"Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, for the past 50 years."

"David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. ...
    "David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.
    "The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Beyond Question?'

National/Ethnic Pride

"I've never understood national pride; I've never understood ethnic pride....
    "Because ... to me pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth.
    "Being Irish isn’t a skill. It’s a fuckin’ genetic accident.
    "You wouldn’t say, 'I’m proud to be 5 foot 11 inches. I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer.”
    "So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish, or proud to be Italian, or American or anything?
    "If you're happy with it, that's fine. Put that on your [bumper sticker]."

~ George Carlin from his monologue 'Proud to be American' [VIDEO]

"The top-down Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun."

"New Zealand is currently living through another top-down revolution. Though far from complete, it has already captured control of the commanding heights of the public service, the schools and universities, the funding mechanisms of cultural production, and big chunks of the mainstream news media.
    "The ideology driving this revolution is not neoliberalism, it’s ethno-nationalism. A potent amalgam of indigenous mysticism and neo-tribal capitalism has captured the imagination of the professional and managerial class and is relying on the latter’s administrative power and influence to drive through a revolutionary transformation of New Zealand society under the battle-flags of 'indigenisation' and 'decolonisation.' The glue which holds this alliance of Māori and Non-Māori elites together is Pakeha guilt....
    "The origins of the present ethno-nationalist revolution may be traced back to the early 1980s – specifically the 1981 Springbok Tour.... The [Māori] nationalist activists ... created a movement towards 'Māori Sovereignty' in which revolutionary Māori would lead, and guilty Pakeha would follow.... The Guilty Pakeha’s 'long march through the institutions' had begun.
    "Only one more strategic victory is required to complete the Māori nationalist revolution: Pakeha pride in their past and in their culture has to be undermined. The men and women once celebrated as nation-builders have to be recast as colonial oppressors. The country famed for being 'the social laboratory of the world' has to be re-presented as just another sordid collection of white supremacist, treaty-breaking, killers and thieves.
    "Māori, too, are in need of a complete makeover: from slave-owning warrior-cannibals, to peace-loving caretakers of Te Ao Māori – a world to which they are bound by deep and mystical bonds. Inheritors of a culture that sanctioned genocidal conquest and environmental destruction, how can the Pakeha hope to lead Aotearoa towards a just future? As in the 1980s, the Twenty-First Century journey requires revolutionary Māori to lead, and guilty Pakeha to follow. And those guilty Pakeha in a position to make it happen appear only too happy to oblige.

    "Which is why, in March 2023, New Zealand has an educational curriculum dedicated to condemning colonisation and uplifting the indigenous Māori. Why Māori cultural traditions and ways of knowing are elevated above the achievements of Western culture and science. Why representatives of local iwi and hapu wield decisive influence over private and public development plans, as well as the credo and content of media reporting and university courses.
    "The Māori nationalist revolution is not yet complete – but it has, most certainly, begun."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'The Revolution Has Begun'

Treatyism and re-tribalism

"The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, like all human products, of its time and place. One aim – shared by British and Maori signatories alike – was to establish the rule of law by imposing British sovereignty through British governance. Sovereignty and governance go together as two sides of the same coin – with intertwined meaning. In the decades which followed, the treaty lost relevance in the new colonial society. This is the case with all historical treaties.
    "Revived in the 1970s as the symbol of a cultural renaissance, the treaty was captured by retribalists in the 1980s to serve as the ideological manifesto for the envisaged order – a reconstituted New Zealand. It was given a ‘spirit’ to take it above and beyond its historical location so that it could mean whatever retribalists say it means.
    "This treatyist ideology successfully promotes the false claim of partnership between the government and the tribes. However there is a deeper more insidious strategy propelling us to tribal ethno-nationalism. It is the collapse of the separation between the economic and political spheres....
    "The corporate tribes have already acquired considerable governance entitlements – the next and final step is tribal sovereignty. It’s a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology – enabled by a compliant media.
    "Given the enormous success of retribalism is it too late to reclaim New Zealand from the relentless march to blood and soil ethno-nationalism? ...  

    "Retribalism has attacked ... democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring ...

    "[First] the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text.... [and then] the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose....

    "[Second], our education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason....

    "[Finally], an ideology becomes omnipotent when it is not challenged. In a democracy the media should inform us of all competing interests and in all their complexity. We, the people, need to know everything, because it is us who will decide what should happen. Mainstream media has failed to do this – indeed is culpable in embedding treatyism."

