Nurturing Nationalism.

• Author: McCarthy, Daniel
• Position: The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization - Book review

John B. Judis, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018), 157 pp., $15.99.

Economic globalization ran into difficulties a decade ago with the crisis we call the Great Recession. Political transnationalism, whether of the European Union variety or of the sort required by George W. Bush's "global democratic revolution," has likewise left only disillusion in its wake. The return of nationalism is therefore not so surprising. But why nationalism of the right rather than left?

From international Communism to today's campus multiculturalism, the left has often been anti-nationalist. But John B. Judis' new book offers a timely reminder that there is such a thing as a nationalist left, and the author himself is part of it. A longtime writer for The New Republic and the author of numerous books, including a well-received biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., Judis has consistently argued for a new American nationalism. Though nationalism "is often associated with the extreme right of Germany's Hitler," Judis writes, it "was also central to the French revolutionaries of 1789, the North in the American Civil War, the national liberation movements of the twentieth century and to Britain's resistance to the Nazi onslaught during its 'finest hour.'"

Even in Germany, nationalism did not have to mean Nazism--which was the result not of national unification and the romantic myths accompanying it in the nineteenth century but rather of such proximate causes as defeat in World War I, the punitive terms of the peace that followed and "the specter of Bolshevism... the incomprehension of American, British, and French finance officials during the 1920s, and the utter failure of an embattled Weimar democracy."

For Judis, nationalism serves a check upon economic power in a modern world otherwise bereft of institutions that provide shelter and support for the naked individual. "Modern capitalism's divorce of production from the family," he writes, "and the challenge to the traditional family from the new sexual norms weakened a key institution that allowed individuals to transcend their isolation. Science's conflict with religion dealt another blow to an important source of group identity." Labor unions were, in part, an earlier answer to the problem, but unions themselves have been rendered powerless by the now global mobility of capital. Only the nation can restore a modicum of power...