Defining nationalism

The article below rightly points out that the word"nationalism" is used in several different ways. I like Orwell's definition in his "Notes on Nationalism":

"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it IS the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception."

Current debates over nationalism seem to generate more heat than light. Critics claim it amounts to creeping fascism. Champions claim it’s the way out of conservative malaise and failure. Figuring out who’s right is hard to assess, though, since disputants use the word to refer to so many different things.

We might expect this equivocation from critics on the left. But even those who endorse some form of “nationalism” don’t seem to agree on what it means.

Some, for instance, define it as a popular or democratic resistance to a global empire. Others equate nationalism with certain policies, such as those thought to boost working-class jobs. Some understand it as a broader disposition to promote the national good.

It’s fair to ask: If “nationalism” means so many different things to different people, what extra work does the word do, beyond sowing confusion?

Indeed, what some refer to as “nationalism” may be mostly a robust defense of national loyalty. If so, then talking about that might help reverse the ratio of heat to light in the current debate.

Three Nationalists—Four Definitions

Each of the above views figured into a recent panel at the Catholic University of America. It addressed a simple question, “Are nationalism and Catholicism compatible?” The answers were far less simple.

Dr. Bradley Lewis from Catholic University’s School of Philosophy pointed out that what we often refer to as “nationalism” is simply a desire for democratic accountability. And this only exists at the level of nation-states, not in transnational entities like the United Nations.

First Things editor Rusty Reno defined it a bit more narrowly. He called nationalism a “priority-setting word” that signals a regrouping of national identity. Many feel the pendulum has swung too far toward global empire, he argued, so they turn to nationalism to “reconsolidate” power.

The related National Conservative coalition, in which Reno has figured prominently, likewise emphasizes the need to reclaim national sovereignty against an encroaching global regime. The NatCons’ homepage defines nationalism as “a commitment to a world of independent nations,” and their 10 broad principles include the rule of law, national independence, and free enterprise. At this level, NatCons sound like standard conservatives. But they also set forth more specific policy goals, such as provisions to boost domestic manufacturing and realign education to serve the national interest.

At the Catholic University panel, however, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, argued the National Conservative movement doesn’t offer meaningful solutions for working-class Americans. Frey saw nationalism as inextricably linked to “Trumpism.” As a result, nationalism is not likely to repair civic bonds when its advocates often reject civility outright.

Reno disagreed. Yes, Trump plays a role here. But Reno insisted that Trump prompted a shift in elite attitudes toward the middle class. Trump’s focus on the “forgotten man” of middle America went beyond his time in office and signaled to Democrats, including the Biden administration, to pick up the slack.

Reno offered as an example Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a multi-billion-dollar spending package that will purportedly help the middle class. The Biden administration is right in spending $700 billion-plus to “make American jobs” and “force manufacturing back into the US,” he said. “That’s nationalism, folks.”

Though Reno helped draft the statement of principles, it’s not clear whether this policy opinion would be endorsed by the NatCon movement at large. It is a diverse coalition. As a result, National Conservatism, like its near synonym “nationalism,” is hard to define. It takes on different shapes and colors depending on whom you ask.

Accordingly, the fourth panelist, Michael Dougherty of National Review rightly noted the protean character of nationalism. “The reality is that it’s not one thing,” he said.

A Protean Character

So, the question remains: Is nationalism a set of policy rhetoric and priorities, a disposition, a sense of national loyalty and identity, democratic accountability, resistance to global empire, Trumpism, a bipartisan priority, or a combination of these elements? Or, to reduce this blooming buzzing confusion to three options, is it mostly about policies, a principled defense of the national good, or a populist revolt against elites?

The chameleon-like feature of “nationalism” has long been a problem. The writer Mark Helprin described the word as parametric: a constant parameter applied to variables. Nationalism takes on new shapes depending on the context in which it is applied. The word has different functions in different historical contexts. But the ambiguity persists even within a single historical context and within similar religious circles. So it’s fair to ask how fruitful these debates will be if the disputants fail to settle on a common definition.

And, again, if it means so many different things to different people, what use is the word? For instance, if nationalism just means supporting policies that help, or at least claim to help, boost manufacturing jobs in the US, why do we need the word? Why not just talk about industrial policy? If it’s about reasserting the national interest and embracing national identity, why not call for patriotism?

Indeed, the word seems to hide a deeper ambiguity. Arguments over nationalism often seem to act as proxies for other questions: What is the nation? What is its purpose? Is the national interest something worth pursuing?

