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Nov. 17, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:02:06
Rich Lowry | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 77
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You become an American fundamentally by you learn the language, you adopt the mores, you thrill to the stories and the heroes, you honor the symbols, and you believe in the ideals.
that makes you an American. - Hey, hey, welcome to the show.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday's special.
I am eager to welcome to the program Rich Lowry.
He's editor of National Review, syndicated columnist, a commentator for the Fox News Channel.
His brand new book is The Case for Nationalism.
Hey, I blurbed it.
It's a great book.
Go check it out today.
Rich, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thanks for having me, Ben.
So why don't we start from the beginning.
What exactly is the case for nationalism?
It's been much derided.
Obviously, nationalism has now been equated by the media with full-scale white supremacy.
If you say nationalism, just like if you say Judeo-Christian values, what you actually mean is white civilization.
So what exactly does nationalism mean in your definition?
Okay, so a couple things.
I make sort of two cases.
The broader case for nationalism, and then the specific case for American nationalism.
So the broader case is nationalism, or at least national feeling.
There's an argument about how old nationalism is.
But it's very old, it's natural, and it's powerful.
Look at Joan of Arc.
A 14-year-old girl has a vision in her father's garden from an angel that says, you are going to liberate your country from the English.
She kicks out the English, she restores the French heir to the throne, and the English want to wipe her out.
They burn her at the stake, scatter her ashes in the Seine River, and her memory never goes away.
And she becomes a symbol of France and France's independence that's so powerful when France is occupied later by a much more hideous power, you know, Germany.
The Free French Forces use Joan of Arc's symbol, the Cross of Lorraine, on their planes, on their ships.
So that's a good example of just how natural a national feeling is, the sense of loyalty and togetherness for people that share a language and a culture.
And that is not a bad thing.
It can be abused, like everything in human life, but it's very natural and you can't do away with it.
You know, we've had empires that have tried to smash nations.
You've had totalitarian ideologies try to smash nations.
They never succeed.
And then there's specifically an American tradition that runs to the Revolution, the Constitution, victory in the Civil War.
Alexander Hamilton's really the taproot of the American nationalist tradition.
We're going to have a strong and capable national government.
It's going to be limited, yes, but strong and capable.
We're going to have a strong military, including a strong navy, and we're going to become a great power like Great Britain.
That was the Hamiltonian vision.
Okay, so let's start with sort of the broader attack on nationalism.
Hannah Arendt is usually identified with the broader attack on nationalism, the idea that romantic nationalism is what causes World War I, it causes World War II, that basically there are people who believe that their nation is more important than other nations, that they are very nation-centric as opposed to seeing themselves as global citizens.
Why shouldn't we focus our efforts on trying to convince people that they are not actually subjects of a nation, that in fact they are citizens of the world, as many on the political left would want it?
Well, that's an illusion.
I mean, there's no such thing as a citizen of the world.
And the way I think about it is, say you get in a jam somewhere around the world.
You're kidnapped, or I don't know what.
Who comes to save you?
You know, who cares about you more than anyone else?
It's your own country, right?
Your country's military comes and gets you.
And there's no such thing as a universal nation.
There's no such thing as a universal military.
There's no such thing as a universal language.
And the history is that empires that have done the most to kind of mimic what would be a citizen of the world.
They've never been a liberal democratic project because someone has to rule.
Someone that speaks a certain kind of language has to rule.
Someone from a certain nation has to rule.
So you have the Habsburg Empire, for instance, you know, exists for 600 years.
It's a pretty good run in the middle of Central Europe, but constantly is riven by various revolts from the nations that are part of it, saying, well, our language needs more recognition.
We need more power within this imperial contrivance.
And eventually, when the repressive apparatus gives way, it falls apart.
The nations want to go their own way and govern themselves.
And a more recent example, in the 20th century, is the Soviet Empire.
You know, 70 years.
They had their boot on the necks of the countries of Eastern Europe.
But again, once the coercion gives way, the nations want to go their own way and govern themselves.
So in a second, I want to ask you about the possibility of xenophobia attached to nationalism that people tend to connect with the concept.
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Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the downside of that sort of nationalism.
So, a lot of folks will look at the world today and they'll look at nationalistic states, particularly in Eastern Europe, where nationalism has been seen to be on the rise.
Some people say Israel, where nationalism is obviously very strong in an area of the world where Israel is under existential threat.
And they'll say, well, why aren't they more cosmopolitan?
They don't want more immigrants.
They want to shut their borders.
They seem xenophobic.
So, how do we reconcile the idea of, for example, liberal democracy with nationalism?
Yeah, so clearly you have forms of nationalism that are caught up in a certain ethnicity and they become ethno-nationalism.
I don't think that's the tradition in the United States.
And I think true nationalism is not tribal.
The nation is a loyalty above your race, above your ethnicity, above your sect, above your partisan loyalty.
So it should be a unifying Now, does that always happen?
No.
Has it largely happened in this country?
I would say yes.
And this is where I would underline that the large part of my book is about American nationalism, which I think, like a lot of things about this country, is different than versions around the world, different than versions in Europe or Eastern Europe.
So let's talk about American nationalism.
The chief critique of American nationalism is that we're not actually a nation, that we're a set of different competing interest groups and that we have been bound together by fate or by military power, depending on how you see it.
But realistically, The idea of a common American nation that spans both slaves and slaveholders, that spans Native Americans and the people who drove them off their land, that spans oppressors and people who were oppressed, that that is a fantasy or a mirage and that it's history written by the winners.
How do you respond to that?
Well, there's been an American nation for a very long time, and my contention is that it predates the revolution in 1776.
I can't tell you exactly when the American nation arises, but it's sometime between the early 17th century where the settlement starts here and the revolution where you have people who become used to governing themselves that have their own governing institutions.
Most importantly, this colonial assemblies that are governing for 100 years.
That's a very long time.
