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I see in the resurgence of radical nationalism one of the principle threats to the United States and the world. Nationalism serves the needs and interests of the tribe at the expense, and often to the detriment, of everyone else.

I.

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama announced the end of History.[i] (The capitalization is essential to Fukuyama’s meaning.) The worldwide triumph of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism signaled the demise of authoritarian governments, which had been, or soon would be, superseded and replaced by the international free market that was everywhere on the rise. There could be no doubt that from Asia to Europe, from the Middle East to East Africa, the ideas of John Locke and Adam Smith had prevailed, as had the Hegelian dialectic. By “History,” Fukuyama meant “a single, coherent, evolutionary process” that encompassed “the experience of all peoples in all times” and that gave “a meaningful order to the broad sweep of human events.”[ii] Among the many problems with such a definition is that no historian conceives of history in this way. Nor does any person who is no more than modestly reflective about human experience. When and where has even the life of an individual, to say nothing of a nation, ever been unitary, unwavering, and progressive? Such is not and has never been the case. “History,” as Fukuyama would have it, is not an abstraction with a life of its own. There is no overarching logic, no innate purpose, no elemental meaning to History. On the contrary, history and meaning do not exist apart from human ideas, actions, and purposes. Human beings make history, and are themselves only what they have been and done.[iii]

It is not quite fair of me to reprove Fukuyama more than three decades after the publication of his book with the benefit of hindsight that such a perspective offers. Yet, although we live forward, we can only think and understand backward. Fukuyama’s thesis is analogous to Louis Hartz’s declaration that liberalism was the only political tradition in the United States uttered at the very moment when conservatism emerged as a robust political movement.[iv] It was (or ought to have been) clear before the ink dried on their pages that Fukuyama, like Hartz, was wrong, that the opposite of what they asserted was taking place. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, liberalism and democracy were already faltering and in retreat throughout the world, including in the United States. Their continued decline is (or ought to be) palpable.

Proclaiming the end of History as an intelligible system, Fukuyama never addressed the dangers inherent in the rise of nationalism and the deification of the state, phenomena that, in the West, originated with the French Revolution. Becoming quickly inimical to the liberalism that had generated it, the revolution sacrificed individuals to the fatherland with merciless ease. Even some of the revolutionary cadre themselves recoiled at the future that such nationalist fervor portended. “There is something terrible in the sacred love of the fatherland,” reflected Louis-Antoine St. Just, who was an ardent Jacobin. “This love is so exclusive,” St. Just continued, “that it sacrifices everything to the public interest, without pity, without fear, with no respect for the human individual.”[v] When Samuel Johnson condemned patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, it was this blind devotion to la patria that could justify any outrage or atrocity in the name of the fatherland and that often disguised self-interest as service to the nation which he had in mind.[vi]

Industry and technology subsequently bestowed ever more powerful instruments on the modern state, which leaders around the world continue to misuse and pervert. Suspicion, animosity, rancor, violence, and death followed until, as the French historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine predicted at the end of the nineteenth century, the West took “retrograde steps towards brutal and selfish instincts, towards the sentiments, habits, and morality of the antique city and of the barbarous tribe.” [vii] The questions that haunted the twentieth century, as Taine anticipated, remain the questions of the present and the future: do human beings have rights that no nation, no state, and no society may legitimately take from them? Do men and women have the right to dissent? Does the state or the nation possess the authority to forbid or to prevent the free exercise of conscience, or does it merely have the power to do so?