~ Elizabeth Rata, from her 2022 speech 'In Defence of Democracy'

What is 'He Puapua'? [updated]

He Puapua is a report commissioned by the Ardern Government to carry out The Key Government's commitments after signing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a "legally non-binding resolution passed by the UN in 2007" without New Zealand's vote -- which was withheld by the Clark Government. Among other rights and pseudo-rights asserted in the Declaration are said to be "the indigenous peoples' right to [their] own type of governance." That is almost specifically the aim of the He Puapua report, which 

sets out a timeline for ... transformational constitutional change which will divide the polity into "'three streams: the Rangiratanga stream (for Maori), the Kawanatanga stream (for the Crown) and the Rite Tahi stream (for all New Zealanders).'

In the words of Elizabeth Rata, the report's commissioning and conclusions make it "clear [that] New Zealanders are at a crossroads." 

We will have to decide whether we want our future to be that of an ethno-nationalist state or a democratic-nationalist one.

The report itself makes its own aim abundantly clear: it "describes our future as an ethno-nation."

Delivered to the Ardern Government last year, and only released because it was leaked to the Opposition, the words "He Puapua" themselves translate as "a break," or "a separation."

While it’s usually used in reference to the ocean and a break in waves, in this case the expression centres on a 'breaking of the usual political and societal norms and approaches.’

Such a sundering is not a trivial thing. It brings to mind another famous Declaration, which recognised that "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Neither decency nor respect has impelled any such declaration in this case. Instead, as Rata says in an excellent take-down of the report:

Displaying an astonishing confidence, the authors claim that 'We consider Aotearoa has reached a maturity where it is ready to undertake the transformation to restructure governance to realise rangatiratanga Maori (self-determination).' I hope [says Rata] that this 'maturity' can accommodate the vigorous debate that is certainly needed if we are to abandon democracy - for what exactly? While each sentence of the Report deserves scrutiny I will confine myself to two points. The main one is the Report's premise of the political category as an ethnic one. The second concerns judicial activism in constitutional change.
    He Puapua envisages a system of constitutional categorisation based on ancestral membership criteria rather than the universal human who is democracy's foundational unit. Ancestral group membership is the key idea of 'ethnicity'.... The word entered common usage from the 1970s followed by 'indigenous' in the 1980s. 'Ethnicity' was an attempt to edit out the increasingly discredited 'race'. However changing a word does not change the idea. 

The report, in total, and the separate future it demands, is race-based. Explicitly. 

"When we politicise ethnicity by classifying, categorising and institutionalising people on the basis of ethnicity," warns Rata, "we establish the platform for ethno-nationalism. Contemporary and historical examples should make us very wary of a path that replaces the individual citizen with the ethnic person as the political subject." No such worries appear to occupy the report's authors.

"Interestingly," she continues, "those examples show the role of small well-educated elites in pushing through radical change." The report's authors are exactly as described. And as well-educated, well-heeled, and well-connected "culturalist intellectuals," their bios reveal them to be virtually all of one mind:

