In the past, I’ve written about why I’m a pluralist, and I also a great book I read on Christian Nationalism. The reason I am pluralist and not a nationalist is the same reason why I’m liberal, non-religious, and capitalist with a strong libertarian streak.
Nationalism Doesn’t Work
I reject the politics and culture of inflicting moral violence on people for arbitrary reasons. It’s nearly impossible to make people like something they don’t like and bad to punish people for acting upon preferences that harm no one.
Nationalism does all of these things. In The Religion of American Greatness, Paul Miller’s outlines how Nationalism, pushed to anxiety from a changing world, looks to resolve complicated political, moral, and cultural disagreements. It does this by codifying one answer (a “thick” answer) to these questions into law and policy, and enforcing that culture with the force of state violence.
This doesn’t solve the problem of disagreement, but instead causes minority groups to rebel against the status quo, making the problem worse. This leaves even more confusion and disagreement, which causes the nationalist to start the cycle over again.
“Nationalisms” Everywhere
Nationalists aren’t the only group that stubbornly insist on protecting and preserving thick identities with state violence, as other groups do so as well. Our world, culture, and communities constantly change, not just at the level of national electoral politics, so we find “nationalist” tendencies on smaller scales.
NIMBYs in America can’t let go of a thick conception of what their community and housing stock looks like. Social conservatism can’t let go of a thick conception of gender and sexual roles. Protectionists can’t let go of a thick conception of what the economy should look like. All of these groups look to inflict these thick conceptions on the rest of us through various government policies, causing various harms and divisions.
On a deep level, these ideologies are the outgrowth of fear of change and wanting to use state power to freeze society in a particular time of history indefinitely. We want to preserve the good old days! Placating this nostalgic impulse makes us all poorer, more divided, less happy, and overall worse off.
The World Changes, And So Must We
I reject Nationalism because it’s a non-solution (state violence) for a non-problem (the constant change of life) that inevitably creates real problems (division, poverty, conflict) that actually hurts people.
More controversially, I reject supernatural thinking, anti-market policies,1 and illiberal policies because they are all similarly non-solutions that create real problems.2 In contrast, I am a liberal, secular, pluralist, and capitalist because these are the best philosophies and systems to manage the world’s changes.
We should be skeptical of someone who argues against liberalism, secularism, pluralism, and market societies because they are so effective at solving human problems. We shouldn’t be dogmatic in their defense, but we should proportion our belief to the evidence, and the evidence for their success is massive.
We cannot change the world, nor can we shield ourselves from change; we can only hope to change ourselves for the better in response to it. Nationalism denies these realities. Nationalism is wrong; therefore, I reject Nationalism and its adjacent backwards ideologies.
I’m not referring to regulation or redistribution here, but command-and-control economic policies
I won’t go far to say that these policies and thought patterns are responses to non-problems like Nationalism is.