My pal Curtis Yarvin is pondering the meaning — and the mess — of “liberal nationalism” with respect to its involvement in Ukraine and elsewhere in the age of liberal nationalism. But what is it?
Liberalism, he writes is “an ethical method” while nationalism is blood and soil. Thus,
In country A, citizenship is a piece of plastic in your pocket, a row in a public database. Every citizen is the same as any other citizen. The community can make anyone a citizen. But in country B, citizenship is a mystic bond of blood and soil, tongue and faith. Citizenship is by birth.
Country A is liberal; country B is nationalist. And as any fool knows,
the main thing we mean by “liberal nationalism” is “good nationalism.” Clearly, there is also a “conservative nationalism,” which is “bad nationalism.”
You can see the benefit for our rulers. Since they are liberals, anything they do is good, and everything that their opponents do, whether Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, is bad.
Thank goodness that has been all worked out!
I suppose the point of liberalism as an “ethical method” is that anything that liberals want, as we say, to “fundamentally change” is good. Whereas, we might say, the truth is that “conservative nationalism” doesn’t really have an ethical agenda.
Liberal nationalists can ponder Ukraine and Russia and decide to “make a difference.” Conservative nationalists might ponder the same thing and think that it would be nice if their grandsons did not have to go to war to teach Our Vlad the time of day.
Strictly speaking, I imagine, liberals are not supposed to go to war. Because war is the Old Regime and feudal lords and absolute monarchs. But if you are the ruling class, you gotta have a war, because Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and the notion that there is no politics without an enemy.
And yet, liberal nationalists have been really gung-ho on the world war front. Right liberal-nationalist Woodrow Wilson and liberal-nationalist Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Hoo boy, did those liberal guys like a nice world war!
Really, in my view, it is inevitable that our liberal friends should like a nice world war. Why? Because they think that the way to change the world and make a difference is with politics and there is no politics without an enemy and therefore we cannot change the world and make a difference without a war.
Whaddya think climate change is all about? Forget that SUV; forget that nice convenient gas stove. We gotta save the world before it’s too late!
Leaving aside the clear appetite for war with “liberal nationalism,” I wonder if any government, of any stripe, can exist without at least beating the drums of war. My fantasy is that a commoner middle-class nationalism might not be that interested in war. But there is no way of knowing because middle-class commoner nationalism has never been tried.