Column: A careful nationalism may be our best option

When it comes to uniting people behind liberty, a careful nationalism may be the best option.

I’ve followed libertarian politics closely for the last five years. So, yes, I’ve given up hope that libertarian ideals on their own will soon electrify any significant proportion of America. I think that, like several of Rand Paul’s ribs, that dream is broken for many of us young little “L” libertarians. 

What finally did it for my fantasies of spontaneous classical liberal revival was the 2016 Republican presidential primary, especially the debates, where it seemed like the only Republican candidate concerned about civil liberties or human decency was the aforementioned Senator Paul — who never got his poll numbers above 17 percent. 

Why did he do so poorly? Because non-coercion by itself is a hard ideal to build collective action around.

A vignette from a march in Warsaw on Saturday struck me as a revealing example of how libertarian ideology lacks mass(es) appeal. The Polish independence day march drew lots of press, including in this article from The New York Times and this one from The Wall Street Journal. Both newspapers noted the rally’s significant attendance (in the thousands) and marked far-right flavor (it was organized by National Radical Camp, a youth group that seeks an “ethnically pure Poland,” according to the WSJ). 

In the context of recent nationalist political successes in the Eastern European country, word of banners reading “Europe Will be White” and “Clean Blood” flying over many young Poles struck me as disturbing, but in a now familiar way — anyone who’s been reading left-leaning media at all for the last two years is well aware of the existence of white nationalism.

The aspect of the rally's coverage that nabbed my attention in a new way was the direct comparison it offered of two rival ideologies’ visceral attractiveness. 

National Radical Camp gathered thousands with its “We Want God” slogan (a historically important phrase taken from a Polish nationalist song). Meanwhile, The New York Time’s Megan Specia reported, “The crowd at a counterdemonstration, with the slogan ‘For our freedom and yours,’ was greatly outnumbered.” 

There’s a picture of some of the counter-demonstrators attached to the NYT article. Several of them fly rainbow flags, and several others are holds a banner that reads “Rainbow is the New Black” and “Queer Solidarnie.” 

These sayings, “For our freedom and yours,” and “Rainbow is the New Black” are potently individualistic. They call for the widespread tolerance necessary for individual liberty, that prerequisite for self-actualization, and that is why they often fail to inspire popular action: 

Both are slogans about individual fulfillment and its multicolored fruits. They don’t draw on the pools of collective mythos or point to singular meaning in the way that fuels large movements. By contrast, ethnic, religious or otherwise nationalist rallying cries like “We Want God,” or “Make America Great Again,” (as Eliora Katz noted in a recent editorial about modern liberalism’s meaning-deficit) do. Because of that, they are easy to support with your buds. 

Looking forward, those of us interested in preserving and advancing freedom should hitch our liberty wagons to better riding lawnmowers than those offered by pure-freedom-hawkers like Rand Paul, or multiculturalists like Clinton or Obama. We need to bind individual liberty and fulfillment to shared American culture, language and identity. 

America’s unique history and mythology — from the First Amendment to the Civil Rights Movement — opens the door for benign forms of such nationalism.

We can still tolerate religious, racial and other differences without totally abandoning an authentic nationalism. 

We can harness nationalism’s unifying power, without descending into bigoted tyranny.