America's emerging nationalism crisis

Moreover, once nationalism becomes the main political factor, there’s no putting that troublesome genie back in the bottle. Politics become tribal, ethnic conflicts waged at the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. Having done most of my scholarly work on multiethnic societies like the Habsburg Empire and Yugoslavia, I can attest that the fires of nationalism, once stoked, are only put out with great difficulty—and that ethnically diverse societies that play games with nationalism are living dangerously.

Nationalism transforms politics from ideology to tribe. As Lee Kwan Yew, whose founding and prosperous running of multiethnic Singapore for three decades made him one of the most successful politicians of the 20th century, expressed it concisely, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

The power of nationalism ought never be underestimated. German nationalism in the first half of the last century was so potent that it took two world wars—at the cost of ten million dead Germans, most of their cities flattened, plus major territorial losses and decades of foreign occupation—to finish it off as a political force.

Many Americans have taken to the odd notion that some nationalisms are bad while others are good. This is a thoroughly Marxist conceit, and Communist regimes for decades tried to assess whose nationalisms were “progressive” and which ones were “reactionary.”