The Coming Nationalist Realignment

Every couple of decades, the United States has what is called a “realigning election”, where conventional wisdom about regional and demographic politics is turned upside-down. For example, the South was solidly Democratic from the Civil War through the 1950s but shifted to the Republican candidate Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, the only region he won outside his home state of Arizona. Since then, the South has been a Republican stronghold. California was a solidly Republican state for most of its history until demographic change and the growing influence of liberal Silicon Valley flipped it blue in 1996. No Republican has come close to winning California ever since.

Future historians will record 2016 as yet another realigning election. Since 1945, and even more explicitly since 1991, the leaders of both parties in the United States have bought into the globalist philosophy. Adherents of globalism consider themselves citizens of the world rather than of any specific country. They often believe that national borders should be weakened if not erased entirely, and work to build international organizations that have precedence over national sovereignty. Globalists often advocate for military interventions in situations that do not threaten their home country. Above all, globalists see all the people of the world as interchangeable cogs in a great machine, whose heritage, culture, and ethnicity are simply meaningless flairs. As Steve Sailer says, the globalist position is one of “invade the world, invite the world”.

This globalist ideology has dominated American government for decades. The Truman Doctrine stated that the United States would oppose the spread of Communism anywhere in the world, setting up our country’s role as world policeman. Prior to 1945, the United States rarely intervened in affairs outside our borders, or at least outside of our hemisphere. It was after 1945 that the United States took a leading role in the creation of international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and many others. Our government contributed vast sums of money to these organizations and entered into many treaties and contracts that chipped away at our national sovereignty. The more powerful these international organizations become, the more power they desire. As I write this, the United Nations is pushing compacts on migration and refugees that would criminalize speech critical of illegal immigration.

After the end of the Cold War this embrace of globalism became more explicit, rather than less. Without an external existential foe, the United States dove headlong into President George H.W. Bush’s “new world order”. Foreign military adventures, illegal immigration, and resettlement of refugees increased, while more and more national sovereignty was traded to international governing bodies. This trend was not just in the United States, of course. Over the last few decades the European Union grew from a simple free trade zone to a free movement zone with a unified currency and calls for a supranational European army.

The globalist agenda was not confined to just one of the two major parties. It was the Democrats who launched our military adventures in Korea, Vietnam, Syria, and Libya, while the Republicans invaded Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The Democrats have endorsed unlimited immigration, both legal and illegal, with the knowledge that the new citizens this generates will expand their voting base and keep them in power. Meanwhile the leaders of the Republican Party and their wealthy donors favor increased migration in order to keep wages low and profits high. Finally, both parties have advocated for increased financial aid to foreign nations and international organizations, even as the national debt grows ever larger.

For many years, the media has been able to control criticism of the globalist agenda by equating any dissent as racism. As globalism rose after World War II, nationalism was made taboo by associating it with the worst evils of Nazi Germany. William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, led the effort to expel conservative nationalists such as the John Birch Society from the public square. Even today, the conservative establishment attempts to square the circle by holding up patriotism as a high American ideal while condemning nationalism as beyond the bounds of respectable discourse. Conservatives are taught to believe in what might be called “civic nationalism,” a belief in America as an idea rather than a people. In response a to a misandrist tweet by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted:

“Our future is:

AMERICAN

An identity based not on gender, race, ethnicity or religion. But on the powerful truth that all people are created equal with a God given right to life,liberty & the pursuit of happiness.”

It sounds nice, but if you dig into this philosophy you will find it is mostly meaningless. If America is nothing more than an idea, then what is it? What do our borders contain? What is the value of citizenship? If being a true American means holding to these ideas, then should we institute some sort of purity test for citizenship? If a man born to American parents in the United States declares that he no longer believes in these ideas, should he be deported? Once you dig deeper into the idea that “American” is simply a state of mind the less it makes any sense at all. We should take the Founders of our nation seriously when they declared that the purpose of the Constitution was to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity. The American nation is the posterity of its creators. According to mainstream media, however, noticing this is just as “racist” as any other criticism of globalism.

