There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.
— U.S. President Donald Trump, December 1, 2016
The twenty-first century is witnessing a resurgence of nationalism in the West. In 2016 the most influential political movements across Western Europe and North America were driven by a disillusioned working class led by populists with grand promises of returning self-determination to the nation-state. This global rebalancing is a consequence endemic to a decades long globalization agenda created and governed by a relatively small group of wealthy global elite. The arena within which we now find ourselves pits globalists against nationalists in a battle to radically reconstruct or passionately defend the global order. While recent political movements in Europe and the U.S. share a common cause linked to globalization, there is a distinct ideological difference in the nationalist sentiment found in America. I would also argue that they can not be understood as evidence for the enduring nature of the national idea. This willfully propagated misconception has been quite useful to the globalists who have added ‘nationalism’ to their arsenal of linguistic weaponry. By associating American movements with the atrocities propagated by movements of the 19th and 20th century and deliberately manipulating English language, globalists have successfully created enough confusion amongst the TV trained masses that the focus of rage has shifted towards one another and away from those responsible.
Considering the past Presidential election, how we understand and define nationalism in America matters. In simple terms, nationalism is defined as “ Patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts.1 It is the belief in national liberation and a sovereign nation state. Nationalists are simply those who advocate political independence for their country. The term does not include an assumption of how the political institutions of regimes, or state should be structured. Nor does it assume the means about how independence is achieved. Nationalism’s inherent opposition is “globalism.” This is not to be confused with globalization, which is concerned with business opportunities in a transnational and global market. Globalism is the ideological compound of globalization that ultimately leads to the post-modern dream of a worldwide political system in which western European leaders will dictate laws governing international policy. It is an agenda concocted by the elite that will destroy the working class and nation-state through worldwide financial imperialism. President Trump, who is clearly a nationalist, centered his campaign message on fighting against globalism and its proponents. Their response has been an unrelenting, hate-filled attack painting the President and his supporters as “new nationalists”, thought to be somehow more virulent and dangerous than previous iterations. It is an extremely unfair assertion given the fact that American nationalism is the purest form of political or civic nationalism (as opposed to the cultural or ethnic type.)2
The roots of this nation are the political ideals we have defended since inception; self-government, freedom of speech and association, equal opportunity, and belief in progress. From a comparative perspective, the United States case is especially significant due to its distinctive position as “the first new nation”3, its survival as a multiethnic and multiracial polity over several centuries, its status as a global hegemon, and the prominence of civic nationalism in the American “civil religion”4 . In countries such as the Soviet Union and Japan, love for the nation comes from attachment to primordial ties of religion and language which have long preceded it. As a new nation, America built its identity around the shared values and institutions of the original settlers. They were primarily English speaking, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who’s purpose for coming here was individual freedom. From this newly assembled culture, came a set of universal principles and ideas that were articulated by the founding fathers: liberty, equality, democracy, constitutionalism, liberalism, limited government, private entrepreneurship, and market economy.5 This became our creed, which was solidified in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
The greatest test to U.S. national identity was the Civil War. Following this bloody battle, survival of the nation was dependent on reconstructing the deep fissures amid religion, race, class, and immigrant status. It was then that many of the present-day customs and national icons originated with an organized group of Union veterans called the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Founded in 1866 on the principles of “Fraternity, Charity, and Loyalty,” the group’s original purpose was to provide camaraderie and assistance to men who had served and their families. In 1868 General John A. Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the GAR, requested members of all posts to decorate the graves of their fallen comrades with flowers on May 30th. This idea which became known as Memorial Day, came from his wife, who had seen Confederate graves decorated by Southern women in Virginia.6 Perhaps recognizing the importance of women’s emotional intelligence and maternal instinct, the GAR continued to meet with women, formally recognizing the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC) as its official auxiliary in 1883.7 The organization’s published objectives included “maintaining true allegiance to the United States of America” and to teach patriotism and “love of country.”8 The creation of Memorial Day celebrations denotes the beginning of the WRC’s patriotic education movement. Through the insistence of the GAR and WRC, the pledge of allegiance and the U.S. flag were brought into public school classrooms. The Woman’s Relief Corps. left behind an undeniable legacy that helped unite a divided nation through patriotism.
