Nationalism Examined
America First! Make America Great! The nationalist agenda is an old tale - not just in America, of course, but in many civilizations across history.
In America, the nationalist frame of mind reaches us 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.”
To many, much of this sounds both reasonable and desirable. 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, there is a deeper question worth examining:
What does it actually mean to put a nation or a nation’s people “first”? And what are the tradeoffs and consequences involved?
The Deeper Nature of Nationalism
A nationalist agenda is inherently a centrally planned agenda. Programs initiated with the goal to help America be "first" and "best" in things like industry, technology, or GDP are entrances of the political sphere into spheres of otherwise voluntary action. The primary move involved in nearly every one of these programs is confiscating time, resources, labor, and life energy from citizens and re-allocating them based on decisions by political officials.
Instead of relying on the distributed intelligence of each individual acting in accordance with their own conscience to dispose of the products of their efforts, that responsibility is shifted so that government officials may dispose of those products in ways they believe will serve national interests.
While often well-intentioned, actions based in the nationalist mindset often work to subordinate individual freedom. It’s difficult if not impossible to prioritize the interests of people in your nation over those of people in another without eventually prioritizing the interests of some people within your nation over others in your nation. Coercion is a tool that requires losers for the existence of winners.
And a stance that endorses and condones force against one peaceful individual can eventually come to threaten any individual or group.
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 the condition in which people can make choices without facing the threat of force and coercion. Yet the political sphere relies on force and coercion to pursue its goals. Free enterprise is mutually exclusive with the idea of dictating the terms upon which trade can be conducted with people from other countries.
Fear and Dependence
We’re often told that if America isn’t first, another nation will be. There’s a sense that we should be suspicious of the prosperity of other nations and what their governments might do. We’re taught (implicitly and explicitly) to fear and distrust those beyond our borders and to see them as competitors.
In the course of this national competing, the American government imposes countless trade barriers upon its people. That’s right—each tariff, import tax, subsidy, quote, export tax, and tax incentive is a barrier imposed on the average American citizen as well as foreign citizens, making it progressively difficult and expensive to engage in global trade to mutual benefit.
Trade sanctions against other countries often lead to reciprocal measures. Over time, this dynamic contributes to a global environment filled with barriers to exchange, maintained by governments of all types and sizes. In this environment, the costs are widely distributed, while the bulk of the benefits tend to be concentrated among those positioned to navigate or influence the political systems.
Government officials around the world observe and learn from one another, often adopting similar approaches. The same underlying message is repeated across borders: “We must protect our interests as a nation.”
Through time, this way of thinking—combined with ongoing trade conflicts—helps to create and reinforce the climate of international competition and hostility that leads to bombs being dropped.
A feedback loop tends to emerge. As tensions rise, they are cited as evidence of the need for continued protection and intervention. It’s generally forgotten that government action is the main catalyst of these tensions to start with. As this cycle continues and deepens, and the hostilities become greater, it becomes easier and easier to believe in the necessity of centralizing power and control with government. And unfortunately, that is a large part of what this cycle is about—control.
The primary beneficiaries of the centralized apparatus of violence (the politically connected) are afforded immense wealth, influence, prestige, and power by this position. Even if it is not always deliberate and more simply driven by incentives of the system, part of maintaining this position is keeping everyday citizens controlled and dependent.
And the best way to keep people dependent is to keep them fearful.
The nationalist story has a strong foundation in fear. Part of the hook is keeping us believing that we can't make it in this world without the government watching over us and our "enemies." Are they your enemies? My enemies?
When we believe this is the government's job, to keep us #1 and to watch out for us in a hostile world, we are wading in to a great danger. We need to take a hard look at that belief; 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.
Our Interests
“We must protect our interests as a nation.” I respectfully 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 part of that immense wealth to engage in political activity that engenders international hostility. That climate of hostility is then often used as a justification for greater resource absorption by government, and on and on the cycle goes.
Whose interests are ultimately served by this dynamic? The nationalistic thinking way will tell us that this is the best we can do; we are using government action to protect American interests against other groups in a world where other governments are doing the same. However, the truth is that there is no such thing as “American interests.” A nation cannot have interests. Only individual humans have interests and take actions.
And this dynamic that centralizes so much power and influence with governments largely serves the interests of a very small subset of individual humans—the close stakeholders of government. The people who get to fill their pockets in obvious ways and subtle ways with tax money.
The majority of the other humans on Earth get poorer, work harder, go to fight and die in the meaningless wars, have their movements ever-increasingly restricted and surveilled, and have their optionality reduced unilaterally.
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 national interest, and think more about human interest.
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 a guaranteed 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 self-defeating. 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.
If we choose, we can 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 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 living peacefully and which are using violence to achieve their goals at everyone else’s expense.
When we try on this lens, we can see that modern governments are often the enemies of prosperity and harmony – to the extent that they are initiating violence against peaceful people.
When we understand clearly that violence is a category of action that can only destroy or take away that which is created, but create nothing, and when we understand clearly that all state action is violence, we will begin to perceive that a great many sufferings of the world today are directly related to the modern form of our governments.
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 misguided.
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 starts to emerge naturally as the influence of organized violence fades. “Humanity First” necessarily means “Individual Humans First” - prioritizing the agency of individuals and their ability to use their faculties.
This policy doesn’t follow a predictable path or a conventional narrative. It’s transnational—it doesn’t favor one nation over another. It’s tempting to support coercive policies that favor the nation we live in over others – however, when men try to force their own policies on each other, they just get in the way of the deeper emergent policy of progress that no one can directly control.
The degree to which America has ever been recognized as great is simply the degree to which it cultivated an environment free of coercion (mostly by limiting the power of its government), thereby allowing passage to the radiant beams of this emergent policy working through the voluntary action of millions of individuals.
Those beams are shining in each society of the world right now, however, some of this light is being blocked out by coercive structures reinforced by nationalism.
America can be great again by setting an example of peace, creativity, and community—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 move toward greatness by reducing participation in the game of national competition. It can restore itself by removing coercive barriers to voluntary action within its borders. 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 reducing the use of physical coercion by government. Scaling back government to focus more and more narrowly on restraining violent actors and maintaining defense.
The more we do this, the less the imaginary boundary lines we’ve drawn all over the world will seem to matter, and the more we will reach out as potential partners and collaborators.
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