The Nationalism Show

Do you thrill to the sight of a military parade?

Planning a splendid military parade was practically the first thing Donald Trump did upon being elected to the presidency, a $100 million exercise in political semiotics. He calls himself a “nationalist,” not a conservative. And there’s something to that, and the parade is part of it—maybe all of it.

At the National Review Institute’s biennial Ideas Summit in Washington last week, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and NRI fellow Jonah Goldberg had a spirited discussion about nationalism’s place in U.S. politics, with Lowry advancing the nationalist banner and Goldberg wary of it. It was intellectual nutrition: spirited, frank, unrehearsed, and I am grateful to have been there for it, and to be part of an institution where ideas matter.

What American nationalism might mean as a question of public policy is unclear. Self-proclaimed nationalists talk about acting in the national interest, but that’s no good: Senator Sanders thinks implementing a Soviet-style health-care system would be in the national interest; Tom Metzger has other ideas about the national interest. People of good faith (and other kinds of people) have radically different notions of national interest, because they have radically different notions about community and the good life. Nationalism as a creed does not help us to distinguish prudently between those competing conceptions. As Goldberg argued, the character of nationalism depends greatly on the character of the nation—and the times, too: The New Deal was the nationalist project of a nationalist president. Mohandas K. Gandhi was speaking as a nationalist when he conceded the excellence of British administration but insisted that any people would naturally prefer bad government of their own than the good government of an alien power. Joseph Stalin was a nationalist. Jack Kennedy’s motto was a nationalist one: “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” As -isms go, nationalism is pretty loosey-goosey.

“Make America Great” is the nationalist motto of the moment (the “Again” is a concession to conservative nostalgia), but that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, inasmuch as our gentle new nationalists despise so many of the very flourishing institutions and endeavors in which the United States actually excels: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, the universities, the National Institute of Science. (Yes, yes, but doesn’t national greatness supersede your petty partisanship?) Do our nationalists swell with pride thinking of Eugene O’Neill’s Nobel Prize . . . or Barack Obama’s?