Posted on 08/12/2016 5:28:25 AM PDT by Kaslin
Google "Donald Trump" and "nationalism" and you'll get 1,090,000 results, the large percentage of which are, to judge from the top hits, negative. "Nationalism" is deemed to be bad stuff, maybe even akin to Nazism.
But is nationalism always so bad? Not, it seems, for the millions of people around the world watching the Rio Olympics. They watch as the TV networks keep track of the metal count -- and they root for the men and women they see representing their nations.
Americans were thrilled to see Michael Phelps propel the U.S. team to gold in the freestyle relay and excited to watch 19-year-old Katie Ledecky destroy the field in the 400 meter freestyle. People who watch gymnasts at only four-year intervals were amazed at the skill of the 4-foot-9-inch Simone Biles.
News coverage in other countries has focused on their own athletes. British front pages flashed pictures of record-breaking breaststroker Adam Peaty, mouthing the words of "God Save the Queen" as he held his gold meal. Brazil's TV Globo showed judo medalist Rafaela Silva, who grew up in a Rio favela, bow down on her knees to Brazilian fans in the stands.
Sports nationalism easily embraces ethnic and racial diversity, not only from historically biracial America and Brazil (which abolished slavery in 1865 and 1888) but also from European and other nations. One Olympic table-tennis match featured a Japanese-descended Brazilian and a Chinese-descended Congolese. People from nations with sharply divisive politics (not least our own) and suffering from economic setbacks and pervasive corruption (like the Olympics host, Brazil) nonetheless find themselves united in rooting for their country's athletes.
An elite globalist may scoff at the arbitrariness of national border and style himself "a citizen of the world," as Barack Obama described himself before a massive crowd in Berlin in 2008. But most people don't think of themselves that way. Nation-states inspire loyalties in a way the United Nations or the European Union have failed to do.
Nationalism, properly understood, can be a positive force, welding otherwise disparate people together to build a decent society, secure a competent government and rally to defend themselves against attack. Each nation has developed its own particular culture, its own manners and mores, its own rules, written and unspoken.
An intelligent nationalist can respect the strengths of other nations, while preferring his own, just as an Olympics fan can appreciate the superb performance of athletes from other countries even while keeping an eye on the medal scoreboard.
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, writing in The American Interest, notes that as nations grow more prosperous, their elites become more globalist in outlook, and consider nationalism as blind prejudice or even racism. But, as he writes, "having a shared sense of identity, norms and history" -- e.g., nationalism -- "generally promotes trust."
"Nationalists feel a bond with their own country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways," he goes on. "Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people."
This is a principle that Donald Trump, in between off-the-cuff gaffes and self-harming diversions, affirms. Nations have boundaries and owe greater duties to their citizens than to foreigners. They have no obligation to open their borders entirely. It is not racist, Haidt argues, to bar those "whom they perceive as having values that are incompatible with their own, or who (they believe) engage in behaviors they find abhorrent, or whom they perceive to be a threat to something they hold dear."
Hillary Clinton takes a different view. She would not deport any noncriminal illegal immigrant, which amounts to a permanent open borders policy -- as extreme a position as Trump's now discarded ban on Muslim immigration.
But even Democrats at their national convention found it useful to sound nationalist themes, decrying Trump's "dark" picture of America in his acceptance speech as somehow unpatriotic and, after conservative bloggers noted their supposed absence on the Democratic Convention's first day, installing more prominent American flags on the stage.
And former Treasury Secretary and Obama adviser Lawrence Summers has called for "a responsible nationalism" which recognize government's responsibility "to maximize the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good."
Evidently, nationalism, like rooting for your nation's Olympians, is not necessarily a bad thing.
teh=the
Nataionalism and patriotism will save us.
Diversity and globalism will destroy us.
I knew that back when the internet was new and folks would call me mean names on Prodigy when we’d debate.
The fact that this country is even having a debate about the merits of nationalism shows how truly effed we are.
I see what you did there.
Nationalism is the same as sovereignty except the left hasn’t figured out how to dirty the word sovereign....
Liberals always exist in a dream world of their own making, right up to the point of getting raped at a German Trains Station or Beheaded on Youtube.
The real world always lands on them very hard.
This is a principle that Donald Trump, in between off-the-cuff gaffes and self-harming diversions, affirms.
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Snarkiness seems to be a disease of so called journalists. These “digs” are unnecessary and destroy the article. No such thing is said with regard to Clinton.
Rarely is anything worth reading anymore.
We the people should control who we trade with and negotiate the terms equally beneficial to Americans, not simply the bottom line of multi-national corporations, the connected and or politicians.
We've been lied to/deceived into believing free trade was good for Americans. Free trade was sold to us in various forms, but one thing is for damn certain, we Americans are NOT better off decades after NAFTA, GATT. We sure as hell won't benefit from TPP either.
Americans first in all things. American workers first!
Of course it is.....
It is each “sovereign” nation’s job to take care of itself first and foremost...
Gee ya think Barone? A blind squirrel finds a nut.
National socialists, international socialists, fascists and their propagandists are ruining the republic. Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Bastiat.
They should be in federal prison.
Nationalists and patriots can restore it.
I think Barone (and some of the commenters) are confusing “Nationalism” with “patriotism”. Nationalism denotes centralized power and policy, as opposed to federalism, what we were supposed to have. Nationalism is VERY dangerous, no matter who the king is...
Bizarre.
On one side, you have idiot socialists who want worldwide feudalism, in the most dehumanizing and murderous ways possible, returning the world to the joy of the Dark Ages.
And on the other side, you have multinational corporatists, who know that the socialists are useful idiots, and want to instead create a New World Order of elites that control corporations, ruling over a gigantic international faceless bureaucracy. Using a veneer of socialism to force the peasants to pay for their own needs, so the corporations don’t have to.
Ladies and Gentlemen, our Corporate Anthem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gej6SKHF7gw
And, off to the side are nationalistic conservatives, who love their respective countries, histories, cultures, languages, and peoples; who do not need nor want a blended, generic mediocre population; who “cling to their God and their guns”; who prefer republican-democracy and liberty to voyeuristic totalitarianism under an elite class and its “Bureaucratic-military-intelligence-police-industrial complex”; and *still* doggedly cling to the idea of limited government.
Sometimes typos are poetic. ;-P
To me it’s idiotic to use that word, with all of its negative connotations, when you have a proper word to describe, that is almost universally considered positive: patriotism.
The abiding spirit Nationalism is what has made America the greatest country in the history of mankind.
I speculate how different things would have been if the National Socialist German Workers Party, had simply been called the "Socialist German Workers Party". They probably would have been called "Sozis" instead, and there wouldn't have been the tie with Nationalism, as there is now with the Nazis.
A high percentage of all of the Athletes do live and train here in the US.
It would be more appropriate to have them represent the US Universities they went to.
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