Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, joins me to talk about nationalism and why we seem so confused about the topic. We talk about what nationalism is, why it s bad, and what it is good.
00:00:40.140So, nationalism is of course a hot topic.
00:00:42.740There's been a battle, of course, on the left.
00:00:44.820Nationalism is evil, it's terrible, it's the worst thing one could imagine.
00:00:48.320Unless you're Ukrainian, in which case, blood and soil nationalism suddenly becomes an essential part of what you're doing.
00:00:55.920Same thing on the right, of course, there's been the battle over Christian nationalism.
00:00:59.800Whether this is something that should be the center of kind of a right-wing reordering of politics.
00:01:05.720But then we see, of course, something like the Israeli war pop off and all of a sudden nationalism is a very clear thing that everyone should support on the right as well.
00:01:15.460And so, I wanted to talk to Jeremy Carl.
00:01:17.960He is, of course, a senior fellow over at the Claremont Institute about nationalism and why we seem so confused about the topic.
00:01:29.320Alright, guys, we're going to dive into all that in one second.
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00:03:02.920All right, Jeremy, so obviously we seem to have some deep confusion in the United States about what nationalism is, whether or not it's desirable.
00:03:19.020If not nationalism, then what would be the other kind of political order that we should seek?
00:03:24.140I think a lot of people, of course, think that the nation-state is a fundamental building block of the way that we organize ourselves politically, but for some reason, just referring to someone as a nationalist is very scary.
00:03:35.900Why is that the case on both the left and the right?
00:03:41.780It's not an official thing that has anything to do with, per se, being a nationalist, which is not an infinitely old political concept.
00:03:51.200I mean, we did have different civilizational sort of ways of arranging things before we had the nation-state, which is more of a modern invention, but I think there is a tendency among critics of nationalism to, you know, say,
00:04:07.600ah, well, nationalism is like national socialism, or it's sort of this excessive patriotism and means that you hate everywhere else, or, you know,
00:04:16.700they try to sort of put all of this luggage or baggage on the top of nationalism that are not really intrinsic to the nationalist project,
00:04:25.760but they sort of try to load it down with various negative kind of concepts such that it will be discredited in people's eyes.
00:04:37.400Is this just a feature of kind of the scale of social organization?
00:04:41.120Of course, early on, city-states, you know, much smaller units of political organization were the key.
00:04:47.000You did have empires, but empires tended to be ruled from one central kind of city-state, and then they would allow other rulers to kind of control their regions.
00:04:56.580Is it just that we are now more interconnected and this issue suddenly crops up?
00:05:00.880I think that's part of it, and I think part of the blowback to nationalism is precisely also this interconnection.
00:05:07.740You know, you sort of talk about, even Trump will sort of talk about nationalists versus globalists, right?
00:05:13.320And so we have this level of interconnection that is inherent, even when we're living in nation-states today.
00:05:18.680And so there's a tendency to say, well, you know, we're global citizens or whatever have you.
00:05:25.220I mean, these are things we normally associate more with the left, although I think they're absolutely conservative globalists.
00:05:31.140And in fact, they've had way too much power, in my view, in the Republican Party for quite some time.
00:05:36.240But I do think that probably the nation-state is kind of a result of the greater scale that we're able to have due to technology to some degree.
00:05:49.440But having said that, of course, nation-states can be of tremendously different size, scale, population.
00:05:56.220I mean, I don't know technically whether political theorists of nationalism would consider Monaco with its one and a half square miles or whatever it is a full-on nation.
00:06:06.020But certainly you could point to a place like Singapore, maybe, that is certainly a nation, even though it's very, very small, I think 280 square miles or something.
00:06:16.980So what we call a nation-state or a nation can vary dramatically in scale.
00:06:22.700It can vary dramatically in population, et cetera, even all within the same umbrella of organization.
00:06:28.840Yeah, and I think that's really the problem is the terminology is just everywhere.
00:06:32.180And I think even the orientation that people understand, a lot of people would have thought of nationalism as a left-wing project back in, say, the 1700s or 1800s, right?
00:07:49.580In the U.S., obviously, even the South is in some way kind of its own nation, at least culturally in certain ways.
00:07:56.700But you could easily say the same thing about the West Coast to a lesser degree or or New England or, you know,
00:08:02.220we have nations within the fundamental nation state, depending on how you want to define them.