Perhaps getting clarity on the answers to those questions might help bring the current debate over nationalism into clearer focus and create common ground between some self-identified nationalists and traditional conservatives.

Humane National Loyalty

French political thinker Pierre Manent and the late Pope St. John Paul II offer visions of humane national loyalty. In his 2006 essay “What Is a Nation?”, Manent argues that, of all available political regimes, the nation-state best integrates communion and consent. The nation, as we now understand it, was a unique development of Christian Europe, the Church having emerged as a “third party” to the ancient conflict between city and empire.

Though not strictly political, the Church reordered the way people viewed human association in antiquity. Manent writes that Christianity’s animating principle, charity, allowed the Church to go “deeper than the city and further than the empire.” But the Church also limited the state’s dominion over souls, while also broadening the outlook of people beyond their village or city. In this way, the nation reflected a broader Christian charity and communion, which had a salutary influence on citizenship and loyalty to the nation.

John Paul similarly describes the development of nations from Christian Europe. In his book Memory and Identity, he describes the nation as a community, based in a territory and distinguished from other nations by its culture. Christianity shaped the European character and contributed to the growth of native and national cultures.

For John Paul, the nation is linked with ideas of native land and patrimony—“the totality of goods bequeathed to us by our forefathers.” A nation’s patrimony was originally conceived merely in terms of the natural generation through family and tribe.

The Church added a spiritual dimension to the idea of patrimony. “The Church herself, in carrying out her task of evangelization, absorbed and transformed the older cultural patrimony,” writes John Paul. Christ’s inheritance orients the patrimony of native lands to an eternal homeland.

Yet this new dimension of patrimony doesn’t diminish its temporal content. Underpinning the idea of nations is a deep bond between the spiritual and the material, the culture and territory. National identity is tied up with territory, but also with language, history, religion, and cultural traditions. Patriotism, for John Paul, is “a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its features.”

John Paul and Manent both acknowledge that the virtue of national loyalty can take on a toxic form. John Paul refers to the distortion of national loyalty as nationalism: an excessive love of one’s country at the expense of others. “Of this, the twentieth century has supplied some all-too-eloquent examples, with disastrous consequences,” he writes.

Manent points out that the spiritual communion of the nation, properly conceived, has “little to do with the toxic nationalisms and exclusive valorization of one’s people” as seen in totalitarian regimes.

Aristotle understood moral virtue as a means between opposing vices of excess and deficiency. The virtue of national loyalty can similarly slip into excess (a toxic nationalism) or deficiency (apathy toward or hatred of one’s home, or “oikophobia” as the late Sir Roger Scruton called it).

Any remedy for these distortions need not sacrifice true national loyalty—the proper appreciation of one’s heritage and home. It is precisely the nation, out of all political options, that best meets the spiritual and temporal needs necessary for human flourishing.

Measuring Perspectives

Both Manent and John Paul II use “nationalism” as a pejorative. As Jennifer Frey noted in the panel, recent nationalist movements have largely rejected civility and law and order outright. Such forms of nationalism, which often place national interest as the highest good, are incompatible with any notion of humane national loyalty, which assumes a properly ordered love of nation, love of God, and love of fellow man.

But, as we’ve seen, this is not the only definition of “nationalism” on offer.

What some refer to as “nationalism” is simply a desire for national sovereignty and democratic accountability. Likewise, the NatCons’ defining feature, abstracting from the details, might be a desire to defend and restore national identity against those who seek to dissolve it.

Notions of national sovereignty and resistance to global empire needn’t be at odds with humane national loyalty in principle. Moreover, if a proper understanding of the “national interest” includes human flourishing, then pursuing the national interest could be compatible with—and even an expression of—humane national loyalty as well.

Industrial policy is another matter and represents a departure from postwar American conservatism. Still, if NatCons’ priority is the national interest rather than specific policy, then perhaps the best way for conservative skeptics of, say, industrial policy, to engage NatCons is not to denounce them. It’s to offer evidence that such a policy is not—despite good intentions—in our national interest.

In sum: if “nationalism” refers principally to loyalty to one’s nation, then surely it’s worth defending. But, then, why call it nationalism? If what we’re talking about is retaining a love for one’s country and homeland, what extra work is that term doing?