This is where the paradox of American nationalism begins. While viewed by the rest of the world as a highly nationalistic country, it generally does not see itself as such. Exemplifying the psychological power of language, Americans do admit however, that they are extremely patriotic. I disagree with Eller and Coughlan who argue that there is no direct psychological evidence to distinguish the rational state of patriotism from the irrational force of nationalism.9 Michael Billig seems to accurately approach the American case, claiming that while nationalism remains a dangerous concept, it is ascribed to other nations as ‘their’ problem. By simply giving it a new label, ‘our’ nationalism appears as ‘patriotism’ which is beneficial and necessary to America.10 The danger of this paradox is exactly what we are seeing play out today. Progressive liberals have redefined core American ideals to coincide with their “advanced” utopian aspirations, claiming that the symbolic nationalist sentiments that our patriotism is rooted in, are outmoded and obsolete. Once patriotism is completely divorced from nationalism, then patriotism itself will be an empty shell. This is the inevitable result of the “patriotism good, nationalism bad” argument, as one cannot survive without the other.
The terms used to identify political groups in the U.S have undergone many confusing changes in the 20th century. The “progressives” of today are certainly not the same as those of the 1910 — John Dewy era, just as the term “liberal” describing those belonging to the Democratic Party (1948–1969), is not the self-styled “liberalism” of the 1940s and ’50s. These socially and morally conservative, Cold War supporting, intensely patriotic liberals did not disappear. They are today’s neoconservatives. In the 1950s a new ‘progressive’ group founded on the ideas of Marxist theorists Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno emerged, sowing the seeds for the sexual revolution and multiculturalism. What is now known as ‘Cultural Marxism’ was born in a 1930 Neo-Marxist think tank in Frankfurt, Germany called the Institute for Social Research, which would later come to be known as simply The Frankfurt School.
In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. Its members fled to New York City, where the Institute was reestablished with help from Columbia University. The members of the Institute gradually shifted their focus from German society toward American society, introducing their doctrine of Critical Theory. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating … influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings.11 They stressed moral relativism and the “question everything” atmosphere that became the 1960s counterculture zeitgeist. They essentially taught people to question and liberate themselves from the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heredity, ethnocentrism, convention and conservatism. Its purpose was to destroy the deeply entrenched Western values that emphasized the individual over the collective.
This is precisely what Lukacs and Gramsci argued stopped the workers uprising, subsequently leading to failure of the Marxist theory.12 This type of thinking is what many claim signaled the start of the postmodern political movement. It was philosopher Jean Francois-Lyotard (1924–1998) in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition who first coined the term. There he characterized postmodernism as “an an incredulity towards metanarratives.”13 A metanarrative being defined by Oxford as “An overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences.”14 This quite accurately describes the Marxian, Hegelian, Freudian ideals of the 60s. Naturally, many students educated by the Frankfurt School went on to become teachers and professors, who taught another batch of teachers and professors, who are now indoctrinating our youth. Others became ensconced in the media or in government positions. This is what Gramsci meant when he said socialists would have to embark on “a long march through the institutions”, to infiltrate the schools, the media, the churches, the bureaucracies, the unions and so on.15
Following WWII, Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany. Herbert Marcuse, another influential member of the school, stayed in America. Marcuse was a member of the Freudo-Marxist Frankfurt School and professor of political philosophy at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California San Diego. In his 1955 book Eros and Civilization, Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order, repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes — the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. ‘We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of “polymorphous perversity,” in which you can “do you own thing.’16 Marcuse’s scathing critique of capitalist society entitled One-Dimensional Man, sold over 300,000 copies in 1964. Journalists called him the “Father of the New Left” because of his immense popularity among student radicals. In 1965 Marcuse published Repressive Tolerance. In it he explained that tolerance of all values and ideas meant the repression of “correct” ideas. It was here that Marcuse coined the term “liberating tolerance” which called for tolerance of any ideas coming from the left but intolerance of those from the right.17 One of the overarching themes of the Frankfurt School was total intolerance for any viewpoint but its own, which accurately describes today’s political climate.