During the 1980s and the 1990s, thoughtful conservatives such as Russell Kirk celebrated the rebellion of “half the peoples of the world” against the Soviet Leviathan.[viii] Kirk rightly acclaimed the spread of liberty and independence among peoples who had spent as many as seventy years groaning under Soviet ineptitude and oppression. At the same time, the freedom of various ethnic nationalities in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe did not reinforce the freedom of individuals. Many in the newly independent states surrendered to the madness of bigotry, the exultation of vengeance, and the will to power. They unleashed their fury not against the weakened Leviathan but against one another and the minorities within their borders. In the same year in which Fukuyama published The End of History, Václav Havel, then president of the Czechoslovakia, observed that:

The return of freedom to a society that was morally unhinged has produced something it clearly had to produce, and something we therefore might have expected, but which has turned out to be far more serious than anyone could have predicted: an enormous and dazzling explosion of every imaginable human vice. A wide range of  questionable or at least morally ambiguous human tendencies, subtly encouraged over  the years and, at the same time, subtly pressed to serve the daily operation of the totalitarian system, have suddenly been liberated, as it were, from their straitjacket and given freedom at last. The authoritarian regime imposed a certain order—if that is the right expression for it—on these vices (and in doing so “legitimized” them, in a sense). This order has now been shattered, but a new order that would limit rather than exploit these vices, and order based on freely accepted responsibility to and for the whole of society, had not yet been built—nor could it have been, for such an order takes years to develop and cultivate.[ix]

Havel recognized, as Fukuyama evidently did not, that although circumstances may change, sometimes dramatically, human nature changes only by increments, if at all. He saw that order is not intrinsic to human experience in the past or the present, but that disorder is often the order of things, the raw material from which life and history are made.

The fate of Havel’s Czechoslovakia illustrates both the intractability of human nature and the perils of extreme nationalism. When he became president, Havel granted the Slovaks political and cultural autonomy. They scorned his generosity. When he traveled to Bratislava, the Slovak capital, to speak, they vilified him and pelted him with rotten eggs and spoiled vegetables. As a playwright, Havel had a keen dramatic sensibility. In a poignant gesture, he returned the Pittsburgh Declaration of 1918 to Czechoslovakia, bringing it not to Prague but to Bratislava.[x] The Slovaks again rebuffed his efforts, making it impossible for him to finish his speech. Despite the lengths to which Havel had gone to prevent it, in July 1992, the Czechs and the Slovaks divorced and went their separate ways.

Nationalism had prompted the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire. Nationalism also contributed to the end of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Nearly seventy-five years after the Great War and more than forty years after the Second World War, nationalism brought about the destruction of many of the independent countries that nationalist sentiments had helped to create in 1918 and to sustain after 1945. Fukuyama missed the significance of this development, caught up as he was in the exhilaration, or at least the uncertainty, that accompanied the fall of communism. An independent Slovakia owed its existence to Adolf Hitler who had permitted it to come into being in March 1939. The reestablishment of Slovak independence in 1992 was thus at least a partial vindication of Hitler’s vision of a German empire in Eastern Europe. Then, as in 1939, the Slovaks, or those with the power to shape events, were not motivated by their love of freedom or even their desire for self-government. On the contrary, their nationalist hatred of the Czechs propelled them toward independence, just as in 1939 they preferred to make themselves subservient to Germany rather than to stand with the Czechs.[xi]

Liberalism was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century that barely survived the conflicts of the twentieth, which were themselves conflicts between nations, and may have no future in the twenty-first. The animating force of the twentieth century was nationalism, which is still very much alive. Even before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the Russian novelist and social critic Leo Tolstoy had already discredited liberalism, characterizing parliamentary government as “the cult of incompetence” and insisting that ministers throughout Europe had a “horror of responsibility.”[xii] Tolstoy was hardly alone in this assessment. After the war, growing numbers of Europeans regarded liberalism as politically and morally impoverished and parliamentary government as futile. They looked for salvation from the problems of the age in dictatorship. During this moment of crisis and confusion, men and women lost patience with parliamentary debate, constitutional procedure, and the complexities of democratic politics. They sought instead quick answers and definitive solutions. They wanted effective leaders who took action–any action, as long as they did something. Many, like Tolstoy, had come to regard parliamentary governments as havens for lying and hypocritical politicians who squabbled ceaselessly among themselves to access the spoils of public life, often profiting at the expense of the people whom they had vowed to serve. Liberalism and parliamentary government seemed old, enfeebled, corrupt, and poised to be overthrown.

