The Auron MacIntyre Show - Proxy Nationalism ｜ Guest： Jeremy Carl ｜ 11⧸9⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, thanks for joining me.

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00:00:40.140 So, nationalism is of course a hot topic.

00:00:42.740 There's been a battle, of course, on the left.

00:00:44.820 Nationalism is evil, it's terrible, it's the worst thing one could imagine.

00:00:48.320 Unless you're Ukrainian, in which case, blood and soil nationalism suddenly becomes an essential part of what you're doing. 0.96

00:00:55.920 Same thing on the right, of course, there's been the battle over Christian nationalism.

00:00:59.800 Whether this is something that should be the center of kind of a right-wing reordering of politics.

00:01:05.720 But 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.

00:01:15.460 And so, I wanted to talk to Jeremy Carl.

00:01:17.960 He is, of course, a senior fellow over at the Claremont Institute about nationalism and why we seem so confused about the topic.

00:01:24.880 Jeremy, thank you for joining me.

00:01:26.760 Thanks so much for having me, Oren.

00:01:28.800 Absolutely.

00:01:29.320 Alright, guys, we're going to dive into all that in one second.

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00:03:02.920 All 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.

00:03:19.020 If not nationalism, then what would be the other kind of political order that we should seek?

00:03:24.140 I 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.

00:03:35.900 Why is that the case on both the left and the right?

00:03:39.600 Well, I think it's sort of coded.

00:03:41.780 It's not an official thing that has anything to do with, per se, being a nationalist, which is not an infinitely old political concept.

00:03:51.200 I 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,

00:04:07.600 ah, well, nationalism is like national socialism, or it's sort of this excessive patriotism and means that you hate everywhere else, or, you know,

00:04:16.700 they 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,

00:04:25.760 but they sort of try to load it down with various negative kind of concepts such that it will be discredited in people's eyes.

00:04:37.400 Is this just a feature of kind of the scale of social organization?

00:04:41.120 Of course, early on, city-states, you know, much smaller units of political organization were the key.

00:04:47.000 You 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.

00:04:56.580 Is it just that we are now more interconnected and this issue suddenly crops up?

00:05:00.880 I think that's part of it, and I think part of the blowback to nationalism is precisely also this interconnection.

00:05:07.740 You know, you sort of talk about, even Trump will sort of talk about nationalists versus globalists, right?

00:05:13.320 And so we have this level of interconnection that is inherent, even when we're living in nation-states today.

00:05:18.680 And so there's a tendency to say, well, you know, we're global citizens or whatever have you.

00:05:25.220 I mean, these are things we normally associate more with the left, although I think they're absolutely conservative globalists.

00:05:31.140 And in fact, they've had way too much power, in my view, in the Republican Party for quite some time.

00:05:36.240 But 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.

00:05:49.440 But having said that, of course, nation-states can be of tremendously different size, scale, population.

00:05:56.220 I 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.

00:06:06.020 But 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.

00:06:15.380 And then you have Russia, right?

00:06:16.980 So what we call a nation-state or a nation can vary dramatically in scale.

00:06:22.700 It can vary dramatically in population, et cetera, even all within the same umbrella of organization.

00:06:28.840 Yeah, and I think that's really the problem is the terminology is just everywhere.

00:06:32.180 And 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?

00:06:41.580 You're breaking down monarchies.

00:06:43.540 You're getting rid of these reactionary governments and replacing it with democracy and rule of law and all these things.

00:06:49.840 And so these were left-wing, in some sense, movements, breaking down more traditional forms of organization.

00:06:58.280 Now it's considered a staunchly right-wing idea in many cases.

00:07:02.660 But like you said, it seems to apply both to small islands and giant continent or multi-continent empires.

00:07:10.720 There doesn't seem to be any real grasp of what a nation could be.

00:07:14.520 Sure. And you do see, of course, within some of the bigger nations, some tensions even within that project.

00:07:21.540 Russia is federated in all sorts of really complicated ways.

00:07:25.880 And as a non-Russia expert, I wouldn't even pretend to get in to all of them. 0.61

00:07:30.400 But there are various autonomous communities and states and other sorts of things, some of them dating from the Soviet era,

00:07:37.060 where they've tried to kind of put this very unwieldy large geographic area together under a nation,

00:07:47.280 kind of the umbrella of a nation.