Globalism is rooted in the neoliberal doctrine of the Washington Consensus, which was initiated by the first post–Cold War U.S. president, Bill Clinton, and carried out by the successive administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It’s proponents include the majority of Western nation states, multi-national corporations, currency speculators, mainstream media outlets, the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and hundreds of other non-governmental organizations. They envision a world moving inextricably toward the adoption of a unified set of rules and standards in economics, politics, and international relations. National borders would gradually lose relevance and even disappear. Cultural distinctions would give way to universal values. Electoral democracy and market capitalism would spread the world over. Eventually, all countries would be governed in more or less the same way. Whether you call them neoconservatives, neoliberals, neoprogressives, they all stand behind an elite agenda for a new world order and global governance. It is an agenda that is routinely defended by way of Hegelian dialect. Globalism is the thesis, neo-nationalism and “populism” the antithesis, and creating a more fully emergent globalist world order, the synthesis.
Manufacture of Consent is the management of public opinion to achieve acceptance of government policies by people in the U.S. on the basis of the partial picture of issues offered by the mass media, denying them access to alternative views which would lead them to oppose such policies. Chomsky and Herman present this as a propaganda model in which the mass media select material in relation to the values of those in power. 18 It is a concept found in Gramsci and Althusserian Marxism, in which the dominant class sustains its hegemony through engineering assent. It should then be no surprise that the phrase was originally coined in 1922 by one of the most influential pioneers of American journalism, Walter Lippmann. “False consciousness” is another important Frankfurt School concept derived from Marxist theory of social class. The concept refers to the systematic misrepresentation of dominant social relations in the consciousness of subordinate classes. Essentially, it’s a neo-Marxian diagnosis for those holding false beliefs that are contrary to one’s social interest and which thereby contribute to the disadvantaged position of the self or the group. Friedrich Engels first used the phrase in 1893:
“Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed, its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought.”19
It was yet another idea offering an explanation as to why members of the working class failed to embrace Marxism. The Neo-Marxists that incorporated these theories into American media were experts in human consciousness and psychological manipulation of the masses. They produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. Adorno and Horkheimer developed a Marxist sociological approach to media studies. They saw the media as a “cultural industry” that maintained power relations and served to lessen the ‘resistance standards’ of cultural aesthetics by popularizing certain types of culture.20
Like “racism,” the term “nationalism” has been broadened and cheapened to the point of being drained of substance. So much so that the two words are now linked together and placed in an ideological fast lane to “fascism.” Their mode of transportation — mainstream media. Indoctrination of the political class and diversion of the masses make up the essence of the democracy practiced in the U.S. Modernist and Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm argued that both nations and nationalism are products of ‘social engineering’. Hobsbawm distinguishes between two processes of invention, namely the adaptation of old traditions and institutions to new situations, and the deliberate invention of ‘new’ traditions for quite novel purposes. 21 When considering this theory in relation to globalism, logic would suggest that the same methods would be used to invent, legitimize and promote the globalist objective as well. Resistance to this type of social engineering is dependent on knowledge and awareness, which is a core principle of Western civilization. Logos is the practice of using rationality, logic, and reasonable argument to both communicate and find ‘truth’. What if the past victims of manipulation and falsehoods that led to war would have had the means and access to information we enjoy today? Perhaps a mass-led, ‘nationalistic’ effort of those motivated by logos would have stopped it from happening by rising up against the elite. This could offer an explanation to the nationalist movement that was so influential in our last presidential election. I think consideration of this possibility in our advanced society offers a whole new dimension in approaches in social construct theory.