Pessimism about the future, disdain for reason, unwillingness to compromise, contempt for individual freedom, and indifference to the rule of law, which many Europeans had voiced even before the Great War, found renewed expression during the 1920s and 1930s in political movements that exalted myths of national greatness. In marked contrast to these nationalist sensibilities, liberal thinkers and statesmen in the United States and Western Europe had viewed the First World War as a confrontation between democratic and autocratic government. They expected Allied victory to extend and strengthen democratic ideals and liberal institutions. They were wrong. But in the immediate aftermath of the war, it did seem that liberalism would not only survive but also prosper in the twentieth century. The collapse of the German and Austrian empires led to the formation of parliamentary governments, and similar developments occurred throughout Central and Eastern Europe, except, of course, in Russia. Within twenty years, these liberal, parliamentary governments had all but vanished. With their disappearance, the hope of a more democratic world order faded.

Benito Mussolini had a more incisive appreciation of European political realities than did his liberal counterparts. When, for example, King Alfonso XIII of Spain abdicated after the anti-monarchist victory in the election of 1931, Mussolini remarked that the establishment of a liberal republic “was going back to oil lamps in the age of electricity.” [xiii] As had happened in Italy and Germany, most of the nations in Central and Eastern Europe adopted one or another form of authoritarian government in the two decades between the First and the Second World Wars. Under the leadership of President Tomáš Masaryk and Foreign Minister Eduard Beneš, Czechoslovakia was the sole exception. Hungary in 1920, Poland and Lithuania in 1926, Yugoslavia in 1929, Estonia in 1933, Bulgaria and Latvia in 1934, Greece in 1936, and Romania in 1940, all rejected liberal values and parliamentary government and embraced dictatorship.[xiv]

Following the first war, Austria had briefly become a liberal republic. But from the outset, the liberal Austrian government faced economic and social problems that it never solved. People went hungry; food shortages were especially acute in cities. Faced with a dearth of raw materials, the liberal government could also not revive struggling Austrian industry. Tariff barriers erected between the former states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire only worsened the economic situation. Between 1922 and 1926, the League of Nations had to rescue Austria from bankruptcy on multiple occasions. By the mid-1920s, many Austrians were convinced that only a dictator and an economic and political union with Germany (Anschluss) could end their deprivation, alleviate their suffering, and bolster their dying hopes for the future.

The Second World War brought about the demise of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. But it did little to diminish the appeal of totalitarianism and nationalism, and even enhanced the reputation of the Soviet Union in some parts of the world. At the same time, the Soviet domination of Eastern and parts of Central Europe added luster to the United States and intensified the allure of American democracy, which seemed at once the harbinger of freedom and the source of prosperity. The example, influence, and prestige of the United States mitigated and restrained the worst aspects of populist nationalism around the world. Until now. For liberalism was not the product of ideas alone. It also arose from particular social conditions, which have now receded if they have not yet altogether disappeared, even in the United States. By its nature, liberalism is patrician. To succeed, liberal, parliamentary government requires leaders who are willing to talk and to listen to members of the opposition, who can see value in the ideas of their adversaries, who are prepared to compromise, and who consent to set aside private interests in service to the public good. Such a ruling class no longer exists. A political rhetoric that vilifies opponents, or those with whom one simply disagrees, as enemies of the people is alien to the patrician spirit of liberalism and inimical to the cohesion, stability, and peace of society.

A patrician nationalism represents an irreconcilable contradiction. It is, in a word, oxymoronic. Nationalism by its nature is tribal and populist, attracting, and frequently inciting, the masses. In its appeal to the lowest common denominator in politics, society, culture, and even entertainment, nationalism is the very anthesis of patrician manners, attitudes, conduct, and refinement. Resting on the love of self and excluding the love of others, nationalism has historically been selfish, uncharitable, and often inhumane. United by hatred and concerned with their own welfare, the most radical nationalists extol the survival of the fittest, a doctrine that violates both the humanist tradition of Western civilization and the ethical teachings of Christianity.