• Claire Charters, "(Ngāti Whakaue, Tainui, Ngāpuhi, Tūwharetoa) [and the Report's chair] gained her LLM from NYU in the US, and her PhD from Cambridge University. She is an associate professor at Auckland Law School, University of Auckland, and Director of the Aotearoa Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law. She has been an advisor to the UN President of the General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples’ participation at the UN (2016 – 2017); chair of the UN Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples, Trustee (2014 -2020); chair of the cabinet-appointed working group to provide advice on the realisation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2019-2020); co-chair of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission Kaiwhakatara Advisory Group on human rights, Te Tiriti rights, and Covid-19; and worked on the negotiations for the adoption of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1998 – 2007)."
• Canadian Kayla Kingdon-Bebb is "the current Director of Policy at Te Papa Atawhai / Department of Conservation. Previously she served for three years as Principal Advisor (and earlier, Private Secretary) to two successive Ministers of Conservation. Kayla has extensive experience in the machinery of government, and has led programmes of cross-agency and collaborative work on policy issues relevant to indigenous rights and interests... Kayla has a PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral and master’s theses focused on Treaty law, indigenous customary law and legal pluralism in the context of natural resource management."
• Tamati Olsen is the "Chief Advisor Maori at Housing New Zealand Corporation" and "Director (Acting), Wellbeing, Policy Partnerships. Te Puni Kōkiri – New Zealand Ministry of Māori Development" formerly "Manager Cultural Wealth" at Te Puni Kōkiri"
• The 26-year-old Waimirirangi Ormsby "is project manager at Ka Awatea Services Ltd, developing Ka Awatea strategic vision document base on Mātauranga Māori principles." "Of Waikato, Ngātiwai and Te Arawa descent, [she] has foraged deep into her whakapapa to help environmental sustainability resonate more with her people. But for her the key is to live it herself every single day.... Together with her husband she created Pipiri Ki A Papatūānuku or PKP, which encourages a month of passive environmental action every year. People agree to a period of minimising their waste, tūkino free eating where they try to avoid industrially-farmed produce, begin composting or recycling and minimising plastic waste, or anything else they feel they can commit to.... Longer term, she has much grander ambitions for the recognition of traditional ways. “Te pae tawhiti, my vision for the future is, to be honest, one or two generations from now to have indigenous people leading the way and having indigenous knowledge systems be implemented into constitution, into law and policy, into the way that we live our lives, for everybody.” 
• Previously at the Office of Treaty Settlements, Emily Owen is "General Manager Policy, Department of Corrections NZ. She holds a Masters in History from Massey University."
• "Passionate about Te Tiriti o Waitangi and human rights," Judith Pryor holds "a PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory from Cardiff University in the UK (2005)." Her "doctoral research in constitutions - examining law, history, policy and practice from a theoretical perspective - was published in 2008 as Constitutions: Writing Nations, Reading Difference." "Since returning to Aotearoa in 2006 from the UK, I have predominantly worked in Te Tiriti or human rights-related areas, including at Te Kāhui Tika Tangata, the Human Rights Commission; the Waitangi Tribunal, and the former Office of Treaty Settlements." She "can advise and support you and your agency to develop a capability plan as now required under the Public Service Act 2020. I can also devise a training programme for you, and can deliver Te Tiriti analysis training. Drawing on my previous experience in Policy, my workshop is particularly aimed at policy practitioners, and can be adapted for other audiences. The training covers:​ What the role of the Crown is in the Te Tiriti relationship; Why Te Tiriti analysis is critical for developing sound policy; How to embed Te Tiriti at each stage of the policy process (including engagement); How to practically work through a policy problem using a Te Tiriti framework."
• Jacinta Ruru "is co-Director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga [New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence], and Professor of Law at the University of Otago." Her "research interests focus on exploring Indigenous peoples' legal rights to own, manage and govern land and water. Jacinta's PhD thesis (University of Victoria, Canada, 2012) is titled "Settling Indigenous Place: Reconciling Legal Fictions in Governing Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand's National Parks."
• Naomi Solomon has an LLB from VUW. She is Ngati Toa's "General Manager, Treaty and Strategic Relationships."
• Gary Williams is a "Disability Sector Leader ... [whose] particular interests are issues for disabled people and especially disabled Maori, leadership development and training, the rights of disabled people and effective organisational governance and management. [Formerly] CEO of DPA [Disabled Persons Assembly], he has extensive sector networks, both nationally and internationally, and networks within government agencies."

Rata herself is explicit that what begins in ethno-nationalism often ends in bloodshed. "In Rwanda the ethnic doctrine 'the Mahutu Manifesto' of 1953 was written and promulgated by eleven highly educated individuals identifying politically as Hutu. The raw material of the ethnic ideologies that fuelled the violence in Bosnia and Serbia was supplied by intellectuals. Pol Pot began his killing campaigns immediately on his return from study in Paris." In all these cases, the bad philosophy preceded the horrific outcome. In Rata's 2006 speech to the NZ Skeptics she said: 

In New Zealand we are obviously not far down the track towards ethno-nationalism. However we need to recognise that the ideas which fuel ethnic politics are well-established and naturalised in this country and that the politicisation of ethnicity is underway". Fifteen years later the He Puapua Report shows the progress towards ethno-nationalism. Why has this racial ideology become so accepted in a nation which prides itself on identifying and rejecting racism?

The answer, of course, is what the report's authors call their philosophies. PhDs in subjects like Critical and Cultural Theory* have a real-world impact that appear in documents such as these. As Rata concludes:

'He Puapua' means a break. It is used in the Report to mean 'the breaking of the usual political and social norms and approaches.' The transformation of New Zealand proposed by He Puapua is indeed a complete break with the past. For this reason it is imperative that we all read the Report then freely and openly discuss what type of nation do we want - ethno-nationalism or democratic nationalism?

* * * * * 

* Quick reminder that Critical Race Theory and the like are not merely “Let’s teach the bad parts of history too” -- it's more like "Let's teach that history is all bad. And racist." Richard Delgado, for example, founder of the critical race theory school of legal scholarship, noted for his 'scholarship' on hate speech, and for introducing storytelling into legal scholarship baldly asserts:

Unlike traditional civil rights [e.g., Martin Luther King’s approach], which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

Also, Critical, Cultural Theory etc, its not a theory. 
"The critical race theory (CRT) movement [says Delgado in Movement, Activists, Transform, Power] is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power."

So it's a "theory" only in the same sense that AntiFa is an idea.

Don't say you haven't been told. 

