2020 Election, General, Politics

Whither American Nationalism Now?

Bob Claude |

As we move on after the wreckage of the Trump administration, this call to courage from Theodore Roosevelt is both sobering and hopeful.  Nationalists made a mistake in putting their hopes in Donald Trump.  He damaged the nationalist brand, but not irreparably. The occasional successes of the last four years point the way to repairing the damage and rebuilding it on a positive policy platform. 

First, we have to accept the reality of the damage. True American nationalism seeks to build a common American identity across cultural and other boundaries. Instead, Donald Trump associated it an ugly white ethnic nationalism that fed identity politics, rather than fighting it.  A movement to create a progressive conservatism that strengthened America and the middle class instead enacted a major tax cut that benefited globalist corporations without requiring any corresponding investment in the nation. (see this previous post). Worse, it ended, not with a celebration of American culture and symbols, but with a sickening attack on the Capitol building, one of the citadels of American freedom itself.

However, there are unmistakable signs of success amidst these failures. The blue wave anticipated by Democrats never really materialized.  As this article illustrates, Trump’s nationalist trade and immigration policies were popular not only with white voters, but also minority voters. The shift towards a realist foreign policy and the withdrawals from Afghanistan and the Middle East caused heartburn among mainstream neocons and liberal hegemonists, but fulfilled Trump’s major foreign policy promises. All of this forced candidate Biden to talk about buying American, creating good jobs and getting tough on China. Thus, while Trump’s rhetoric often failed to meet the reality, there were still solid accomplishments.

American nationalists now need to hold President Biden and Vice-President Harris accountable for results that matches their rhetoric. Biden’s Democratic Party is still led by a Senate majority leader that represents Wall Street and a Vice President and Speaker of the House from the headquarters of Silicon Valley and Big Tech. Their goal of union-wage level jobs is commendable, but will be worthless if companies shift production to China and elsewhere overseas as they did during the Obama Administration. Calls for unity are nice, but are hypocritical if they result in a new woke identity politics that essentially is a left-wing echo of Trump’s ethnic nationalism.

In order to recover from this setback, American nationalists need to highlight our common concerns by building coalitions across party and other boundaries. If Biden pursues policies that really create secure good-paying jobs that strengthen America, we should cheer for and support such policies.  We also should remember the old maxim that all politics is local and start to build grass-roots organizations at the city, county and local level. Finally, we should avoid social issues so long as tolerance is observed on both sides.  

TR’s life was a study in indomitable courage against seemingly insurmountable odds, whether political, intellectual or military.  He experienced numerous failures as well as historic successes. As fellow American nationalists, we are called to pick ourselves up and continue the fight for a strong America and the American Dream for all.    

Foreign Policy, History and Future of Nationalism

Nationalist Foreign Relations – A History

Bob Claude |

I am insisting on nationalism against internationalism.

Theodore Roosevelt in a letter to Sen. Albert Beveridge

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the globalist’s worst nightmare. Nations scrambled to protect their own citizens first by ensuring that medical supplies and other essential items stay within their borders rather than be traded to the highest international bidder.  It should never have been this surprising.  Even the apostle of globalization Thomas Friedman foresaw this in his paean to globalization “The World is Flat”, when he identified a pandemic as one of the dangers that could halt the phenomenon he praised so effusively.

In fact, the pandemic is actually a stress test revealing the endurance of nationalism as the true basis of international relations.  Rather than inevitably leading to war, a nationalist-based foreign policy can create as stable a world as globalism while also preserving its diversity of cultures. But how do we get there?  This post will begin a series on the history and background of nationalism and the models it provides to achieve the common goal of peaceful international relations.

Origins of Modern Nationalism

Nationalism is hardly a recent phenomenon.  Next to the family, nations are the oldest form of human community.  They arose out of the need to band together for safety and maximize efficiency by encouraging specialized skills.  Nationalism could take the form of nomadic tribal loyalty or simply a commitment to one’s neighbors in a local village or city-state. Eventually, the ties between the members became based on a shared perception of a common ethnicity or culture, enabling them to easily identify in and out groups.  National rivalry and conflict inevitably resulted from these distinctions and has defined much of human history.

