Explaining Trump, Brexit and Other Expressions of Nationalism

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/books/review/john-b-judis-nationalist-revival.html

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THE NATIONALIST REVIVAL Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization By John B. Judis 157 pp. Columbia Global Reports. Paper, $15.99.

Since the twin convulsions of 2016, Trump and Brexit, a cottage industry has evolved dedicated to explaining these phenomena, especially to liberals shocked and appalled by them both. John B. Judis was an early entrant into the field, publishing “The Populist Explosion” to wide acclaim just before Donald Trump was elected president. Like many of his fellow explainers, Judis writes as a liberal who has wised up, one who has seen what so many of his progressive confreres have missed and who sighs with exasperation at how desperately out of touch they have become.

His project in “The Nationalist Revival” is to explain the resurgence of nationalism, in both the United States and Europe. Once again, his timing is sharp: The fall midterm campaign saw Trump tell a Houston rally, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist.” In that same speech, the president pitted himself against “corrupt, power-hungry globalists,” deploying a term understood by anti-Semites as a code word for Jews. A week later, a self-described nationalist gunned down 11 Jews at prayer in Pittsburgh. So an inquiry into nationalism seems both necessary and urgent.

Methodically and with data widely drawn, Judis points the finger at a globalization that has seen once well-rewarded jobs shipped overseas; at immigration and the cultural and economic resentment it stirs; and at terrorism and the fear of the other it provokes. He also reminds us that ethnic nationalism is hardly new in the United States — that the melting pot self-conception of the American nation is relatively recent and that for more than a century the American people conceived their country in strictly white, northern European and Protestant terms. Wisely, he argues that nationalism does not have an innate political color, that it can shade right or left depending on the ideological pigment with which it is combined.

With that context established, his focus is on the here and now and on explaining the current nationalist surge. Such an endeavor always carries a risk: that in seeking to explain a phenomenon, you stray into justifying it. Judis crosses that line more than once. Straining hard to see the world from the point of view of a voter for Trump or, say, the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, he too often channels that view unchallenged, accepting too many of its assumptions.

He draws, for example, on the typology set out by the British writer David Goodhart, who divides voters into two categories: Anywheres and Somewheres. The latter tend to live in once-homogeneous towns rather than diverse cities, valuing tradition and rootedness, while the former are footloose, prizing the novel over the long-established and constructing their identity from their individual professional or educational achievements rather than from the collective affiliations into which they were born. In this view, it is the Somewheres, often left behind economically and alienated by the rush to diversity, who have driven the nationalist revival, backing Trump, Brexit and a host of xenophobic politicians across Europe, while Anywheres remain stubbornly clueless about the pain and cultural dislocation their fellow citizens have endured.

But Judis, like Goodhart, too easily caricatures Anywheres as unmoored citizens of the world (both writers eschew the phrase “rootless cosmopolitans,” with its unhappy history, but that’s the idea). Anywheres are disconnected from and deaf to the natural feelings of national kinship that animate their less well-heeled, less educated countrymen and women. Judis constructs a straw man when he takes on “the cosmopolitan liberals who believe in a borderless world,” for how many liberal arguments, outside a John Lennon lyric, seriously demand a world without countries?

Similarly, in fleshing out the supposed outlook of these cosmopolitans, a category that he estimates makes up “perhaps, 15 to 20 percent of the electorate,” he cites a poll taken of the founders of internet start-ups in Silicon Valley, as if that tiny, rarefied group reflects the views of one-fifth of the American population. Sure, these tech millionaires and billionaires love immigration and value “global trade” over “American workers,” but they are outliers.

More troubling is Judis’s embrace of some of the presumptions that underlie the hawkish nationalism he aims to analyze. A small tell is his adoption of aquatic language when discussing immigration: Twice we read of a “flood” of refugees. Elsewhere a “trickle” of migrants becomes “a raging stream.” It’s only a small act of dehumanization, but it is such a common trope of anti-immigrant rhetoric that one would have expected Judis to be on guard against it.

It is striking too that Judis accepts the link that xenophobic nationalists make between immigration and terrorism. True, he is careful to write that this is the perception of anxious voters drawn toward nationalism, but he could surely have devoted a sentence or two to the question of whether that perception has a solid basis in fact. “Some of the terrorist incidents involved refugees,” he writes. That’s true of a handful of cases in Europe, though the vast majority of incidents did not involve refugees. Meanwhile, the number of acts of terror that have been committed by refugees in the United States since 1980 hovers between one and zero, depending on whether you count only fatal acts (zero) or nonfatal ones (one).

Judis handles other (white) nationalist prejudices the same way. “Many Americans blamed the rise of welfare spending … on new Hispanic immigrants and newly empowered blacks using relaxed welfare laws to free ride,” he writes, again without challenge. Later we learn of the “resentment that many in the Euro-American core felt toward African-Americans and Latino immigrants, whom they believed to be benefiting from government programs without paying taxes to support them.” Sure, the verbs here are “blamed” and “believed,” but it would not have impaired Judis’s exercise in understanding to note that black and Latino Americans are of course taxpayers too.

There’s a reason this matters. The fact that many of these hostile perceptions of migrants and minorities are often only loosely grounded in reality is surely central to understanding the current nationalist surge. It tells us that this is as much about fear as it is about reality. Judis himself provides the evidence, noting that the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States peaked in 2007 and has declined ever since. Yet Trump was able to use the issue of supposedly rampant illegal immigration as rocket fuel for his campaign. Fear is the heart of the matter.

In a well-informed survey of the nationalist ascendancy in Europe, Judis again scolds liberals for being oblivious to nationalism’s enduring power. He upbraids the European Union for insufficient sensitivity to the national yearnings of Poland and Hungary — never quite saying whether the E.U.’s error has been in condemning those countries’ drift toward illiberal democracy or in admitting them into the E.U. club in the first place — and admonishes the Clinton and Obama administrations for a similar tin ear toward Russia. But here too he slips from explanation to justification, adopting what sounds a lot like Putin’s narrative. In his telling Russia did not invade or annex Crimea, for example, but merely “reclaimed” it.

Still, Judis would surely wave aside these objections as typical liberal fastidiousness, untuned to the more elemental, raw longings of national identity that liberals need to accommodate fast. On that point, he makes a robust case: Liberals have indeed underestimated for too long the need for a collective sense of belonging, failing to see that any social democratic project involving redistribution or welfare spending requires a basic level of fellow-feeling among citizens. That too is nationalism, and this book is a timely, if flawed, reminder of its importance.