[Hat tip Stephen Hicks, Peter Renzland]

"Increasingly, it feels like the Christchurch atrocity is what happens when the politics of identity, the reduction of everyone to cultural or racial creatures comes to be the only game in public life... The identitarian impulse has catastrophically divided society." Bonus #QotD

"[W]hat feels terrifyingly mainstream about the ideas that appear to have energised and inspired this racist mass murderer [are] the politics of identity. To read the killer’s alleged manifesto ... is to gain a horrible glimpse into the cultural fragmentation and racial paranoia unleashed by the relentless rise of identitarianism. Increasingly, it feels like the Christchurch atrocity is what happens when the politics of identity, the reduction of everyone to cultural or racial creatures whose relationship with other cultural and racial cultures must be monitored and managed, comes to be the only game in public life.
    "The killer seems to see himself as little more than a cultural being. In his seeming manifesto he professes commitment to the warped ethos of ethno-nationalism and continually refers to himself as white. He can see no identity for himself beyond the one he inherited by birth. Strikingly, the killer appears to say that his attack was done in the name of diversity – he says he wants ‘diverse peoples to remain diverse’, meaning identity groups must remain ‘separate, unique, undiluted, unrestrained in… cultural expression’. This sounds chillingly similar to the separatist ethos of the identitarian outlook, in which ‘cultural appropriation’ is a sin and anyone who seeks to speak up for other races or cultures risks being reprimanded with the words, ‘Stay in your lane’. The killer’s belief in cultural purity is of a piece with the identitarian worldview...
    "The identitarian impulse has catastrophically divided society. It has nurtured cultural and racial conflict. It has given rise to a grotesque game of competitive grievance. It has had an inexorably fragmentary impact, ripping the social fabric. We are now actively invited to think racially, behave racially, conceive of ourselves as little more than white men or black women or whatever, and to engage with people through a racially and culturally heightened perspective: check your white privilege, watch your microaggressions, 'stay in your cultural lane,' etc. It would be remarkable if such a depraved culture did not help to nurture new forms of violence. Christchurch confirms that identitarianism is now a scourge of the violent right as well as the woke left...
    "[I]if we want to limit the attraction of such violent identitarian thinking, such vicious cultural paranoia, we must urgently make the case for a new humanist politics in which your character and humanity count for more than your skin colour and your heritage. The war of identities must end, whether it’s in public life or bloodstained places of worship."
          ~ John Ray, from his post 'The barbarism of identity politics'
.

Is Nationalism the Friend or Foe of Liberty?

The question is, is Nationalism the friend or foe of liberty? In this guest post, Jeffrey Tucker argues that a nationalism that presents itself as a friend of liberty is one that must wilfully ignore the most bitter lessons of the last century, while eschewing the greatest lesson of all: that the only true guarantor of liberty is liberty itself.

Is Nationalism the Friend or Foe of Liberty?

Guest post by Jeffrey Tucker

Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony is hitting the opinion pages (excerpts from his new book) with a provocative thesis: that nationalism is not a threat to liberty but rather a guarantor of it. His argument is about stability under democracy. It requires mutual trust, fellow feeling, cultural cohesion, a sense that the other could be you because you share similar values, he argues. “Nationalism was the engine that established modern political liberty,” he claims, and now we need nationalism to maintain the kind of political stability that undergirds freedom itself.

This is near impossible in what he calls “multinational states,” by which he means a geographic territory too mixed up in terms of language, religious allegiance, and culture. He cites unsustainable states like Iraq, Syria, and Yugoslavia. Such mixing has worked, more or less, in the US because “the original American states shared the English language, Protestant religion and British legal traditions, and they had fought together in wartime.” New additions to the mix (Catholics, Jews, and former slaves) were acculturated only due to pre-existing cultural dominance.

He further argues that the national consensus in the US no longer exists, due to high rates of immigration. This has shattered mutual loyalty, he maintains, so as regards America as an experiment in multinational diversity: “It’s not clear that the U.S. is succeeding at this task.”

Good and Bad Nationalism?

You might be thinking you have heard this line before. You have seen the memes from the far right, read the tweets, bumped into the fanatics at rallies. Such sentiments have been credited with getting the current president elected.

But Hazony is careful to distance himself from such movements.

Every nationalist movement contains haters and bigots (though not necessarily more of them than are found in universalist political and religious movements). But nationalism’s vices are outweighed by its considerable virtues. A world in which independent nations are permitted to compete freely with one another is a world in which diverse ways of life can flourish, each an experiment in how human beings should live. We have good reason to believe that such a world holds out the best prospects for freedom, for innovation and advancement, and for tolerance.