II.

Since at least the late 1980s, nationalism has been evolving into a secular religion in the United States, or if not becoming a faith in itself is often a substitute for the orthodox religious beliefs to which it is commonly linked. But so-called Christian Nationalism is neither conservative nor Christian. It is, in fact, a threat to Christianity by substituting for faith in God an idolatrous deification of the nation, the symbols of nationalism, and the cult of the leader.

Unlike nineteenth-century liberal nationalists who imagined a commonwealth of free and equal nations peopled by free and equal citizens, radical nationalists during the twentieth and now into the twenty-first century are arrogant, without being self-confident, petty, indignant, shrill, vulgar, humorless, envious, vindictive, belligerent, and unapologetic.[xv] “We are living… under the brutal empire of the masses,” declared the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. “The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.”[xvi] Nationalists not only mistrust foreigners but also anyone who is different, even those among their countrymen who do not share their views or who question their ideology. To be distinctive is scandalous and indecent. Ortega warned that for the mass man “anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”[xvii] Nationalists seek to harass, ostracize, and punish dissidents by reducing them to perpetual outsiders even in the land of their birth. This outlook constitutes not as much a political or cultural as it does an intellectual and spiritual discrimination.

The essence, if not the consistent practice, of any liberal democratic order lies, by contrast, in respect for the rights and toleration of the opinions of those in the minority. Such respect and toleration disappeared long ago in such one-party states as Hungary, and are visibly eroding in the United States. Those who stand in opposition to the cult of the leader, the state, and the people are denounced as anti-American (that is, not sufficiently nationalist), anti-Christian, deceitful, corrupt, and subversive. Although in the United States the process is not yet complete, the conception of democracy has already mutated among many Americans. Democracy has come to mean that the majority rules and the minority does not count, a recognition that helps to explain why those who are out of power seek so desperately to acquire it and those who are in power endeavor to hold on to it by any means at their disposal.

Under these circumstances, which are unfolding in plain sight, it is not difficult to imagine that the system of checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution will disappear, or what is tantamount to the same thing, will cease to operate, that one branch of government will co-op the others into its service if one or both of the others do not first yield their sovereignty and pledge their devotion and obedience. Nor is it hard to conceive that the ruling party, with the aid of collaborators in the media, will come to control not only the government but also society and public opinion, and that the civil service will consist of officials whose principal qualification will be loyalty to the party and its leader. Herein lingers the germ of tyranny, waiting only to be summoned to infect the body politic.

It is possible, of course, that we are not at all witnessing the mutation of American democracy but rather the emergence of sinister tendencies latent within it. “If you admit that a man vested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “why not admit the same concerning a majority?”

Have men, by joining together, changed their character? By becoming stronger, have they become more patient of obstacles? For my part, I cannot believe that, and I will never grant to several that power to do everything that I refuse to a single man….  No one would wish to maintain that a nation cannot abuse its power against another  nation. But parties form something like little nations within the nation, and the relations between them are like those of strangers. If it is agreed that a nation can be tyrannical toward another nation, how can one deny that a party can be so toward another party. [xviii]

Omnipotence, whether exercised by an individual or the collective, always and everywhere has led to chaos and ended in destruction. As Tocqueville explained, “only God can be omnipotent without danger because His wisdom and justice are always equal to His power.” [xix] For Tocqueville, justice established the limits of both rights and power. To be authentic, justice could not apply merely to one nation, a solitary individual, or a single people. The appeal to justice had to be universal, cloaking the whole of humanity at once with the same protections and responsibilities. Anything less provided no guarantee against the tyranny of the majority, the form of despotism that Tocqueville identified as peculiar to democracies.