You don't get the revolution if you don't have a nation prior to it that feels that it has its own claims and rights that need to be vindicated.
Now, the shortcomings of the nation, African-Americans are part of the cultural nation from the very beginning, but their rights aren't recognized by the government and the state, and Native Americans are pushed aside by the American nation.
So these are two shameful aspects of our history, and I spent a lot of time talking in the book how we need a truthful history of the United States that includes our sins, but it shouldn't Um, necessitate lying about ourselves, which is what we see now in the 1619 Project, the New York Times, and elsewhere, which is something I think really unprecedented in human history.
Usually the national tendency is you lie about the other guy.
You lie about the other country to drag them down.
We have people now who are dragging our own country down.
So when we talk about people joining the stream of American history, being admitted to the broader stream of American history, in the case of freed slaves, for example, or Native Americans who decide not to live in tribal reservations, which are a separate governed area, how do people join the American nation?
Because if America is a creedal idea, that makes sense, but if America is more than a creed, how do you join with a nation that has a separate history or a separate culture?
Yes, I think one of the pillars of the American nation is a cultural core.
And African-Americans were contributing to that from the very beginning.
I spent some time talking in the book about how Southern culture is really impossible to disaggregate in certain important respects.
What's the African influence and what's the European influence?
Because it's all mixed up.
Native Americans, again, a different case.
They were pushed aside, they were excluded, and that's part of the original sin of this country.
But you become an American fundamentally by you learn the language, you adopt the mores, you thrill to the stories and the heroes, you honor the symbols.
And you believe in the ideals.
That makes you an American.
And something I say in talks about this topic is if, hypothetically tonight, take a tourist metaphor, an African American meets a white American on the streets, on the stairs of the Paris Opera House, they instantly have more in common than anyone around them.
It doesn't matter whether their ideologies are different, their politics are different, where they are from this country, they have a common language, a common mode of dress likely, common cuisine, tend to like the same kind of food, and a huge stock of common cultural references.
And I just don't think you can minimize the importance of that to what it is to making an American.
So yes, the creed is important, and it's part of that, and the culture and the creed interact with one another and support one another, but it's not just a creed entirely.
So, philosophically, what separates group identity from national identity?
So, you know, we can say that, for example, black Americans obviously are part of the American story, but there are some black Americans who say, well, we're not.
We were left out of the American story, and our chief loyalty lies to the black American story, which is different from the general national American story, and trying to pretend that we are just one part of a broader American history is selling us short.
Why should loyalty be to a nation, and in some cases a nation that victimized the group to which it belonged, As opposed to the group to which you, which seems closer to you in terms of proximity.
Well, I mean, I think they're overlapping loyalties, right?
We're all loyal, most of all, to our family.
We might have an affiliation, you know, if you're Irish or American, you might be particularly have a connection to Ireland and St.
Patrick's Day and aspects of that language and culture.
But ultimately, I think we're all in this together.
And none of us are what we are if it weren't for this country.
And being born in this country is something none of us are responsible for.
It's just an incredibly gratuitous blessing that we're here.
So for me, that argues for loyalty to the nation.
Now, African Americans, it's a much more difficult case, because they were Treated unjustly for 150 years, horrifically.
You know, I've been reading up on slavery because I've been arguing with some of the people who wrote for the 1619 Project, and the Atlantic passage is something it's almost impossible to read about.
It's so nauseatingly horrifying.
But the story of African-Americans is of loyalty to this country.
The emphasis on African-American has to be American.
And the lead essay in the New York Times' 1619 Project, I think, was actually moving and correct on this topic.
Participated in every American war, even when they had no rights or returning to a country that was going to oppress them.
And it's a very moving anecdote in an essay where the author describes being a little girl in school, and the teacher has some project where all the students are going to point to the country on the globe that their family is originally from, and her African-American friend They have no idea.
They have no idea where to point.
Because they're so American.
Exactly because they're so American.
And because of various factors, including that we didn't import many slaves here compared to Caribbean islands, and our immigration policy was racist, and we didn't welcome African-Americans.
For that reason, if you're an African-American and your family didn't emigrate fairly recently, your lineage in this country probably goes way, way, way back.
And in that sense, you're more American than any of the European-American neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, for instance.
So let's talk about the Charlottesville supposed-America-first nationalists.
So they talk about themselves as nationalists all the time.
They speak overtly in terms of ethno-nationalism.
They like to quote the founders on this.
They will suggest that the founders were talking about white European stock when they were talking about human rights.
How do you rebut claims that America was in fact an ethno-state and that over time we sort of changed that, but originally it was designed to be an ethno-state?
Yeah, well, originally it was imagined as a country for white people.
And that, again, is a great failing of this country at the beginning.
Now, I would argue, you know, the founders, even the most blinkered on race, they weren't neo-Nazis, right?
I mean, that's just a ridiculous smear.
And they created a country that had in it the inherent seed for something bigger and more wide-ranging.
And not all the founders were completely blameworthy on this score by contemporary terms.
There were some, Alexander Hamilton again, who were relatively tolerant on questions of race at the time, certainly had a dim view of slavery, and they created a system that had this tension.
You know, they wanted to have the southern states To do that required compromising with the slave system, but they didn't give away the store.
And there's a famous debate in the Constitutional Convention where there's a question of whether we're going to explicitly recognize property in men, whether that phrase is going to be in the Constitution.
And Madison says no, because that will really give the slave system a legitimacy it doesn't deserve for.
And I think the argument that also, in the back of their minds, is that eventually slavery would be whittled down and eliminated was an important part of that as well.
And they were leaving that possibility open.
And just the idea, we've heard, that the American Revolution was about slavery and preserving slavery is completely false and a lie.
It was actually a time of openness on the question where you have northern states embracing gradual abolition of slavery and even a loosening in the South.
Now, obviously there's major backsliding in the South in the 19th century, but if you didn't get the largely free North at that time, At that time, you wouldn't have had a section of the country that eventually is going to win the Civil War and eliminate slavery and at least, in theory, extend rights to blacks.