00:07:49.580 In the U.S., obviously, even the South is in some way kind of its own nation, at least culturally in certain ways.

00:07:56.700 But you could easily say the same thing about the West Coast to a lesser degree or or New England or, you know,

00:08:02.220 we have nations within the fundamental nation state, depending on how you want to define them.

00:08:08.060 And to some degree, we get back to what the sociologist Benedict Anderson called imagined communities,

00:08:13.540 which is to say that all of these communities, I don't kind of go as far as Anderson does.

00:08:18.960 I mean, I do think that there are actually real things about them.

00:08:21.460 But we sort of create our own political communities ultimately over time.

00:08:26.200 And that kind of creates its own meaning.

00:08:29.100 In fact, even Palestine, I think one could make pretty persuasive arguments. 0.98

00:08:34.040 I think the Palestinian people consider themselves a nation right now.

00:08:39.240 But 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.

00:08:47.520 And so it's hard to kind of pin down nationalism or what a nation even is at any given point of time.

00:08:54.120 When 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.

00:09:03.980 Yeah. And we can kind of see this in the way that the United States, again, has kind of adopted what seems like proxy nationalism.

00:09:11.240 Right. For the left, again, it's it's supposed to be against nationalism.

00:09:14.080 We're all universal citizens. We're global citizens. It's a global village.

00:09:18.420 But 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.

00:09:26.820 Right. All of a sudden, it becomes very sacred.

00:09:30.160 Same thing for the right.

00:09:31.400 It just feels like there's this desperate need.

00:09:34.560 People 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.

00:09:46.800 What do you think about that?

00:09:48.220 Absolutely. 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,

00:09:55.900 I remember when it was the Ukraine and it was sort of just a part of the Soviet nation.

00:10:02.120 And, you know, it took some years before I could even say Ukraine as a proper.

00:10:09.000 Oh, this is a real country that has its own separate identity.

00:10:12.040 And 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.

00:10:26.680 But 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.

00:10:38.480 And it wasn't really seen by outsiders as kind of being its own nation.

00:10:43.600 And over time, it took on that sort of a role.

00:10:47.860 And these sorts of things can be very mobile over time.

00:10:50.460 I 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,

00:10:56.300 Poland literally physically moved over time.

00:10:59.560 I'm actually in Hungary right now for a little while, for a few weeks.

00:11:03.940 Hungary 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.

00:11:14.300 And so you go to the Hungarian National Art Gallery, which I did today, and you'll see lots of things.

00:11:19.440 And I'll talk about this great Hungarian painter from this city that had a Hungarian name.

00:11:23.960 But, you know, today it's in Slovakia.

00:11:25.820 Today it's in Romania.

00:11:27.240 And so what constitutes a nation even can really change dramatically over time?

00:11:34.280 So for the right, there's obviously there's a more interest in nationalism there.

00:11:41.560 You have the idea, of course, Donald Trump coming out rather controversially for some reason at the time, saying, I'm a nationalist.

00:11:49.560 This this was a huge deal.

00:11:50.800 This is very transgressive.

00:11:52.680 Hey, I'm running for the presidency of a nation.

00:11:55.060 I am therefore a nationalist.

00:11:56.600 But this was this is incredibly scandalous.

00:11:58.520 The question, I think, that has now come up for a lot of for a lot of people on the right is what that means.

00:12:05.420 And 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.

00:12:24.060 Right. We people are supposed to come in and they become Americans because they say an oath and they believe in a creed.

00:12:30.500 But if they stop believing in the creed or they renounce the oath, they still stay American.

00:12:35.760 So it doesn't seem actually very propositional.

00:12:38.020 So so there seems to be a driving for something else, an identity that's beyond just a creedal identity in the United States.

00:12:48.800 And they seem to be driving towards a religious identity.

00:12:51.220 But that also seems scandalous, even for many right wing.

00:12:55.460 Absolutely.

00:12:55.860 And 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.

00:13:10.420 In 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.

00:13:17.560 But, 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.

00:13:31.620 But 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.

00:13:42.440 But it's a group of people that see themselves as a group that have the sort of same customs, more as traditions.

00:13:48.640 They see themselves as having a common history in a certain way.

00:13:51.700 And, 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.

00:14:05.320 But 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.

00:14:13.900 Yeah, 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.

00:14:27.140 But just that, you know, Armenia is also a Christian nation.

