Nationalism Explained

Given the left-wing media establishment’s focus on fringe white racial nationalists, The Daily Wire thought it useful to provide a primer on the concepts of nationhood and nationalism for the uninitiated.

In order to understand the ideology of nationalism, political observers must first understand the concept of nationhood.

Putting aside an analysis of the degrees to which nationhood is shaped by top-down and/or bottom-up forces – an inquiry beyond the scope of this article – a nation, broadly defined, is a group of people unified along one or more shared dimensions. These dimensions may include:

1. Shared geography: A group of people living in close proximity to one another tend to amalgamate in some ways. This may change in the future as people can coalesce across the globe with modern technology.

2. Shared history: Nationhood is almost always predicated on a sense of shared history – real and/or imagined.

3. Shared destiny: Building upon a shared sense of history, members of a nation tend to view their destiny as inextricable from one another. Views of what their shared destiny will be or should be, however, can vary between members of nation.

4. Shared culture and values: More amorphous but arguably more important, the most important glue that connects a nation’s members to one another is a shared set of values and way of life. Elements of a shared culture range from attitudes towards politics and religion to favored cuisine and arts.

5. Shared language(s): Common languages are essential in order to allow members of nations to communicate with one another.

6. Share heredity: Some nations view their peoplehood as predicated upon or inseparable from their racial commonalities; real or imagined. Racially diverse nations such as America end Russia tend to have much less alignment with this dimension than more racially homogenous nations such as Somalia or North Korea. The Jewish nation, idiosyncratically, is composed of persons from various racial and ethnic groups, some of which have higher degrees of shared heredity as a result of historical forces and customs.

The aforementioned common denominators unify people and allow them to coalesce into a somewhat cohesive group: a nation.

Given the amorphous nature of intangible concepts such as nationhood and peoplehood, natural disagreement between persons occurs over what constitutes a nation and how various nations are defined.

Nationalism is an ideology predicated on the assumption that nations are organic and desirable products of human nature. Nationalists advocate for their nations to be protected and served through their politics. A nationalist wants politics to best serve the interests of his or her nation. Naturally, disagreement between nationalists will occur over the defining characteristics of their shared nation and what policies best serve the interests of their nation’s well-being and continuity. In other words, the well-being of the nation – however the nation and its best interests are defined – is the priority of a nationalist.

Viewing nationhood as a feature of the human condition, nationalists want nationhood to be understood and leveraged towards outcomes they deem as desirable. In other words, nationhood is a natural alignment of people, a concentric circle of social unity and organization more broad than and flowing out of family, tribe, and community. They advocate for state governments to recognize and be built around nationhood; hence the term nation state.

Left-wing dominance of popular culture – particularly in academia – has led to widespread misunderstandings over the concepts of nationhood and nationalism. Low-information political observers often view Nazism as the standard of nationalism. The left exploits this misunderstanding, framing nationalism as necessarily based on a perception of nationhood as predicated on race and necessarily ascribing genocidal intentions to nationalists of all stripes.

Racial nationalists, such as neo-Nazis and the Black Panthers, view race as an essential unifying feature of nationhood. Shared heredity, according to them, is a prerequisite for a person to belong to a nation defined on racial grounds. More broadly, racial nationalists may subscribe to a Hitlerian view of the world – a racial struggle – in which various races are destined to compete with one another for dominance over one other. Such groups view racial heterogeneity as necessarily damaging to national cohesion. At a minimum, racial nationalists advocate for geographical/territorial separation of races – which they view as nations – in order to achieve a harmony they believe it predicated on national racial homogeneity.

American nationalism transcends race and seeks to unify people through ideas. Borrowing from Dennis Prager, the “American Trinity” describes American nationalism as built on the following ethos: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum.

President Barack Obama regularly attended a black nationalist “church” for over twenty years headed by Jeremiah Wright, who also presided over his wedding to Michelle Obama.

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