How would one evaluate a government, and what does this imply about nationalism vs. trans-nationalism?
For a conservative, the question is how well the government preserves the civilization of the people within its jurisdiction. According to Hazony, this is most likely to occur within a nation-state, that is a state that consists of people with a shared culture. Trans-nationalism threatens to imperil national civilizations.
A progressive might ask whether a government sides with the oppressor or the oppressed. A government must have enough power to overcome oppressors. This might require trans-nationalism, in order to overcome oppressors in particular nations. But nationalism may suffice.
A libertarian might ask whether a government limits its use of coercion. Trans-nationalism sounds like coercion carried to a higher degree. Even nationalism may be too coercive. It should be easy for people to exercise exit. In the United States, federalism was supposed to ensure relatively easy exit, but that is no longer the case.
Thanks to Yuval Levin for suggesting applying the three-axes model to the issues raised by Hazony.
This is helpful. Allow me to expand on the freedom/coercion axis?
When federalism is done well, it diffuses government coercion. Sometimes it works out that you can ask dad when mom forbids or vice versa and whoever permits is sufficient permission. A large part of commerce clause jurisprudence is labeled “the dormant commerce clause,” where the cases are about states attempting to stop out of state trucking firms or out of state milk, and the Supreme Court forbidding the states from forbidding.
One of Megan McCardle’s points is that one advantage of living in a large country is the liberty it affords. Small villages are totalitarian regimes. So are neighborhood associations. In a large city, everyone leaves you alone. In a large country, you move coasts. Nationalism, for the most part, allows bigger polities so tends to be better on that front than tribalism. But the EU allows it more so. Although I suppose if you don’t like your nation, and you don’t like the transnational cosmopolitan expatriate community, you don’t have great options.
Alternatively, from a libertarian perspective, transnationalism may enable bargains that reduce coercion overall. Libertarians are probably mostly in favor of GATT and the WTO, for example.
Similarly, transnationalism in the EU secures the right to move across borders. Most libertarians don’t like things about the EU as compared to the US, but it’s also worth considering the hypothesis that most European countries would be less free if they had not joined.
Something is happening all over the world on the right and with ‘conservatism’. Indeed, there is widespread awareness of the sea change even and collapse of both the center and the old foundations, even if there is little agreement on the diagnosis or right prescription going forward. There is a lot of pent up frustration and internal disagreement, and daily battle for intellectual influence over what the ‘real’ meaning of the conservatism or an inchoate and nascent neo-neo-conservatism should be, but so far there has been no emergence of consensus or consilience.
So, many theories, models, or frameworks of interpretation that rely on treating ‘conservatism’ as a stable persuasion, perspective, or disposition are going to start straining and stretching as a result of these underlying changes, and so may need some updating. I suspect that’s what’s going on with the Three Languages of Politics too.
Furthermore, the progressives so thoroughly dominate the ranks of so many important and influential sectors and institutions that they are effectively ‘the establishment’ guarding rules and structures of their own making, which encourages them to use ‘conservative’ language when convenient to either preserve the status quo or bolster their own take on ‘civilized’ behaviors and policies.
You yourself have mentioned that the election of Trump has tended to scramble things (or was itself a symptom of more core and upstream causes of the scrambling) which has set up a BoBo vs. Anti-BoBo axis, or Nationalist vs. Globalist axis, or, as I would say, maybe just Progressives vs. Everybody Else axis.
Let’s see how this applies in the context on Nationalism.
I have already pointed out that progressives use the language of ‘barbarism’ when talking about certain kinds of violence or punishment for crimes, most especially the death penalty. Gold, as a standard, was famously a ‘barbarous relic’. Before the onset of New Left multiculturalism and the fetishization of Western self-debasement, it was common for progressives to look at the religious and other traditions of most of the rest of the world as also being primitive, barbarous, backward, and uncivilized practices and superstitions, destined to be swept away by modernization, a process they were clear was worthy of celebration and encouragement.
Now, Hazony mentions in his book that progressives look at and talk about nationalist, patriotic, or even culturally-chauvinistic sentiments in largely the same way – as contemptibly barbaric and tribal impulses which are irrationally divisive, generative of pointless wars, tending towards the privileging of some while dehumanizing of others, and an obstacle to the recognition of universal human rights and the achievement of perpetual peace and brotherhood of all mankind. To put it more simply, progressives view nationalism in the way the old nationalists, colonists, or imperialists viewed the primitive tribalism of savages and other less developed peoples they encountered: as a lower form of human civilization at best, and often clearly worthy of disdain.
Indeed, it’s easy to see the commonality between all the recent derogatory use of ‘tribalism’ and the meaning of ‘barbarism’, and it’s clear that it’s being used in a way that condemns those political coalitional instincts as barbaric, primitive impulses which people should endeavor to overcome for the sake of ‘civility’. And plenty of progressives are part of the chorus of that complaint.
(As an aside, I think all this use of tribalism is basically intellectual malpractice the effect of which is a gimmick to pre-emptively avoid conceding the high stakes of current disputes or having to get into debates on the merits, by dismissing one’s opponents as acting out of stupid and primitive group-emotions and phenomena of social psychology, instead of actually believing in different ideas.)
Libertarian language is much more consistent in terms of emanating from a more stable perspective and set of core principles (with some recent exceptions), but cuts both ways on the issue of nationalism. As Bob McGrew pointed out above, and mirroring their disagreements on American Federalism, libertarians are often conflicted about the coercive authorities of centralized or higher powers, when that power can potentially be used to impose certain mandates and force lower governments (that is, local majorities) to implement more individualistic policies. This is the “14th Amendment Libertarian” issue.
So, just like the US government power is ‘bad’ when restricting individual liberty – and in those cases libertarians will argue that at the very least states and localities ought to be free to make their own decisions on the matter – that same central power is ‘good’ when it prevents the states from restricting individual liberty. Transnational institutional power is seen in the same way, with a combination of hope and suspicion. The hope is for freer movement of goods, capital, and people, and the suspicion is of much more onerous regulation of business and personal behavior.
As for conservatism and nationalism, it’s currently a welter. Part of the issue is, for various reasons, that elite, intellectual American conservatism increasingly distanced itself from traditional sentiments and principles of populist nationalism. As Hazony wrote about the neoconservatives like Krauthammer, the view was that America was the New Rome, and that Bush Sr.’s post-Cold War New World Order would be the Pax Americana analogue to the Pax Romana, and would be sustained by enforcement of the UN consensus on security via American power, wealth, and arms; and also by the encouragement (and, occasionally, imposition) of the Washington Consensus neoliberal economics and governing model across a world connected by global trade.
The results have been a mixed bag, and many of them proved to be quite unpopular, especially when combined with changes in domestic politics. So, part of the current political churn and pain of transition on the right results from an attempt to heal that division, reconcile, and reintegrate nationalism into a reconstructed intellectual framework toward another, newer, new conservatism. That kind of thing has to be done from time to time, and the fact we already had a neoconservate movement, which itself has now almost completely run its course, is some evidence of that proposition.
But in the meantime, while all that gets hashed out (if indeed it can be hashed out at this late stage), ‘conservative’ use of political language about the proper perspective on nationalism is unstable, confused, and all over the place.