Perhaps the answer will turn out to be that it has forced a debate over the virtue of national loyalty. In any case, if we want to defend the good of our nation, then we should try to use our terms carefully.

https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/defining-nationalism

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British PM to consider law change to protect ‘biological’ women

Watchdog says move could offer ‘clarity’ on women-only spaces but create risks on equal pay and sex discrimination

Rishi Sunak is to consider official advice that says changing the definition of sex in law would create greater “clarity” around women-only spaces.

Amending the Equality Act 2010 to specifically refer to “biological sex” merits further consideration, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concluded after the government asked it to consider the pros and cons of such a change.

But a change in the definition could be “more ambiguous or potentially disadvantageous” when it came to equal pay and direct and indirect sex discrimination, it warned.

The move risks reigniting the row over transgender rights and comes just days after Sir Keir Starmer tried to clarify his stance on the issue.

Sources close to Rishi Sunak said he “remains committed to his campaign pledge” to reinforce rights around biological sex and would support equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who called for the review, in “taking that work forward”.

In its review, the EHRC found “no straightforward balance” but said it had come to the view that defining sex as biological sex “would bring greater legal clarity in eight areas”.

These include hospital wards where the EHRC said that a “biological definition of sex would make it simpler to make a women’s-only ward a space for biological women”.

When it came to sport, it would mean that organisers could exclude trans women without having to show the move was necessary because of fairness or safety.

But a change in the definition could be “more ambiguous or potentially disadvantageous” when it came to equal pay and direct and indirect sex discrimination, it warned.

It stated: “On balance, we believe that redefining ‘sex’ in EqA to mean biological sex would create rationalisations, simplifications, clarity and/or reductions in risk for maternity services, providers and users of other services, gay and lesbian associations, sports organisers and employers.

“It, therefore, merits further consideration.”

Earlier this week, Sir Keir said that for the vast majority of people “let’s say 99.9 per cent, biology matters” in defining a woman.

But he added that voters were more interested in the cost of living crisis and that Labour was trying to agree a “commonsense, respectable and tolerant position”.

Baroness Kishwer Falkner, the EHRC’s chair, said there should be “due regard to any possible disadvantages for trans men and trans women”.

She said: “Our response to the minister’s request for advice suggests that the UK government carefully identify and consider the potential implications of this change.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-trans-women-biological-b2314144.html

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The rule of lawyers

Rod Liddle

Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I may soon be involved in a serious car crash.

The research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows a very strong correlation between someone’s Covid vaccine status and the probability of them being involved in a very bad road accident. The correlation suggests that those who have not been vaccinated are 72 per cent more likely to be involved in some kind of awful smash-up – a remarkable finding, but one I am prepared to believe. The greater road safety which pertains to the fully vaxxed is not, of course, a direct consequence of Pfizer’s miraculous elixir, but because those who have not had their jabs are more ‘reckless’ and ‘anti-authority’ than those who, like me, did as they were told by the government. Therefore they ignore speed limits and perhaps even have no regard for the median strip, instead hurtling headlong into incoming traffic laughing maniacally and screaming: ‘To hell with you, Bill Gates, 5G and the Zionist occupation government. I do what I want when I wa…’

As I say, this seems to me a reasonable proposition. But then so would a proposition that states if the government told us all to jump off a very high cliff, people who eschewed taking the vaccines would be 72 per cent more likely to continue living by the simple expediency of not actually jumping off a cliff. Or maybe 100 per cent. The study I quoted was clearly intended to show anti-vaxxers as being perverse and stupid – and perhaps they are. But there are health benefits, as well as deficits, in telling authority to get stuffed, surely.

Meanwhile, I am forced to return to a question which I find myself asking at least three times each week: should we intern all the lawyers on vast narrenschiff moored in the middle of our great estuaries, and force them to make the kind of plastic tat the Chinese churn out for western markets? Or just intern the majority of them? We have so many, after all – they are bred like lilacs out of the dead ground. Indeed, we have roughly ten times the number of lawyers per head of population than Japan, and more than any other country except for the USA. They have been our big growth industry these past 40 or 50 years, and there seems no end in sight to their fecundity and malign involvement in how we should run the country.

The latest lot to have done something genuinely malign call themselves ‘Lawyers Are Responsible’ – which they most certainly are, for all manner of wickedness. These 120 largely high-born liberal bellends have signed a ‘Declaration of Conscience’ which they say will prevent them ever having anything to do with the prosecution of anti-oil protestors such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. They also say they will never represent any branch of the oil industry. Among their number is the obnoxious Jolyon Maugham – famous for his hopelessly failed legal actions designed to stop or reverse Brexit and also for bragging about clubbing a fox to death.

