Nationalism Examined
America First! Make America Great! The nationalist agenda is an old tale - not just in America, of course, but in many civilizations throughout history.
In America, nationalism is held up as an ideal by some people who say they're champions of freedom and prosperity. It is a promise to increase prosperity for Americans. To preserve the American identity and way of life. A promise to protect Americans from economic, military, spiritual, and cultural threats posed by people from other countries.
The policies typically sponsored under this mindset include things like tariffs, quotas, and taxes for imported goods, tax incentives and subsidies for businesses based in America, maximum funding to the military, surveillance of American citizens when deemed necessary, a relatively large focus on border regulations, and heavy government funding of scientific research and development, as well as national-level competition with other countries in technologies deemed vital (such as AI).
The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) provides a fairly good example of the nationalist frame of mind. Their mission statement is below:
“AFPI exists to advance policies that put the American people first. Our guiding principles are liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.”
Sounds good to many. It’s comforting to hear how we as Americans will have our interests backed up in a rapidly evolving world where all global cultures and economies interact more and more every week, month, and year, and new complex challenges loom in our future.
However, experience and study have convinced me that the nationalist agenda is crucially flawed, and that the more steps we take down this road, the further we get from our most precious values.
The Deeper Nature of Nationalism
Nationalism is Socialism
Though held up as an ideal by many who believe in American freedom, nationalism is in fact a socialist frame of mind.
A nationalist agenda is inherently and inevitably a centrally planned agenda. Any time you hear a politician say they're going to help America be "first" and "best" in things like industry, technology, or the hilariously meaningless concept of GDP, you can be 100% certain that they mean to do it by forcefully confiscating and re-allocating your time, your resources, your labor, your life energy.
Instead of trusting you, American citizen, to exercise your natural right to dispose of the products of your efforts according to your own conscience, that right is taken from you, in order that government officials may dispose of those products in ways they believe will serve national interests.
The conscience of a nation is the sum of every single individual conscience in that nation. Just like all socialist endeavors, nationalist policies starve the expression of 99% of the national conscience to make room for the politically connected 1% to find greater expression in its stead.
At its core, nationalism is a stance against the individual. It’s a system of using force to pick winners and losers. A policy that puts people from one nation first over other nations will inevitably put some people in that nation first over other people in that nation.
It seeks to benefit some individuals at the expense of others by using violence. And any stance that endorses and condones harm to even one individual eventually does harm to all individuals.
Revisiting the mission statement of the AFPI, liberty and free enterprise are conditions existing in irreconcilable conflict with the political goals of national greatness and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities. Liberty is a condition that thrives only in the fresh air of an environment free of central planning. Free enterprise is mutually exclusive with the idea of dictating the terms upon which trade can be conducted with people from other countries.
Nationalism is Based on Fear and Dependence
I've heard the following refrain at least 10,000 times in my life: If we're not first, someone else will be. Think about how many times you've heard that. That is exactly the kind of garbage that our system throws in the front lawns of unguarded minds.
What is implied by this psyop refrain is that we should be very afraid of the prosperity of other nations, and what their governments might do. Our government and our system teach us to fear and hate other peoples like China and Iran. They spend billions of dollars and billions of hours spying on these countries and their governments, violently intervening in their affairs, and imposing countless trade barriers on us. Yes, make no mistake, trade barriers are a penalty to you and me, stopping us from engaging in global trade to mutual benefit.
Trade sanctions against other countries invariably result in trade sanctions being imposed by those other countries against the initiator. The entire globe is choked with obstacles to trade violently enforced by governments of all types and sizes, and every single person on the globe loses from this condition except the politically connected who make and enforce these rules. Government officials in smaller countries have learned by watching countries like the United States how rich they can get if they play the game as well.
They feed their citizens the same story that we hear all the time: “We must protect our interests as a nation.” This way of thinking that has proliferated over the Earth, along with the endless trade wars of tariffs and sanctions, creates and maintains the climate of international competition and hostility that leads to bombs being dropped.
A vicious cycle has been formed. Once all governments are doing it, it’s so easy for our government officials to point to this atmosphere as an urgent indicator of the need for their protection and intervention. Nevermind the fact that government violence created this atmosphere to begin with.
The truth is that the greater the hostility becomes, the more our government can delude itself and us of the necessity of its power and control. And that’s what the system is mostly about – control. The people in control of the centralized apparatus of violence (the politically connected) benefit more than most of us imagine from this system. They continue to benefit by keeping everyday citizens controlled and dependent. And the best way to keep people dependent is to keep them fearful.
The entire nationalist story is based on fear. It's meant to keep you believing that you can't make it in this world without the government watching over you and all your "enemies." Are they your enemies?