If you had never read an argument for nationalism that is calm, reasoned, and rooted in history, you might find his point persuasive. Many liberals (and pre-libertarians) a century ago certainly did so. [But they didn't yet have the evidence before them of a century of bloody nationalism as evidence against the thesis - Ed.]

Back then, the pressing issue, on which the fate of civilisation rested, was the following: what should be the standard for the drawing of borders after the chaos of Great War? It was a war for democracy, they said but it was the death knell for the old multinational monarchies of Europe.

Political loyalty in the old world was based on dynasty, intermarriage of rulers, deal making, and religious control. In the new world, there is no question that democracy would be the watchword. The nobility would no longer rule; the people would be in charge. A unity global democracy is impossible. There must be states and there must be borders, so what constitutes the basis for nationhood?

Liberalism had a number of answers to the problem and most came down to precisely the terms that Hazony presents here. States should be organized along the lines of fellow feeling, mutual trust, and citizen identity in whatever form.

Liberal Nationalism?

Ludwig von Mises, writing in 1919, was at that immediate post-war stage highly sympathetic to the nationalist project. What’s a nation? Mises rejected the then-fashionable trope of carving up the human population by race on grounds that the supposed science of the project was “a thicket of error, fantasy, and mysticism.” Instead, he wanted to define a nation specifically according to one overriding standard: language. Polyglot nations are unsustainable. Experience in educational institutions alone shows this. Attempting to fund and run schools with multiple language groups feeds resentment and hate. It’s true for all public institutions. The only real answer is separation, that is, universal secession by smaller groups against larger groups. If national feeling feeds this, it is a friend of liberty.

What is the liberal attitude toward nationalism, in Mises’s view? The true liberal rejects dynastic control of lands because it “rejects the princes’ greed for lands and chaffering in lands.” Further, it embraces the right of a people to determine their own fate: self-determination, in the phrase of the time. However, Mises clarified that there is nothing inconsistent between love of nation and love of universal well being. Liberal nationalism is always directed against the tyrant. It always seeks peace between peoples: “The desire for national unity, too, is above all thoroughly peaceful.”

Now, keep in mind the year he was writing. It was 1919, before the rise of fascist ideology in Europe. The idea of forming states on the "national principle" alone was entirely new, and Mises saw it as the only real path to preventing a new world war from being borne out of allied imperialism and postwar German resentment. His vision was to let bygones be bygones, let people alone, permit any group or any part of a group to form its own nation (even down to the individual level, if that were possible), and move toward a world of free trade, free migration, and universal limits on power.

Mises’s Mind Changed

The Misesian path was not the one followed, obviously. Mises’s 1927 book on liberalism drops the endorsement of nationalism but retains the longing for self-determination. After the Second World War, following his migration to the US as a refugee, having spent six years being sheltered in Geneva, he was given the chance to revisit the question of nationalism. His new outlook appeared in 1944, in his book Omnipotent Government. Having witnessed at first hand the results of the nationalist experiment, Mises had completely changed his mind.

This book goes to great lengths to walk back his theory from 1919. In a world of statism, he recognises, nationalism is a philosophy of aggression. Whether based in religion, racism, or territorial expansionism, nationalism is a threat to liberty itself and the project of human cooperation. It leads to migration barriers, trade protectionism, violence against non-nationals, and finally war. He no longer believed that nationalism could be a friend of liberty. The reverse is true: “nationalism within our world of international division of labour is the inevitable outcome of etatism.”

What had made the difference? Life experience, for one. He watched his beloved Vienna be invaded by German armies. He saw the universities purged of intellectuals, particular those deemed Jewish and liberal. He saw Europe enveloped in despotism, war, and mass death, in the name of territorial expansion and domination by the master race. He watched with horror as the nationalist principle, the one he imagined might be a source of peace, become the basis of the bloodiest nightmare.

What mistake had he made? As he put it, his nationalist idea was rooted in an underlying philosophical presumption of liberalism, that is, models of public administration that do not interfere in people’s lives and property, do not seek war, do not restrict trade and migration, do not attempt to control racial and language demographics, and do not manipulate people’s desire for belongingness to shore up the power and status of a “great” leader. In other words, the real answer is liberty; nationalism not only contributes nothing to the cause but is easily weaponised by any state that expands beyond its proper role.

Renan’s Deconstruction

Having witnessed the horrors of what nationalism wrought in his home and throughout Europe, Mises sought out some theoretical basis for his new realisation. He found it in a 1882 writing by the French historian Ernst Renan: What Is a Nation? Mises was right: if another essay has done as good a job in dealing with the issue, I’m unaware of it. Renan wrote it while the age of monarchy was coming to a close, as the rise of democracy was occurring everywhere, but still before the Great War unleashed such territorial confusion. Ideologies like socialism, imperialism, and “scientific” racism were vying to replace old-world understandings of political community.