Numbers alone did not tell the whole story and did not constitute the majority, which was defined instead by access to power. However vast, the opposition was ineffectual, and thus represented the minority. In A Disquisition on Government, published posthumously in 1851, the American statesman and political philosopher John C. Calhoun addressed the fragile nature of a democratic polity that rested on majoritarian rule. Although Calhoun, who championed southern rights and defended slavery, maintained that any social order worthy of the name was stratified and hierarchical, bestowing particular rather than universal rights, he also believed that society was more important than government. Without government society was in jeopardy but without society, humanity itself was in jeopardy. Since he assumed that all governments had historically tended toward the abuse of power, Calhoun sought to devise a political mechanism by which to preserve the constitutional limits on power that would still enable government to protect society from internal threats and external dangers. In A Disquisition, Calhoun asked:

how is this tendency of government [to abuse power] to be counteracted?… It cannot be done by instituting a higher power to control the government and those who administer it. This would be but to change the seat of authority and to make this higher power, in reality, the government, with the same tendency on the part of those who might control its powers to pervert them into instruments of aggrandizement. Nor can it be done by limiting the powers of government so as to make it too feeble to be made an instrument of abuse, for,… [that] would… defeat the end for which government is ordained, by making it too feeble to protect and preserve society.[xx]

The franchise was indispensable to establishing the means by which the governed could peacefully resist the usurpation of power. But the vote by itself, although necessary, was insufficient. Democracy did not ensure the success or survival of limited government. It was no more than a political means to an end. The vote gave citizens the ability to choose elected officials; it did nothing to control the behavior of those officials once in office. Democracy could not forestall the inclination of government toward despotism. Calhoun had no difficulty imagining a democratically elected tyranny.

Problems with democracy arose because of the existence of diversified interests in society. If all citizens had the same interests, then all could agree and government would be equally beneficial or equally oppressive to all. Such was not the case. It was a commonplace that the actions even of a democratically elected government helped one group while harming others. Although social by nature, human beings had a greater regard for their own security and happiness than they did for the security and happiness of their fellows. “While man is created for the social state and is accordingly so formed as to feel what affects others as well as what affects himself,” Calhoun wrote, “he is, at the same time, so constituted as to feel more intensely what affects him directly than what affects him indirectly through others, or, to express it differently, he is so constituted that his direct or individual affections are stronger than his sympathetic or social feelings.”[xxi] To be blunt, human beings are naturally selfish. Connected to, and perhaps arising from, the instinct for self-preservation, this predisposition to selfishness disposed them to look first after their own interests and, if necessary or expedient, to sacrifice the welfare of others to them. Such decisions had the potential to create universal discord between one group of citizens and another, the war of all against all that Thomas Hobbes had described as characterizing the mythical state of nature. Should such fictive conflict ever became real and remain unchecked, Calhoun reasoned that it could end only in the murderous annihilation of social order and civilized life.

Like Tocqueville, Calhoun believed that the tyranny of the majority threatened democratic governments that had relaxed the constrains on power. Once in power, the majority enacted policies of taxation, disbursement, and patronage to enhance the authority and wealth of itself and its constituents. Recognizing the advantages of majority power, opposing interests would begin to coalesce into opposition parties, thereby dividing the community into two great factions that continued to compete with each other, and whose very existence, in time, would be circumscribed by the struggle. “Some conception may [thus] be formed,” Calhoun proclaimed:

of how one portion of the community may be crushed, and another elevated on its ruins, by systematically perverting the power of taxation and disbursement for the purpose of aggrandizing and building up one portion of the community at the expense of the other. That it will be so used, unless prevented, is, from the constitution of man, just as certain as it can be so used; and that, if not prevented, it must give rise to two parties, and to violent conflicts and struggles between them, to obtain control of the government.[xxii]

Calhoun called his proposed solution to democratic tyranny the concurrent, or constitutional, majority.