00:08:08.060And to some degree, we get back to what the sociologist Benedict Anderson called imagined communities,
00:08:13.540which is to say that all of these communities, I don't kind of go as far as Anderson does.
00:08:18.960I mean, I do think that there are actually real things about them.
00:08:21.460But we sort of create our own political communities ultimately over time.
00:08:26.200And that kind of creates its own meaning.
00:08:29.100In fact, even Palestine, I think one could make pretty persuasive arguments.
00:08:34.040I think the Palestinian people consider themselves a nation right now.
00:08:39.240But I think that that was a much more amorphous concept a century ago when a lot of these wars really got began to kick off.
00:08:47.520And so it's hard to kind of pin down nationalism or what a nation even is at any given point of time.
00:08:54.120When you're talking about a group of people, they can be unstable over time, despite the sort of proponents who will try to always claim that they're eternal.
00:09:03.980Yeah. And we can kind of see this in the way that the United States, again, has kind of adopted what seems like proxy nationalism.
00:09:11.240Right. For the left, again, it's it's supposed to be against nationalism.
00:09:14.080We're all universal citizens. We're global citizens. It's a global village.
00:09:18.420But at the minute that Russia crossed the border into Ukraine, all of a sudden, Ukraine becomes a very real place with a real people and real traditions.
00:09:26.820Right. All of a sudden, it becomes very sacred.
00:09:31.400It just feels like there's this desperate need.
00:09:34.560People will understand the need for this kind of this kind of organizing identity, but they want to pick and choose when it gets invoked, maybe only when it's part of the global project for the left.
00:09:48.220Absolutely. And I mean, even if you go back to for those of us of a certain age who still have some memory of of the Soviet era,
00:09:55.900I remember when it was the Ukraine and it was sort of just a part of the Soviet nation.
00:10:02.120And, you know, it took some years before I could even say Ukraine as a proper.
00:10:09.000Oh, this is a real country that has its own separate identity.
00:10:12.040And obviously, by the way, and I'm truly not trying to take sides here, I'm not suggesting that there wasn't a language and a culture and other things that were certainly typical of Ukraine way before 1989.
00:10:26.680But it is to say that for a long time, Ukraine existed within this this nation that was the Soviet Union that called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
00:10:38.480And it wasn't really seen by outsiders as kind of being its own nation.
00:10:43.600And over time, it took on that sort of a role.
00:10:47.860And these sorts of things can be very mobile over time.
00:10:50.460I mean, if you look at, say, Poland over the last century and you kind of look at the map of where Poland was in Poland,
00:10:56.300Poland literally physically moved over time.
00:10:59.560I'm actually in Hungary right now for a little while, for a few weeks.
00:11:03.940Hungary is a nation that has a much larger cultural and civilizational history than its current borders that have a lot to do with how wars turned out over the last hundred years.
00:11:14.300And so you go to the Hungarian National Art Gallery, which I did today, and you'll see lots of things.
00:11:19.440And I'll talk about this great Hungarian painter from this city that had a Hungarian name.
00:11:23.960But, you know, today it's in Slovakia.
00:11:56.600But this was this is incredibly scandalous.
00:11:58.520The question, I think, that has now come up for a lot of for a lot of people on the right is what that means.
00:12:05.420And there's been an attempt, I think, for many in the evangelical movement to look at a Christian nationalism and say, OK, well, the purely propositional American nation seems to have some serious problems.
00:12:24.060Right. We people are supposed to come in and they become Americans because they say an oath and they believe in a creed.
00:12:30.500But if they stop believing in the creed or they renounce the oath, they still stay American.
00:12:35.760So it doesn't seem actually very propositional.
00:12:38.020So so there seems to be a driving for something else, an identity that's beyond just a creedal identity in the United States.
00:12:48.800And they seem to be driving towards a religious identity.
00:12:51.220But that also seems scandalous, even for many right wing.
00:12:55.860And the Christian nationalism debate is in some ways even trickier because there's so many different definitions, even among, you know, Stephen Wolf, who's kind of written the biggest book on this at this point, the case for Christian nationalism.
00:13:10.420In fact, it's really the only kind of systematic, synthetic book that I'm aware of on the subject, even though a lot of people talk about it.
00:13:17.560But, you know, he has his definition. Other people have their own definition and and whether or not they're for it really depends on how they're defining Christian nationalism, which is, of course, in its in and of itself, a creedal faith.
