Taking back our nation(s)

“I’m Brad, and I’m a proud nationalist.”

How does that sound? You bristle? But what if I give it context:

“I’m Brad, and I am a proud nationalist. My nation includes John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and Billie Holiday. My nation’s culture and language have been shaped by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Its political achievements were won by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. My nation’s greatest representatives include brown people and queer people at the forefront, and are not exclusively male. That is why we are so strong.”

Nationalism has historically been coopted by fascists, and it is right now. But it’s not for a fascist to tell me what my nation is. I get to decide.

A nation is different than a country. A country endeavors to be a nation – it tries to unify a heterogenous group of people under one flag. But a nation is the flag, in flesh and blood, in real time – it is the legacy, and the living culture, here and now.

A nation has primacy over a country in a certain regard, thus. A fascist understands this, and uses it to leverage their power. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we?

A nation overlaps the geographical borders of its supposedly corresponding country, imperfectly/perfectly. Oscar Peterson, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson are in my nation. Or I can say: I am in theirs. They spoke and speak my language and my culture. They spoke it before me. They are part of my legacy, because they gave me something irreplaceable and sacred. They have given me musical ecstasy, and they have taught me about myself.

They are Canadian, but we are in the same tribe. I do not think of them as “honorary Americans” or some other such bullshit. I would just as well happily be an honorary Canadian. But “Canadian” and “American”, in the sense I have in mind, are arbitrary contingencies.

Maybe because of all the jingoistic fairy tales about our origins, us American citizens sometimes confuse merit and good old plain luck. I mean this: I was born into American citizenship, just like any other person in the world is born into theirs. Every human has been thrown into a national existence, be it in an ostensible democracy, a dictatorship, a failed state, etc. I didn’t will my citizenship, but am certainly grateful for what it has given me, namely, peace and prosperity for myself and the people I love. This is as real as it gets; this is where the rubber hits the road. Nevertheless, I am not “proud” of that citizenship, in as far as it was awarded to me through the circumstances of my birth. This being-thrown-into [1] a particular citizenship is a universal phenomenon, not a uniquely American one. I just make the obvious point that we should not derive virtue from that into which we are born. I make that point as much to myself because there is a specifically snooty liberal version of that cognitive error.

I am aware that the peace and prosperity I have been awarded is lopsided towards me, because of the history of racism in my country, The United States. I am aware that this racism is institutionalized, and is an ongoing predicament for everyone in my country, because if we are truly a unified political body, then we must work together to realize and uphold the country we want.

I do not think it is enough to call Donald Trump a nativist. He is a blatant racist. I lived in New York City in 1989, when he took out full page ads demanding to reinstate the death penalty for the five Black and Latino young men who were wrongfully accused of raping a jogger in Central Park, and later exonerated. He wished for those young men’s deaths. I remember that acutely. Importantly: He has refused to apologize to this day. This is the current president of The United States.

It is more accurate to say: Trump is a racist and a nativist, in the form of a conspiracy theorist. He repeatedly falsely claimed that former President Obama was born in Kenya, not the United States. These are facts. Many of the people who voted for Trump are conspiracy-minded. My country of citizenship, the United States, is full of such eggheads. They’re not the only ones in the room; but they’re very loud.

Furthermore: I am not convinced that the aggressive military actions which the executive branch of my government has ordered, through the egghead-in-chief, without consent of the legislative branch, and without the good will of the people – the demos in a democracy – are to insure my peace and prosperity. I believe, like others, that these actions have another animus, which is to preserve American economic hegemony in a dynamic geopolitical landscape. If I am even a little bit right, or even if I am wrong, there is a dissonance: between my nation – my culture, my values, my very identity to a point; and my country – the political structure under which I agree to live, for the time being.

As a person mediating between my country and my nation, trying to make the square peg of the former fit in the hole of the latter, my concerns are not abstractions. And I don’t have to shut up about it. To the MAGA supporters who tell me to “stay in my lane” as an artist, I’ll keep with your clichéd metaphor, and say: I am staying in my lane. You, MAGA supporter, are passing me on right, flipping me the bird – you self-righteous, amped-up little cocklet.

In all this, I am not any more “ashamed” to be American than I am “proud” to be one. I have close friends who are Russian and Israeli. The variables are the same with them. We’re dismayed by what’s taking place in our countries at the hands of our governments. Should we feel “ashamed”? Should we abandon the pride we have in our nations?