The concurrent majority gave each competing interest a voice in making and executing the law. Perhaps more important, it granted each interest the power to veto legislation. Calhoun was careful to distinguish the concurrent from the numerical majority.The numerical majority, he insisted, was not a genuine majority, for it never represented more than a portion of the people, its own narrow constituency. Yet it professed to represent the entire people and to act in the name of the whole. This circumstance persuaded Calhoun that the Constitution itself was insufficient to check the tendency of government to accrue power. To his friend, Secretary of the Treasury Samuel D. Ingham of Pennsylvania, Calhoun had written on October 30, 1830 that “to protect the subject against the Government is in fact the only object & value of the Constitution. The government needs no constitution. It is the governed, that needs its protection.”[xxiii] The purpose of any constitution was to restrain government as it was the purpose of law to restrain individuals. The merit of a constitution was measured by the degree to which it incorporated this principle of restraint. The numerical majority in control of the government was sure to use the Constitution, the legislature, and the courts to sustain and, whenever possible, to increase its authority. The minority must, therefore, retain enough power to constrain the majority to act always within the limits of the Constitution and the law. Calhoun concluded that only the concurrent majority could provide such assured means of doing so.

Without the concurrent majority or a similar instrument, Calhoun feared, all the constitutional limitations imposed on government would be distorted or weaken in time. Even efforts to clarify the powers of government would, in the end, come to no avail. For, as Calhoun made clear, “it is not possible to distinguish, practically, between a government having all power, and one having the right to take what power it pleases.”[xxiv] He had little confidence in the ability or the desire of those in power to discipline themselves; they would eventually transform what had begun as a democratic government into an authoritarian regime. If such a situation should ever came to pass in the United States, Calhoun predicted that statesmen would be reduced to mere partisans for whom getting elected and remaining in office would be more important than governing. Self-interest and ambition would alone determine their conduct. Electoral victory would become an end in itself.

Opposing parties meanwhile would more often than not follow the party line and serve party interests rather than consider what was best for the country. Power would pass from the hands of the people to the hands of the cabal that dominated the majority party, over whom not even rank-and-file members would exercise much influence. No longer interested in defining issues or solving problems, this irresponsible elite would do whatever was necessary to keep a firm grip on its power. Corruption, violence, and anarchy were certain to follow. The “appeal to force” then remained the sole option. There for Calhoun ended the American experiment in ordered liberty and self-government.

III.

Between 1918 and 1945, three competing ideologies dominated world politics: communism, liberalism, and nationalism. Communism remained confined to the Soviet Union until the advance of the Red Army enabled the Russians to establish communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. Liberalism prevailed in Western Europe and the United States. Nationalism, often imprecisely called fascism, had various incarnations both in and outside of Europe, the most virulent of which emerged in Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The First World War had shown that Germany was the most powerful state in Europe. In the east, the Germany army fighting almost alone, its Austrian ally proving more of a liability than a benefit, had defeated the Russians; in the west, the Germans would have fought the French and the British to no worse than a stalemate had it not been for the intervention of American troops. From the earliest days of his political career, Adolf Hitler dreamed of reversing this humiliating and what he regard as unwarranted German defeat. Once in power he was determined to rescind the Versailles of Treaty and to forge a vast German empire in Central and Eastern Europe.

Hitler believed that only a war of conquest would win for the German nation the territory and security it required, and that the German people, as a superior race, deserved. War was an essential component of Nazism from the outset. For Hitler, as for many veterans, the First World War never ended. The Second World War was incontrovertibly Adolf Hitler’s war. He wanted it. He planned for it. He chose the moment to start it, and for almost three years, between September 1939 and June 1941, he controlled its course and very nearly won it.

In the Second World War, as in the First, the enemies of Germany could not succeed on their own.Victory required the alliance of liberalism and communism—an unnatural alliance as Joseph Goebbels recognized and one destined to unravel, but an alliance that survived long enough to to bury the Third Reich and, for a time, to keep radical nationalism at bay. In 1945, it seemed that the future would be defined by the struggle between liberalism embodied in the United States and communism embodied in the Soviet Union. With the fall of communism in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR itself in 1991 it seemed that liberalism alone had survived, emerging battered but unbowed from the terrible conflicts of the twentieth century. Thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama, who saw history, or rather History, as linear, rational, progressive, reached that conclusion. Such judgments may have been logical. They were also mistaken.