Renan observes that people frequently throw around the word nationalism without unpacking what precisely it means. He delineates five conventional theories of nationhood from history and practice:

1. Dynasty. This view believes that ruling-class lineage forms the foundation of nationhood. It’s about a history of initial conquest by one family or tribe over one people, its struggle to gain and maintain power and legitimacy, its marriages, wars, treaties, and alliances, along with a heroic legend. This is a solid description of European experience in feudal times, but it is not necessary for nationhood.
    The dynastic sense of what nationhood is has largely evaporated in the 20th century, and yet nationhood is still with us. Renan saw that the dynastic view of the nation is not a permanent feature of the concept but only incidental to a time and place, and wholly replaceable. “A nation can exist without a dynastic principle,” writes Renan, “and even those nations which have been formed by dynasties can be separated from them without therefore ceasing to exist.”

2. Religion. The belief that a nation needs to practice a single faith has been the basis of wars and killings since the beginning of recorded history. It seemed like nationhood couldn’t exist without it, which is why the Schism of the 11th century and the Reformation of the 16th century led to such conflict.
Then emerged a beautiful idea: let people believe what they want to believe, so long as they are not hurting anyone. The idea was tried and it worked, and thus was born the idea of religious liberty that finally severed the idea of national belongingness from religious identity. Even as late as the 19th century, American political interests claimed that the US could not be a nation while accepting Catholic, Jewish, and Buddhist immigration. Today we see these claims for what they are, politically illicit longings for conquest over the right of conscience.
In addition, what might appear at first to be a single religion actually has radically different expressions. Pennsylvania Amish and Texas Baptists share the same religious designation but have vastly different praxis, and the same is true of Irish vs. Vietnamese vs. Guatemalan versions of Catholicism. This is also true of every other religious faith, including Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. 

3. Race. In the second half of the 19th century, there arose the new science of race, which purported to explain the evolution of all human societies through a deterministic reduction to biological characteristics. It was concluded that only race is firm and fixed and the basis of belongingness. Renan grants that in the most primitive societies, race is a large factor. But then comes other more developed aspects of the human experience: language, religion, art, music, and commercial engagement that break down racial divisions and create a new basis for community. Focussing on race alone is a revanchist longing in any civilised society.
    There is also a scientific problem too complex for simple resolution: no political community on earth can claim to be defined solely by racial identity because there is no pure race (Mises says exactly the same thing). This is why politics can never be reduced to ethnographic identity as a first principle. Racial ideology also trends toward the politics of violence: “No one has the right to go through the world fingering people's skulls, and taking them by the throat saying: 'You are of our blood; you belong to us!'” 

4. Language. As with the other claims of what constitutes nationality, the claim of language unity has a superficial plausibility. Polyglot communities living under a unity state face constant struggles over schooling, official business, and other issues of speech. They have the feeling of being two or several nations, thus tempting people to believe that language itself is the basis of nationhood. But this actually makes little sense: the US, New Zealand, and the UK are not a single nation because they hold the same language in common. Latin America and Spain, Portugal and Brazil, share the same language but not the same nation.
    There is also the issue that not even a single language is actually unified: infinite varieties of expression and dialect can cause ongoing confusion. How much, really, does the language of an urban native of New Jersey have to do with expressions used in rural Mississippi? “Language invites people to unite,” writes Renan, “but it does not force them to do so.” There is nothing mystically unifying about speaking the same language; language facilitates communication but does not forge a nation. Mises too embraces this view, thus reversing his position from 1919. 

5. Geography. Natural boundaries are another case of nation-making in the past which, as with all these other principles, actually has little to do with permanent features of what really makes a nation. Rivers and mountains can be convenient ways to draw borders but they do not permanently shape political communities. Geography can be easily overcome. It is malleable, as American history shows. The existence of geographically non-contiguous nations further refutes the notion.
    Americans speak of “sea to shining sea,” but how does that make sense of Alaska and Hawaii? Also in the US, enclaves of past national loyalty are a feature of city life: little Brazil, Chinatown, little Havana, and so on. Even further, to try to force unity based on geography alone is very dangerous. “I know of no doctrine which is more arbitrary or more fatal,” writes Renan, “for it allows one to justify any or every violence.”

All the above have some plausible claim to explaining national attachment, but none hold up under close scrutiny. In Renan’s view, nationhood is a spiritual principle, a reflection of the affections we feel toward some kind of political community – its ideals, its past, its achievements, and its future. Where your heart is, there is your nation, as Albert Jay Nock said. This is why so many of us, even outside the U.S. can still feel genuine feelings of joy and even belongingness during July 4th celebrations. We are celebrating something in common: a feeling we have that we share with others, regardless of religion, race, language, geography, and even ideology.