Maybe I do feel like something like shame. But it’s not for you to determine that. That’s right, I mean you, EU guy! You – the one wearing a scarf and pink cashmere in April, reading Le Monde or Der Spiegel, giving me your rueful opinion, drinking Riesling or Prosecco in the Lufthansa lounge. You are that Schengen-zone continental European around my age, who lures me into a conversation under one or another pretext, only to then condescendingly ask me, with thinly concealed schadenfreude:

“Isn’t it hard being American now? We Europeans just don’t understand how you voted for Trump…”

To which I say: “Kiss my Yankee ass.”

And then, immediately after, I fill up your glass and mine, and say “Santé!” “Prost!” And after cheering you with real good will, I say: Let’s be friends. Let’s stay friends. We already were, damn it. I love your culture, Europeans! I love the enlightenment. I love Mahler and Sartre; I love Buñuel, Pasolini, Bergman…And you guys love jazz – you love it more than many Americans!

Let’s stay friends. Why? Because whatever ill will we have is a silly and childish form of tribalism. But also, let’s stay friends for another reason: Because you’re as fucked as we are. Your United States of Europe is falling apart by the seams quicker than I can say “AfD”. You’ve got the same problem as we’ve got: nationalist sentiment on the uprise, but not the good kind of nationalism. It’s more… the brown-shirted kind.

No? Your pond stinks just like ours does. So, stop doing the same thing you’ve been doing since the beginning of the Cold War, or at least within my lifetime, since I’ve been roped into this kind of conversation: Stop averting your eyes from the problems in your own country, by fixating on the ones in mine.

You really do have a unique problem, EU friend, and I do have concern for you; it’s not schadenfreude. I want your federalist European governance to succeed, for the same reason I want the United States to succeed, because the alternative (no pun intended) scares the shit out of me. But just as I do not want to relinquish what I’ve been calling my “nation” – the good parts of my geographically determined culture – neither should you. This is a particular challenge for you: you have long felt you are not permitted voice nationalist pride, because it is closely associated with a history of fascism.

Look where that has gotten you, though. You are getting exactly what you feared – parties like AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, the Orwellian-named Forum for Democracy in The Netherlands, the ruling Fratelli d’Italia in Italy…and the list goes on. These parties are nationalist and Euroskeptic, and, like Trump in America, they are nativist. Maybe this is what you want? If it’s not, then I would say: flip the script; do what I’m proposing we Americans should be doing. Tell me, tell the world, what is great about your nation. Otherwise, a fascist will continue to monopolize the space: he or she will fear-monger and tell the world what is wrong with your nation, and how it has to get back what it once had – just like Trump.

In any case, EU person, please do not present yourself to me in that conversation as some kind of pan-European. Please, do not begin your assessment of me/The United States with, “We Europeans think…” You do that a lot, and it’s really just bullshit. It’s bullshit because “you Europeans” do not think on a unified level about your own interests. You think about national interests, ultimately, because you think about your own material interests, to some extent. I am not judging you: Everyone thinks like this, including me. (We already know this from history – this is why an international communist worker’s movement never worked.)

Or do you really maintain that you are an EU citizen, in the sense that your interest in a federal Europe trumps your national interests? Is there something more to the EU than a shared economic pact? Do you still think you can hold on to this idea of a Pan-European identity? Perhaps you can, but only in a limited capacity, in the present situation: as a victimized cosmopolitan minority, threatened by a fascist to the west across the large pond, and another not far to the east, and a growing number of your compatriots in sympathy with one or both of them.

I am not anti-EU. I am also not anti-American. On the contrary, I’m patriotic. But I am patriotic towards my nation, the one I just sketched above, not the shambles of my republic, The United States of America, to whom I pay taxes. Not now anyways. We need to take back that word, “nation”, from fascists, historically, and fascists now – we, who love everything great and enduring about our nation, our culture. Otherwise the fascists win. They’re already winning now, in the sense that they have a monopoly on nationalism and are writing the narrative. This is not a uniquely American problem.

