Globalist Nationalists

Warning: This one is not about Russia or Iran!

I’m sure that you have seen the news about Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland. If you have not, here’s a roundup: The good lady from Finland was caught on camera partying and dancing. That’s it. Literally.

So a “scandal” broke. The nationalists who defended Boris Johnson amidst the Partygate were outraged that Marin was partying. Mind you, Marin’s 36, and Johnson was in his late 50s.

Anyway.

The anti-Marin camp of quasi-intellectuals with verified Twitter accounts were also the defenders of the Canadian truck drivers who before that were outraged by Australian totalitarianism over lockdowns.

Some of these right-wingers are your average conservative. Others, however, are the self-proclaimed nationalists.

The nationalists are a curious case. The American nationalist intellectual movement was mobilized by a book, The Virtue of Nationalism, written by Israeli intellectual, Yoram Hazony. Its political leader is Viktor Orbán. Its second conference was held in Italy. Its conferences’ speakers include Hungarian, Italian, and French politicians. And its Catholic members want to move the U.S. capital to Vatican. They are obsessed with what is happening in Australia and Canada and Finland. What bleeping nationalism is this?

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Alternative Explanation: They are not nationalists. They are the same globalists they hate, just that they want a different kind of globalism.

The nationalists’ opponent is a strawman of globalism. They believe in the idea of nation-state. Okay, so do I. And so do the Germans and the Finns and the Japanese. If you get out of the bougie parts of New York City, Washington, and Boston—ironically, all these super socially conservatives live in these super progressive cities by choice—days, maybe even weeks, will pass before you can run into someone who wants to abolish borders. I lived in Phoenix, AZ. It’s hardly the conservative capital of the world. Everybody around me was complaining about gentrification, and the neighbors were all putting up solar panels. People would laugh at you if you said that you wanted to abolish borders. There are actual globalists who object to the nation-state, of course. There are dozens of them, dozens!

So the nationalists have been modifying their descriptions of their adversaries. Recently, they have turned their focus to too much trade, international institutions, cultural exchanges, and so on. In short, it is not globalism they oppose. It is liberalism, the bipartisan, cross-ideological liberalism that Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan shared. It is not globalism they oppose but the liberal international order. And their beef with Marin is not that she partied. It’s that she’s young, feminist, and progressive, and that she has applied for NATO membership.

Now, I am hardly a progressive, but I am—ironically—more nationalist than they are. I care about the conduct of the U.S. President. As for Finland, do as you want. So long that you’re applying for NATO membership, be my guest! Australians can have excessive lockdowns as much as they want. As long as it is a democratic government that is doing it, again, it’s none of my business. It is their navy I care about. As for the Canadian truck drivers, I was invested in the story because Canada is a trade partner of the United States. Ironically, when you asked the anti-trade nationalists about why they care about it, they’d say the same thing. So who’s the nationalist here?

Now, there are people really invested in LGBTQIA+0941(*@` rights in other countries. They want a global movement for gay rights, and another one for transgender rights, and another one for women’s rights, and one for Palestine’s liberation—but not liberating it from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—and then another movement of course for animal rights. Okay, globalists. But isn’t the global campaign to end lockdowns and vaccine mandates the nationalists wanted also globalism?

Here lies the secret: This nationalist movement, like all nationalist movements in the past, is also ideological globalism and imperialism. It objects to global cultural trends like rising secularism and cultural progressivism—which is way excessive at home but overdue in most of the world. It is operationally forming a global coalition of cultural conservatives to push back. That I have to suffer Israeli Hazony’s and Hungarian Orbán’s lectures on America is not nationalism. That they show up at the same conference to say the same thing, to form common agenda for what the world should look like, and to work together to implement their agenda is globalism.

I guess I’m too liberal to be either a progressive globalist or a conservative globalist. Maybe I’m the true nationalist? Okay, scratch that. I hate that term.

I don’t like it when people go to Davos to form common agenda for justice in their own countries, especially since their vision for justice is neither correct nor in touch with their own peoples. International summits, in my judgment, should be about international relations, not shared domestic conducts. They should be about security pacts and trade. So I also don’t like it when nationalists do it.

But make no mistake. That I have to suffer Hazony and Orbán is indeed nationalism, and today’s nationalists are the same as the nineteenth and twentieth century nationalists were. They object to liberal trade just as German nationalists in the nineteenth century did. They are reactionaries to cultural changes as the European nationalists of the time did. They resent the elite and academia just like their predecessors from two centuries ago—and one century ago. And they want to rewrite the world order for their common vision. They are not liberal because they are indeed nationalists. But also, they are globalists. The two are perfectly compatible, believe it or not!

Maybe I’m wrong, and true nationalism has never been tried. But I’m quite sure that I’m right, and the nationalists are mostly a garrison of charlatans with a few useful idiots among them.

Whatever they are, cultural changes is not their enemy. It’s their grievance. To them, it’s the symptom. The enemy is the systemic world order that is causing everything else. It is the liberal international system they want to rewrite. And it won’t be the first time. International orders have been revised in the past. But there has always been a period between erasing the current order and writing a new one. That period has always been marked by war.