00:13:31.620But Wolf, in his book and in his talks, I mean, he he does kind of make reference to an ethnos as part of that, which is not is not necessarily racial.
00:13:42.440But it's a group of people that see themselves as a group that have the sort of same customs, more as traditions.
00:13:48.640They see themselves as having a common history in a certain way.
00:13:51.700And, you know, he sort of suggests that the Christianity is, is, I think, quite correctly, a part of that history, a core part of that history and what it means to be an American, which doesn't mean, of course, you can't be American if you're not Christian.
00:14:05.320But but sort of the role that Christianity plays and how close it is to the state is sort of central to the question, Christian nationalist project.
00:14:13.900Yeah, I have my own issues with Christian nationalism, not that I disagree with the fact that Christian principles should be, you know, woven into into our law or the way that we kind of understand our identity.
00:14:27.140But just that, you know, Armenia is also a Christian nation.
00:14:30.340So that seems perhaps necessary, but insufficient to an actual definition of American identity.
00:14:37.140I do think it's interesting, of course, a lot of people immediately when they hear nationalism, they hear ethno nationalism.
00:14:45.100You know, that that's that's kind of the the red flag that a lot of people, even people who are on the right or are worried about this.
00:14:51.980And you brought up an important point there that is really critical.
00:14:55.380A lot of people have conflated race and ethnos in a way that I think is an absolute tragedy, because I think the the identity of pretty much every peoples throughout.
00:15:07.140History would have been defined as an ethnos and and there's many what would be considered right wing or reactionary authors that actually lamented this this kind of vulgar transition from the idea of ethnos to genetic race.
00:15:24.700When this started to become a thing in the 1900s.
00:15:28.520And I think the fact that that is an idea that that even the right seems unable to separate anymore is a real failure in their ability to understand what would be necessary to have a nation that could combine people into one identity, but not be running some kind of one drop purity test throughout its population.
00:15:49.500Right. Right. No, exactly. And in fact, I've got a forthcoming book that looks at some of these issues coming out early next year.
00:15:56.520And one of the things I talk about is sort of how do you recreate an American ethnos?
00:16:00.320Because, I mean, there's plenty of people, just to be fair, who would say we shouldn't, you know, we can just be this happy, totally multicultural group with, you know, a bunch of very distinct cultures, maybe even without all that much in common.
00:16:13.960But we're all sort of living under the same umbrella. And you can say, well, maybe, you know, it's actually all creedal.
00:16:19.480And as I think you correctly point out, hey, we're not kicking out people who don't believe in whatever elements you or I might define as the American creed.
00:16:27.760Secondly, even figuring out what that creed is, I think, is questionable.
00:16:31.060But I sort of look at, well, you know, what would it take to reconstitute a majority ethnos and a majority culture out of, you know, out of who we have here already?
00:16:40.180Because we're not I mean, we can deport people who are illegally, certainly.
00:16:44.320But we're not we're not going to change the fact that we're certainly a multiracial democracy here in the United States.
00:16:52.180So the question is, how can you create a common culture, a common feeling of being a common history around where we are today?
00:16:59.880Now, I wouldn't have put us where we are today. I think it's a it's a challenging project, but it's a project that the right should not shy away from trying to do and trying to define.
00:17:08.600Because if not, the left is going to do it for us in ways that I think will be really unsustainable for the American project over the long term.
00:17:15.640Yeah, I think that's critical. It's so easy to get terrified.
00:17:18.800And I see a lot of these people who are supposed to be on the new right running away from this issue, just screaming with their hair on fire.
00:17:24.940Oh, no, we can we can organize around the logos. We can stay a creedal nation.
00:17:29.160It's like, guys, that's obviously not working for you like that.
00:17:32.740That project has has failed, whether it's it's an inherent failure of the organizing mechanism or one that was due to, you know, multiple decisions that were made along the way when it comes to things like immigration and integration.
00:17:45.920It's hard to say, but it's very clear that the left has the advantage here.
00:17:51.060They've understood that the reason that the left is winning on this issue and owns this issue pretty much in its entirety is that they recognize the contradictions and it's part of their game plan to point out the contradictions and sitting there and saying there are no contradictions.
00:18:05.060It'll all just be fine. Yeah. The left has a terrible vision.
00:18:08.740It's going to destroy everyone. But I understand that some section of reality and the person who has some grasp on this is going to win because people can kind of smell that reality behind it.
