

Breitbart News Network has released a video of a Google employee meeting recorded shortly after the 2016 presidential election that reveals an atmosphere of panic and dismay amongst the tech giant’s leadership, coupled with a determination to thwart both the Trump agenda and the broader populist movement emerging around the globe.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Senior VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker rail against tribalism / populism (i.e., nationalism) and promote progressivism / globalism (i.e., imperialism):

Sergey Brin can be heard comparing Trump supporters to fascists and extremists. Brin argues that like other extremists, Trump voters were motivated by “boredom,” which he says in the past led to fascism and communism.”

Kent Walker tried to explain the motivations of Trump supporters: “fear, not just in the United States, but around the world is fueling concerns, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.”  Walker goes on to describe the Trump phenomenon as a sign of “tribalism that’s self-destructive [in] the long-term.”  Striking an optimistic tone, Walker assures Google employees that despite the election, “history is on our side” and that the “moral arc of history bends towards progress.”  Walker also approvingly quotes former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s comparison between “the world of the wall” with its “isolation and defensiveness” and the “world of the square, the piazza, the marketplace, where people come together into a community and enrich each other’s lives.”  Responding to an audience member, Walker says Google must ensure the rise of populism doesn’t turn into “a world war or something catastrophic … and instead is a blip, a hiccup.”

 Google’s management also made promises to actively engage on only the progressive side of the political process by “using the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important [progressive] values, increasing matched Google employee donations to ‘progressive’ groups, and ensuring its ‘educational products’ reach segments of the population [they] are not [currently] fully reaching.”  While the dangers of an unregulated monopoly run by billionaires who can censor and control what news and information we see is a scary prospect, we will leave that subject for another blog on another day.

Instead, we will focus on the progressive agenda against populism / nationalism by reviewing and quoting liberally from the new book, The Virtue of Nationalism, by Yoram Hazony.

Hazony delves into today’s battle between conservative populism / nationalism and progressive globalism / imperialism.

He defines nationalism as a “principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.  This is opposed to imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.”

He notes the irony in progressive’s historical support of “Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as beacons of hope for mankind — precisely because they were considered expressions of nationalism, promising national independence and self-determination to enslaved peoples around the world.”

He also calls out the progressive ideological wars over the past four hundred years, fought in the name of some universal doctrine that was supposed to bring salvation to all of humanity, but instead wrought unlimited devastation:

THIRTY YEARS WAR:  Fought to assert a German-Catholic Empire over Europe.

NAPOLEONIC WARS:  Fought to overturn the old political order and establish a French-Liberal Empire across an entire continent and beyond.

WORLD WAR I:  German imperialism was revived to thwart an aggressive expansion of the British, French and Japanese Empires, which between 1871 and 1914 led to the conquest and annexation of roughly one-quarter of the earth’s land surface.

WORLD WAR II:  Progressives claim that today’s U.S. populism / nationalism will lead to fascism, citing the horrors of Hitler’s National Socialist party as the prime example.  But Hazony debunks that erroneous myth.  “Hitler saw his Third Reich as an improved incarnation of what he referred to as the ‘First Reich’ — which was none other than the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs.  The Catholic-German dream of Austriae Est imperare orbits universe, the Nazi-German dream of becoming ‘lord of the earth,’ and the Enlightenment-German dream of ‘an international state, which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the people of the earth,’ are all transformations of a single ideal and passion, that of emperors and imperialists, who dream of extinguishing all nations that are self-determining and free upon this earth.”  Hitler’s dream was not nationalism, it was “to build an empire on the ruin of all national states in Europe.”

Hazony lumps in 70 years of Soviet imperialism as another horrific example of human destruction brought about by imposition of “political truth” on others.

Progressives also claim that U.S. populism / nationalism leads to hatred.  But Hazony points out that “Christian anti-Semitism is perhaps the most famous example of hatred generated by imperialist or universalist ideologies,” while noting that “Islam, Marxism, and liberalism have also proved themselves quite capable of inflaming similarly vicious hatreds against groups that are determined to resist the universal doctrines they propose … suggesting, in fact, that liberal-imperialist political ideals have become the most powerful agents fomenting intolerance and hate in the Western world today.”

Yes, you heard right, it is actually liberals / progressives / globalists who best represent the intolerant.  As Hazony aptly notes, “Human beings are intolerant by nature.  And if one wishes to inflame this innate intolerance, making it harsh and poisonous to the greatest degree possible, one could hardly do better than to disseminate a worldview according to which there is but one true doctrine, and mankind’s salvation depends on the entire world submitting to it.”  Progressive political coercion, biased news reporting, social media platform censorship, and university speech suppression are contemporary examples.

To paraphrase Hazony, the principle of national freedom is what strengthens and protects our unique institutions, traditions, laws, and ideals of a nation against the claim that they must be overturned in the name of doctrines being promoted by advocates of a universal empire or political theory.

Hazony concludes his must read book by stating that no one person or one nation or one international body has a corner on the truth, that “true moral maturity is attained only when we stand on our own feet, learning to govern ourselves and defend ourselves without needlessly harming those around us, and where possible also extending assistance to neighbors and friends.”