But in the Reconstruction era, there's backsliding, a lack of national will, and then you get another hundred years of oppression.
So one of the things that you kick back against in the case for nationalism is the idea that America is solely a creedal nation.
So what's wrong with the idea that America is solely a creedal nation based on the Declaration of Independence, this sort of secular catechism, the Constitution of the United States?
It simplifies a lot of the problems because when you say common history, language, culture, It's easy for folks on both the ethno-nationalist right and on the left to read that as, well, what you actually mean is race.
What you actually mean is ethnicity.
When you say that America's creedal, then anybody can join, anybody can leave.
Basically, you fulfill these basic tenets and you're American.
This is an open debate, obviously, even in the pages of National Review.
I know Jonah Goldberg and David French have taken a sort of antagonistic position to your own on this.
I have too, actually, on occasion, on this subject.
So what's the objection to the idea of American patriotism based on creed as opposed to American patriotism that has this additional element of history, language, culture.
So I don't think the creedal nation, the idea of the creedal nation takes account of this distinct bounded entity that is the American Nation.
If sort of the ideas are all that matter, what distinguishes us now from any really advanced Western country?
They've all embraced the idea.
In the 1776, we were different in how thoroughgoingly democratic, small d, democratic we were.
Not anymore, you know?
So are we all just, America's just the same as any country in the list of OECD countries?
I don't think so.
It doesn't account for the distinctiveness of America that runs much deeper than the ideals.
And two, without the nation, without a nation that has significant territorial extent and power, I would argue the ideals wouldn't mean as much.
You can write them down, but this is the insight of the founders that led to the adoption of the Constitution.
If you're just going to fall apart into squabbling statelets and be picked apart by, you know, European powers still on our periphery, what's going to happen to your ideals?
They're going to be discredited.
And we wouldn't have been able to apply our ideals in the way that we did in the 20th century if we weren't a continental nation.
So again, the extent and the power of the nation matters and buttresses the ideals.
So the distinction between a creedal nation versus a nationalist nation has some practical significance in terms of policy, most obviously on immigration policy.
So the idea of a creedal nation would suggest that any Anybody who is willing to join the American creed should be let in.
And if they don't have a right to let in, they have at least a very, very strong case to be let in.
The idea of a nationalist nation would suggest that even if you adhere to the American creed or you sort of like the American creed, that the American nation still has the sort of moral right to reject you.
How do you think that plays out in practical terms?
And why do you think that the national view of immigration, the nationalist view of immigration, is superior to the creedal view of immigration?
Yeah, so I just don't think, even if for a creedal nation, why would that affect levels of immigration necessarily?
I mean, why does that dictate you should have two million rather than one million?
You still have to make a policy choice.
And, by the way, my idea of nationalism, it's not exclusive.
Because people can come here, they can learn the language, they can adopt the mores, they can learn to love the country.
That happens all the time.
So it's not as though an immigrant from Bangladesh can't do that.
They can, and they have.
But I object to sort of the saccharine view of America as a quote-unquote nation of immigrants.
That means that we can't really question our current immigration policy and can't say we should have fewer immigrants or different kinds of immigrants with different characteristics.
I think that's just wrong.
I think immigration policy has always been contested in this country.
Levels have gone up and down.
And I spent a lot of time talking, and this has been misunderstood by critics, talking about the experience in the early 20th century.
We had this big characteristic wave of immigration from various European countries.
That was a strain on our economy, on our culture, and we worked really hard to absorb These immigrants, there's an incredibly machinery of assimilation set up called the Americanization Movement, and something that's kind of horrifying when you look back on it, is that every elite institution in our life was part of this project, was vested in this project, whether it was the schools, or the non-profits, or the corporations.
The Ford Motor Company, don't quote me on this, but it's like 40% of the guys on the factory line were immigrants.
A lot of them didn't speak English, so the Ford Motor Company was teaching them English, and the first line in their instructional manual was, I am an American.
Now we have comparable high levels of immigration with that machinery of assimilation totally broken down, and with the elite institutions all tilting the other way, kind of against the idea we have of common culture, against the idea of assimilation, which are Presumed to be somehow hateful or divisive or small-minded and exclusive.
So that's what worries me about the current high levels of immigration.
Also, in the early 20th century, you had all sorts of different people from different countries that spoke different foreign languages, which prevented the creation of big ethnic enclaves all speaking a foreign language, which is hugely problematic for national cohesion.
You see examples of this all around the world.
So I worry about so many of the current immigrants speaking Spanish at a time when assimilation is weakened.
So I would tamp down numbers somewhat, and I would also emphasize skills more than we do currently.
And it seems to me there's nothing hateful about that, But the basic insight is that immigration policy should serve our interests, not the interests of the immigrants.
And once someone's here, we should be welcoming to them.
I'm not anti-immigrant in the least, but we should also be demanding in terms of learning the language and adopting the culture.
So in one second, I want to ask you about some of the other policy ramifications of nationalism, where you come down on various issues as an American nationalist.
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Alrighty, so let's talk about so-called economic nationalism.
So there's a whole group of people, particularly on the right, who have talked about economic nationalism, although you've seen Elizabeth Warren actually adopt some of this language, economic nationalism.
We have to stand up for America.
She accuses corporations of being transnationally loyal, that corporations are not loyal to the United States.
You've seen folks like Tucker Carlson suggest the same.
The idea being that economic nationalism is about the welfare of American citizens, which means that we should have high trade barriers, we should have subsidies for particular industries.
How does economic nationalism cross streams or not cross streams with nationalism?
Well, I think it's just a word for protectionism, basically.
And where I come down on this is that the nationalist policy should be, we are putting the interests of our workers first.
And same thing in foreign policy.
The interests of the nation should come first.
Now what constitutes a policy that supports their interests?