So, what happened in 2016? Donald Trump shocked the world by winning the presidential election, a contest that nearly every journalist and pundit assumed was in the bag for Hillary Clinton. The most obvious reason for Trump’s victory was the defection of the so-called Rust Belt states to the Republican ticket. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had been solidly Democratic since the Reagan era and their white blue-collar workers had been reliably Democratic voters. Why the unexpected switch? It is this blue-collar world that has been most impacted by globalism. The factories that once allowed a man to make a good living and support a family in postwar America had closed, as free trade made it more profitable to pay workers in third-world countries pennies a day. Sons and daughters of these factory workers enlisted in the military and fought in our endless wars in the Middle East, coming home with PTSD and missing limbs, facing depression, unemployment, and drug addiction. The opioid epidemic spread like wildfire in these communities, as millions turned to cheap and deadly drugs imported from Mexico and China. Yet instead of being offered sympathy and a helping hand from our government, these communities were excoriated for the crime of being white and male. Elite bureaucrats and journalists gloated about the coming demographic changes in America, and mockingly told unemployed blue-collar workers to “learn to code”. Is it any wonder they turned to the one candidate who promised to help them?

Whether President Trump will keep his promises to his blue-collar voters remains to be seen. As I write this, Trump has been in office for two years yet there is still no wall and no effort to rebuild our infrastructure or end the military adventures in the Middle East. We can at least take heart that no more wars have been started in that time. But the realignment that began in 2016 is less about Donald Trump personally and more about the constituency that he discovered. While our leaders have wholeheartedly embraced globalism, many of our citizens desire a nationalist approach. “America First” resonated with people because it stood in stark contrast to the implicit aim of globalism, which is for America to be used for the benefit of the rest of the world in the same way that an animal carcass is used by scavengers, carrion eaters, and parasites.

The magnitude of this realignment was noticeable during the campaign, as globalist Republicans turned against Trump even after he had won the nomination. National Review, long considered the standard bearer of the conservative movement, published an entire issue denouncing Trump in January of 2016. When a tape of some of Trump’s crude comments was leaked to the media in September, many prominent Republicans urged him to step down. As Election Day approached, some Republican commentators and politicians even publicly stated that they would vote for Hillary Clinton, despite spending the last two decades building her up as the ultimate bogeyman opponent. What was so dangerous about a potential Trump presidency that it would cause Republican leaders to so egregiously defect? Was it simply his personal life? I doubt it. President Ronald Reagan had divorced and remarried, though he was obviously not as flamboyant and crude as Trump. Senator John McCain was unfaithful to his first wife, was involved in a major congressional scandal, and was caught on tape making all sorts of crude remarks, yet the Republican elites had no problem urging us to vote for him in 2008. Yet McCain was always a committed globalist, while Trump was a self-identified nationalist. Donald Trump promised to end free trade and impose tariffs, build a wall to stem illegal immigration, reduce the number of refugees that entered the US, and to end our military interventions in foreign countries. I believe these were the unforgivable sins that caused the Republican establishment so much fear and consternation.

For two years the so-called NeverTrump Republicans have been building alliances with the globalist left against their common enemy. Mainstream media published article after article highlighting Republicans against Trump, implying that he must be pretty bad if his own party hates him to much. But here is the rub: the NeverTrump Republicans were always globalists first and Republicans second. When the late Senator McCain took to the Senate floor to denounce Trump, remember that he was always a globalist. When George W. Bush basked in his newfound respect from left-wing media and canoodled with Barack and Michelle Obama, remember that the Bushes and the Obamas have always been members of the Globalist Party, despite their own party labels. When Jeff Flake or John Kasich are given sympathetic airtime on CNN or MSNBC, remember that both men (and both networks) have always been part of the Globalist Party. During this realignment phase the old party labels are still sticking, but not for long. Media still calls these men “Republicans” because it serves their purpose to attempt to divide people. However, I believe that once this realignment is complete, we will have an explicitly Nationalist Party and an explicitly Globalist Party competing for the soul of America.