00:14:30.340 So that seems perhaps necessary, but insufficient to an actual definition of American identity.

00:14:37.140 I do think it's interesting, of course, a lot of people immediately when they hear nationalism, they hear ethno nationalism.

00:14:45.100 You 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.

00:14:51.980 And you brought up an important point there that is really critical.

00:14:55.380 A 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.

00:15:07.140 History 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.

00:15:24.040 Right. Right.

00:15:24.700 When this started to become a thing in the 1900s.

00:15:28.520 And 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.

00:15:49.500 Right. Right. No, exactly. And in fact, I've got a forthcoming book that looks at some of these issues coming out early next year.

00:15:56.520 And one of the things I talk about is sort of how do you recreate an American ethnos?

00:16:00.320 Because, 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.

00:16:13.960 But we're all sort of living under the same umbrella. And you can say, well, maybe, you know, it's actually all creedal.

00:16:19.480 And 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.

00:16:27.760 Secondly, even figuring out what that creed is, I think, is questionable.

00:16:31.060 But 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? 0.76

00:16:40.180 Because we're not I mean, we can deport people who are illegally, certainly.

00:16:44.320 But we're not we're not going to change the fact that we're certainly a multiracial democracy here in the United States.

00:16:52.180 So the question is, how can you create a common culture, a common feeling of being a common history around where we are today?

00:16:59.880 Now, 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.

00:17:08.600 Because 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.

00:17:15.640 Yeah, I think that's critical. It's so easy to get terrified.

00:17:18.800 And 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.

00:17:24.940 Oh, no, we can we can organize around the logos. We can stay a creedal nation.

00:17:29.160 It's like, guys, that's obviously not working for you like that.

00:17:32.740 That 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.

00:17:45.920 It's hard to say, but it's very clear that the left has the advantage here.

00:17:51.060 They'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.

00:18:05.060 It'll all just be fine. Yeah. The left has a terrible vision.

00:18:08.740 It'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.

00:18:19.780 Sure. 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. 0.99

00:18:30.300 I 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. 0.97

00:18:38.880 They can't think in any other way or any broader way or they just they've been brainwashed or or whatever have you.

00:18:45.100 But I think it's it's you know, everybody else has kind of woken up and figured out what time it is.

00:18:50.100 And 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,

00:19:02.040 which 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,

00:19:11.080 articulate the the the goals of the Declaration of Independence of the Constitution or say this is important or teach them.

00:19:17.000 And 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.

00:19:27.540 The 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.

00:19:38.340 And I think that, unfortunately, we don't.

00:19:41.080 So it's not that I'm suggesting that the ideological elements of nationhood are irrelevant.

00:19:47.720 I'm just suggesting that they are far from sufficient and that we need to recognize that sooner rather than later,

00:19:53.700 as 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.

00:20:00.440 Yeah, that seems very clear for a lot of people.

00:20:04.020 I wrote an article article here recently about the history podcaster Dan Carlin,

00:20:09.540 who who recognized that there was no magical dirt under Israel and that if Palestinians moved in and, you know, suffrage inside that nation,

00:20:18.220 they would fundamentally transform the nation.

00:20:21.200 For some reason, that seems very difficult then for people to kind of move over and apply to the United States.

00:20:27.080 Maybe the dirt in America is just that much more magic, but it seems like there's this lack of understanding.

00:20:34.440 And you would think that facing the consequences of multiculturalism, looking at the protests that are going on,

00:20:40.420 the 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,

00:20:49.860 say, you know, Jewish people now that they're protesting Israel.

00:20:52.660 Well, you would think that they would understand the kind of the wages of what they're pushing for.

00:20:57.600 But this just doesn't seem to bring any kind of critical thinking into frame.

00:21:01.580 Right. Well, I mean, denial is not just a river in Egypt. Right.

00:21:04.860 I mean, it's really that there's a lot of that going on, unfortunately, in the right.

00:21:08.800 I 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.

00:21:18.940 And 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,

00:21:27.220 even 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.

00:21:36.720 I mean, people are uncomfortable.

00:21:38.000 Well, I say all the time and it's, you know, it's an unfashionable thing.

00:21:41.100 I mean, in my view, broadly speaking, diversity in a society is bad. 0.99

00:21:46.300 Uniformity, more uniformity is good.

00:21:48.680 Now, you can disagree with that.

