RE: Hanania on Western Nationalists

Let's stop the hate and separate.

Hanania opens his latest piece with the popular misconception that nationalism is National Chauvinism:

Nationalism is often considered immoral because it values the interests of some people over others, rather than being universalist in its circle of concern. For nationalists themselves, the ideology is often defined by such a preference.

Nationalism is an abstract universal ideology, an -ism, one where the ethnic, tribal, national identities of the world should enjoy dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination against prevailing forces. Everybody understands that libertarianism does not imply that only the libertarian himself gets to have freedom. That would be stupid, but this elementary error is routinely made by neoliberal propagandists when critiquing nationalism.

Nationalism is not isolationism. The nationalist ideological approach applied to the Israel / Palestine conflict is the two state solution. This approach is the one favored by China, Russia, the European Union, the Global South, Trump, and (ostensibly) Joe Biden and his State Department. In his speech last night, Biden made eye contact with the camera and directly spat out “two state solution” in a moment of clarity among all the generic presidential speech boilerplate.

The only major opponents of the two state solution are Hamas insurgents, Israel’s Likudnik gang, and Likud’s American proxies. The American Empire is neoliberal and neocolonial in its policy and impact, but still relies on classical liberal appeals to the nationalist ideology when justifying itself. In the Ukraine Conflict, nationalist ideology remains the central argument offered by the State Department.

Many observers have been noting the distinction between caring about the “Palestinian cause” and the Palestinian people. As I’ve also pointed out, if you want what’s best for the actual human beings who live in Gaza, you would encourage them to seek a better life elsewhere. But there is relatively little interest in this as a solution, because it would harm the cause of Palestine, which keeps millions of individuals and their families stateless for generations for the sake of a political movement.

Hanania’s perspective is unpopular because it’s evil, favoring the dissolution of one’s ethnic extended family into the abyss of global cosmopolitan individualism and alienation because an imperial opponent is attacking you. It’s also unpopular because it’s incoherent. Popular support for Israel existing among its large and hostile neighbors relies on the same popular and positive nationalist themes. Speaking in the abstract, a rejection of the Palestinian cause is a rejection of the Israeli cause.

Despite being an academic, he relies on a poorly defined twitter poll to arrive at the specious conclusion that White Nationalists care more about White Nationalism than about White people. It’s popularly understood that twitter polls are garbage even when they’re clearly defined, and I don’t think I’m the only one who reflexively answers twitter polls with whichever answer is the most absurd or comical. I suspect most people answering with the “deranged” result were trying to make a point that lies outside his contrived framing.

This is quite frankly a deranged result.

It’s quite frankly a deranged framing of the question, and a deranged framing of the result. If you were to ask my family members if they would rather each have a million dollars or remain together, I’m hopeful that they would choose to remain together. Most family members would offer that “deranged” answer, scandalously acting against their “individual interest.”

Obviously, people answer the other way quite often. People move from their closely knit hometowns to where the jobs are. Immigrants flood into America, leaving their charming little villages behind for “opportunity” by the millions. Husbands destroy their children’s lives to bang the secretary, maximizing their own individual happiness in the process.

Maybe because it is so taboo, white nationalism simply attracts a particularly disturbed kind of human being.

There’s nothing disturbing about White Nationalism. In fact, most minorities and foreigners will agree that it’s a fair and moral position if one decouples it from the chauvinist, supremacist, revanchist, and irredentist associations that it has been incorrectly associated with. Everybody agrees that ethnic groups ought to be allowed to exist and pursue their own dreams and future if they’re not harming anybody else, except for neoliberal ideologues like Hanania.

The good thing about increasing GDP is that it can go towards practically whatever ends you want, and the extent to which nationalists fail to consider how greater wealth can help them achieve their goals is simply another manifestation of zero sum thinking.

muh gdp

Nationalism is crucial to the advancement of democracy, small government, and good government because humans are instinctively tribal, and will vote and behave tribally if subjected to a multicultural context. Hanania cheers for the decline of the White American supermajority then jeers for White Americans becoming more tribal in their thinking and behavior as an unavoidable consequence. Our GDP will decline as the zero-sum thinking integral to tribal and territorial primates devolves from the geopolitical level of international diplomacy to the regional and neighborhood level of ethnic rivalries and contentions.

Some people will argue that they just want to live around people like themselves, and that’s fine.

This is the most important line in the essay, where even Hanania can’t quite bring himself to disagree with White Nationalist theory.

What prevents them from doing that though is civil rights law, which is why we don’t have that freedom anymore.

Civil Rights law is the direct consequence of the very ethnic rivalry Hanania promotes, where ethnic groups within a shared political space took advantage of the fact that Whites aren’t awakened to and mobilized in defense of their group interests. Hanania wants Whites to refrain from thinking and behaving as an ethnic group with nationalist interests and yet he bemoans the direct consequences of that (civil rights legislation). As if the two could possibly be decoupled.

Trying to make a country white because you want to live around other white people is like trying to pass a law to make everyone into anime so you’ll have more friends with similar interests.

It’s technically illegal to live around other white people. Following his own silly analogy, they’re banning anime because too many people who are anti-anime have been allowed into the country. And if you want your manga, you must band together as anime enthusiasts and think and behave in precisely the tribal manner Hanania finds so objectionable.

Across the West, a lot more political capital goes into immigration restriction than legalizing freedom of association, while the latter is actually the direct path towards building communities composed of likeminded individuals and families.

The only path forward is: both. Fighting for freedom of association while welcoming in tens of millions more people who structurally oppose that freedom is at least as pointless as the inverse, opposing mass migration while failing to affirmatively address the legal obstacles to freedom of association. Constructing and defending this false dichotomy is important for Hanania.

But the meanings of words change over time, and when an intellectual or politician calls himself a nationalist today it generally indicates that he takes a parochial and overly pessimistic view of intergroup relations[.]

This is sophistry. The term “nationalism” is etymologically anchored to “natio-,” “of birth,” and “-ism,” abstract universal ideology. Besides, Hanania’s semantic games don’t even hold up, as he even opposes nationalism at its most defensible, like that of the Palestinian peoples and their right to exist with dignity and security in their ancient homeland.

But I think some nationalists are simply misguided in adopting a default zero sum worldview, which they can be argued out of if you can convince them that their outlook makes the people they care about worse off. The great advancements in ethical reasoning have come from moving beyond this kind of thinking. The current state of Arab societies presents a stark warning about what happens to cultures that are stuck in the past. Westerners with pride in their civilization should have higher ambitions.

He concludes the essay with a pointed appeal to western chauvinism, insisting that dissolving ethnic loyalties is what we’re all about. It’s not. Western Civilization in general and Pax Americana in particular both reached their zenith when they promoted and applied universal nationalist principles. When you force all of the bugs into the same jar, they necessarily fight and kill each other instead of doing constructive things. Nationalism is the equitable and noble answer to the tribalist obstacles to peace, prosperity, and liberty.