National Liberalism: It's Still Very Much Alive

[Anthony '58]

(11-19-2019, 12:49 AM)Teejay Wrote: I don't believe that Nationalism is a inherently bad ideology, indeed I have subscribed to Left-Wing Nationalism. Left-Wing Nationalism is based on the principles of social equality, popular sovereignty and national self-determination. While at the same time it rejects racism, imperialism and colonialism. Although I don't oppose international institutions, if they don't infringe on these principles I have described above, which is certainly not the case with the WTO, IMF and World Bank as they are currently constituted. However I reject the dominant form of nationalism in this present age, which is racist or religiously bigoted of the sort espoused by Donald Trump.

My left-wing nationalist tendencies, have informed my "Soft Euroscepticism", which sees the European Union increasingly infringing on popular sovereignty. Indeed I would rather see the European Union, go back to an organisation like the European Economic Community was, although with addition features such as freedom of movement inside the European Union.

However, I know I am becoming something of a dinosaur here in the west, because the Left are rapidly abandoning nationalism in any form, which is increasingly being seen as Fascist or even Nazi.

National liberalism doesn't mean nationalism.  Think of it as the G.I. Old Left that was rebelled against by the Boomer New Left in the '60s - and contrasted starkly with the right's crude jingoism, expressed best by Curtis LeMay, George Wallace's running mate in 1968, who pledged to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

The grandchildren of the mid-20th Century national liberals (the first of whom were actually last-wave Missionaries like FDR), such as the Buster Michael Lind (born 1962) who coined the term, are determinedly anti-racist, support "big government" liberalism, and believe that the conspiracy theories targeting the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank - and especially the CFR - are inherently anti-Semitic (Lind went Mit Brennender Sorge on these types in his second book).

And I say that nationalism is best expressed at the Olympics, when everybody chants "U.S.A." regardless of the race of the athlete competing.  BTW, being old enough to remember what Jane Fonda and the hippies did during the Vietnam (I was 11 years old when the "Hard Hat Riot" happened, and I was totally on the side of the hardhats), I am vehemently opposed to what Colin Kaepernick and his fellow seditionists have been doing.