Read against this reality, it is easy to dismiss globalism as simply the modern elite’s commitment to hope over experience.  In fact, Western globalism has deep roots and can be traced back to the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church. The Romans knit numerous nationalities into a unitary state based on the rule of law that continued in some form for almost two millennia. To Europeans, the Roman world became synonymous with peace and unity. It’s pull on the Western psyche is illustrated by the fact that, after the fall of the original empire in 476 AD, the first successful king of Europe Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD and a Holy Roman Empire lived in central Europe until the 17th century.  Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire survived and often dominated the Middle East until it’s fall in 1453. 

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the most successful globalist institution in the Western world was the Roman Catholic Church.  In the medieval world, it held not only religious power, but claimed territory and temporal power over rulers.  Its theology taught that all Christendom was to be united in peace under the twin pillars of Empire and Church, though the Church was to be predominant.  In fact, this peaceful unity was rarely, if ever, achieved,  The emperor’s power declined until he became only a titular ruler over the dukes and kings of what later became Germany and Austria.  In an historically accurate gibe, it was said that he became neither holy, nor Roman, nor an emperor.  The Church’s power also was increasingly challenged by medieval and Renaissance rulers.  Despite all this, the idea of a unified religious and secular Christendom survived in local and international law.

The dream of any such unity came crashing down during the 17th Century, when the Holy Roman Empire itself was racked by a brutal religious war between Catholic and Protestant rulers. Known as the Thirty Years War, it remained the deadliest war in European history until World War I. While fought officially by kings and dukes, it was really a religious war fought in the name of Catholicism and the various Protestant denominations adopted by local rulers.  In other words, it was essentially a war between two sets of globalist, transnational institutions.

The exhausted warring powers finally ended the conflict in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which created the modern system of international law and relations.  Since globalism caused the war, the treaty established the nation-state as the bulwark for keeping the peace.  The treaty vested religious and secular power in sovereign states and officially ended the Catholic Church’s claim of transnational authority.  States were defined as those entities that had effective governments that ruled within territorial boundaries.  While Europe was no stranger to war in later years, the Westphalian system avoided the indiscriminate killing of the Thirty Years War for over two centuries afterwards. 

The French Revolution and resulting Napoleonic Wars brought back memories of the dangers of globalism to Europe. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the victorious powers in that war re-established the old system of nation-states, which managed to keep the peace until the beginning of the twentieth century.  The horrors of the two world wars then caused national leaders to question the nation-state as a peace-keeping model and revived globalism as a potential solution. The failures of this solution will be the subject of the next post.

Coronavirus, Domestic Policy, Government

The Dangers of Executive Overreach

Bob Claude |
Theodore Roosevelt at his desk with papers

As this helpful article from the Smithsonian Magazine illustrates, the debate over the use of presidential executive orders to end-run Congress originated with Theodore Roosevelt.  In his conservationist zeal to protect unique land and monuments, TR pushed the limits of the Antiquities and Reclamation Acts. While we are all blessed by the resulting preservation of sights like the Grand Canyon, his expansive view of presidential power also resulted in abuses like FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans and President Truman’s attempt to seize the steel mills to prevent a strike. President Trump’s recent orders to provide partial relief for workers hit by the COVID-19 pandemic shows the limitations of the practice and its danger to our constitutional democracy.

This story from CNN sets forth the problems with these orders and why congressional action was required. The new $400 per month unemployment benefit may never materialize since it was not authorized to be distributed through the current unemployment insurance system. The payroll tax cut is really a deferral and so worker could be on the hook for a huge catch-up payment next year. Finally, the eviction protections simply consist of a study by the Secretary of Health and Human Services of ways to provide such protection.

When the last coronavirus relief effort stalled in March, I criticized both the President and Congress over their failure to reach agreement under the headline “Leaders Don’t Dither. They Decide”.  This relief bill should be more targeted toward the unemployed and essential workers on the front lines of combating the disease and supporting American society in dealing with it. However. dangling partial relief for them by a questionable legal method is not real leadership.  Leadership in our system of separation of powers often involves compromise. TR’s sympathy for those workers would probably drive him to swallow his pride to provide a “square deal” for them in time for destitute and heroic workers to receive the meaningful help they need.