00:18:19.780Sure. And it's really white Christian Americans, as we were talking about Christian nationalism, that have kind of are the are the most retarded, if you'll pardon me, using the R word in that way.
00:18:30.300I mean, they just they can't see it. And, you know, we can speculate as to why they're sort of so so used to being the majority.
00:18:38.880They can't think in any other way or any broader way or they just they've been brainwashed or or whatever have you.
00:18:45.100But I think it's it's you know, everybody else has kind of woken up and figured out what time it is.
00:18:50.100And a lot of, you know, a lot of people who should really be with us who are conservatives are kind of engaging in this solely creedal nation family by which fantasy,
00:19:02.040which I'm not suggesting that trying to have a set of common principles is a is a bad thing or that we shouldn't try to, you know,
00:19:11.080articulate the the the goals of the Declaration of Independence of the Constitution or say this is important or teach them.
00:19:17.000And I think certainly an area that you and I would, I think, agree on is that there is no neutral ground in the education system and that we should be unashamedly teaching these sorts of things in schools.
00:19:27.540The question is whether we really have the level of unanimity in terms of the leadership of society to kind of have anything resembling a uniform vision of what that looks like.
00:19:38.340And I think that, unfortunately, we don't.
00:19:41.080So it's not that I'm suggesting that the ideological elements of nationhood are irrelevant.
00:19:47.720I'm just suggesting that they are far from sufficient and that we need to recognize that sooner rather than later,
00:19:53.700as we're trying to look to to kind of reconstitute an American nation on a little bit better lines than we're doing right now.
00:20:00.440Yeah, that seems very clear for a lot of people.
00:20:04.020I wrote an article article here recently about the history podcaster Dan Carlin,
00:20:09.540who who recognized that there was no magical dirt under Israel and that if Palestinians moved in and, you know, suffrage inside that nation,
00:20:18.220they would fundamentally transform the nation.
00:20:21.200For some reason, that seems very difficult then for people to kind of move over and apply to the United States.
00:20:27.080Maybe the dirt in America is just that much more magic, but it seems like there's this lack of understanding.
00:20:34.440And you would think that facing the consequences of multiculturalism, looking at the protests that are going on,
00:20:40.420the kind of the terrified look that a lot of left wing progressives have had towards the way that many of their more radical flanks are addressing,
00:20:49.860say, you know, Jewish people now that they're protesting Israel.
00:20:52.660Well, you would think that they would understand the kind of the wages of what they're pushing for.
00:20:57.600But this just doesn't seem to bring any kind of critical thinking into frame.
00:21:01.580Right. Well, I mean, denial is not just a river in Egypt. Right.
00:21:04.860I mean, it's really that there's a lot of that going on, unfortunately, in the right.
00:21:08.800I mean, we don't we don't want to accept that we sort of we sort of failed in this strong elements of the American project here in recent years.
00:21:18.940And as you point out, you know, there's sort of one standard for Israel and there's a very different standard for how the same people in good faith,
00:21:27.220even are looking at the the American project or there's one standard for Ukraine and there's another standard for how we're supposed to look at the American project.
00:21:50.340I'm not suggesting that we should all sort of be the same in some sort of Stepford Wives society.
00:21:55.360But it is to say that in general, when you have polity, a polity that considers itself really diverse, that tends to be a polity that winds up in really unpleasant civil wars.
00:22:07.660And that if it's a more unified polity that sort of sees itself as all part of the same civilizational project, that's a good thing.
00:22:14.660And that's not to suggest that any particular group of people is bad.
00:22:18.840It's to suggest that having, you know, several different distinct groups trying to constitute one country, but not really having a lot in common, that in and of itself is not a good thing.
00:22:31.320And we shouldn't be shy, in my view, about saying that.
00:22:34.240And I certainly try to say that pretty clearly.
00:22:36.640Yeah, it is amazing to watch a bunch of, again, evangelical Christians who are terrified of the idea of Christian nationalism immediately rush and say, but we have to defend a Jewish state.
00:23:42.340I mean, we theoretically have laws on the books that you can't become a U.S. citizen unless you know English.
00:23:47.560And those are completely violated in practice or even doing things simply as, you know, you have an English language ballot, period.
00:23:56.120You know, and that's how we we do things.
00:23:58.180I do think that you can sort of there is a there is a scholar in England, Eric Kaufman, who wrote an interesting book called White Shift.