00:21:50.340 I'm not suggesting that we should all sort of be the same in some sort of Stepford Wives society.

00:21:55.360 But 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.

00:22:07.660 And 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.

00:22:14.660 And that's not to suggest that any particular group of people is bad.

00:22:18.840 It'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.

00:22:31.320 And we shouldn't be shy, in my view, about saying that.

00:22:34.240 And I certainly try to say that pretty clearly.

00:22:36.640 Yeah, 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.

00:22:46.020 Explicitly a Jewish state. 0.94

00:22:47.740 It's critical.

00:22:48.840 And there's no holds barred in what kind of money and resources that should immediately be, you know, sent to kind of fulfill this vision.

00:22:57.400 And so I guess the question for a lot of people is, what could be some of these things that could bind the United States together?

00:23:07.680 You mentioned that that's an issue that you are exploring in the book.

00:23:11.320 I think that, of course, a shared religion is a key part of that.

00:23:16.040 But, you know, as we said, that's not the only thing.

00:23:18.500 What are some of the other things that, you know, would this have to be a regional project for the United States?

00:23:23.440 Is it something that could go nationwide?

00:23:26.000 What would be some of the things that would entail?

00:23:27.800 Well, religion, certainly language would be another element where you really get into it.

00:23:35.640 And obviously, most people in the U.S. speak English, and that's more true generationally.

00:23:40.620 But I think we could do a lot more.

00:23:42.340 I mean, we theoretically have laws on the books that you can't become a U.S. citizen unless you know English.

00:23:47.560 And those are completely violated in practice or even doing things simply as, you know, you have an English language ballot, period.

00:23:56.120 You know, and that's how we we do things.

00:23:58.180 I 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.

00:24:10.400 And 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.

00:24:21.380 But 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.

00:24:42.180 And interestingly, somebody like Barack Obama could have done this.

00:24:45.640 I mean, Barack Obama is not descended from any American slaves, but he is descended from American slave owners and founders.

00:24:53.460 You know, he chose to kind of adopt.

00:24:57.420 And 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.

00:25:08.520 But it's not necessary that that would happen.

00:25:10.900 He could have easily told a different story about himself.

00:25:13.660 And 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.

00:25:30.820 So these things do come down to choices that we make choices that we make choices that we tell about ourselves.

00:25:37.140 And 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.

00:25:51.980 Hungary has a mythological identity.

00:25:55.080 It's actually not mythological. Sorry, I misspoke.

00:25:58.820 Hungary was sort of conquered about a thousand years ago by Central Asian nomads.

00:26:03.100 And 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.

00:26:17.280 They picked up a sort of cultural identity of themselves as kind of being descended from the sort of Central Asian warriors in some parts.

00:26:25.880 But 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.

00:26:39.020 They 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.

00:27:02.620 And 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.

00:27:15.720 But 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,

00:27:31.240 that 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.

00:27:41.340 Yeah, 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.

00:27:49.840 I 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,

00:28:01.240 was 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.

00:28:14.640 They change the balance of power, especially in the democratic system. It doesn't allow you to heal some critical relations, of course, as well.

00:28:23.320 I 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.

00:28:34.680 They 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,

00:28:46.760 if 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.

00:28:54.960 In 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.

00:29:05.840 Sure. 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.

00:29:21.800 So already you begin to get some splits in that population that have very different histories that they're telling each other about themselves.

00:29:30.580 But 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. 0.66

00:29:43.720 If you look at kind of what was almost the heyday of like cheesy level Americanness in people's minds, it was the 1950s maybe.

00:29:53.160 And 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.

00:30:02.800 That goes on until 1965 when you have Hartzeller that kind of opens the floodgates and brings our current immigration. 0.93

00:30:09.560 But it's really this kind of like late 50s timeframe where we've had very little immigration.

00:30:15.460 We've had also the experience of the army going to war together, where you have like the multi-ethnic buddy movie.

00:30:21.760 That'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.

00:30:33.360 But we really did begin to cohere in this in this kind of process of ethnogenesis where we became this unified American people.

00:30:43.480 And again, I'm oversimplifying that, obviously, but there was a strong element of that.

00:30:48.820 And then in 1965, we opened up the floodgates to everyone and anyone.

00:30:53.700 And 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. 0.57

00:31:04.540 And 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.

00:31:11.400 And nobody really knows how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

00:31:15.200 Yeah, I also wonder about some of the key cultural elements.

