Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: Nationalism is What We Need Now--The Case for an "Unpatriotic Conservatism" Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/nationalism_is_what_we_need_now_a_case_for_an_unpatriotic_conservatism#23374 Post contents: Dan, you write: "I am not a nationalist," yet you claim that we need more of something that you're unwilling to embrace yourself. I'm not quite sure I understand that logic. You write: "Bush and his voters are not inflamed by nationalism, which the president has vociferously abjured, but by—among other things—overweening patriotism." You can make this statement by abandoning the traditional distinction between nationalism and patriotism (which did not first come from Orwell, despite the usefulness of his essay--read Lukacs on how the concepts of "nation," "nationalism," "patriotism," and "national consciousness" developed from the 16th century on), but you haven't really offered a new definition of patriotism that is anything more than, well, another version of nationalism. You write: "What the United States needs now is less passionate love for our country right or wrong, and more prudent adherence to national interests and national borders. More nationalism, less patriotism." Exactly wrong. "Prudent adherence to national interests and national borders" is a patriotic action; the nationalist, like the internationalist, cares not for the historic borders of the nation-state. It's just that the nationalist desires to expand them--literally or figuratively through the spreading of an ideology which the nation is seen as being the ultimate representative of. It's in that latter way that the Bush and his voters are clearly nationalists--what is "spreading democracy" if not, in their minds, the extension of "the American way of life" to benighted souls elsewhere? I understand the desire to rescue the term "nationalism," and I think that your essay is motivated by such a desire. I find myself gravitating toward the term "economic nationalism." Yet if we're going to redefine the terms "nationalism" and "patriotism," abandoning the traditional distinction, we should have a better reason to do so than the fact that we like the term "nationalism," or that people we admire, who are actually patriots concerned with the national interest and not really nationalists, mistakenly apply the term "nationalist" to themselves. Sent at: 2008 05 16