This campaign song title from the 1912 presidential election is nostalgic for reasons other than the obvious. Many historians believe the race between Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Taft to be among the most informative and substantive in American history, pitting several different visions of federal and state economic policy against each other for the American people’s consideration. Wilson won with a plurality of the vote and his program became the model for our current regulatory system.
Today the American people need and deserve a similar debate that both illuminates relevant differences and unifies us behind policy choices. That debate should center on the choice between nationalism vs. globalism and it would appear that the Trump vs. Biden race would epitomize that choice. Appearances, however, can be deceiving, and a close examination of their records may show less of a difference than the media and campaigns portray. This website will classify the issues from the standpoint of Theodore Roosevelt and identify the policy choices from a nationalist vs. globalist perspective. Those categories are
Political Reform
Foreign Policy
Antitrust & Trade Regulation
Environment & Climate Change
A Strong America
Character
I will include specific issues that have been featured at some point in the campaign as well as key nationalist issues that have been largely ignored by candidates and the media. While the analysis will focus on records of action or inaction, the ratings will also consider their current party ideologies. The candidates will be rated on a plus or minus 3-point scale with a positive score indicating a nationalist position and a negative score indicating a globalist stance.
I hope you find this index helpful in analyzing congressional candidates as well. Please feel free to comment on and criticize the system as we move forward.
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.
Theodore Roosevelt’s devotion to the preservation of American natural resources is legendary. The challenge of climate change speaks to the depths of and potential conflicts between TR’s interests in conservation, social justice and national security. While it is always risky to speculate about how a historical figure would deal with current issues, applying his philosophy to the problem may be helpful as we develop the national consensus necessary to address the issue.
First, as one of the foremost natural scientists of his day whose works are still used as references, TR would have accepted the basic science of global warming and been alarmed by its effect on forests and the environment. He would have had nothing but contempt for climate change deniers. Indeed, he probably would have come up with one of his pithy insults to describe them.
At the same time, his sympathy for the common man and inherent nationalism would cause him to bristle at the idea that Americans should bear the primary sacrifice of reducing world carbon emissions. The man who rode with poor cowboys and led them up Kettle and San Juan Hills would have remembered the average American’s sacrifices to win two world wars, defeat communism, and build an international system that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. He would not ask them for further sacrifices without being able to assure them with a straight face that others were sacrificing equally.
However, as a student of international relations dedicated to keeping America safe and strong, he would know he could not make that kind of guarantee while China and the rest of the world continued to increase their rate of emissions. The man who foresaw the rise of Japan would have understood the desire of these nations to develop their economies and gain respect in the international community, as I discussed in a previous post. He would hesitate to embark on an international crusade to force them to reduce carbon emissions if it would significantly damage American national security and create an equally damaging economic upheaval at home.
So how would he have reconciled these conflicting priorities?
Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and vitality of the nation.
Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism, August 31, 1910
Because of Roosevelt, America led the world in natural resource conservation. He would have expected it to do so again on a threat like climate change, but only to the extent other nations were willing to follow. He would remember it was China and the developing world, not the United States, that insisted the limits in the Paris Accords be voluntary and unenforceable. The agreement was a start, not a sacred totem, that bound the United States no more than other signatories. Instead, it freed us to negotiate as the great power we are to develop more stringent limits that were enforceable. TR would have pushed carbon emission limits in bilateral trade and other agreements with China and other leading nations. In particular, he would not have entered into the Obama Administration’s climate agreement with China that allowed them to avoid any real limits on their emissions until 2030, effectively ceding economic leadership to them for the next decade.
Nevertheless, he would have insisted it was our moral duty to reduce America’s emissions as much as possible. In addition to phasing out coal generation plants, he would have pushed for stringent leak detection systems on energy facilities, though he would not have sought the immediate end to oil & gas production because of the economic shock it would cause. Roosevelt would have been a fan of distributed electric generation in the form of rooftop and small solar and hydrogen fuel cell units, mainly because they give the common man, not corporations, control of a family’s energy supply. Any mandates and subsidies for preferred clean energy sources would have come with corresponding utility-style rate and quality of service regulation of those industries to prevent excess profits. Displaced workers would be re-trained and new clean energy companies would have been expected to hire them at decent wages. Hopefully, these initiatives would have been accomplished through congressional legislation, though TR would not have hesitated to use the “bully pulpit” of the presidency and executive power to achieve them if necessary.
All of this would have been contingent on the effect on the American family and our national and economic security, even if it extended the goal of carbon neutrality another few decades. Carbon reduction goals would have been calibrated to the reductions of other nations to insure the American people were not carrying too much of the load. The “big stick” of tariffs and other trade sanctions would always be available for use against willfully profligate countries, but it would have been used only when it did not damage other national security goals.
These limitations, however, would have caused the scientist and political realist in Roosevelt to reluctantly admit that the Paris Accord’s goal of reducing the increase of global temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius was unattainable. To protect both our resources and our people, adapting America to global warming would have been his highest priority. In addition to flood control and other infrastructure projects to protect communities from future sea rise and temperature changes, federal funding would have been made available to move people to safer ground. Agricultural research would concentrate on developing crops that could withstand higher temperatures. Smart, energy–efficient construction would be required so long as the average family could still afford their own home. Some of these programs already exist, but they would have been a central plank in any Roosevelt political platform.
Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on.
Theodore Roosevelt’s career proves that responding to climate change is not just a globalist mantra. It is an American nationalist issue that affects our own economic and national security. Nationalist solutions exist that meet the future needs of the American people without enslaving us to globalist guilt or greed. They are not without sacrifice, but the preservation of our independence and the American Dream for ourselves and our children are worth it.