Some Democrats can be considered part of the Nationalist Party, even if they might still run from that label because of the way the media associates it with racism and Nazism. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, for example, has long spoken out against the globalist military agenda of the United States. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, before he was co-opted by the Democratic establishment, advocated for socialist positions for America, rather than spending blood and treasure on the rest of the world. (Just don’t call him a National Socialist.) The explicitly Nationalist Party of the next decade will begin to include Republicans and Democrats, who might disagree about economic systems or moral values but who all agree that the purpose of the American government should be to serve the American people.

The reaction by the Globalist Party against President Trump for the past two years is just the beginning. Expect a strong push by the globalists to retain their stranglehold on American culture and politics. They were overconfident in 2016, believing that they had won a final victory over the forces of reaction and nationalism and that a Star Trek-style one-world government utopia was just around the corner. Brexit and President Trump might have been shocking to their psyches, but this was only a setback for the globalists, not a defeat. They have spent the better part of a century amassing power and influence, and will not be so easily destroyed.

It is still dangerous to self-identify as a nationalist. The globalists who control our media and culture will not hesitate to censor, deplatform, and destroy those who challenge their rule. Globalist elites control Hollywood, academia, advertising, journalism, public schools, and much of the federal bureaucracy. They like to present the idea that globalism is an unmitigated good, and only evil racist Nazis could oppose it. They propagandize from one side and censor from the other. Yet nationalism is rising all around the world. As I write this today, massive protests are occurring in France against the globalist elite’s attempt to turn that country into a minor province of a European empire. Two years after the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, agitation rises as the globalist Parliament does its best to subvert the will of its constituents and keep Britain enthralled to the EU. Nationalist leaders have risen in Italy, Poland, Hungary, and many other nations. The fiercest resistance to the globalist agenda appears to come from Eastern Europe, which spent two generations under the thumb of the totalitarian Soviet Union and has no desire to substitute one tyrannical regime for another. Even if the globalist cabal in the United States succeeds in destroying or marginalizing President Trump, the zeitgeist that carried him to victory will not soon abate.

Sometimes a globalist movement can wear a nationalist mask. For example, the Scottish National Party seems nationalist on its face as it advocates for complete independence from the UK. However, the SNP advocates for a closer relationship of Scotland and the European Union, and heavily opposed Brexit. Their contention with London is not that they want more freedom, but that London has not ceded enough authority to the EU. They desire independence in order to become more subsumed into the globalist empire. That is not to say that American nationalists should oppose the SNP and other organizations like it. To be a nationalist is not to be a supremacist. Nationalists believe in sovereign national borders and the right of citizens to govern themselves as they see fit. The founding documents of the United States make clear the right of a people to establish their own government. I believe in self-determination for all people, whether Scottish, Catalan, French, Russian, Sudanese, or Texan.

The war between the Globalist Party and the Nationalist Party in the United States is just beginning. The lasting value of the Trump victory in 2016 might well be to simply define the battle lines and clarify the combatants. As you watch current events unfold for the next few years keep in mind who is who. When you see a Republican criticizing the Trump Administration on cable news, ask yourself if this person is a globalist or a nationalist. Does he or she believe that all cultures are equal and people just replaceable cogs in a machine? Does he or she advocate for military intervention in foreign nations that has nothing to do with protecting American citizens? Does he or she say that America is simply an idea with no inherent culture or heritage? If so, then this person is a member of the Globalist Party, despite whatever label is on the chyron. Keep this paradigm in mind when watching politicians, journalists, celebrities, and anyone else that our media presents as an authority regarding our culture. Ask yourself what they are trying to accomplish. Don’t let the globalist media tell you what people and beliefs are off-limits. Nationalism is rising and it is inevitable.