00:24:10.400And Eric is himself sort of multiracial, and he sort of talks about what might be called multiracial whiteness, which is sometimes used as a kind of humorous term.
00:24:21.380But it's essentially the idea that you may have groups from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds or mixed ethnic backgrounds, which is obviously the fastest growing group in the United States that over time kind of tend to identify with the founders and they kind of see themselves.
00:24:42.180And interestingly, somebody like Barack Obama could have done this.
00:24:45.640I mean, Barack Obama is not descended from any American slaves, but he is descended from American slave owners and founders.
00:24:57.420And again, I'm not trying to beat up on him for doing this because there are there are reasons why, you know, he may look in the mirror and choose to, like, say, well, I'm going to identify with African-Americans.
00:25:08.520But it's not necessary that that would happen.
00:25:10.900He could have easily told a different story about himself.
00:25:13.660And in fact, one of his siblings who actually lives in China effectively kind of did that and never understood Barack Obama's sort of obsession with his blackness in that way, as opposed to some of the other ways in which he would have been tied to America's history.
00:25:30.820So these things do come down to choices that we make choices that we make choices that we tell about ourselves.
00:25:37.140And interestingly, again, the most dramatic example that you could probably point to of all of the kind of why this doesn't necessarily need to be the difference between an ethnos and race is here in Hungary, where I happen to be for a few weeks.
00:25:55.080It's actually not mythological. Sorry, I misspoke.
00:25:58.820Hungary was sort of conquered about a thousand years ago by Central Asian nomads.
00:26:03.100And it picked up a language from those people that is totally distinct in the world, except I think it has some relationship with Finnish, but it's not at all like any of their Central European neighbors.
00:26:17.280They picked up a sort of cultural identity of themselves as kind of being descended from the sort of Central Asian warriors in some parts.
00:26:25.880But it turns out if you actually kind of look at the history and the genetic history that we've been able to do over the last 20 years, all of those Central Asians and their descendants, for the most part, with a tiny, tiny exception, were sort of elite in Hungarian society.
00:26:39.020They were wiped out like 700 years ago. And so if you look, Hungarians are genetically pretty much like all of their Central Asian neighbors, but they have this, excuse me, Central European neighbors, but they have this very strong ethnos, this identity that's very unique that has to do with their shared history, even though it's not a genetic history, it's a cultural history.
00:27:02.620And so that's about as dramatic example as you're going to get of how I think ethnos can be very different than how we would think of race and how culture kind of plays into these issues.
00:27:15.720But I think that there are a lot of things that we can do in the U.S. that we can unify around, whether it be language, whether it be religion in many cases, whether it be a kind of multi-ethnic identification with the founders or with ancestry you might have,
00:27:31.240that it goes back to earlier periods of American history. And we could choose to do that. We just haven't historically chosen to do that, at least over the last half century.
00:27:41.340Yeah, I think a really key part is, of course, also the moratorium on immigration or almost a complete stop because you have to stabilize the population.
00:27:49.840I think there have been many points inside American history where we probably were moving towards an ethnogenesis, where we probably were moving towards a true identity, a real understanding of what American,
00:28:01.240was going forward. But then we have these massive influxes of immigration that radically altered the landscape of the United States change, especially the urban centers and their populations.
00:28:14.640They change the balance of power, especially in the democratic system. It doesn't allow you to heal some critical relations, of course, as well.
00:28:23.320I mean, look at the special relationship, at least, that African-Americans used to have as a minority population in the United States when they were almost a singular minority population.
00:28:34.680They had a much more powerful kind of link in history to what was going on. Now it's just one of many, and it seems like it's more and more difficult for them to continue to maintain a seat at the table,
00:28:46.760if not for kind of a linchpin role they play inside a democratic coalition. And so you lose that ability to kind of, I think, reconcile issues.
00:28:54.960In fact, exacerbating those issues continues to be a key part of driving the democratic process rather than letting everything heal and, again, kind of congealing into one ethno.
00:29:05.840Sure. And you mentioned particularly with African-Americans. I mean, I think right now, greater than 15% of today's African-Americans are either African immigrants themselves or descendants of 20th or 21st century African immigrants.
00:29:21.800So already you begin to get some splits in that population that have very different histories that they're telling each other about themselves.
00:29:30.580But even among non-African-Americans, if you look, kind of, if you go back, because I think immigration really is the key and having essentially almost a net zero immigration for a significant period of time would be the key.