Then you have a big policy dispute.
And this is one thing I frankly acknowledge, is that nationalism doesn't really give you any of these policy answers.
In the book, I kind of outline what I think would be a lowest common denominator, conservative version of nationalism.
It's emphasizing some of the cultural aspects we've talked about, emphasizing immigration policy, emphasize teaching our history and not as an unrelieved tale of oppression and woe.
But once you get beyond that, it's really there's a huge policy dispute.
And it's not enough.
It doesn't tell you enough about where you are in the political spectrum.
Just to say you're a nationalist, you need some further definition of it.
You need more adjectives.
What is the case for nationalism have to say about the symbols of unity in the United States?
So, for example, we've had a huge, massive controversy break out over the use of the American flag.
We've had the New York Times running articles basically every other week suggesting it's too controversial to use the American flag.
Even the mainstream right has accepted the idea that flag burning is a legitimate form of expression under the First Amendment.
The argument there in part seems to turn on the creedal nationalism versus the Sort of historic nationalism argument, meaning that, you know, when I was in when I was in law school, there was a professor named Richard Parker, who's actually a fan of the new left, who's kind of a Robert F. Kennedy liberal.
And he wrote an entire book basically arguing in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, because his idea was that you do need the symbols of American unity and that the notion that we should tolerate people who are attempting to destroy those symbols is a mistake.
Where do you come down on that debate?
Well, I appreciate that sentiment.
I do think, under the First Amendment, you can't ban flag burning.
But you have to have these symbols.
They're really important.
Part of them just stirs human nature.
The great Zionist Theodore Herzl said, with a flag, you'll lead men.
That's really true.
And we're the most flag-soaked society in the world.
And really the adulation of the flag rose up with Civil War and in the aftermath of the Civil War.
And you read about the Civil War and color sergeants who were responsible for carrying the flag, just amazing moving stories.
Because these battlefields are confused, they get filled with smoke, guys don't know where to go, and they look for the flag.
And the flag is considered a symbol of Honor, you can't lose the flag to the other side.
So you'll have instances like in Battle of Fredericksburg, one color sergeant shot down, hands it to the other, picked up by the next color sergeant, shot down, picked up by the next color sergeant.
So men, not just in a metaphorical sense, in a literal sense, have died for this flag.
And if this isn't going to be a symbol of our national unity, you need something else.
You have to create something else, and I don't know what it's going to be.
And just the idea, I have a colleague whose daughter went to school in New York City, and they wouldn't display any flag.
And she asked about this, and the answer from the school was, it's too exclusionary, which is completely absurd.
This is something that belongs to all of us.
And protest movements always make a mistake if they don't embrace the flag.
If they're seen opposing the flag, they hurt their own cause.
I just remember when I was at Barack Obama's acceptance speech in 2008 in that big stadium in Denver, Colorado, and I was leaning back, I was down on the floor of the stadium, and leaning back towards where the stands were, filing something, a BlackBerry, still had a BlackBerry, then right at the end of the speech, and something was whipping my head, and I didn't know what it was, and I looked back, and it was the biggest honking American flag I've ever seen outside of maybe a car dealership,
And it was an African-American family of 8 to 10 people just waving this flag as vigorously and joyfully as you can imagine.
And that's embracing the symbol, and we all should do that.
Speaking of those sort of symbols, and symbols of divisiveness, and sort of how broadly we should read the American nationalist stream, what do you make of the controversy over the Confederate flag?
So there's obviously been this massive controversy over the Confederate flag.
It seems to me, largely from the angle of The Confederate flag as a symbol of enslavement, which is obviously correct at the time, but also as a symbol of it doesn't mean secession.
Does it not mean secession?
How much respect should be granted to symbols or statues of people who are forcibly attempting to remove part of the United States from from the American nation?
Yeah.
So the Confederates weren't Nazis.
Robert E. Lee wasn't a Nazi.
But I'm not a fan of the statues.
I don't want them vandalized and people going after them with sledgehammers at 2 a.m.
in the morning or anything like that.
But it's ultimately a decision for the localities.
But my preferred solution would be sending them to battlefields or sending them to museums.
They're highly offensive for understandable reasons to African-Americans.
In some instances, not all, but some instances they were erected specifically to send a message to African-Americans and to send a message about the worthiness of the Confederate cause.
And that's a huge problem.
So I'm not a fan of any of those symbols.
So why do you think there's been such a kickback against American nationalism over the last 50 years?
It's very odd.
For a long time, there wasn't a huge amount of kickback over the idea that America was a cohesive nation, even when we were significantly more divided than we are today.
I mean, in a time of segregation, there wasn't even this sort of controversy over American Cohesion as a nation.
I remember on my radio show I interviewed one of the last surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, a red tail, and he was obviously leaving a country that was segregated, going and serving in the military to protect, in many cases, white pilots, shooting down Germans, and then coming back to a country that was segregated.
Yeah, unbelievable.
And I said to him, you know, why did you do this?
He said, because America is my country, and the Constitution of the United States is our founding document, and that's what I was protecting.
Right.
And now we live in a time where segregation is legally abolished, in a time when everyone, virtually everyone in the United States, with very, very rare exceptions, believes that there should be equal rights for everyone in the United States.
When our differences on these sorts of issues that destroyed unity in America for hundreds of years have basically ended— And in the wake of that, we have seen more kickback against nationalism rather than more unity via nationalism.
Why do you think that is?
Yeah, so I think a couple things.
One, cosmopolitanism used to be a posture of the outsiders and the critics of societies, going way back to the philosopher Diogenes, who lived in the marketplace and said, I'm a citizen of the world, at a time when that was completely a meaningless statement because In that time, in that society, you had no meaning outside the polis, your city-state.
But this attitude in the 60s and 70s in this country began to seep into the mainstream of our elite institutions.
So we now have a denationalizing elite in effect, which again is probably unprecedented in human history, because the governing elite has usually been concerned with building up the nation, as you would expect, because they have a huge role in leading The nation.