Rather than liberalism triumphant and unassailable, the vacuum left by the disappearance of communism spawned an opportunity for the resurgence of a militant nationalism in various countries around the world. Since the last years of the twentieth century, the love affair with nationalism and the fascination with authoritarian government has continued to grow. Attendant on these developments is the decline of American prestige and thus of American power around the world. The image and reputation of the United States are tarnished. To many in Europe, America seems weaker and less reliable than at any moment in its history. Entrenched social divisions and intractable political disagreements have led many to question or reject American values, ideals, practices, and institutions. The ascendancy of radical nationalism is inseparable from the decline of the United States and the liberal democratic order that the United States once represented and defended.

Of the three ideologies that shaped the contours of the twentieth century, communism is gone and liberalism is in retreat. Despite the outcome of the Second World War, neither communism nor liberalism together or alone proved capable of subduing and eliminating nationalism, or more than temporarily restraining it. Human nature itself may partially explain the resilience of nationalism, its durability and evolution presaged in the survival of some atavistic quality that alerted people to be wary of strangers who might wish them harm. The mixture of aristocratic convictions and democratic ideals is unnatural and often volatile. But that rare hybrid nurtured the conditions in which civilization in the West flourished and grew. Generosity and kindness born of confidence and strength (cruelty in many ways arises from insecurity and weakness disguised as power), self-restraint in place of self-indulgence, and the authority of reason over passion became its hallmarks. Those principles, those standards of civility, now seem antiquated. They belong to another time that is receding from view.

Because we live in an age of ideological fervor that is not always well disposed to nuanced thinking, we tend to see the world in binary opposites. Many will assume that my critique of nationalism means automatically and by default that I am a liberal. There is no other alternative. They may be forgiven their presuppositions, but they are wrong. I am neither liberal nor conservative nor, should I add, am I a socialist. In the welter of contemporary politics, such designations have long since lost all meaning. I refuse to be a partisan. If I fit into any political category, I cast my lot with those who wish to end the sectarian antagonism and to silence the frenzied and irresponsible rhetoric that daily encourages the abandonment of civility and, with increasing frequency, condones acts of violence.

Yet, for these reasons, I do see in the resurgence of radical nationalism one of the principle threats to the United States and the world.[xxv] Nationalism serves the needs and interests of the tribe at the expense, and often to the detriment, of everyone else. It justifies atrocities, however barbarous, in the name of safeguarding and preserving the tribe. It issues from the presupposition that the critical motive in determining human conduct is, and ever will be, the quest for power. Liberals badly misjudged human nature by overestimating the human capacity for benevolence, compassion, and magnanimity. But their naivety was preferable to the transgressions of nationalists, who have awakened all that is base and sordid in human nature, who have granted to people the one thing that they need to be and to do their worst: permission.

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Notes:

[i] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). In 1989 Fukuyama published a preliminary version of his argument in an essay titled “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3-18.

[ii] Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, xii, 3.

[iii] See, for example, José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System (New York, 1961), especially 217-23.

[iv] Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955).

[v] Quoted in Hans Kohn, Making of the Modern French Mind (New York, 1955), 17. Not only the political but also the intellectual history of the French Revolution is a matter of some complexity. The French revolutionaries themselves seldom used the word “nation.” (See note vi.) They referred more often to “le peuple,” “la patrie,” and “la république.” Yet, in their unreserved cult of the people the revolutionaries fashioned the archetype of modern, populist, and totalitarian nationalism, political sentiments that the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies then exported to the rest of Europe, ironically often to the detriment of France.

[vi] The word “nationalism” had not appeared in English at the time Johnson wrote, although the concept certainly existed. “Patriotism” first appeared in print in English in 1738. Although “nationalisme” was included in a French dictionary in 1823, “nationalism” appeared in English only in 1844. See John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), 201.

[vii] Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France: The Modern Regime, Vol. I. trans. by John Durand (New York, 1931), 231.

[viii] Russell Kirk, “Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism,” in The Politics of Prudence (Wilmington, DE, 1993), 113.

