Bad Nationalism

I wrote an article for Arc Digital about white nationalism.

The gist of the article is that “white” people are not and cannot be a nation, because they do not have the right sorts of things in common. We think of white people as a group solely because of their roughly similar skin color, and not because they actually share any meaningful characteristics.

You can potentially get around this by saying that, by “white” people/culture, the white nationalists are referring to something more specific, like the culture of the antebellum South. Perhaps “Southern whites” constitute a nation by virtue of their shared commitment to preserving antebellum southern values, including chivalry, their particular form of the Christian religion, and white supremacy. This more specific grouping might constitute a nation in some sense, as they do share the right sorts of cultural and religious commitments.

So then the question becomes, not whether a group of people constitute a nation, but whether their nation ought to exist. And it should be easy to see that the nation described above ought not to exist, as one of its core commitments is white supremacy.

Nationalism is supposed to be a shield for a people to protect itself and its culture from harm. That’s why Israel exists: to protect Jews and Jewish culture from harm. Likewise, America exists to secure the liberties of Americans and to preserve our core ideals. This is right and good. We should encourage it.

But some cultures (and by extension some nations) are predicated upon vicious evils. Such is the case with white nationalist movements. They want a white supremacist nation, because their “culture” is white supremacy. If this were not the case, then white nationalists would be content to live in a racially diverse society as long as white people are treated justly. “White culture” is only under attack if you define “white culture” as white supremacy.

My focus in the Arc Digital piece is on what “nationhood” means. But it might be more useful to develop an account of what distinguishes good nations from bad nations. To put it shortly, bad nations are predicated on the oppression of those who do not belong to the nation.