Renan: “Man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains. A large aggregate of men, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we call a nation.”

Mises was clearly taken with this view, and hence his change of heart and mind.

Orwell on Nationalism

Around the same time, the always-remarkable George Orwell presented his own Notes on Nationalism in 1945. It’s not as careful an essay as Renan’s but consider the context: fury and disgust at the rise of Nazism, nationalism, communism in Russia, and a ghastly war that wrecked so much of the world. Orwell had had it up to here with collectivism of all sorts.

His essay is in three parts. He first defines it: “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’” Secondly, “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

Notice that Orwell’s definition is not rooted in the territorial issue. His nationalism is more ideological. It’s the habitual and uncritical celebration of some group-based cause that one believes is specially blessed to solve all the world’s problems. In this sense, the typical Communist is a nationalist, looking the world over for revolutionary movements to cheer on, such as the political pilgrims who look at a place like Cuba and Venezuela and find not tyranny but emancipation. He even finds nationalism in the works of G.K. Chesterton who celebrated a “little England” but found virtue in expanding imperialism so long as it took on the Catholic brand (Orwell was especially disgusted at Chesterton’s defence of Mussolini).

Second, Orwell identified three nationalistic habits of mind:

First, obsession: “No nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort.”
Second, instability. “The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable.” It’s a tribalist mindset and it can easily migrate. Thus were so many fascists recruited from the ranks of communists, and so many champions of the Pan-Germanism that bred Nazism came from the upper-class ranks of British society. In his view, nationalism is inherently unprincipled in this way.
Third, indifference to reality. “All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts…. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

He elaborates this prescient point that pervades the left and right today.

Although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

Orwell discusses other manifestations of this mentality, such as forms of identity politics. All salvation comes from the white rice; all virtue is in the non-white races. All glory or evil resides in the Jewish people. Greatness/evil extends from one country. And we could go on with every list in the Identitarianism of our time: misogyny/feminism, disabled/abled, Christian/Islam, rich/poor, and so on.

The nationalist is forever counterposing diverse societies with homogenous ones, as if the latter thing even exists. The word homogeneity should not even apply in any literal sense to any two members of the human family. No two people are the same; even twins have minds of their own. The chase for a homogenous population will always and everywhere result in forcing people into a group not of their choosing.

Orwell writes: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality."

What’s most interesting about Orwell’s essay is that he takes a broadened view of the nationality question, to the point that it is no longer about territorial politics alone and instead touches on the psychological impact of political rule itself. (Sigmund Freud has long ago identified this as a pathology in his overlooked Group Psychology book.)

In this case, his analysis of nationalism applies not only to Nazism, not only to Communism, not only to Catholicism or any other religious or Identitarian movement you can name. It could, conceivably apply, for example to libertarianism itself. No one, no movement, is immune from the virus. Reflect on that point to perhaps explain a lot that has happened to the “liberty movement” over the last ten years.

Back to Hazony

Our Israeli professor friend Yoram Hazony is not unaware of Orwell’s writings, and addresses them directly. Still, he comes out on the other side, still arguing that nationalism is a friend of liberty. But what does he mean by liberty? He means democracy, stability, and high trust among society’s members such they that have warm affections for the national state and see it as an essential source for social order.

“The national state leverages these bonds of mutual loyalty,” he writes, “to get individuals to obey the laws, serve in the military and pay taxes, even when their own party or tribe is out of power and the government’s policies are not to their liking.”

This might be right – nationalism is certainly useful in manipulating people to intensify loyalties to the state – but is this necessarily the highest goal of society? Liberalism argued that the answer is no. The highest goal of society is realised not through loyalty to the state, but through freedom that leaves people alone in their person and property to find their own path to happiness.

A century ago, Hazony’s views might have been plausible. No more. Ludwig von Mises learned this lesson between his earliest and later writings. He lived through the experiment in controlled nationalism, and discovered the truth that it cannot be controlled. In fact, it can unleash literal hell as a propaganda device to disguise gross injustice and evil.