00:29:43.720If you look at kind of what was almost the heyday of like cheesy level Americanness in people's minds, it was the 1950s maybe.
00:29:53.160And that's not a coincidence that in the 1920s, we have the Johnson Reed Act, the most strict immigration law that America has ever passed.
00:30:02.800That goes on until 1965 when you have Hartzeller that kind of opens the floodgates and brings our current immigration.
00:30:09.560But it's really this kind of like late 50s timeframe where we've had very little immigration.
00:30:15.460We've had also the experience of the army going to war together, where you have like the multi-ethnic buddy movie.
00:30:21.760That's almost the cliche of, you know, the Italian soldier and the Jewish soldier and the, you know, upper, you know, upper New England soldier and they all get together and they all become American.
00:30:33.360But we really did begin to cohere in this in this kind of process of ethnogenesis where we became this unified American people.
00:30:43.480And again, I'm oversimplifying that, obviously, but there was a strong element of that.
00:30:48.820And then in 1965, we opened up the floodgates to everyone and anyone.
00:30:53.700And now we are kind of a Babylon of Tower of Babel, rather, I guess, of squabbling nations and languages, you know, all sitting inside the same state.
00:31:04.540And we, you know, in many ways, it also kind of feels like we're just at the looting stage of the empire at this point.
00:31:11.400And nobody really knows how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
00:31:15.200Yeah, I also wonder about some of the key cultural elements.
00:31:18.860You know, you made the mention there, of course, people going to war together was a key binding thing.
00:31:24.460And another big part of, of course, that big push towards ethnogenesis during that time was the unification of, I think, a narrative in the school system, public education becoming uniform, television, shared radio programs.
00:31:38.200For the first time, people on entirely different ends of the country could uniformly get the same culture delivered.
00:31:45.400And that kind of allowed for that unification in many ways.
00:31:49.180But the big problem, of course, is the people in charge of all of this stuff.
00:31:53.760Yes, it would, of course, be great if we could have a unifying educational system and media apparatus.
00:32:00.140You know, Patrick Deneen, in his new book, Regime Change, talked about, you know, mandatory civic service, creating that kind of wartime camaraderie.
00:32:08.920All those things seem good, except, of course, the problem is it would be the government in charge of all of these things.
00:32:15.780And the government is trying to actively destroy everything good in society.
00:32:19.120So, so, yes, if we could have, if we could, we could forge a positive identity if we just wielded the entire total state.
00:32:26.880But unfortunately, it seems like, seems like that's not in the near future.
00:32:34.520I mean, for just what you said, and I think we've got a variety of potential things we can do, and none of them are great options for, I think, the reasons that you just outlined.
00:32:43.560And I'd say one of the things you can do, and you're beginning to see, as we are beginning to see real political sorting geographically happening at increasing rates in the United States, I think, at the city level and even at the state level, more importantly, which is where it matters a little bit, because as much as the feds have kind of tried to erode state sovereignty, states really do practically still have some sovereignty in some important areas.
00:33:08.020But, you know, you, you get the sort of stories that we're talking about, you get the sort of plans we're starting about, you see it at a state level, maybe in ways that we've seen in a state like Florida, which has kind of pushed some aggressive things in this domain, and obviously has a very diverse population that they're working with and doing that.
00:33:26.600Or in a state like Montana, or in a state like Montana, where I live, you know, we're also doing some things.
00:33:31.100So I think that the best thing we can probably do right now is to assertively have the total state working at a state level.
00:33:40.100I don't know, that probably violates your broader formulation, but it's the best I can kind of come up with is that you sort of have that working in smaller geographic units,
00:33:50.860and hopefully the thing that you create is appealing enough that maybe some other folks decide that they're going to take it on.
00:33:56.960Or maybe you kind of wind up with, with a few very different versions of what America looks like, but they're all kind of able at least to kind of muddle along under the same umbrella in some way.
00:34:10.540Again, none of those are ideal solutions, but they're, they're better than what we have now.
00:34:16.380Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm with you that the regional solution is the, is the best one, though, because I'm not long on the, you know, American project.
00:34:25.560I don't, I don't know that the America as we see it now is going to be able to hold together, but that does mean that your regional project becomes even more important.
00:34:34.500I guess that is the next thing I'd ask you about this.
00:34:37.160It seems like democracy is a big problem here.
