Timothy Birdnow

Nationalism is a concept that is antithetical to the American experiment.

With the rise of Donald Trump many good conservatives have bandied about the term Nationalism and spoken of a desire to "return to" this concept without really understanding what it is and where it came from. Nationalism is not patriotism, nor is it promoting your own country first. It is not even a chauvinism that promotes national exceptionalism. Nationalism was the creation of the philosophy that also created socialism, and it was intended not to promote any one nation so much as to break the old social order and the power of the Church in favor of a new and strange god, a mystical worship of the Nation as the embodiment of the Collective Will and as such it was and is a rejection of individualism and Free Will.

When Jean Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract he sent an earthquake through the political and social order of the day. Rousseau, a man who believed in the "noble savage" concept that Man was inherently good and in a state of nature was happy - a direct contradiction of the Christian concept of Original Sin - believe d that science and culture were a part of the repressive nature of modern society. It was vanity, he believed, that led to progress in those fields and this vanity caused friction and social discord. Rousseau thought that the social order was inherently unfair, a trick played by the rich and powerful on the proletariat.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica has this entry under Nationalism:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/nationalism

"Nationalism is a modern movement. Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their parents, and to established territorial authorities; but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of modern history. Because of its dynamic vitality and its all-pervading character, nationalism is often thought to be very old; sometimes it is mistakenly regarded as a permanent factor in political behaviour"

The New World Encyclopdia entry on Rousseau states that Rousseau argued in Discourse on Inequality :
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

". As humans were forced to associate together more closely, by the pressure of population growth, they underwent a psychological transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of their own well being. Rousseau associated this new self-awareness with a golden age of human flourishing. However, the development of agriculture and metallurgy, private property and the division of labor led to increased interdependence and inequality. The resulting state of conflict led Rousseau to suggest that the first state was invented as a kind of social contract made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful. This original contract was deeply flawed as the wealthiest and most powerful members of society tricked the general population, and thus instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society"

[…]

"According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law. While Rousseau argues that sovereignty should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. The government is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will and is composed of a smaller group of citizens, known as magistrates."

Rousseau argues in The Origins of Inequality:
http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq_04.htm

"But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.”

In short, the ascent of Man led to the creation of almost all social ills.

"It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all the numerous vices that go in their train. On the other hand, free and independent as men were before, they were now, in consequence of a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection, as it were, to all nature, and particularly to one another; and each became in some degree a slave even in becoming the master of other men”

He then provided a solution in the Social Contract:

http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_01.htm

""Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."

IF the State is a moral person whose life is in the union of its members, and if the most important of its cares is the care for its own preservation, it must have a universal and compelling force, in order to move and dispose each part as may be most advantageous to the whole. As nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members also.”

You see where this is going. Man can only be free if He subsumes himself into the collective. And the institutions that made the West what it became were oppressive, abusive, and created for the benefit of the rich and their parasites. Doesn't this sound like any modern Democrat?

Rousseau wanted to empower the Collective Will and break the powers of the day; the aristocracy, the Church, the men of letters and science. To do that he had to create a substitute, a new church to compete with the old, a new god, a new Man. From this vision came Nationalism, the rise of the worship of the State, all glory be upon her! Rousseau couched it in terms of "civil religion” and even accepted God and an afterlife, but he was clearly interested in creating something that served his dream of the collective rather than God and absolute Truth.

He was echoed by Jean Bodin in France and Hobbes in England. (It is interesting to note that many of the Nazi party members belonged to the Thule Society, a pagan Theosophist order which emphasized Monism.)

The German J. G. Fichte, in his effort to undo concepts of Natural Law and human reason, promoted Nationalism https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/nationalism-and-racialism-in-german-philosophy/ and was followed by other Germans, including Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
Indeed, Ernest Gellner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner, the British-Czech social anthropologist, considered it a political construct and described it as:

"the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the population. It means the general diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous impersonal society, with mutually sustainable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of the previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups Thomas Hylland Eriksen

and Thomas Hylland Eriksen lists the following as the principle points of Gelner:

* Shared, formal educational system
* Cultural homogenization and "social entropy"
* Central monitoring of polity, with extensive bureaucratic control
* Linguistic standardization
* National identification as abstract community
* Cultural similarity as a basis for political legitimacy
* Anonymity, single-stranded social relationships And

Notice how little of this applied to the American experiment; America had no standardized education until John Dewey and the Progressive era, and even not then; Common Core is the first truly national effort in this regard. America shared common culture to a point, but allowed for some rather large differences (which were settled by the cultural imperialism of the North in the aftermath of the Civil War). Until Reconstruction America had no central bureaucratic control, and even then it was largely dismantled until the Progressives rebuilt it. America has never had a national language and the dialects are many and varied in our common language - English.