Then you've also had business and technological changes.
The late great sociologist Samuel Huntington pointed out that the 19th century had a lot of business and technological changes that created national affiliations, national loyalty, over and above local affiliations and loyalties.
Now in the 20th, late 20th, early 21st century, those kind of changes have tended to create transnational attitude or loyalties over above national loyalties.
And then finally, we've seen the rise of anti-racism as kind of a quasi-religious disposition.
And it's important to emphasize, there was a Democratic Party nationalist tradition in this country.
FDR relies on nationalist symbols and sentiments to sell his program and to rally the country against the real Nazis.
And JFK, too, is kind of an exemplar of a consensus nationalism in the mid-20th century.
Now that tradition in the Democratic Party is totally blown away.
When it comes to the Decline of nationalism and social media.
One of the things that I think is an interesting phenomenon is not just the rise of sort of transnational affiliation via social media, but the nationalization of every issue.
So if you read the Federalist Papers, there's this idea that the federal government by being set up in a particular way would eventually draw loyalty toward the federal government and away from states and localities.
But at the same time, it seems because every issue has now been nationalized, I mean every issue, It's actually led to a breakdown in nationalism, meaning that the agreement of nationalism was that we had to agree on a few top-line items, and this is what made us a nation.
We had a few top-line cultural items.
But beyond that, we were members of states, localities, local communities, families.
As every issue becomes nationalized, ironically, it actually ends up breaking down the nation because we realize just how much we disagree with each other as soon as people start saying that we have to agree at a national level about a lot of these contentious issues.
Yeah, and that's a really good point.
I think also what's going on is there's this whole strata that conservatives have traditionally been focused on that libertarians haven't been.
Libertarians tend to have a view of the society as the state and the individual.
Well, there's this whole middle ground of civil society and civil affiliations, whether it's church, family, workplace, volunteer organizations.
And that has really been wiped out is too strong a word, but it's been significantly eroded and you have huge parts of the country that don't feel those attachments anymore.
So you have a rise of a kind of more isolated individualism than you ever have before.
And those people are inherently unhappy.
Sometimes to the point of suicide and extremely self-destructive behaviors.
But the kind of less maligned form of it, though, is we lack those affiliations now.
Now we have our team and our jerseys in terms of national politics, and that's what I'm going to be invested in.
And that's a very unhealthy thing.
So in one second, I'm going to ask you about President Trump's use of the word nationalism and has that been good or bad for general American perceptions of nationalism.
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Alright, so let's talk about President Trump.
So obviously, Trump uses the word nationalism a lot.
He talks about nationalism.
The left loses it on a regular basis every time he uses the word nationalism.
It's unclear to me what Trump necessarily means by nationalism.
It seems to me more a sort of gut level...
I like the flag, I like the military, which is fine.
I mean, all of that is stuff with which I agree.
But the left wants to read him saying nationalism as alt-right white nationalism or as xenophobic nationalism.
He makes a speech in Europe that I thought was actually the best speech of his presidency about nationalism in Europe and then extending that to nationalism in the United States.
What do you make of Trump's impact on the nationalism debate?
Yeah.
So first of all, there's just this nationalist baton that's kind of left on the floor because the Republican Party had lost touch with it under the influence of libertarianism, under the influence of the business elite we've talked about.
So he picked up this really powerful force when no one else was interested in it.
And I do think it's instinctive.
And Trump's nationalism, when you strip it down, it's that famous photo of him at CPAC a year or two ago hugging the flag.
I mean, that's his nationalism.
But you get him on the teleprompter, and I think it's unassailable, and in some cases really powerful and moving.
The Poland speech that you're referring to is a great example of that, where he talks about, and this is deeply true, how the Polish nation could never be eliminated, because there's something so Polish about the Poles.
So even though it's in this horrific place in Europe where it's constantly trampled and occupied and partitioned and subject to the worst kind of horrors during World War II, the Polish nation never goes away.
And this is really an insight, this might be the only insight that Rousseau and Trump have ever shared, but Rousseau wrote that this is the key, you know, when Poland was being occupied by Russia, just stay Polish.
Your customs, your mores, your tradition, hold to those, and they'll never absorb you and make you go away.
And that turned out to be correct.
Then you get Trump out in the wild, off of the teleprompter, and I think a huge part of the appeal of nationalism is the potential to make a unifying, one-nation appeal.
And Trump just throws away this opportunity Over and over again.
Just an example, two months ago, the tweets storm about Baltimore, where it says no human being would live in Baltimore or West Baltimore.
Well, the fact of the matter, human beings do live in West Baltimore, and they're not just human beings, they're Americans, and Donald Trump is the head of state of the United States of America.
So it's just one of these other instances, and I think this is one of the main pitfalls of his presidency, where he doesn't stop to think, I'm the President of the United States, right?
If people are looking at me, and I'm not just the host of Celebrity Apprentice anymore, you know, fighting with Rosie O'Donnell on social media.
I have a much higher role than that, and he falls down on that.
And obviously, Charlottesville is another example, where it's just a layup to forthrightly and unambiguously denounce the neo-Nazis.
And I know, read it closely, he does denounce the neo-Nazis, but does it kind of in a mealy-mouthed way.
And these are just instances of Trump just falling down as a president and as a nationalist.
So when you talk about the Democratic Party having abandoned its former adherence to nationalism, and obviously from FDR to JFK this was a common strain for the Democratic Party.
At the same time, you'll hear Democrats argue that Barack Obama was talking about our higher ideals, the better angels of our nature, that he was attempting to unify.
It's just that there were too many people in America who weren't willing to hear his version of unity.
Now, as a conservative, I do not recall a lot about Barack Obama that was unifying, nor do I remember him trying to unify the country very much.
I seem to remember more him talking about his typical white grandmother and how America's racism was baked into its DNA and all the rest of this.