00:34:39.720You know, again, like I said, the, these multi-ethnic, you know, the empires have existed successfully before the real, but they almost uniformly were again, run in non-democratic ways.
00:34:52.860And you had kind of these regional rulerships that were allowed to be given the level of flexibility for each group to kind of do its own thing, you know, have its own rules, have its own culture, custom, those kinds of things.
00:35:04.760And they still kick back to the central state.
00:35:06.920They still kick back to, to kind of the, the governing entity, allowing them to stay as one political organizing unit while operating independently enough to not let their differences destroy each other.
00:35:19.900Yeah, you begin to see, I mean, I, I've heard talks about, talk about this, where in California, you're beginning to see this sort of ethnic enclave is of almost take root.
00:35:29.580And maybe again, this is like an acceptable third best sort of solution where we, we do some things that kind of alter existing civil rights law, which is run totally off the rails.
00:35:44.720And also in many ways, totally contrary to the existing, the intent of the law when it was put in.
00:35:52.680But you sort of restore a lot of private freedom of association for people.
00:35:56.560And maybe they begin to self-organize in some groups that are a little more sustainable.
00:36:01.560And they kind of work as communities where we do have this greater level of agreement.
00:36:08.000They run their own affairs to a significant degree, but there's, you know, there's a central state that is ultimately overarching it.
00:36:15.220They're each kicking back to the central state because ultimately they decide that there's enough value in that central state that they want to keep it going.
00:36:24.660But people can kind of live in ways that are more appealing to them individually.
00:36:30.980I think there are some opportunities to do that, but it's really hard to know exactly how that's going to develop.
00:36:38.720It's sort of contingencies upon contingencies.
00:36:41.640And all you can kind of do is try to think about it and be ready.
00:36:45.340And when opportunities present themselves to sort of push forward, as Rahm Emanuel said, never let a crisis go to waste.
00:36:52.380So I think we're not going to have a shortage of crises, and we just need to be ready to come up with attractive alternatives to have governance post those crises.
00:37:06.580Yeah, I tend to think, and of course, you know, situations are, of course, wildly different at the moment, but there is a little peering into possible futures, hopefully not.
00:37:15.160But South Africa and kind of what Afroforum has done in many ways with their organization where, you know, the central government is just a failure.
00:37:25.640They're not going to solve most of their problems.
00:37:28.360And so they're building their own colleges.
00:37:30.260They're building their own electric grids.
00:37:32.240They're, you know, filling in their potholes.
00:37:36.200And they're organizing along cultural lines.
00:37:40.020You know, you have to speak Afrikaans to join certain communities.
00:37:43.100But these things are, they're coordinating with other communities.
00:37:46.880These are multi-ethnic coalitions that are working to defend their ability to have these regional communities and protect themselves from what is a wider kind of devolving situation inside their nation.
00:37:59.400And actually, in many ways, South Africa is often cited as a really bad example of like, oh, my gosh, what's going to happen?
00:38:05.340But in some ways, you can see it as a very optimistic example, because guess what?
00:38:08.900We are, for a variety of reasons, we're not going to go anywhere near, I think, the level of dysfunctionality the South African state has.
00:38:15.740I think just the numbers and the balance and the inter-ethnic dynamics and the history, it's just, it's all much more favorable here.
00:38:22.780And in South Africa, I think it's much more unfavorable toward having a long-term peaceful solution.
00:38:28.800And yet, they do seem to be muddling along, not in a great situation, but essentially, people are building their own institutions and things are working functionally.
00:38:39.560It should be, at least in theory, dramatically more easy to do that in a U.S. context with different groups.
00:38:48.120And again, those groups do not necessarily, or even most probably, are not going to be defined along anything like purely racial lines or even cultural lines, per se.
00:39:02.680It could be a million different permutations that we can't even begin to imagine.
00:39:07.020But essentially, you build these different communities that decide that they're able to live together, at least in peace, with their neighbors as long as they can get their own autonomy, and they kick enough back to the central state that things can still function there.
00:39:22.960And I don't think that that's at all unrealistic.
00:39:27.140And as other people have said, I'm sort of short the United States, but I'm long America, or maybe Americas, we should say, in this context.
00:39:37.160I mean, I think we've still got a tremendous amount of talent.
00:39:40.580We've got a tremendous amount of goodwill.
00:39:42.540You can kind of come here and say, oh, my gosh, things look so dysfunctional.