[ix] Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, trans. by Paul Wilson (New York, 1992), 1-2.

[x] The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which Austrian officials signed on September 10, 1919, confirmed the break up of the Hapsburg Empire and recognized the independence of Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In 1918, a group of Czech and Slovak émigré politicians had signed a document in Pittsburgh that declared what the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye later ratified: the existence of an independent Czechoslovakia. It was this document, the Czech declaration of independence, that Havel brought back to Czechoslovakia in 1991.

[xi] Havel, Summer Meditations, passim, but especially 21-59, 102-22. Just as I was completing this essay, news broke that Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, had been gravely wounded in an attempted assassination. A divisive figure in Slovakian and European politics, Fico’s policies were pro-Russian and anti-American. As the leader of the Smer Party, Fico was also a populist and a nationalist who sought to prevent the Slovakian government from aiding Ukraine. In Slovakia itself, he tried to control the media, to revise the penal code, to overhaul the justice system, and in general to establish a more authoritarian regime. Fico became a victim of the political discord that he helped to foment, and that his political allies and foes alike have rightly denounced in the wake of his shooting. Had they condoned such political violence, they would have substituted bloodshed for reason and deliberation. Should murder ever become the accepted way to deal with political opposition, the Slovaks will have entered a period of political carnage that can only end in destruction, as it did in the Roman Republic. What is true for Slovakia today is also true for any country, including the United States.

[xii] Quoted in Eugen Weber, A Modern History of Europe (New York, 1971), 882.

[xiii] See “What’s gone wrong with democracy?” The Economist (February 27, 2014).

[xiv] The political history of Hungary in the immediate aftermath of the First World War requires clarification. In March, 1919, Hungary fell to the communist dictatorship of Béla Kun, an ally of Lenin. Kun did not have the support of the peasants, who made up the majority of the population, and his government collapsed within six months. Admiral Miklós Horthy replaced Kun and served the regent of Hungary between 1920 and 1944, when the Nazis abducted him. Although a military dictator, Horthy had long resisted making common cause with the Nazis. During the 1930s, his political associate Gyula Gömbös, who served as prime minister between 1932 and 1936, sought to align Hungary with Nazi Germany. Although Gömbös failed to achieve much of his nationalist and anti-Semitic program, the Hungarian government, wishing to regain territory lost during the First World War, did draw closer to Hitler and the Nazis.

[xv] It is worth noting that although the socialists took up the fight to extend rights and freedom to the laboring classes when bourgeois liberals abandoned and finally came to oppose such an effort, nationalism, not socialism, doomed the liberal politics that had predominated in Europe between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848. Liberals came under increasing suspicion because they were not, or did not seem to be, sufficiently nationalist.

[xvi] José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York, 1932), 19,18. Italics in the original.

[xvii] Ibid., 18.

[xviii] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, twelfth edition, trans. by George Lawrence, ed. by J.P. Mayer (New York, 1988), 251.

[xix] Ibid., 252.

[xx] John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution of the United States, ed. by Richard K. Cralle (Columbia, SC, 1851), 8-9.

[xxi] Ibid., 2-3.

[xxii] Ibid., 22. Italics in the original.

[xxiii] John C. Calhoun, Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. by H. Lee Cheek Jr. (Washington, D.C., 2003), 313.

[xxiv] John C. Calhoun, “The Fort Hill Address,” July 26, 1831, (Richmond, VA, 1960), 9.

[xxv] A discussion of the other threats is out of place in this essay. In brief, they are, first, the relentless insistence on economic progress and the ceaseless pursuit of material wealth, which, has, second, endangered the stability of nature and the health of the planet on which all life depends. I have written about these dual perils elsewhere. See, for example, “The False Promise of Progress,” The Imaginative Conservative (March 17, 2015); “Nature, Science, and Civilization,” The Imaginative Conservative (September 26, 2018); “The War Against Science,” The Imaginative Conservative (September 8, 2021).

The featured image is “Dictatorship Offered to Cincinnatus” (between 1725 and 1729), by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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