But people on the left seem to remember a completely different Barack Obama who actually was pursuing American unity rather than American division.
What do you make of Obama's presidency along these lines?
So I do think there was an appeal to a creedal patriotism or nationalism.
It completely slighted or left out kind of the more grounded aspects of nationalism that I've been talking about.
But I think certainly in comparison to where the Democratic Party is today, and this is an endless progression, where in Obama years Clinton looked like a moderate, and Obama now looks like a moderate compared to where the left is today.
So compared to what we're hearing from current Democrats, yes, he was patriotic compared to where they were, and he was trying to make a unifying appeal on race, certainly compared to where the left is today.
What's been fascinating to watch is Beto O'Rourke, who obviously, after flaming out spectacularly in the early stages of this campaign, decided to become the most woke person on stage and simply say what he thinks was lying at the root of the soul of the Democratic Party.
You know, we're going to grab all of your guns.
I'm going to remove tax-exempt status for every church in the country.
Among the things that he was saying, and has continued to say even after his campaign, is that America was founded in 1619, repeating the nostrums of the 1619 Project.
How do you rebut the presumption that America was founded on slavery, that the true founding of the United States was not 1776, or even Plymouth Rock, that the true founding of the United States was in fact when the first African slave arrived on American shores?
Yes, I don't see how that makes any sense.
Why would that be the founding of America?
It's very important.
date in America, tracing this threat of oppression back to the beginning.
But I think it makes no sense to say that that's the founding of America unless you are going to make America entirely about race and entirely about slavery and entirely about our sins, which is obviously what they're doing and why they're focusing on that date.
And And Beto, while the campaign was still going, he had a meeting, I think it was in San Antonio or something, with recent immigrants and refugees.
And he was telling this story of the country to these people who the best thing that's ever happened to them has actually gotten here, and he's telling them a lie.
About America.
And again, going to assimilation, I worry that we are going to assimilate immigrants into a culture of grievance about the country they've joined.
And that's a shameful and really worrisome thing.
Frankly, I'm sort of amazed at the adherence that the 1619 Project has brought.
You saw the Washington Post immediately launch its competitor to the 1619 Project, suddenly running pieces about slavery as though this was breaking news.
And it seems to me that it's been over for at least 150 years, but apparently should be covered on the front page of every major newspaper as soon as the New York Times starts pushing the 1619 Project.
Again, the 1619 Project to me, and I was very critical of it, was It has some points to make, obviously, about what Americans should know about the dark side of American history and slavery, and I'm a big believer in that.
At the same time, every single essay was geared toward the idea that major institutions in America were rooted in American slavery in a way that was utterly disconnected from both logic and history.
It was bizarre.
Traffic jams in the Atlanta suburbs are because of slavery.
That's actually one of the better pieces.
I mean, the traffic jams in the Atlanta suburbs, at least they tried to connect that to segregation and the history of living patterns.
My favorite was when they connected your use of an Excel spreadsheet to slavery.
There's an actual piece in the 1619 Project where someone posits that because slave masters used to tally How much work people were getting done on a ledger, that that was an element of capitalism that you repeat every single day when you go into your office and you fill out a time sheet, which is completely ridiculous.
It's complete insanity.
What's driving all this?
What is the motivating factor behind this?
I really think we have people in this country, we talked a little bit about denationalizing elite, and a left that does not like the American nation and wants to tear it down, and wants to tell lies about it.
And that's a shameful proposition.
I will say this though, as conservatives and republicans.
We talked about how we need a truthful version of American history, and there have been times when we've turned away from our sins.
I think they're telling a lie, and we have at times told ourselves a sugar-coated version, so we should face frontally the nation's sins and should realize, as the 1619 Project points out, the freedom fighters in American history at the vanguard have been African-Americans.
And I've talked about how the lineage of African-Americans goes back so far in this country and the emphasis is on Americans.
So as conservatives who love this country and love freedom, we need to be connected with that more.
It's a historic tragedy that the Republican Party is so alienated from African-American voters and conservatives.
We are, and I think we need to be aware of this, and we need to work at this.
And Frederick Douglass should be on the currency, right?
Frederick Douglass, the most photographed man in the 19th century, looks like an Old Testament prophet, you know?
No one looks better than Frederick Douglass.
Should be on the currency.
We should mark Juneteenth.
That's a big deal, the end of slavery.
We should reject the lies about ourselves, but also acknowledge the truth in that story about African-American history and their oppression by this country.
I mean, it seems like we're in such a reactionary time, where if you say that much, then people on the right say, well, you know what the left's going to do.
What the left's going to do is now they're going to say, okay, you've acknowledged all these evils of history, and they're going to say, well, every evil that exists today is actually a vestige of the evils of history.
So how do you logically Create gaps between the evils of slavery, the evils of Jim Crow, and what people would say are vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow in lasting inequality between black and white in the United States.
Well, thinking's all about drawing lines.
And yes, there's a slippery slope.
There's a slippery slope in everything.
But you don't want the fact that giving one concession leads to something completely absurd to make you avoid giving the concession if it's justified.
And People on the right, including at National Review, push back against me on Confederate monuments.
This is a point they make.
They'll come after Thomas Jefferson, which they will.
They'll come after George Washington, which they will.
But they can be defended, and should be defended, on entirely different grounds.
I talk about in the book this historic church in Alexandria, where after the Charlottesville They took down a plaque of Robert E. Lee, because he had worshipped there, and they also took down a plaque of George Washington, because he was worshipped there.
These two things are not the same.
These are not comparable figures with comparable contributions to American history.
So it's incumbent on conservatives, as the rational people, to be willing to make these distinctions and not get pushed into an unthinking tribalism just because that's what you have on the other side.
So, speaking of nationalism more broadly, not just American nationalism, what is the, Yoram Hazony has talked about, again a nationalist scholar, he's talked about nationalism a fair bit.
