Nationalism Is Looking Pretty Normal Right Now
American Greatness,
by
Pedro Gonzalez
Original Article
Posted By: gundisalvus,
1/11/2020 10:46:05 AM
The recent troubles with Iran highlight the problem with America First nationalism: it would mean placing the interests of regular people at home before transnational “interests” like foreign wars that have no bearing on middle-American life. Put another way, real people living in a real country with real interests of their own have a real problem with really stupid government and the real Stupid Party, otherwise known as the Republicans, that enables bad government while pretending to stand against it.
Americans have no desire to see the blood of their children spilled on the altar of the foreign policy establishment.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
earlybird 1/11/2020 11:01:25 AM (No. 285455)
Gonzalez feels very much like Tucker Carlson about our getting back into a ME involvement. I don’t believe that taking out a terrorist who was hated in many quarters, including in his own country, is restarting a ME involvement. It appears that Iran agrees - for now. (They cannot afford to go up against the full might of our country and they know it.) His attitude toward immigration and assimilation is very strong. He believes in legal immigration and assimilation. Old-fashioned concepts. And America First - across the board.
If America were based entirely on abstractions, people like Holmes wouldn’t have to try so hard to avoid serious discussion of Federalist 2. They would not have to ignore Benjamin Franklin, when he asked “why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens,” who “will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?” Or Hamilton, when he warned that diverse immigrants “tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.”
Those old boys could see the future pretty clearly...
9 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Knotwyrkin 1/11/2020 11:06:22 AM (No. 285460)
I guess I am just stupid. I read the first several paragraphs three times trying to understand the premise he is setting up. Gave up. Felt like I was reading George Will without the logic and just as big a thesaurus. Guess I'm just gap-toothed.
12 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
bad-hair 1/11/2020 11:31:45 AM (No. 285498)
If you're shouting "Death to America" you can move to the front of the line. It has been established that most Middle East leaders like Assad and Khameni will quite happily kill their own citizens to protect their butts. Salamiman went to the front of the line. Who wants to be next?
6 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
DVC 1/11/2020 12:40:35 PM (No. 285562)
Nationalism IS normal. A person should love their country. That is just normal. And the hateful lunatics who say otherwise are wrong, and just hateful lunatics.
9 people like this.
Pass the ice cold Coca-Cola around and let's teach the world to sing.
That's as good as any foreign policy the US has had since the fall of Communism. The ME fanatics are as good a "common enemy" as any. A variation of Mickey and Judy's exhortation in their musicals, "Let's put on a war." 9/11 was pretty obviously the scheme of radical Saudis. So, we invade Iraq and Afghanistan, which offered us some tomato can bad guys to knock down, Saddam and the Taliban. And two decades later...still securing the landscape with no apparent shortage of bad guys and a trickle of American deaths. A new recruit then would be preparing his retirement papers today.
I'm all for putting America first, and first we dump the feckless NATO allies and other "welfare queens" we've supported for decades. Then we take to heart Washington's warning upon his farewell to attachments with or animosity toward other nations saying such will only cloud our foreign policy judgment.
7 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
humboldt 1/11/2020 1:01:14 PM (No. 285583)
Certainly, nationalism is good and is even necessary to glue the country together. The problem is that anything carried to an extreme, nationalism included, generally has very negative consequences. (One has only to look at the rise of Hitler.) Much as extreme nationalists would like, we cannot ignore the rest of the world. As Trotsky stated, "you may not want war, but it will come looking for you." At any rate, I think that retaliation for the killing of U.S. citizens is a healthy nationalism, rather than the opposite. All foreign policies of the U.S. should be done with the attitude of doing what is best for the U.S. This is healthy nationalism and Trump seems to embody this.
5 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Lawsy0 1/12/2020 12:42:33 AM (No. 285940)
It IS normal to want to stay out of foreign wars, to preserve your religion, language, people, and culture. What is NOT normal is trying to smash your way down another country's throats. Like #2, I could hardly believe I was reading American Greatness, but I threaded through it, paragraph at a time, and figured out what he was preaching. Amen.
0 people like this.
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The real reason nationalism is so dangerous, is that it would mean minding our own business, looking after our own people first, and putting America First once and for all.