[T]here is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him.
—Joseph de Maistre, 1797
It was at a rally in Texas in 2018 that Donald Trump, then in his first presidential term, stopped being coy about where he stood on the question of nationalism. “Radical Democrats want to turn back the clock,” Trump asserted. “Restore the rule of corrupt, power-hungry globalists. You know what a globalist is, right? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. And, you know what? We can’t have that.”
“You know,” the president continued in impeccable barstool English, “they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. And I say, ‘Really? We’re not supposed to use that word.’ You know what I am? I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist.”
Nationalism has enjoyed many moments over the centuries, and Trump’s second election shows that it is enjoying one now. Not in liberal and progressive society, mind you, where a sympathetic mention of the word can elicit raised eyebrows and sidelong glances. But for populists of the right-wing persuasion, nationalism is part of the price of admission. And not only in the United States: Oddly, there is even a nascent Nationalist International, a network of politicians, intellectuals, and activists stretching across dozens of countries, stoked by hyper-influencers such as Steve Bannon and his English friend Nigel Farage, working to slay globalism and all its works.
Assuredly, elite society has its reasons for keeping its distance from nationalism. In American discourse, it seems to carry implicit modifiers like “white” and “Christian,” and hence to be reserved for the erstwhile majority that we are constantly told is dwindling. But not all nationalists over the centuries have had in mind ethnic or religious exclusion. An ideology that asserts that the nation—however defined—ought to be coterminous with the state, nationalism has often figured in mainstream liberal and even progressive projects. Depending on where one looks, nationalism has been imperialistic and anti-imperialistic, sectionalist and anti-sectionalist, liberal and anti-liberal. Today, a moderate and civic nationalism, one that aims to rebalance equal opportunity with economic growth and relax the recurring cultural and political spasms of our day, could help rejuvenate democracy at home and abroad.
Centripetal and Centrifugal
As the historian Eric Hobsbawm noted, the word nation first took on political meaning in Europe during the French Revolution. Derived from the Latin nāscī, meaning “born,” nation originally signified a cultural or ethnic group within a larger state. (Even today, a few old universities in Sweden and Finland have “nations,” clubs that originally corresponded to students’ home provinces.) From 1789, the word came to mean all persons living in a particular state. And as this was also the time when “state” and “sovereign” were being detached from “crown,” the politicization of the nation was also its democratization. It was Rousseau who, a generation earlier, had relocated sovereignty from the monarch to the “general will.” “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will,” he wrote in 1762, “and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”11xJean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton, 1950), 15. For the French republicans of the 1790s, the people were sovereign—where “people” was not simply the plural of person but a thing in its own right, a collectivity of equal, rights-bearing citizens. At this point, in what historian R.R. Palmer called the “age of the democratic revolution,” being for the rights of man meant being for the nation.22xR.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959 and 1964).
In practice, the French did not constitute a nation of equal citizens. Travel across that country, and you would encounter attachments to the divinely ordained king and to local nobles, distinct dialects, regional ways of life, suspicion of the metropolis, and deep loyalty to the Catholic Church. The nation had to be built, its local particularities ironed out. And the French were not the only ones embarking on this immense project. A generation later, across the Atlantic, Henry Clay and his National Republicans (ancestor of the Whig Party) thought to use federal infrastructure spending to weaken localism and sectionalism, which American nationalists regarded as backward, and forge a more united United States. What we might call centrifugal nationalism sought to shift people’s loyalties, and power itself, from small to large—from tribe, ethnicity, class, or region to society as a whole.
Centrifugal nationalism became an Enlightenment obsession in the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mill stated the case vividly in 1861: “Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be…a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship…than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.”33xJohn Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, second ed. (London, England: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), 300.
The nationalist’s task entailed the construction not only of a unified set of basic laws and rights but also a unified culture. “Italy is made. Now we must make Italians,” wrote the painter Massimo Taparelli, the marquis d’Azeglio (or his posthumous editor) in his 1867 memoir, as the liberal Risorgimento rolled on to completion. The task often involved war as well—in the Italian case (1861–1871), but also the German (1866–1871) and indeed the American (1861–1865). Left obscure at this point was how to determine where one nation ended and another began. The French and the Germans struggled over that, and even Americans and Canadians took some time to work it out.
But once these great nation-building projects were completed, nationalism did not go away. It found new work by reversing direction. Centripetal nationalism moved from large to small, asserting that the historic linguistic groups within empires and large nations—the Poles, the Irish, the Serbs, the Romanians, the Norwegians—were nations, too, and hence deserved states of their own. It was then, in the late nineteenth century, that the word nationalism gained currency in English.