America was not founded with a common national identy in many ways; prior to the Civil War we were a nation of nations, with people identifying themselves as Virginians, New Yorkers, etc. first. And cultural anonymity was clearly not an early American value; America was rooted in the local community, in the churches, in the social clubs and the saloons and other such institutions. Our local nature was the antithesis of anonymous, single stranded social relationships. In fact, it was a bit much for some, who often fled to the big cities to escape having all their neighbors in their business in rural America.

The philosophers whose work fostered the American revolution were not the same as those who created Nationalism. America was built on John Locke, Edmund Burke https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/burke/ (whose advocacy for Natural Law was sharply at odds with Rousseau), Francis Bacon's scientific method and David Hume's "synthetic" and "analytic" truths (self-evident). The Americans adopted older British enlightenment thinking, before the Enlightenment turned malevolent.

And Christianity was a critical part of the American model. Where the later French Enlightenment thinkers sought to weaken the power of religion America was predicated on it in many ways. It was enshrined in our Constitution and the "wall of separation betweeen Church and State” was intended not as a way to weaken religion but to weaken government.

At the core of the American belief system were a number of things antithetical to Nationalism as it would later be constructed. Property rights loom large; in more Nationalistic societies property can only be held at the pleasure of the State because the collective is supreme. Rousseau famously stated:
http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq_04.htm

"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

Indeed, for The People to be sovereign the individual must surrender his right to property. The end result is either overt socialism (where property is wholly owned by the State) or fascism (where the State controls the use of property while permitting the image of private ownership.) America was built on the view that property is a sacred thing, one that one owns by virtue of improving it from a state of nature or by the agreement to transfer ownership. God gives property to Man to "subdue the Earth”. The thinking is very different in Nationalistic societies.

Rousseau also stated:

"I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.."

This illustrates the subordination of the individual or the small group to the collective, something that is required under a nationalistic order. Again, it is grossly at odds with the American spirit, which says "men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights". The individual has rights over the group.

Indeed, the idea of Natural Law is pretty much dismissed by the progenitors of Nationalism as human inventions.

America celebrated true multiculturalism (not the nonsense modern leftists promote which is designed to destroy the cohesion of the community) where friends and neighbors create their own support systems and develop their own customs. America was a network of free peoples engaged in life as they saw best. Nationalism makes a nation a net to ensnare people. The Progressives have largely succeeded in doing precisely that.

They have created laws to force association where none is desired. For instance, requiring Christian bakers to make cakes (and serve them) for gay weddings. They have created endless laws to force acceptance rather than opportunity. Corporations are forced to hire people on a quota system rather than the best suited, for their needs. Private clubs are forced to accept members they do not want. There are laws against maintaining private communities. Long gone are the days of singles apartments, for example; there are laws against discrimination based on marriage status. A landlord has to rent to a drunk by law. He has to get permission before he rents to anyone, too. And there is always the threat of being accused of "creating a hostile work environment” if you don’t like your affirmative action hire and don’t treat him as a buddy. They gave us school busing and public housing in what were once strong communities.

And the most galling thing about this is that the Leftists - the creators of Nationalism - have managed to tar the Right with ownership of it. After the spectacular fail of Fascism and Nazism the Left immediately accused Conservatives of being the root of this evil and most people believe it because they created the national educational system which promotes the lie.

So many good conservatives attempt to reclaim their heritage by using the redefined term. It is a mistake: it was redefined by the Left to use as a blood libel and it remains so. We need to point out that we are NOT Nationalists, that America was never a Nationalistic enterprise, and that the true bloody monsters of the metastasized Nationalism of Germany and Italy were clearly, unequivocally, men of the Left.

They own it; it's time we make them with it.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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