00:31:18.860 You know, you made the mention there, of course, people going to war together was a key binding thing.

00:31:24.460 And 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.

00:31:38.200 For the first time, people on entirely different ends of the country could uniformly get the same culture delivered.

00:31:45.400 And that kind of allowed for that unification in many ways.

00:31:49.180 But the big problem, of course, is the people in charge of all of this stuff.

00:31:53.760 Yes, it would, of course, be great if we could have a unifying educational system and media apparatus.

00:32:00.140 You know, Patrick Deneen, in his new book, Regime Change, talked about, you know, mandatory civic service, creating that kind of wartime camaraderie.

00:32:08.920 All those things seem good, except, of course, the problem is it would be the government in charge of all of these things.

00:32:15.780 And the government is trying to actively destroy everything good in society.

00:32:19.120 So, so, yes, if we could have, if we could, we could forge a positive identity if we just wielded the entire total state.

00:32:26.880 But unfortunately, it seems like, seems like that's not in the near future.

00:32:31.160 So, so what does that mean?

00:32:33.440 Well, it's, it's a challenge.

00:32:34.520 I 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.

00:32:43.560 And 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.

00:33:08.020 But, 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.

00:33:26.600 Or in a state like Montana, or in a state like Montana, where I live, you know, we're also doing some things.

00:33:31.100 So I think that the best thing we can probably do right now is to assertively have the total state working at a state level.

00:33:40.100 I 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,

00:33:50.860 and hopefully the thing that you create is appealing enough that maybe some other folks decide that they're going to take it on.

00:33:56.960 Or 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.

00:34:10.540 Again, none of those are ideal solutions, but they're, they're better than what we have now.

00:34:16.380 Yeah, 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.

00:34:25.560 I 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.

00:34:34.500 I guess that is the next thing I'd ask you about this.

00:34:37.160 It seems like democracy is a big problem here.

00:34:39.720 You 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. 0.98

00:34:52.860 And 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.

00:35:04.760 And they still kick back to the central state.

00:35:06.920 They 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.

00:35:19.900 Yeah, 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.

00:35:29.580 And 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.

00:35:44.720 And also in many ways, totally contrary to the existing, the intent of the law when it was put in.

00:35:52.680 But you sort of restore a lot of private freedom of association for people.

00:35:56.560 And maybe they begin to self-organize in some groups that are a little more sustainable.

00:36:01.560 And they kind of work as communities where we do have this greater level of agreement.

00:36:08.000 They run their own affairs to a significant degree, but there's, you know, there's a central state that is ultimately overarching it.

00:36:15.220 They'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.

00:36:24.660 But people can kind of live in ways that are more appealing to them individually.

00:36:30.980 I think there are some opportunities to do that, but it's really hard to know exactly how that's going to develop.

00:36:38.720 It's sort of contingencies upon contingencies.

00:36:41.640 And all you can kind of do is try to think about it and be ready.

00:36:45.340 And when opportunities present themselves to sort of push forward, as Rahm Emanuel said, never let a crisis go to waste.

00:36:52.380 So 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.

00:37:06.580 Yeah, 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.

00:37:15.160 But 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.

00:37:25.640 They're not going to solve most of their problems.

00:37:28.360 And so they're building their own colleges.

00:37:30.260 They're building their own electric grids.

00:37:32.240 They're, you know, filling in their potholes.

00:37:34.220 They're running neighborhood watches.

00:37:36.200 And they're organizing along cultural lines.

00:37:40.020 You know, you have to speak Afrikaans to join certain communities.

00:37:43.100 But these things are, they're coordinating with other communities.

00:37:46.880 These 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.

00:37:59.080 Yeah.

00:37:59.400 And actually, in many ways, South Africa is often cited as a really bad example of like, oh, my gosh, what's going to happen?

00:38:05.340 But in some ways, you can see it as a very optimistic example, because guess what?

00:38:08.900 We 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.

00:38:15.740 I 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.

00:38:22.780 And in South Africa, I think it's much more unfavorable toward having a long-term peaceful solution.

00:38:28.800 And 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.

00:38:39.560 It should be, at least in theory, dramatically more easy to do that in a U.S. context with different groups.

00:38:48.120 And 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.

00:39:00.380 They may be ideological.

00:39:02.060 They may be whatever.