Centripetal nationalism drew ambivalence from liberals. To its credit, it was anti-imperial. If empires were relics, oppressive by nature, inefficient, undemocratic, then nationalism could be the solvent that finally destroyed them. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the progressive blueprint for world order at the close of the First World War, called for self-determination for the peoples of the shattered Austrian and Ottoman empires and for the Poles (who had long been apportioned among the Austrian, German, and Russian empires).
Yet, there was a problem. Large-to-small nationalism was much more explicitly tied to language and religion, to common ancestry, to specific pieces of land. It was, in historian Hans Kohn’s term, ethnic nationalism. The Bulgarians, the Irish, the Czechs, the Macedonians: All these alleged nations were by nature exclusive and essentialist. Want to be an American or a Frenchman? Simply assent to liberal or republican principles. Never mind actual on-the-ground American or French bigotry and institutional discrimination; the national principle repudiated these things, and the law eventually worked to disable them. The nationalism of these large centrifugal states was what Kohn would later call civic.
But: Want to be a Serb? Unless you had Serbian parents, you were out of luck. Centripetal nationalism was more about blood and soil than about liberation. At least, that is how liberals in powerful countries saw the matter. As did Hobsbawm the Marxist a few generations later: His contempt for these small centripetal nationalisms and their advocates was as palpable as that of the liberal Mill. By its very nature, ethnic nationalism appeared regressive.
The centripetalists could justly note that the big centrifugal nationalists of previous generations were as ethnically minded as they, only without admitting or perhaps even realizing it. French, German, and Italian nationalism traded on the understanding, which had become common to all of Europe, that they did already constitute nations. The point hardly had to be argued anymore. But, in fact, ethnicity, along with size, was doing the work. Otherwise, why the Herculean cultural project of making “peasants into Frenchmen,” in the phrase of historian Eugen Weber? Indeed, for small would-be nations, the ethnic nationalism of the big states was worse, precisely because it was centrifugal: It imposed upon smaller peoples, such as the Bretons, the Welsh, and the Tatars, an alien culture that purported to be their national culture. For the small would-be nations, their problem was not that they were ethnic but that they were small.
Nationalism Becomes Malignant
The liberal worry about explicitly ethnic nationalism was not idle, particularly in the early twentieth century as national “self-determination” came into common use as an anti-imperial principle. The concept was a muddle, because what legitimately constituted a nation remained highly contested. The old centrifugalists wielded self-determination against their adversaries, the old Eastern empires, but exempted themselves from it. The new centripetalists saw through the hypocrisy, but their program would seem to lead to a contagious secessionism, boundary disputes, civil wars, and worse. Woodrow Wilson did not help matters by elevating self-determination to an international norm in the latter stages of World War I. The Fourteen Points contained specific provisions for the Austrian, Ottoman, and German empires. A month after announcing the plan, Wilson elaborated: “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action.”
Imperative to Wilson, perhaps, but still not to America’s liberal co-belligerents, always anxious about their own empires that stretched across Asia, Africa, and the Near East. The British and French understood clearly that the immense territories they had colonized teemed with incipient nations. And sure enough, a few decades later, after World War II, anti-colonial nationalist movements heaved and swelled all over the old European empires and eventually dismantled them.
In one of modern history’s great ironies, it was the fascists who agreed with Wilson. Fascism arose first in Italy on a foundation of postwar discontent, economic distress, anti-Bolshevism, and contempt for liberalism and democracy. Benito Mussolini took his time in defining Fascism, but from the outset it clearly entailed a hyper-centrifugal nationalism. It was d’Azeglio’s old “make Italians” project in overdrive, unabashedly using the coercive State (the Fascists always capitalized the word) to do the job. Not only old regionalism but also Marxist-inspired class warfare had to be hammered out of society. “The State…is a spiritual and moral fact in itself, since its political, juridical and economic organization of the nation is a concrete thing,” il Duce declared in 1929.
What fascists liked about self-determination was its congruity with irredentism, the doctrine that foreign territories inhabited by one’s co-ethnics must be brought back into one’s state, or “redeemed.” Irredentism grafted centripetal nationalism onto fascism because it professed sympathy for ethnic minorities living under foreign rule. Already in 1920, the infant Nazi Party in Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, had listed as its first demand “the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of national self-determination.” Thus, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and the Anschluss with Austria and annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. All in the name of Wilson’s self-determination.
