When I was writing about the Bernie Sanders primary campaign in 2016, I interviewed a number of Sanders adherents who professed socialism, and, when asked to elaborate their views, they pointed almost without exception to some wealthy European country with a capitalist economy and a larger welfare state. Many of them admired Germany, which has a thriving, export-driven manufacturing economy, national policies that prioritize domestic labor interests with a special solicitousness for industrial jobs, and a relatively generous welfare state. Having those priorities doesn’t make you a socialist — it makes you Donald Trump, who was popular among rank-and-file union members even though organized labor continued to act as a Democratic fief. American progressives take a utopian view of Europe, particularly the Nordic countries, but the facts on the ground are more complicated. Want a government in which oil revenues help to fund state-led economic-development activities? You can have that in Norway — or in Texas. Ron DeSantis may be the champion of school choice in Florida, but he’s still way behind Sweden and Finland. Conversely, right-wingers who supported Trump because they worry about enclaves of unassimilated immigrants should really give a second look to Denmark. The old reds may have spent a lot of breath singing the “Internationale,” but, outside of the dorm room, socialists have almost always been thoroughgoing nationalists. And American progressives have traditionally been nationalists as well. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were nationalists, to be sure. Barack Obama tried selling “nationalism” when he was in his short-lived Teddy Roosevelt phase. And Joe Biden doesn’t talk about the “workers of the world” — he talks about the workers of Ohio. He isn’t in any hurry to dump the Trump-era tariffs or liberalize trade.