The Arrogance of Nationalism.
It’s no secret that I view nationalism as the primary internal threat to a democratic society. We have ample examples of the ways in which fraught nostalgia can transform a group of political people into a weapon against their fellow man, because it is not their fellow man they care about, it’s their fellow national. Nationalism is itself a form of security politics. When you decide that a particular conception of the ‘nation’ is worth preserving it almost assuredly is because you think that conception is under threat. That threat is more than a political opponent, they are the enemy, how can they be anything different?
The 2010’s brought with it a global growth in nationalist thinking. The obvious examples in the English speaking world are the election of Donald Trump, who played on nationalist themes and started his administration surrounded by nationalist advisors, and the Brexit vote, which played on nationalist themes of former greatness. But there are a host of further examples from which we can take. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan transformed himself from a center-right politician into something more akin to a Turkish nationalist, focusing on strengthening the role of Islam in the previously secular Turkish state. India elevated Narendra Modi to Prime Minister by voting in his Hindu nationalist party. Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines has played an anti-American-imperial nationalism to gain the Presidency. Nationalist parties in Europe used the refugee crisis in the middle of the decade to gain parliamentary seats across the continent. In Poland, the nationalist Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwośćm, PiS) became the first Polish party to win the government outright since the fall of the Soviet Union. In Hungary, president Viktor Orban has taken his center-right party and transformed it into an illiberal party with nationalists messaging.
The danger in nationalism comes from the practice of the ideology in power. In all of the examples previously listened, the governments led by nationalist parties have enacted some form of minority disenfranchisement and/or discrimination, weakening of state institutions, destruction of democratic norms and principles, extrajudicial killings of citizens and residents, and sowed distrust in media, journalism, education, and science. Ultimately, these governments and political leaders have learned that nationalism gives them license to claim greater authority and undermine their political opponents.
There’s an arrogance that comes with the nationalist world view. This is because one must disavow the epistemological assumptions that underpin the established order and popular society. You cannot convince the nation that they are better off emulating what has been unless you discredit the historians who will add the muddy reality to your vision of a halcyon past. You cannot convince the nation that they are exceptional among the world’s peoples without discrediting behavioral and developmental psychology and biology which level all humans as being fundamentally more similar than different. And you cannot claim superiority in cultural practice when anthropologists can point to foreign influences for nearly every aspect of a country’s culture. So the nationalist must craft their own narratives, find their own proofs, and in doing so, discredit the wider scope of human discover and efforts to find truth. The epistemology of a nationalist first assumes that all knowledge obtained via centers of higher learning or gained through thoughtful study are fraught. Biased against our great nation. This can be accomplished by claiming that research done outside the country is necessarily hostile to reality, our reality. It can also be accomplished via convincing the populace that it’s own institutions of higher learning are either a bourgeois factory for tea sippers with upturned noses or, conversely, the power center which aims to misshape reality. These arguments can be as persuasive as they are dangerous. To undermine the institutions built to ascertain truth, you are in fact undermining the value of truth itself. If we can’t trust universities or journalists to find the truth; if we think universities or journalists are just biased practitioners of scholastic power, then who can we trust?
The nationalist builds their own world, often through the help of long dead scholars and thinkers. Why listen to a scholar today, fallible in their flesh and blood reality, when we can listen to a long dead scholar whom we believe to be speaking the real truth? It also gives the nationalist an air of intellectual clout and superiority. They are not of the university class but they have been to university. They are ‘free thinkers’ unrestrained by the limiting forces of the biased academies. A common man with an uncommon mind. It is through time in which ideas gain their strength and validity, not through experimentation, study, or reassessment. The best ideas were had long ago, and don’t you dare critique them with your modern lens!
The arrogance of nationalism helps to craft an unaccountable institution. If the nationalist controls the state, they have no reason to listen to the advice of scholars and critics, they come from a place of unreason. The nationalist knows what’s best because they can look to the past, their past, to find the answers. Rooted in nationalism is a belief in the extraordinary nature of their nation. That means that finding answers to vexing questions from examples abroad is a fools game, those people aren’t like us after all.
Unfortunately, the nationalist march is difficult to stanch. When new epistemic systems are built for a particular worldview, you cannot simply convince those people to come back to a consensus view. Divergent viewpoints are not the problem, divergent realities are. The aftermath of the nationalist projects that led to World War II established a now seemingly short lived view that consensus of reality was necessary. Even the ideological battle of the cold war was rooted in a power competition where both sides fought to obtain scientific truths and make technological advances. Competing worldviews that still shared a sense of reality even if that reality led to dramatically different policy perspectives.
The defeat of Donald Trump after only one term was a good short term advancement for the consensus epistemology. But Trump will leave behind a base that is more fervently placed in the alternate reality bubble built and isolated by conservative media. The two worlds were on stark display during Fox News’ coverage of the election. As the journalism operation reported vote totals and called states for Biden, the opinion hosts fanned the flames of hysteria labeling the legal voting of mail-in-ballots as a form of fraud or vote packing. The journalists of Fox News pushed back on administration officials who cried fraud, asking for proof and correcting the record. The opinion section offered solace and empathy to the baseless claims mere hours later on the same channel.
The 21st century challenge to democracy society will be the revanchism of nationalism and nationalist epistemic systems. Some approaches we could take is to find nationalist sympathetic voters where they are. The model of local organization and activation being displayed by American politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacy Abrams seem to hold some promise. Local organizations can stanch epistemic shifts by creating human bonds. Making human connections between marginalized groups can slow the growth of negative partisanship and hateful emotions. In certain states the challenges will be harder. In places like Hungary where democratic institutions have been handicapped by nationalist leaders, it will be much harder to take back power and create a more just and open society. In these places, international collaboration will be necessary. The Biden administration should be able to reinstate the values of human rights and democracy as a form of American foreign policy, at least in the short term. That will help but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. Nationalist governments thrive when they can point to foreign interference. These nationalist movements can only be combated on the ground, from neighbor to neighbor. Human connection is the vital component. In our increasingly online world, it can be easy to strip humanity from the ovular avatar and collection of characters the stand in for a real person. In person interaction at least offers the chance of finding some shared reality.
