NATIONALISM---PART 2

So if we are to embrace nationalism, exactly what are we looking at? Robert Reich says there are two faces of nationalism. “The negative face ignores its global responsibilities while the positive face embraces domestic ones.” There is a shared value here, however, in that both embrace the America first belief. Many Americans who consider nationalism the same as patriotism consider the “America First” idea as the one we should embrace as patriots. Unfortunately, many of those don’t understand the economics of the world (I’m not implying that I do which is why I lean on experts.) Also unfortunate, it’s obvious that Trump doesn’t understand either. If you want to turn away from the world unless it meets our demands, good luck with that. President Trump is expected to deliver an “America First” message in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday. But the question for many nations is increasingly not so much whether America should be front and center of trade negotiations, but how much they should bother with it at all, suggest Ana Swanson and Jim Tankersley in The New York Times.
 
“As the world’s largest economy and architect of many international organizations and treaties, the United States remains an indispensable partner. But as the global economy gains strength, Europe and countries including Japan and China are forging ahead with deals that do not include the United States,” they write.
 
“Thirty-five new bilateral and regional trade pacts are under consideration around the world, according to the World Trade Organization. The United States is party to just one of them, with the European Union, and that negotiation has gone dormant. The United States is also threatening to withdraw from one of its existing multilateral agreements — the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada — if it cannot be renegotiated in the United States’ favor.
 
“‘Maybe there was some sort of presumption on the part of the president and his team that if the US said stop, this process would come to a halt,’ said Phil Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an economist in the George W. Bush administration. ‘What this shows is that’s not true. The world just moves on without us.’”
 
Okay, with the world ignored, what about turning our attention what Americans want---jobs, affordable education, health insurance, affordable housing, etc. Is this new nationalism going to focus on that? My answer is not under this Administration; in fact what I see is a “convenient nationalism” that’s like a bowl of jello—push it around to where it’s politically convenient. Otherwise there would already be an infrastructure bill on the floor and everything else would have to wait. That bill would actually help Americans by providing thousands of jobs on projects badly needed. Its estimated cost: in the neighborhood of 3.5 trillion! Compared to the 70 billion cost of building ‘the wall’----wow, these numbers are mind boggling to most of us. Of course the BIG difference is that the infrastructure project actually helps Americans. True nationalism void of political agendas would immediately recognize that. Every move Trump makes is tied to something that helps him politically, without much regard for whether or not it helps Americans.
 
He sees himself like a dictator who can’t understand why people don’t jump at his command. The rule of law is simply an inconvenience. Perhaps he will change over time but history indicates otherwise. Since running for the presidency and after obtaining it, he has encouraged an attitude of turning against minorities and immigrants. Is this because dictators are most successful when people become ethno-nationalists with the belief that this makes them superior?
 
This is already happening in many parts of the world as people look for scapegoats for economic problems, and immigrants are an easy target, followed closely by foreigners and minorities.  Bart Bonikowski, a Harvard associate professor of sociology who studies populist and nationalist movements, in discussing Aamerica, recently said, “There’s a good portion of the population that does … define the nation in ethno-cultural terms. They’re not all members of neo-Nazi groups, by any stretch of the imagination. They just have a particular understanding of what America is: a white, Christian America.”
 
I’ll delve more into this in the next epistle but for now I end with this statement by Robert Reich:  “….those who believe that membership in a society obligates the successful to help those who are falling behind should not recoil from appeals to nationalism. The moral force of social benevolence rests, after all, on the preexistence of strong bonds among a people who share common values and aspirations. Nationalism is not the danger. The real danger comes in allowing the negative nationalists to claim the mantle of patriotism
for their own ends. “