The real threat today is essentially non-nationalist, and this begs the question: maybe we need a new word besides “fascist” to describe some of the key players here. For instance, take Elon Musk. He tweets like a fascist-nationalist, but he’s not a nationalist in any sense – he doesn’t give a crap for America. He is really a crypto-internationalist capitalist. Corporate greed like his is a globalist phenomenon, in the worst sense of the word, in the sense that it has no loyalty towards a nation. Yet here’s the thing: a billionaire like Elon Musk needs a nation – he needs the structure of a governing body with some sense of law and order to do his bidding, to make sure he gets paid. He needs banks, he needs Wall Street, he needs venture capitalists. He is using America, opportunistically, for his own gain. Elon Musk is deeply anti-American.

Do we call Elon a fascist then, when he makes the Nazi salute, or is he just a nihilistic opportunist? And what about Trump? We may call Trump a fascist, in the sense that he is nativist and authoritarian, and against democracy. But let us not grant him the respect, let us not give him the grudging compliment, of calling him a “nationalist.” We know this is not true in any substantive sense. He does not care about his nation, because he doesn’t have one. Trump is a nihilist, and the only loyalty he might have is towards his own blood line, in dynastic fashion. This is probably giving him too much moral credit, though. I believe that even immediate consanguineal ties are of no consequence to Trump, because he is a sociopath. How many times do we need this to be proven? He would most likely sell his own bloodline up the river in a heartbeat – starting with the stupidest son of the three, poor Eric who wants Daddy to love him so much.

I read someone here on Substack a couple weeks back complaining of Trump-fatigue, and I echo the sentiment, so I’ll try not to harbor on the loathsome old piggy too long. Just to say: I think we get confused with Trump. We recognize a fascist in him, and we think of models form the past. The ones who come to mind, though – the ones who shaped history, had intellectual coherency, no matter how megalomaniac and heartless they were. So we keep trying to fit Trump’s daily feed into a coherent strategy. What’s really going, I think, is that Trump’s sociopathy overlaps with fascism. The two overlap, but they are not synonymous. The real threat of fascism now is a technocratic, globalist variety. We need a new playbook for it, and a new language to describe it.

Wait, wait…this doesn’t add up. I’m demanding a new playbook, but using the old language.

1.) First of all, who am I to say what “good” nationalism is? The achievements that I value in “my nation” are progressive achievements. But I am not speaking for everyone – alas, not everyone shares my progressive convictions. I have not found a universal cause. My cause is an us-against-them cause. I have made the classic mistake of the liberal, in assuming that liberalism is universal. But liberalism is not universal. This is the truth I can’t swallow, still.

2.) All my preaching at “Europeans” is disingenuous, and logically flawed as well, because I am telling Europeans that they are not really Pan-Europeans, yet I am addressing them as Pan-Europeans. It’s not coherent.

3.) Related to that: I am telling my hypothetical European friend that the alternative to the EU is a scary one, made up of weakened nationalist states. But can I really say I’m pro EU, as it is right now, and leave it at that? No, I can’t. The technocratic apparatus of the EU governance is flawed, in the sense that many of its citizens feel that they are not democratically represented. The EU is internationalist in at least one bad sense: in hyper-neoliberal fashion, it favors the free flow of capital over the protections for its citizens. The welfare-state model of democracy in a country like The Netherlands, the one that we Americans have long regarded with envy, is strained and cracking.

4.) It doesn’t make sense to dismiss a person who regards themselves as a Pan-European, any more than it does a Euroskeptic. I should listen to them as well. The question arises, am I a Euroskeptic? Reading back above, I start to sound like one. But I’m not, in the sense that I want the EU to succeed. But how? I’ve got no clue, actually.

5.) By the same token I should listen to, and not dismiss, the American counterpart to the disaffected European voter: the person who feels that the Democratic party in the United States does not speak for them, and has not spoken for them, since it became a centrist party starting with Bill Clinton already decades ago, and continued through Obama’s term in many ways in terms of his financial policy, [2] which led to people who voted for Obama switching over to Trump in the next election in 2016.

6.) The business about being “thrown-into” a nation, about how someone shouldn’t feel pride for their citizenship, doesn’t read back well either. It sounds privileged, privileged because I may have been born into peace and prosperity, but many other rightful American citizens have not. Who am I to say who should feel pride? Many Americans have struggled for their citizenship – and now find it being questioned, and at times, under threat.

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[1] I’m following Heidegger here – one of his great word-creations, Geworfenheit, “thrown-into-ness”

[2] I mean this.