00:39:45.620But then when you compare it to the vast majority of other places in the world, we still have a lot of capital of all types, including human capital that are built up here.
00:39:56.200Yeah, and I don't mean to spread out too many black pills here.
00:39:59.620I do think you're right that there is still a good future.
00:40:02.940I think a lot of people are too married to the idea that if you don't have exactly the project you have now, then there can't be a bright future tomorrow.
00:40:10.760And I think it's critical to remember that the nation is the people, not a random assortment of kind of government structures that you hope kind of perpetuate for eternity.
00:40:22.200And I think, like you said, I'm long on the American people for sure.
00:40:26.540So before we go, I want to ask you one more thing.
00:40:31.320We have kind of the nationalism conference with Harzoni.
00:40:36.640There are multiple places that are kind of looking at this international nationalist movement, which is ironic, but I think kind of necessary.
00:40:46.200What we have now is this drive for the global village.
00:40:50.960It's this drive towards this global understanding of what a nation is and forcing that definition on to everybody from Woodrow Wilson on.
00:40:58.920This has been kind of a key project that has just destroyed a lot of a lot of peoples.
00:41:04.440But the thing that I think is going to be critical is kind of a understanding of a multipolar world in which these nations are allowed to exist and they don't have to be forced onto each other's identities, don't have to be forced onto each other.
00:41:20.300They're willing to come to, at least at some level, the defense of each other.
00:41:24.580I don't know exactly how that jives with a certain level of isolationism that a lot of people, myself included, would like to express.
00:41:32.380But what do you think about these international nationalist movements and their future?
00:41:36.340Yeah, I'm a huge fan of international nationalism.
00:41:39.720It's one of many ways when I'm here studying in Hungary with my friends at the Danube Institute is what that looks like in a Hungarian context, which is not the same.
00:41:49.940I mean, I think this is really the key to your project that you've laid out here.
00:41:53.940That's not the same as what it looks like in an American context.
00:41:57.540It's not even the same as what it looks like in a Polish context or a French context.
00:42:17.860And I think the key is to have that sense of healthy nationalism, healthy national pride, healthy sense of belonging and identity without getting into sort of weird nationalist supremacism, which I think has always been the weakness of nationalism.
00:42:32.880Not just to kind of proclaim that I'm happy with my group and my nation and I like how it is, but to sort of say, and we're better and therefore we need to go dominate all these other nations and to sort of be very respectful of other people's traditions, of their
00:42:48.360sovereignties, of their cultures, to not kind of think that we can come in and sort of democratize the world as we try to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:42:57.120And I don't think that those projects turned out very well, but to just really have that that healthy level of respect for difference, to accept that nationalism indeed is an international project.
00:43:11.180And I think maybe that's ultimately the key.
00:43:16.020We're not trying to kind of have one, you know, undifferentiated mass of everybody consuming the same entertainment, same religion, same culture, et cetera.
00:43:26.260But that we can have unique cultural differences within nations and that that's actually a good thing.
00:43:34.500It's actually part of, you know, I'd even argue it's like the different faces of God that you see in different nations, different cultural groups.
00:43:44.680And we don't want to just sort of, you know, make this all try to to make this all one good thing, which will actually end up making it all one terrible thing.
00:43:54.900We need to to respect people's rights to maintain their own cultures, their own languages, their own ethnic identities, and understand that that's actually ultimately a positive thing and not a negative thing.
00:44:08.180Globalism is kind of the danger much more than nationalism.
00:44:12.440All right, Jeremy, well, I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up.
00:44:14.380But is there anything people should be looking for?
00:44:16.180I know you said you have a book coming up.
00:44:17.680Anything else that people should be keeping an eye out for?
00:44:19.760Yeah, well, I have the book coming out next year where I look at kind of in the context of this, the way that kind of anti-whiteism has become a really unifying force on particularly the left in the United States and sort of how that plays out.
00:44:37.540It very much plays into these ethnic issues, these national issues.
00:44:40.720So I'll look for that in the next February, March time frame.
00:44:44.820I've got my Twitter feed at Jeremy Carl Ford that you should certainly follow.
00:44:49.040And I put links to new articles that I'm working on, including a piece on Christian nationalism right now that should be out in the next bit of time.
00:44:57.200But, you know, always a pleasure to speak with you, Aaron, and look forward to chatting more in the future.
00:45:03.800All right, guys, thank you for watching this episode.
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