The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free.

• Author: Nowrasteh, Alex
• Position: Book review

The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free

Rich Lowry

New York: Broadside, 2019, 293 pp.

The newest intellectual trend on the American right is building a coherent ideology around the policies and rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump. Conservatives have experience with this. In the 1990s, the moral majority reigned supreme. During the Bush II years, right-wingers adopted a hawkish neoconservatism. Beginning with the Great Recession, right-wingers ditched the neoconservatism and adopted rhetorically moderate free-market libertarianism. Then Trump took over the Republican Party with his anti-trade, pro-entitlement, anti-immigration, and "Make America Great Again" ideology--also known as nationalism.

Thus, many conservatives are seeking to put some intellectual heft behind nationalism as they did with their earlier ideological flings. National Review editor Rich Lowry steps up with his new book The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free. His book is the latest addition to a growing literature that attempts to put ideological meat on the skeletal nationalistic rhetoric of President Trump.

Lowry begins by defining nationalism as love of one's national culture, language, history, institutions, holidays, and everything good in a nation. According to Lowry, nationalism doesn't promote hatred of foreigners or other cultures, but it is an expression of love for your fellow co-nationals based on those common traits. Lowry correctly claims that nationalism is a natural ideology that has been with humans for a while, expressed in most countries and governments throughout time.

For Lowry, even though nationalism is natural and has existed throughout human civilization, government policy plays an important role in nurturing it and indoctrinating citizens in its ethos. Although nationalism is natural, it can't flourish without constant government subsidy and cultural repetition, hammered into children from young ages. Those who object to nationalism do enormous harm to the citizen collective merely by doubting nationalism.

Lowry spends most of his book countering what he calls "the smear against nationalism." The smear, as he sees it, is that many people assume that nationalism is "inherently militaristic, undemocratic, or racist." He defends the democratic nature of nationalism briefly, so this review will focus on whether it is unfair to describe nationalism as inherently racist or militaristic.

Lowry insists that culture and other commonalities bring people together into a nation and that race or ethnicity is not at the core of nationalism. The first problem with Lowry's argument is that the word "nationalism" itself conveys ethnicity. Its Latin root is natio, which is a noun for ethnic group, tribe, race, breed, or other divisions by birth. Israeli political scientist Azar Gat's short definition of nationalism is "political ethnicity." Nationalism is therefore the "ism" (or idea) that states should be made up of, and represent the interests of, particular ethnicities.

Lowry is culturally constrained in arguing that nationalism is political ethnicity, which is good because modern society is rightfully scarred by ethnicity-based politics. I doubt Lowry even believes nationalism is ethnicity based or that he would embrace nationalism if he believed it was political ethnicity. That makes his enlistment of scholars who define nationalism as political ethnicity even more bizarre.

For instance, Lowry quotes Azar Gat that nationalism is "the doctrine and ideology that a people is bound together in solidarity, fate, and common political aspirations" (emphasis added). The definition of "a people" is important here and a lay reader might not dwell on it. That would be a mistake. Gat defines "a people" as "a common and distinctive historical entity between ethnos and nation. In order to be categorized as a people, an ethnos should have a sense of common identity, history, and fate." The word "ethnos" means ethnic group in stilted academic speak. In other words, in his book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, Gat argues that the basis of any nation is an ethnic group. Lowry quotes him in support of a thesis that is the opposite of Gat's thesis.

Lowry next cites "the great scholar of nationalism Anthony Smith" to argue that nationalism "is the culture that marks off one country from another." But Smith's famous book on nationalism is entitled The...