There’s also Sir Geoffrey Bindman and Tim Crosland (who should have been jailed when he released the Supreme Court decision on the Heathrow Airport extension, in direct contravention of the law). I wonder if their collective antipathy to the oil industry enjoins them to exist in chambers – and of course private homes – devoid entirely of light and heat? Betcha it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, what does it say about their supposed principles?

But that is not the main issue, of course. Lawyers are duty-bound to represent whoever needs representation, regardless of whether the lawyer in question is in agreement – the so-called ‘cab-rank rule’. The essence of the point, then, is that their own views should not come into the matter – they are there to advocate from a position of neutrality, according to the law of the land. They are not there to pick and choose. Do these ‘responsible’ lawyers believe that BP and Shell are more wicked than serial killers, rapists, kiddie fiddlers? Or are these last named occupations things of which they approve and would be happy to represent? Why single out the oil industry? Similarly, do they believe the protestors should be allowed to cause whatever havoc they wish on the streets of our cities, with no recourse to punishment whatsoever? Even when they are stopping ambulances from reaching hospitals, or simply preventing key workers from getting to work? It is a standpoint of almost unfathomable imbecility.

However, it does highlight the mindset of the modern left. There is no debating with these people: they have no capacity for it. Everything, for them, is cut and dried – a bizarre Manichaean world in which some people are right and others are not merely wrong, but evil. It is the same Stalinist certainty you will hear when Labour MPs tell you that debate mustn’t be ‘fetishised’ and can be harmful. The same impulse which leads them to insist not merely that people can use whatever gender pronouns they feel appropriate, but that the rest of us must, on pain of legal redress, be forced to follow suit. It is the certainty which kept the Tavistock Clinic open for business for too many years and which insists that all white people are racist and there’s an end to it. A totalitarian mindset which is utterly intolerant of opposing views.

Then there is the magnificent, overweening narcissism. These lawyers believe that their personal opinions are more important than the legal system they have been expensively trained to serve. Nothing is more important than their own ridiculous views. Disbar the lot.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/__trashed-87/ ?

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The Australian Labor Party backs cost-linked wage rises for the low-paid

Leftist policies often sound fair and reasonable to start with. But then the adverse results of them start coming in. And the idea of a big wage rise for the lowest paid seems wonderful at first. And puts the government in a very good light as "caring".

But the idea is in fact a policy to throw many poor people out of a job. People who are very low paid are low paid for a reason. Their services are seen as worth only a minimum. And in many cases that will be a bare minimum. Raise what you have to pay them and that pay will exceed the value of what their services are worth. So they will be fired. Employing them will have become a losing proposition and no longer be seen as worthwhile. Not all of the low paid will be laid off but many will be. Not so much of a warm glow in that

Hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers should receive ­inflation-linked pay rises, the ­Albanese government has urged, as business warns the economy risks being plunged into recession if unions succeed in their push for a 7 per cent increase for 2.6 million workers.

Urging the Fair Work Commission to ensure the real wages of the lowest paid “do not go backwards”, the government submission to the annual wage review will seek to limit the inflation-linked rises to workers on the national minimum wage and lowest award rates.

Employer groups said granting the ACTU’s “economically reckless” claim for a $57-a-week increase would add $12.6bn a year to employer costs.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry will urge the commission to limit the pay rise to 3.5 per cent, which at $28 a week would represent a real pay cut but be the highest ever proposed by the employer group.

In a joint statement, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said economic conditions remained challenging, with Australians facing high inflation due to supply-chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine.

“While nominal wages growth has lifted, high inflation has seen real wages fall behind,” they said.

“This is having the greatest ­impact on Australia’s low-paid workers and their families – many of whom don’t have the savings to fall back on or wages that cover the rise in living costs.

“These workers are more likely to be women, under 30 years of age and employed as casuals. The government does not want to see them go backwards.”

Labor’s stand in support of low-paid workers came as the government appointed five people with union backgrounds to the commission, declaring it wanted to fix the Coalition’s “shameless stack” of the tribunal with ­appointees from employer ­backgrounds

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/bosses-warn-granting-actu-pay-claim-risks-recession/news-story/1015af03e12dd44f155667945a0b43e3

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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