If you believe this is the government's job, to keep us #1 and to watch out for us in a hostile world, you've already fallen for the psyop and are ready to be dependent. Take a hard look at that belief, for your own sake. Dependency sourced in fear weakens a person's stance and approach in life.
Most people don't realize how powerful the dynamic is. Once this fear-based dependency is established, anything can be justified in the name of the mission. The government can place any activity under the organizational umbrella of aiming for nationalistic supremacy and protecting national interests.
The simple truth is that the nationalist line is just one of many from the arsenal of programming/propaganda tactics used by the politically connected to maintain control of us and retain their status and privileges.
Our Interests
“We must protect our interests as a nation.” I humbly disagree.
As mentioned previously, the decision makers and stakeholders of today’s governments are taking actions that shape the world for more government action tomorrow. It’s a vicious cycle. Governments tax and inflate an immense wealth out of their respective societies. Then they use that immense wealth to engage in political activity that engenders international hostility. That climate of hostility is then used as the justification for greater resource absorption by government, and on and on the cycle is going.
Whose interests are served by all of this nationalism?
Only the stakeholders of government. Only the people who get to fill their pockets in obvious ways and subtle ways with tax money. The rest of the people on Earth get poorer, work harder, go to fight and die in the meaningless wars, have their movements ever-increasingly restricted and surveilled, live on a prosperity treadmill, and have the full expression of their unique existence held back.
I believe that if we want greater well-being for everyone in this world, we’ve got to open our minds, transcend the idea of our interests as a nation, and think about our interests as humanity.
Human interest is mutually exclusive with national interest. National interest is necessarily a hostile concept. It’s an “us vs them” frame. It’s violence waiting to happen. And violence is always a losing move in the quest for human well-being.
The entire concept of one country of people trying to be superior to other people in other countries is so harmful. Every human has creativity to contribute, and creativity is how we enhance our material prosperity and realize our full potential as people. Violence is the choice to go against our creative nature.
We’ve got to step outside of the conceptual framework we’ve been steeped in and see through a new lens. We see ourselves as Americans, folks from England see themselves as Englanders, and the same of people from Russia, or China, or Iran. We’re inculcated with this national identity and this story of what’s good for us and who our enemies are, historically and presently.
It’s a compelling story; one we learn at a very early age. Yet it’s only a story, and a dishonest and suboptimal one at that. Don’t forget that we’re primarily humans, then Americans. A more helpful lens to see through is to look at the entire globe and see which people on it are using violence to achieve their goals at everyone else’s expense.
We’ve witnessed the rise of an era of large, centralized nation-states. They are a cancer growing on global society, sucking resources from 99% of humanity for the benefit of 1%, spreading fear, war, poverty, violence, and dishonesty.
These entities are the real enemies of humans of goodwill everywhere. I believe that we must collectively realize the nature of violence – that it can only destroy or take away that which is created, but create nothing. We must collectively realize that the state is nothing more than violence in action, and that a great many sufferings of the world today are the inevitable consequence of the proliferation of large nation-states.
Collectively realizing this across the globe sounds like a pretty fanciful wish; we need to start smaller and go from there. I want to start in America.
Make America Great Again
Was America ever great? If so, what made it great? Could we really make it great again?
As long as the path of force is walked, greatness will elude us. The idea that a person or group can use the coercive power of government to implement a policy that will bring us to greatness is simply misguided. Government is not the way.
What is needed is not an “America First” policy, but a “Humanity First” policy. And that policy is not one that can be centrally planned and dictated. It emerges naturally as the influence of organized violence fades. Greatness is nature’s policy, God’s policy, and when men try to force their own policies on each other, they just get in the way of something they don’t understand.
The degree to which America has ever been recognized as great is simply the degree to which it cultivated an environment free of coercion, thereby allowing passage to the radiant beams of creativity that were already shining from the people there.
Those beams of creativity are shining from the people everywhere in the world right now. Much of that light is being blocked out by the clouds of state violence and fear-mongering nationalism.
America can be great again by setting an example for everyone of peace, creativity, and community. Certainly not by protecting its own interests against those of other peoples. Humanity moves together, inextricably. We are all a family, whether we want to be, whether we realize it or not.
America can be great again by no longer participating in the divisive, wasteful, hellish game of national competition. America can be a great country by removing the shackles and obstructions that are imposed on its own people. We can exemplify freedom, goodwill, and prosperity and encourage others around the world to follow down that path. How can we accomplish all this?
By making our government smaller. That’s all. It’s that simple. Decentralize. Localize. Keep it to its proper role of restraining violence.
Imagine a world full of small, local governments dedicated to restraining violence in their respective jurisdictions. People are free to come, go, and trade as they please anywhere in the world, as long as they don’t engage in violence against others. Do we even need the imaginary boundary lines of countries that we’ve drawn? Might we actually be better off without them?
References:
https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/about