The concept of changing language in order to change the culture is nothing new. Nearly a century ago, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “When one controls the way in which language is used, it can serve to influence how people think about any number of topics, based on what is socially permissible to say or not say.”22 Language is a powerful tool of discourse, mass political indoctrination and agitation. It can shape people’s sense of reality, be used to conceal truths, and even manipulate history. Corruption of the English language has been tremendously influential in both constructing and deconstructing national identity. George Orwell has written many pieces concerning this and quite accurately predicted todays political environment over 60 years ago. His 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature” reflects his alarm over the victimization of truth in the distorted use of language. Orwell pointed out the “deliberate use of misleading double-talk language among those he identified as pro-Soviet.”23 The list of euphemisms and new “politically correct” words demanded by Progressive liberals is exhaustive. Publically funded universities now indoctrinate students with it and even laws are being rewritten to conform to Newspeak. Lawmakers here passed a series of bills since 2007 to root out what they believe is gender bias from Washington statutes. Nearly 40,000 have been scrubbed for so-called gender bias.24 In Orwell’s book 1984, the new country of Oceania’s official language is Newspeak — a language that uses English words and mixes them together to produce an entirely new vocabulary to obscure the truth, deflect scrutiny, and promote pro-government propaganda. The redefining of ‘nationalism’ is one such example, as it is now equated to fascism, Nazism, racism, etc. Even Google has joined in by pinning fascism on the right, changing the definition to read “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.” (emphasis added) And “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.”25 The irony is that Liberal anti-nationalism is inherently divisive, which in most other contexts is regarded by them as political crime.
Social cohesion is inevitably damaged when the concepts of nationhood and patriotism are attacked. Using newspeak to call those resisting their machinations “Nazis”, is irony of epic proportions. When globalist social engineers destroy our nations, and the cultures they sprang from, they obliterate everything that makes us unique. When they create artificial demographic shifts, like what we are seeing in Europe, the only result can be chaos. A chaos they will gladly offer to save you from, if you’ll just surrender the last of your liberty. Americans have spent the past 25 years paying the price as the neocon-neoliberal elite build their empire. Labor force participation has declined to its lowest level since 1982, job creation has still not recovered to levels before 2008, median household income is at 1992 levels, student loan debt is off the charts, healthcare has become unaffordable, and the rich-poor wage gap is wider than ever before.
The resurgence of nationalism has nothing to do with racism or fascism. In fact, it is bringing people together from across the globe in a common movement against globalism. Sovereignty is the antithesis of collectivist power. If you are a sovereign individual, you have rights no government can take away, no matter how many votes it collects. American nationalism is about protecting that right to self-determination and is rising in response to globalism. Nationalism harnesses the power of a population’s identity and concrete interests. Contrary to popular belief, it is not always a bad thing. Nationalists have overthrown governments. The ruling elite fear nationalism because it is more than just a set of abstract ideas. Libertarian nationalism is freedom through power.
Sources
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Bastinelli, Mike. “Washington is Now a Gender-Neutral State.” News Talk KIT, 3 May 2013, newstalkkit.com/washington-is-now-a-gender-neutral-state/. 2013.
Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus. 1967.
Billig, M. Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. 1995.
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- (Oxford Dictionaries | English, 2017) ↩
- Friedrich Meinecke. Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. (1908) ↩
- Seymour M. Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1963), 15. ↩
- Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.” (1967), 96(1):1–21. ↩
- S.P. Huntington, “Who Are We?”, (2004) ↩
- “The Grand Army of the Republic and Kindred Societies.” (2011) ↩
- Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (2013) 123 ↩
- Woman’s Relief Corps, Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Woman’s Relief ↩
- Eller, J. D. and R. M. Coughlan (1993) ‘The Poverty of Primordialism: The Demystification of Ethnic Attachments’ (1993) 183–201 ↩
- Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (1995) 55 ↩
- Max Horkheimer, Bemerkungen zur Religion, Frankfurt: Fisher Verlag. (1972) ↩
- Antonio Gramsci, “Gramsci to Togliatti, Terracini and Others”letter 199–200 ↩
- Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. (1979) ↩
- Oxford “metanarrative” (2017) ↩
- Adam David Morton. “A Double Reading of Gramsci: Beyond the Logic of Contingency.” (2005): 439–53. ↩
- Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization. (1962). 48–50 ↩
- Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse. A Critique of Pure Tolerance. (1965) 109 ↩
- Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. Manufacturing Consent, (1994) 2 ↩
- Friedrich Engel, Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893: Engels to Franz Mehring ↩
- T. Adorno. & M. Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” (1944) ↩
- E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. (1983). 1 ↩
- Antonio Gramsci, Selected Writings, 1916–1935. (1988) ↩
- George Orwell. ‘The Prevention of Literature (1946) ↩
- Mike Bastinelli. “Washington is Now a Gender-Neutral State.” (2013) ↩
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