A nationalism that presents itself as a friend of liberty is one that must wilfully ignore that most bitter lessons of the last century, while eschewing the greatest lesson of all: that the only true guarantor of liberty is liberty itself.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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In her 1977 lecture, Global Balkanisation, Ayn Rand examines the meaning of “ethnicity” and the consequences of “modern tribalism” in politics. Rand argues that the global trend toward political organisation based on race, language and religion bodes ill for the future of Western civilisation. She contrasts the disintegration inherent in modern tribalism with the unity displayed by societies that respect individual rights regardless of race or ancestry.
In this webinar and Q&A, Rand scholars Aaron Smith & Ben Bayer discuss highlights and major themes from this historic lecture, and the applicability of those themes to our world today:

Definition of the Day: Alt-Right

Alt-Right: A neo-Marxist post-modernist political ideology characterised by an affinity for European ethno-nationalism (white supremacy), anti-semitic conspiracy theory (group evolutionary strategy), atheism, biological determinism (race-realism), totalitarian modes of governance (National Socialism), combined with subversive Alinskyite promotional methodology (memes as arguments). In general, they share a disdain for Classical Liberalism (cucks), contemporary Conservatism (cucks) and Libertarian (cucks) political ideologies. Their main hostility is reserved for Social Liberalism in its current form but not in its methodology which they adopt and practice (poorly) in reverse. They also really really like using the word CUCK."
~ taken from the 'All Right' blog post 'Hannibal Ad Portas'

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Who is Steve Bannon?

 

Everyone trying to read Trump’s tea leaves wants to know who will be purveying his tea, so to speak. One of the few announcements so far is his “chief strategist and senior counsellor” Steve Bannon, who was until recently Trump’s campaign strategist.

It was Bannon who took over fringe conservative news site Breitbart after its owner and namesake died,  transforming it into a lurid site full of fetid conspiracy that (says conservative writer Ben Shapiro) “has become the alt-right go-to website… pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist meme-makers.”. (Sample headlines: 'Hoist it high and proud: The Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage'; ‘'Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy'; ‘Trump 10% vindicated: CBS reports ‘swarm’ on rooftops celebrating 9/11’’; ‘Huma Abedin ‘Most Likely a Saudi Spy’ With ‘Deep, Inarguable Connections’ to ‘Global Terrorist Entity’; and ‘Fact Check: Were Obama and Hillary founders of ISIS? You bet.’

There’s more. This is only a taste. As someone said, if you heard some lurid, fact-free alt-right bullshit fantasy over the U.S. election campaign, chances are good it began at Breitbart.

So, this is a fellow who makes Ian Wishart look like a serous fact-checker. Neither an alt-righter nor a conspiracy theorist himself – nor yet the white nationalist that the likes of CNN claim him to be --  like his new boss however he’s clearly happy however to dangle carrots in all those directions for ends that are clearly his own.

Whatever wayward direction he takes may be revealed in one of the few lucid commentaries he’s issued in recent years, praising in a speech at the Vatican, of all places, what he calls “the 'enlightened capitalism' of the Judeo-Christian West” which appears to be simply an update of the old, stale anti-communist conservatism that has “come partly offtrack in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union.” The world was certainly delivered from the twentieth-century’s totalitarian Dark Age, he says, in a

great war [that was] really the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists, right? The underlying principle is an enlightened form of capitalism, that capitalism really gave us the wherewithal. It kind of organised and built the materials needed to support, whether it’s the Soviet Union, England, the United States, and eventually to take back continental Europe and to beat back a barbaric empire in the Far East.

“Beat back” not for the cause of reason, individualism and capitalism, but for faith and force and Judeo-Christianity. For that is the flag he is flying. Yet we have been “in a crisis” since this victory, he says, “a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.”

And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.
    Now, what I mean by that specifically: I think that you’re seeing three kinds of converging tendencies: One is a form of capitalism that is taken away from the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity and, really, Judeo-Christian belief.

He says that what capitalism looks like to him is explicitly not the capitalism promoted by Ayn Rand – which he feels “is almost…disturbing.” And no wonder it disturbs him because, as he makes clear enough, capitalism to him is emphatically not Rand’s “social system based on the recognition of individual rights” (her words); to him it is simply an engine of production that makes states and religion stronger. Producers put in yoke to drag forward the cart of (western) religion and (western) state power.

This is what this senior strategist calls “enlightened capitalism.”

To his partial credit, he does exclude cronyism from his vision, (“a brutal form of capitalism [sic] that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people”) for which we may at least be thankful. The suspicion here however must be that he not so much opposed to the cronyism, but to the siphoning away of the state’s power for other non-statist/religious ends.

What he delivers in his very careful speech then is a picture of a world he favours, in which “strong countries and strong nationalist movements” should not just be tolerated but encouraged. Add to this strong religion – because “secularism,” he says, “has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideal, right?”

Where to begin!

Nowhere in this picture is there a place for Rand’s reason and individualism. Nor for the global trade that previous generations understood was a real generator of peace and goodwill. Instead, and against all the lessons of history up to now, he argues that this recipe makes not for war, but for “strong neighbours” – that this build-up of autarchic blocs “is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”

This is the man from whom – at his faux news site – many Trump supporters already take their daily reading, and who will shortly be Donald Trump’s most senior strategist.

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