But, of course, once they had what they wanted from self-determination, the fascists cast it aside and became outright imperialists. “For Fascism,” wrote Mussolini—or, rather, his ghostwriter, philosopher Giovanni Gentile—“the growth of Empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence.”44xBenito Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, trans. Jane Soames (London, England: Hogarth Press, 1933), 21, 25. And Mussolini was as good as his word, making Italy great by grabbing territory in the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. Nazi Germany’s imperial nationalism was at once more ambitious and more successful. Hitler built ethnic irredentism into his racial theory: The world’s population comprised races that were in a struggle for survival; the Aryans were superior but needed living space, namely Eastern Europe’s vast territories, tilled by hundreds of millions of Slavs under the control of a few million Jews.
Hitler, too, was as good as his word, mounting the bloodiest imperial project in history. Is it any wonder that nationalism’s reputation has never recovered? The self-consciously republican doctrine of Rousseau and the Jacobins, making monarchical subjects into equal, rights-bearing citizens, had degenerated into the Führerprinzip. Self-determination had become its opposite: imperialism. The liberal project to modernize local groups bound by old traditions had morphed into genocide.55xIndeed, the horrors of fascism eventually provoked a revisiting of these older, more progressive forms of nationalism. Rousseau’s “general will” came to appear intrinsically authoritarian, leading to the Reign of Terror in 1793, long before fascism was born. State modernization came to be blamed for the Indian wars and “residential schools” in North America.
For twentieth-century anti-colonial movements, there was still much to be said for nationalism. The principle that subjugated peoples in Africa and Asia were nations, just as their European and American predecessors had been, proved a useful solvent against European empires, especially after World War II. For the elites who led these movements—Gandhi, Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh—independence from the West meant imitating the West by forming nation-states. That required, in turn, a renewed centrifugal nationalism, cobbling ethnic groups and tribes together into a single political unit within defined boundaries.
Internationalism and Populism
Notwithstanding its boost to decolonization, nationalism retained its stigma in the mature democracies. After the catastrophes of World War II, it gave way to, if not quite its opposite—that would be cosmopolitanism—then something nonetheless very different: internationalism. It was imperative to move on from the destructive past, with its zero-sum politics of state against state and might makes right, toward a politics of multilateral interdependence, mutual gain, and peace among independent nations. In the United States, internationalism was assisted by the emergent struggle against the Soviet Union and its Communist system, a struggle that pressed America to find like-minded allies. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the post–World War I period, when it triggered a global depression and refused to cooperate with other democracies to climb out of it, Washington built a network of international institutions that bound itself to these countries.
The idea that nations had common interests was far from new. But it had proved hard to realize those common interests in a world where international trust was hard to sustain. The internationalist innovation was multilateral institutions. Not the United Nations, which was captive to the veto of the Soviet Union. No, the hot core of Western internationalism contained entities such as NATO, the US-Japan alliance, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (ancestor of today’s World Trade Organization, or WTO). As political scientist G. John Ikenberry has argued, America’s one neat trick was self-binding: Washington went against the usual way of great powers and complied with the same rules it set up for the smaller states. That reassured Western Europe and Japan that the United States would not abuse its power or abandon them—and gave them reason to invest in the multilateral relationships. The project of European integration, which led eventually to today’s European Union, was pushed by Washington as well.
Post-1945 liberal internationalism was a smashing success: Cross-border trade and investment rose, as did national wealth and the middle class; liberal democracy was entrenched; the Soviet Union was contained. All was not harmony and peace, though. Washington actually hampered and even overturned democracy in less-developed countries with strong leftist movements. The entire liberal international project was protected by America’s large nuclear arsenal. But nationalism seemed dead and was little mourned. In the 1970s and 1980s, internationalism underwent basic reforms, as the regulatory state gave way to the “neoliberal” one, rejuvenating the entire system. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed under pressure from liberal internationalism. Rump Russia joined up a decade after Communist China had already done so.
Thus, what was originally Western internationalism went global in the 1990s, to still more success. Globalization increased the volume of international trade and investment still more; European integration tightened even as the EU expanded; military budgets were slashed and nuclear arsenals shrunk; the digital revolution brought new efficiencies; Russia and China seemed destined to become liberal democracies; and across much of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa material well-being improved. The iPhones that are now bodily appendages for most Americans; the solar panels that adorn millions of suburban rooftops; the low airfares that bring droves of tourists to Venice or Angkor Wat; the 401(k) balances that the upper-middle classes monitor obsessively: All of these are powered by globalization.