00:39:02.680 It could be a million different permutations that we can't even begin to imagine.

00:39:07.020 But 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.

00:39:22.960 And I don't think that that's at all unrealistic.

00:39:27.140 And 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.

00:39:35.380 And I'm certainly among Americans.

00:39:37.160 I mean, I think we've still got a tremendous amount of talent.

00:39:40.580 We've got a tremendous amount of goodwill.

00:39:42.540 You can kind of come here and say, oh, my gosh, things look so dysfunctional.

00:39:45.620 But 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.

00:39:55.480 I'm with you.

00:39:56.200 Yeah, and I don't mean to spread out too many black pills here.

00:39:59.620 I do think you're right that there is still a good future.

00:40:02.940 I 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.

00:40:10.760 And 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.

00:40:22.200 And I think, like you said, I'm long on the American people for sure.

00:40:26.540 So before we go, I want to ask you one more thing.

00:40:29.640 Like you said, you're in Hungary.

00:40:31.320 We have kind of the nationalism conference with Harzoni.

00:40:36.640 There are multiple places that are kind of looking at this international nationalist movement, which is ironic, but I think kind of necessary.

00:40:46.200 What we have now is this drive for the global village.

00:40:50.960 It's this drive towards this global understanding of what a nation is and forcing that definition on to everybody from Woodrow Wilson on.

00:40:58.920 This has been kind of a key project that has just destroyed a lot of a lot of peoples.

00:41:04.440 But 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.

00:41:20.300 They're willing to come to, at least at some level, the defense of each other.

00:41:24.580 I don't know exactly how that jives with a certain level of isolationism that a lot of people, myself included, would like to express.

00:41:32.380 But what do you think about these international nationalist movements and their future?

00:41:36.340 Yeah, I'm a huge fan of international nationalism.

00:41:39.720 It'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.

00:41:49.940 I mean, I think this is really the key to your project that you've laid out here.

00:41:53.940 That's not the same as what it looks like in an American context.

00:41:57.540 It's not even the same as what it looks like in a Polish context or a French context.

00:42:01.040 I mean, this is a unique people.

00:42:04.580 They have a unique history.

00:42:05.760 They have a unique culture.

00:42:07.180 There are going to be certain things.

00:42:08.520 There are going to be certain things even around the identification with Christianity or particularly Catholicism here.

00:42:13.540 They're not going to be the way that we're going to do things in the U.S. 0.91

00:42:16.960 That's OK.

00:42:17.860 And 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.

00:42:32.880 Not 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

00:42:48.360 sovereignties, 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.

00:42:57.120 And 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.

00:43:11.180 And I think maybe that's ultimately the key.

00:43:13.440 It's an international project.

00:43:14.560 It's not a globalist project.

00:43:16.020 We're not trying to kind of have one, you know, undifferentiated mass of everybody consuming the same entertainment, same religion, same culture, et cetera.

00:43:26.260 But that we can have unique cultural differences within nations and that that's actually a good thing.

00:43:34.500 It'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.

00:43:43.480 This is a good thing.

00:43:44.680 And 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.

00:43:54.900 We 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.

00:44:08.180 Globalism is kind of the danger much more than nationalism.

00:44:11.840 Absolutely.

00:44:12.440 All right, Jeremy, well, I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up.

00:44:14.380 But is there anything people should be looking for?

00:44:16.180 I know you said you have a book coming up.

00:44:17.680 Anything else that people should be keeping an eye out for?

00:44:19.760 Yeah, 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.

00:44:37.540 It very much plays into these ethnic issues, these national issues.

00:44:40.720 So I'll look for that in the next February, March time frame.

00:44:44.820 I've got my Twitter feed at Jeremy Carl Ford that you should certainly follow.

00:44:49.040 And 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.

00:44:57.200 But, you know, always a pleasure to speak with you, Aaron, and look forward to chatting more in the future.

00:45:03.220 Absolutely.

00:45:03.800 All right, guys, thank you for watching this episode.

00:45:06.280 If you'd like to go ahead and get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:45:14.740 And, of course, if this is your first time on the YouTube channel, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe.

00:45:19.740 Thank you for watching, everybody.

00:45:21.200 Thanks to Jeremy for coming on.

00:45:22.760 And as always, I'll talk to you guys next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 09, 2023

Proxy Nationalism ｜ Guest： Jeremy Carl ｜ 11⧸9⧸23

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