He suggests that nationalism is a great, good for the world, makes some of the same arguments you make in the case for nationalism.
He also suggests that in order for nationalism to be justified, there has to be a sort of moral minimum.
And the moral minimum are things like human rights, the capacity to vote, you know, certain things that we all have to agree on.
It seems like one of the things that the left has done in the media and transnationally is they've simply lumped all nationalism together in a ball.
They've said that American nationalism is the same as Polish nationalism is the same as Saudi nationalism and that they are all the same.
How do we draw those distinctions?
Right.
So, first of all, American nationalism is different.
I mean, its sheet anchor is the U.S.
Constitution, which is a document of liberty and a liberal document, and that makes us different than most of the other countries abroad.
But there's no doubt that nationalism can be abused, like anything that's a powerful and natural force.
Malign people will use it for ill ends.
I think a very basic distinction is between small-D democratic nationalism and authoritarian or dictatorial nationalism, which fades into imperialism.
Now, the line gets fuzzy.
What is just being a bumptious and aggressive nation advancing nationalism and what becomes imperialism?
But certainly, Putin uses nationalistic themes, but I think Russia is clearly a neo-imperial project.
The same thing is true of President Xi and China.
But these distinctions are not hard to make and they should be made.
And you look at World War II, the The Nazis make nationalist appeals as well.
I would argue they're not just nationalists.
There's this cracked racial vision of a Europe that's going to be dominated by the Aryan race.
And the people who defeat them, in the West at least, are democratic nationalists.
They're FDR.
They're de Gaulle.
They're Churchill.
So when we look at the future of the United States, do you think that there is a future to American nationalism?
Because we've discussed the fact that the left is making a very strong case against American nationalism, almost a separatist case with regard to various groups in the United States bifurcating all of us, suggesting that we are all members of subgroups rather than the parent group.
And that seems to be having an enormous amount of of effect, particularly on young people, who are either reacting from the left by saying, you're right, America was never a nation, it was all a myth, or reacting, in some cases, on the far right by saying, no, you're totally right, now we want out.
You keep degrading white people, and so we are going to start identifying as white nationalists.
You want your group to be treated as a group, but we want our group to be treated as a group.
Do you see a future for this unity road?
It seems increasingly difficult.
Yeah, I think there has to be a future for it, because identity politics will end one way or the other, eventually, it might take a long time, in destruction of the country, because it will erode our institutions, and it'll eat away at the creed.
If people are loyal to their race or ethnicity above all, that will eat away at the foundations of our country.
And you might not like the emphasis I have in my nationalism and might say other things are more important than I'm giving credit for them, but some version of this is hugely important to preserve this country and its institutions and its ideals.
So one of the things that I'm fearful of is you can see on both the right and the left the revived use of nationalism to go back to the economic nationalism point.
The idea is that if unity can't be found in sort of the higher ideals or a common history, language, and culture, that unity will be found in the leviathan, that unity is going to be found in the government.
A government that takes care of all of us, a government that provides for our health care, a government that decides how the markets are supposed to work.
You see this on the right, I'd say Tucker Carlson tends to be more on the side.
And then on the left, you see it in Elizabeth Warren.
And there's a reason that Tucker has endorsed some of Elizabeth Warren's economic plans.
Are you concerned at all that the rubric of American nationalism can be hijacked by people who say, okay, well, as Barack Obama suggested in 2012 at the DNC, the only thing that we have in common is the government?
Right, right, right.
So I think we need a strong, capable national government, a government that can respond to crises.
That is a point of coherence for the country.
But there are all sorts of other really important aspects of this country besides the government.
And a strong and capable government doesn't need to be handing you a check every month.
It doesn't need to be regulating or cracking down on you if the wrong sort of tortoise wanders into your property somewhere in the southwest.
I do think the party, Republican Party, it needs to become more nationalist in a thoughtful way.
And it does need to become more populist.
It doesn't mean throwing away the markets, but it does mean paying more attention to the plight of the working class in this country.
Now, one of the frustrations I've had in this big debate we're having on the right at a certain 30,000 feet level It's so abstract, it's completely disconnected to what the policies are.
So what are you proposing that's actually going to help these working class voters?
I mean, clearly they should have, it's important to have cheap energy, cheap healthcare, cheap education, high wages, and a culture that is conducive to virtuous behavior and stable families.
I think all conservatives, everyone on the right, support those things.
So let's argue about how to get them.
And I think, by and large, there are ways to get them through market-oriented solution.
But let's think it through and get to some specifics here.
I think that's a big thing that's been missing from the debate.
And I also think that this is one of the ironies of Trump ideologies.
I think a more nationalistic working class oriented politics has more potential to jump racial lines than kind of a conventional stereotypical Mitt Romney republicanism.
I do think there are black working class and middle class males and Latino males who can be attracted to this sort of politics.
Is Trump ever going to realize that?
Probably not.
He'd really have to work it.
He'd have to act differently than he does.
But I do think this is a pointer for some future Republican leader.
And I just think it's necessary because the map, it's going to be driven by the electoral map, if nothing else.
You know, Virginia may be gone for the Republican Party.
He's You see the Southwest, maybe Texas sliding away because of demographic changes there and suburban growth.
So you may need to have a more consistent path to winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
And I do think that will require a different kind of politics.
So there's some on the right.
Henry Olsen comes to mind who believes that the move that the Republican Party needs to make, the conservatives need to make, is a sort of bigger government involvement in the economy and acceptance that the government is going to play a significant role in everything from health care to subsidizing manufacturing and that the conservatives have to get out of bed with quote-unquote big business, move away from the sort of economic libertarianism that has become sort of characteristic of the Republican Party for the last 20 odd years.
Then there are folks who say, no, those policies are good policies, but they need to start making an overtly nationalistic pitch on those grounds.
And then you have folks who say, well, they shouldn't make a nationalistic pitch at all.
They should just make the libertarian sort of argument.