Little noticed at the time, except on the political fringes, was the increasing skew in how the stupendous new wealth was being distributed. Headline economic statistics in democracies are mostly about aggregate growth, inflation, and unemployment. Those all looked good, notwithstanding occasional recessions. But millions of people were losing money and status. That was a feature, not a bug, of international openness. In the early nineteenth century, the British economist David Ricardo had made clear that free trade between England and Portugal would increase overall wealth in both countries precisely because it would press each country to specialize in what it did best and to stop doing what the other did best. England the country would make more money, but English vintners would be collateral damage; the same would go for Portugal and Portuguese clothiers.
It was that imbalance that generated today’s revival in nationalism on the political right. To be sure, the far left noticed, too, and acted. The anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999; the Occupy movement following the 2008 financial meltdown and Great Recession; the transformation of Bernie Sanders from socialist curiosity to scourge of the Democratic Party; the election to Congress of young leftists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: These were all political results. But the new left is more about race and gender than about class, and, accordingly, it has recoiled from nationalism.
Today’s far right, by contrast, owns its nationalism. Its first stirrings were in 1992, when fire-eating Republican journalist Pat Buchanan and the diminutive Texan businessman Ross Perot each saw the deindustrialization that free trade in North America would bring and ran for president. Buchanan put a scare in George H.W. Bush, the quintessential internationalist, for the Republican nomination but ultimately capitulated. Perot’s third-party challenge in the fall relished calling attention to a “giant sucking sound” from Mexico as jobs moved south of the border; he received 19 percent of the popular vote. Buchanan and Perot both tried again in 1996, with less success. But it was clear that right-of-center internationalism was wobbling.
The extent of the problem came to light only later. Economist Branko Milanovic has gathered massive data on income growth between 1988, when globalization was young, and 2008, when it started to decompose. The result is the “elephant curve.”66xBranko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality in Numbers: In History and Now,” Global Policy 4, no. 2 (2013), 202; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366155325/figure/fig2/AS:11431281106294136@1670605664478/Milanovics-Elephant-Curve-Change-in-real-income-between-1988-and-2008-at-various.png.
Across the elephant, from tail to trunk (left to right), one moves from the poorest people in the world to the richest. From bottom to top, one moves from those whose income grew the least to those whose income grew the most. The tail represents the world’s poorest, centered in sub-Saharan Africa, who did tolerably well. The middle class of the world, roughly the elephant’s enormous head, did the best, with real income (not including inflation) rising nearly 80 percent. These are largely the populations of China, India, and Southeast Asia. And the upturning of the elephant’s trunk shows that the richest of the rich—the proverbial one percent—did nearly as well.
It is the pronounced dip in the trunk, representing the global upper-middle class, that hardly advanced at all. Who are these people? Milanovic reports that they are mostly the middle and working classes of the “developed world”—the mature-market democracies of North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia.
The problem was cultural as well as economic. Globalization entailed an ethos of borderless-ness, experimentation, self-creation, and relentless fluidity—what Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity.” It was a culture suited to university-educated urban elites who manipulated digital symbols for a living, but not to manual laborers, clerical workers, or farmers, for whom long-term commitment to place and loyalty to institutions were more natural.
Those in the wealthy countries whose lot had not improved found themselves relatively worse off than before. The elites in their own societies were doing fabulously well and celebrating the rising equality in the Third World. But they barely acknowledged the stagnation in small towns and rural areas in their own countries, except when scolding them for clinging bitterly to their “guns and religion.” The boats lifted by the global rising tide deplored the boats that were capsizing, adding insult to injury. The reaction should not have been surprising: right-wing populism and the new nationalism, with their garrulous radio talk-show hosts, pickup trucks and Hummers, Old Glory clothing, and patriotic country-and-western anthems, all guaranteed to embarrass and affront urban progressives.
Real-estate developer and reality-TV star Donald Trump had toyed with running for president since the 1980s. Finally, in 2015, he sensed that the discontent with globalization in the heartland was raw material for an unabashedly nationalist movement that held elites and their fluid ways in contempt. Trump ran for the Republican nomination by battering free trade, international institutions, and, above all, immigration. A Republican Party still attached to Ronald Reagan’s call to tear down walls was soon taken over by Trump, who promised to build a wall to keep Latin Americans from entering the country.
In his first term as president, Trump began to put globalization into reverse. The bits of the southern border wall he built were insignificant, but he did try to ban immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and to end various programs that allowed children and other family members to immigrate or become permanent residents. Withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement was meaningless, as Trump negotiated a slightly altered version called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But Trump imposed tariffs on a number of goods, including many from Canada, Australia, and the European Union. Most severe were the tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of imports from China.
