That really is the question. What alternatives are you rejecting when you choose this one. Here’s an account that Matt Bai, a Yahoo columnist, published on October 25
“You know what I am?” Trump asked the amped-up crowd. “I’m a nationalist, OK? Nationalist. Nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!”
He then accused his opponents of being “corrupt, power-hungry globalists.” He went on:
“You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person who wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.”
That establishes what alternative President Trump wants to oppose. He is against globalism. That is the fight he would like to have. “Nationalists” against “Globalists.”
And you can see why he would like that. “Pro-lifers” would like to enter into a debate with “Anti-lifers.” And “Pro-choicers” would love to debate “Anti-choicers.” But that’s not really the way the debates are structured. President Trump knows that and he is trying to restructure them. He is not a subtle person.
A lot of times, the whole game is decided when the name of a measure is decided. It is a little like assembling the teams on the field for the coin flip, then whoever wins the coin flip is declared the winner and everyone goes back to the (now completely unnecessary) showers. I remember hearing of a bill to be debated in the Ohio legislature when I lived there. The bill had to do with experiments that may or may not be performed on animals. The bill was going to be called either “the child-saving bill” or “the dog-killing bill.” This is the coin flip. Somebody wins and everyone goes home. [1]
But more often, it is the naming of the alternative that establishes the home field advantage. In the examples I gave above, there is a Life team and a Choice team. In the pro-life v. anti-life game, Life is the home team and in these contests, the home team ALWAYS wins. In the pro-choice v. anti-choice game, the Choice teams is the home team. That is why the choice of home field is so important.
President Trump, in the remarks Matt Bai reports is working to gain the home field advantage. One context pits the Nationalism team (Yea!) against the Globalism team (Boo!). The other contest pits the Nationalism team (Boo!) against the Internationalism team (Yea!).
In the Internationalists stadium, the “nationalists” are just narrow minded jingoists
[hyperpatriots with a big army and a chip on their shoulder]. [2] In the Nationalists stadium, the “globalists” are cosmopolitan snobs who care nothing for the land of their birth.
So…if the home teams always wins, it is a really good thing to be the home team.
President Trump doesn’t confine his sense of what nationalism means to the partisan rallies, like the one Matt Bai reported on. Here he is before the U. N. General Assembly.
Each of us here today is the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition, and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on Earth.
That is why America will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance, control, and domination.
But President Trump thinks he can destroy internationalism as a public choice. He can try to pretend it doesn’t exist. He can link it to “global governance and domination” as he has here. But it’s a big hill for him to climb. Internationalism has been the basic choice of every president since World War II. It was the choice of Presidents Reagan and Obama and Clinton and both Bushes.
The Foreign Policy Association
Let’s take a very short tour of why all those presidents have chosen it. Last year, the Foreign Policy Association lead off their Great Decisions series with a presentation called “The Waning of the Pax Americana.” The idea was that the set of international institutions that have served our interests so well since World War II are being threatened. [3]
The first quote gives us some useful specifics for what is often called “the Liberal International Order” or LIO. This is not “liberal” in the domestic American sense. This is “liberal” in the sense that means pro-West generally.
“…a new order—an American-led order that involved the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. Separate but equally important NATO, the World Trade Organization. These were really the key pieces of architecture of the U S led global order.”
The Liberal International Order is characterized here as “the U. S. led global order,” and so it was. Those institutions were invented to give order to international dealings, but always with the interests of the U. S., as the leader of that coalition, kept in mind. “Globalism” does away with those. “Internationalism” cherishes them. Nationalism simply avoids them in favor of bilateral negotiations, which can be clearly seen in President Trump’s U. N. remarks.
Here is another characterization of internationalism from the Great Decisions series.
“…the Liberal International Order (LIO) that we helped to structure and we did it for selfish American reasons. It was the cheapest way for us to accomplish our goals. And what made it cheap? Allies.”
The question of the cost of our negotiations is raised directly here. Programs run jointly for ourselves and our allies are simply cheaper. We are not stuck arranging quid pro quo for each “deal.” The deals are supervised by institutions organized particularly to do that work—the World Trade Organization, for instance—and they are funded by everybody.
You take these four things together: economic stagnation, large scale immigration, unmediated social media, creaky old sclerotic governments, and what you have is a recipe for populism on a world stage.
Where nationalism will take us
With these considerations, we look at the alternatives. With the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil “populism on a world stage” is exactly what we have and he is not the first such leader. President-elect Bolsonaro wants “a better deal for Brazil.” Does he really? Just imagine? And how will that “better deal” be pursued, do you think?
I would think that President Bolsonaro would try to drive a harder bargain with the U. S. Brazil has a huge middle class and it has been very good about buying American products. If I were Brazil, I would want to use that as a bargaining chip.
And so would everyone else who has a bargaining chip. And that is the end of the international institutions that have brought about an international order favorable to the West.
That’s why I think being an “internationalist” is a good position. It is also why I think that the opposition President Trump proposes between “nationalism” and “globalism” should be exposed as a superficial and misleading opposition.
I’m sure it works well on the campaign trail and I’m sure that is why he uses it, but that is the only sense I can see in it at all, and I think the costs are insupportably large.
[1] I don’t actually remember whose bill passed, but I am sure it is the same as whoever won the naming battle.