Where do you come down on that debate?
I think the libertarian argument isn't a winner.
I think market-oriented policies are the better policies, but how you present them, and in certain cases, you know, your policy might change, but how you present them is certainly important.
One thing that's very frustrating to me, and I think we've seen some changes in this respect, but was the overemphasis on entrepreneurs and the rhetoric of the Republican Party.
Entrepreneurs are extremely important.
We love entrepreneurs.
About 8% of the country or something, entrepreneurs.
The vast majority are workers.
So you need to be focused on them and on their needs as well, at least as a matter of rhetoric.
And we also need to be focused on wages.
We tend to focus on GDP growth, we tend to focus on the stock market.
Astonishingly, President Trump, although the whole thing is supposed to be based on this populism, he talks about GDP growth in the stock market all the time, rather than wages, even though he has a pretty good story to tell about wages, certainly among people in the lower part of the income scale.
But I think it should be higher on the conservative agenda.
How do we get higher wages for workers than it has been in the past?
One of the questions there has historically been, how do you make that pitch without sliding immediately into the terms of debate that the left prefers to use?
As soon as you start talking about workers, then the left starts pitching the labor theory of value.
As soon as you start talking about wages, they say, well, why don't we just subsidize wages with minimum wage?
And I guess the question becomes, on a political level, how do you outpitch the person who is basically offering a direct guarantee that they're going to give you exactly the thing that you're suggesting will naturally happen if you leave the market to its own devices?
Yeah, so I mean that's a problem with every area, right?
They directly say we're just going to give people or mandate whatever this good is, and there's always some major downsides and unattended effects to that which make us oppose it.
So minimum wage laws, obviously you're pricing some people out of the job market, and being in the job market is hugely important.
It's good for your well-being at every level, and it's important to developing skills.
So even if some workers will be better off with that higher minimum wage, if you're screwing others out of a job, that's not a good policy.
Unions, the problem is, they often, in the American model of unions, they can be parasitic on their companies and help destroy them, which isn't good for workers.
But I'm open to considering, are there other forms of worker organization?
There's a policy guy named Eli Lehrer who's written about this a little bit for us.
And let's just be an instance of, let's think it through.
Let's see what the detailed policy would be, whether it's a good idea, and whether we can support it, even though it's something Different, and something that we wouldn't have been focused on, say, in the 1980s.
So I'm going to ask you to do a little bit of political projection here.
You're looking forward to 2020 like the rest of us are.
We may be recording this in our rears, so everything may change in the next five minutes.
We'll see how impeachment is going.
But if you had to ballpark, if you had to forecast what's going to happen in 2020, who takes the Democratic nomination, how President Trump performs against them, what are the factors and what do you see happening?
Well, I think Democrats are going through this phase that we went through in 2016, where we think, oh, it's a big field, a lot of new, fresh faces.
This is a really strong field.
And then you get into it, and you're like, this is a terrible field, and Trump's going to stomp them all.
And that's why, well, this may be over when this runs, but the Bloomberg flirtation with running and others we've heard about, you know, Eric Holder.
And others, it's part of a freak-out on the part of at least an element of the Democratic establishment and the Democratic donor base.
Because you have Joe Biden that's this bifurcated phenomenon.
I'm not sure he's had one good day on the campaign trail.
The fundraising is atrocious.
He's like in fourth place in fundraising.
In the early states, you'd say Iowa and New Hampshire, based on that, he's crashing and burning.
But he has persisted in the strength in the national polls.
So to me, that just shows Democrats, they want to be with him.
They want to like him.
They want someone like that.
But the performance ability isn't there.
And I would just think throwing him into this race with Donald Trump would be a huge risk because you just don't know when he's going to fall on his face, like in a really big moment or during a debate.
Almost literally.
Yeah, no, literally.
And then Elizabeth Warren, she's run a pretty good primary campaign, but she's not objectively, like, a generational talent, you know, the way Barack Obama was.
Maybe Obama, at his best days, could kind of sell this program in a general election.
Can she?
I really doubt it.
And it even seems to be dawning on her that Medicare for All is a huge mistake and is going to be an albatross around her neck.
And if she wins a nomination, she's going to have to find some way, I think, to wiggle out of it.
Bernie Sanders might be stronger in some ways than Elizabeth Warren, but he's a self-declared socialist, and that's a radioactive word in our politics.
So sometimes I squint just the right way, and I'm like, okay, Buttigieg.
Buttigieg is their stronger guy.
He is hyper-articulate, like Obama levels of speaking.
He hasn't had any bad moments in any of the debates except for that one debate over, you know, there's a police-involved shooting, and he was Cornered at one moment, but someone from the wings interrupted and he didn't really quite see how cornered he was.
But he's, you know, bright and shiny as a new penny.
He's the mayor of South Bend, and so far shown just zero appeal to African Americans.
So, that'd obviously be a huge obstacle to winning the nomination, and a huge problem in a general election.
And we've seen some debate about this bubbling out there.
But African-Americans are, there's some element of African-American opinion that is not in to gay marriage.
And this would be a huge problem for him.
So who's the strongest?
I don't know.
I have zero idea.
And Trump's path, obviously, it's a really narrow path, but it's an open path.
And it's a path that does not involve winning the popular vote, which is kind of crazy.
I mean, have you ever thought about an incumbent president who's going to win but can't do with the popular vote?
but it's threading the needle again electorally and...
And that path is open in those formerly blue-wall states, especially if they nominate someone who is deeply flawed or ideologically too far to the left.
And that seems to characterize the top four candidates at the moment.
So in a second, I'm going to ask you what Trump needs to do in order to win.
So you talked about the shortcomings of the Democrats.
I want to ask you what Trump needs to do in order to win.
But if you want to hear Rich Lowry's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click our subscribe button, and you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Well, Rich Lowry, the book is The Case for Nationalism.
Thanks so much for stopping by, Rich.
Great to see you.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
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