The Biden administration that followed turned away from nationalism in some areas but—let the reader understand—stayed with it in others. It relaxed control at the Mexican border, and immigration rose sharply (to the Democrats’ political grief). But Biden kept in place most of Trump’s China tariffs. A rare bipartisan majority in Congress also passed Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, which heavily subsidizes semiconductor research and manufacturing in the United States. Trump has made it clear that in his second term he intends to push the country further in a nationalist direction, from forcing millions of illegal immigrants out of the country to imposing even larger taxes on imports. “To me,” he declared shortly before the 2024 election, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff.’”
And Now, Whose Nationalism?
It is telling that, even in a time of severe polarization, Biden was the most nationalistic Democratic president in many decades. Right and left in America agree on little today, but they concur that globalization has not served the American working class well. In November 2024, a majority of American voters showed they are willing to gamble again on a charlatan—a known one this time—to fix things, partly because he is an unabashed nationalist.
Polite society, then, must get over its aversion to talking about nationalism. It can begin by reiterating that American nationalism in 2025 presents a menacing face to many Americans and many others around the world. Implicitly and even explicitly racist language has been common in the MAGA movement. Bannon, the movement’s godfather, says he prefers “legacy Americans”77xJames Pogue, “Empire State of Mind,” Vanity Fair, November 2024. to newcomers. Intellectual support for the movement comes from self-described “postliberals,” whose commitment to individual liberty is not evident. Former senior aides have accused President Trump of fascism. The clumsy but deadly serious events in Washington on January 6, 2021, cast a long shadow. Beyond that, Trump has begun to downplay MAGA’s original centripetal nationalism—a Little America movement, looking to shrink rather than expand, to bring the boys home rather than send them out to conquer—in favor of a new American empire that would incorporate Greenland, the Panama Canal, and perhaps even Canada. Perhaps this is only bluster or misguided bluffing from a man who wants to go down as the greatest dealmaker in history. If not, it uncovers a bitter irony. Imperial American nationalism, it seems, has one important thing in common with the globalism it loathes: Both see national boundaries as insignificant. Globalists, such as the former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, want to move people across borders. MAGA, it seems, now wants to move borders across peoples.
Regardless of how serious the imperial talk is, the nationalism on offer by the Trump movement is not one that will help reset the country. The United States is, by its nature, outward looking, open, confident that it will profit from neither isolation nor empire but rather from free traffic with the rest of the world, sure of its ability to assimilate and be improved by the new. Its recent mistakes have not been importing goods and services, investing in other countries, or admitting immigrants. Rather, it has gone wrong in embracing the new liberalism of utter and perpetual openness to all of these things and more, assuming an indifference to the effects of that openness on the health of its people and its democratic institutions, and appearing for all the world like a country that is not sure why it has special obligations to the people who elect its governments and fight its wars. And it is not even clear that the new Trump administration is set up to enact its own nationalism. The tech billionaires who helped the administration regain the White House, and now enjoy outsized influence over it, have profited enormously from investing in China, from automating production and transportation, and from the open internationalism that MAGA professes to repudiate.
Nationalism has not always been ethnically essentialist or authoritarian. At its best, it is ruthlessly democratic and liberal, recognizing the equality of citizens. And in our time nationalism has a distinct advantage over its alternatives: It looks at globalization with a gimlet eye rather than through the gauzy lens of the 1990s. At that 2018 Texas rally, Trump contrasted nationalism to “globalism” in simple terms. Globalism, he said, cares about the global good, whereas nationalism is concerned with the good of the country. Internationalists are right to insist there is no necessary conflict between globe and country. But in practice, as Trump’s voters have told us repeatedly, there has been a conflict, and the global has been winning. And it will no longer do to dismiss those voters as white Christians worried about losing their power. Whatever was worrying those white Christians in 2024 was also worrying millions of Latino, Asian, and black Americans.
There are much better reasons to be nationalist, perhaps above all because the nation—and not some fanciful cosmopolis—is, as political philosopher Yael Tamir argues, where democracy lives. In a democracy, government is obligated to seek liberty and justice for all. A suitable nationalism would interpret that not as maximizing gross domestic product, as nearly all governments are now in the habit of doing, but instead in finding the right balance between increasing overall income and fairly distributing that income across the nation. Democracies that are that kind of nationalist should together find ways of achieving that national good together. That is what they did after World War II, and they surely can do it again.
The new nationalists are wrong when they yearn for ethnic homogeneity and a man on horseback. But they are not wrong to push back against what feels like an empire—distant, disruptive, unaccountable, condescending, unfair. They are not wrong to yearn for the renewal of their democratic nation.