[2] Nationalism with a chip on its shoulder and a willingness to go quickly to war has been called “jingoism” for a long time now. Here is the poem that popularized that name.
“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”
[3] I’m afraid I don’t remember any more which quotes go with which people. They are all mainstream commentators on U. S. foreign policy, the they report this in the manner of “As you all know…”
been great for America” or “Just look at the economy, it’s booming.”
talking politics, but you are not.
Usually there is something better.
It is virtually impossible to oppose that as a goal.
For such a purpose, I think Dr. Tamerius’s proposals can hardly be improved on.
Andrew Shepherd (and I hear Sorkin’s touch with words) in The American President. He was talking about “America,” he says. The line goes like this
The school children Sherry Turkle recruited to try out cute little interactive robots [3] came up with a way to split the difference. The robots, which they understood were only on loan to them, were, the children decided, “alive enough” to have a relationship with. Not a bad first formulation, I think.
recognize the distance that is really there, and that is where the “never pretend to be one” comes in. Coats means that the presuppositions of the assistant’s responses can’t be too personal. That would destroy the buffer.
while. It isn’t a real debate, like the Season 7 debate between Matt Santos and Arnie Vinick. It’s more like T-ball, where Governor Ritchie of Florida, the Republican nominee, places the ball on the T and President Bartlet knocks it out of the park. Time after time after time.
them, so you have to assert some functional role for each. We hear this all the time, “Back when I was young and naive….” someone will say, implying that his present views have somehow escaped that naiveté. “My Sunday School teacher always said…” is the beginning of a rejection of that position—or, more likely, a caricature of that position—and a celebration that it has been discarded. [2] Sometimes you hear a narrative placement like, “Our parents always insisted that we…” and this is particularly true if the speaker is trying to assert the continuity of those early practices with his current practices.
So I became a liberal. Kind of. [5] And like a lot of liberals who had once been conservatives, I belittled the conservative views. This was my first experience with “I’m glad I am not there anymore” (IGIANTA). The liberalism I graduated to had a great deal of anti-conservatism in it and I enjoyed both the breadth of scholarship to which my new liberal appetites directed me and also the regular belittling of the views I once held. [6] I told “fundy” (fundamentalist) jokes the way we used to tell “dumb blonde” jokes.
become a blood sport. This isn’t something Donald Trump did. This is the social change that gave us Donald Trump. Years of economic stagnation have left their mark. The effectiveness of ridicule and disparagement of one’s political colleagues pioneered at the national level by Newt Gingrich and widely adopted by Republicans has also left its mark. The moral condemnation of many traditional voters as “haters” of one kind or another has become standard practice by liberals and that, too, has left its mark.
There are some particular issues that have defined Neaera’s life [2] but the thing that intrigued me about this observation of hers is the transition from “time endured” to “life lived.” She calls this transformation “metabolism.” She goes through a whole day without this transformation of minutes into living; she experiences it as not having enough time, but when she becomes a winner and begins to reflect on her life, she knows that isn’t what it was. She felt time-starved, but she wasn’t, really. She was “life-starved.” Here, as played by Glenda Jackson.
passivity, it requires that she help plan the heist, that she cooperate with William G., whom she know only from the context of this proposal, that she sneak the turtles to the coast and set them free. And then, presumably, come back to her own life, which she characterized, early in the book (p. 43) as “I seem to go on doing what I do.” Ben Kingsley here as William G. along with a woman who wants very much to be his girlfriend.
them.
I want to make a comment or two about the song and then I want to return to the “sensitivity problem.”
trashy people.
Long before the body is cold, some manufacturers of “outrages made to order,” a specialty of the house in Macedonia, has begun circulating the rumor that the Secretary had, in fact, killed the Vice President.
style of service she offered as a barista and taught as a manager of baristas. But to do that, I will have to tell you a little about her so you don’t imagine that the kind of service she provided was disembodied and abstract. It was not. She embodied that quality of customer service herself and she made it a part of nearly all the waves (it is tempting for me to think of them as “generations”) of baristas who were fortunate enough to come under her pedagogy.
They would begin to add the personal touches to the transactions. One I remember is the change from “What is your name?” if a name needed to be taken for an order, to “May I have your name for the order?” Little things; classy things. They just began to creep into the language and behavior of the new people, which is why the group called it “the Jennifer Effect.”
First, you may not have noticed, but real honest-to-goodness Nazis are coming back. These are the classic Nazis with the racial paranoia and the lust for authority and the attraction to violence. The guy who edits a Nazi newsletter is a grammar Nazi and it isn’t even a joke. The idea of Rudolf Hess (no relation) as a grammar Nazi actually is a joke and I had not heard it until today.
that Nazis have better grammar than “normal people.” It is the intrusiveness of the enforcement that suggests Nazism. And in the Obama example, the intrusiveness belongs to the users of incorrect grammar. The demand is, “You will use the grammar we use or you will pay the price.”
You might respond that there is an objectionable “snottiness” about the traditional Grammar Nazi kind correction, a common instance of which is the confusion of “your” and “you’re.” (As the example shows.) But I would argue that there is also a remarkably pervasive snottiness about language that is “too white” or “too middle class” for the present group of hearers.
