LIBERAL NATIONALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

By Juliana Geran Pilon

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)

October 8, 2025

I. Liberal nationalism

The seeds of liberal nationalism

At the dawn of civilization, kings promulgated law but were above it, not subject to it. Their subjects of course were just that: subjected. Things changed, however, even before the great philosophers of Greece came along, when the Hebrews articulated the notion of equality before the law (in Hebrew, law is torah, which is also the name of the first five books of what later came to be known as the Old Testament.) As all of you know, it was in Book I of Genesis that the foundational idea of liberalism was articulated: that mankind, male and female, were equally created in God’s image.

The Hebrew God was concerned that humans were too prone to idolizing authority figures. In the book of Samuel, for example, the prophet Saul was said to have been delegated by his fellow Hebrews to tell God their desire to be “like other nations,” with a king to rule above them. God very reluctantly acquiesced. “Heed their demand,” He told Saul, “but warn them solemnly and tell them about the practices of any king who will rule over them.” Saul complied: “The day will come,” he told his kinsmen, “when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen; and the Lord will not answer you on that day.”

Notice the reference to a “king whom you yourselves have chosen.” The notion of democratic rule was practically unknown in antiquity. So too was a vision of mutually respecting, distinct, sovereign communities. Conquest was assumed to be the norm. If you are stronger, you are entitled to take over the weaker body politic. Only Athens, and later Rome, introduced the idea of democratic self-rule, though it had to wait many centuries for a revival, after the Renaissance. It would inaugurate modernity.

Over the course of several centuries, states of various shapes, sizes, and legitimizing narratives would evolve quite differently in different parts of the world. Nationalism as such, as a political ideology, however, did not crystallize until the 18^th century. It took place on the European continent, and was essentially a product of the so-called Enlightenment. Alas, that moment in intellectual history has been, and continues to be, systematically misunderstood and oversimplified. Far from being monolithic, it actually consisted of at least two, distinct, even contradictory, branches: the French and the English, with the Scottish a close third.

Yes, they did all invoke freedom. But the French liberte conflated the hardly synonymous fraternite and egalite, a trinity predicated on the abolition of the old order, by force if need be. It could not but lead to terror. By contrast, the notion of liberty that would prevail in America was the English and Scottish version that emphasized individual initiative, the unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and property (the latter of course providing the means for “the pursuit of happiness”). It was a very different sort of trinity, which constituted what John Locke called “estate.” It was best summarized by the erudite Lord Acton one century after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, in a magnificent speech titled The History of Freedom in Antiquity:

The parallel lines on which all freedom has been won [were] the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development, and not of essential change; and the principle that all political authority must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man.

Natural liberty vs “liberalism”

Labeling what Adam Smith called “the system of natural liberty” liberalism is a compromise with an establishment culture enamored of “isms.” I say compromise because ideology is a nefarious device designed to oversimplify and obfuscate. An ideology fuels passion at the expense of reason, as connotation (notoriously susceptible to political manipulation) overwhelms denotation. In short, it is catnip for sophists and demagogues.

By the early nineteenth century, anti-liberalism grew into anti-capitalism and its twin, antisemitism of the Marxist variety still popular today, soon to be accompanied by anti-Americanism. (Anti-fascism, anti-racism, and antizionism are more recent additions.) Like all ideologies, anti-isms resist refutation.

Take “anti-Americanism.” It is not a function of any particular set of government policies, for even when those change, which they frequently do, the antagonism persists. The Hungarian-born American historian Paul Hollander sought to define anti-Americanism as “a deep seated, emotional predisposition that perceives the United States as an unmitigated and uniquely evil entity and the source of all, or most, other evils in the world.” Intimately related to fear of modernity, wrote Hollander, it reflects “the belief that big corporations (capitalism) are in the process of extending their influence and power around the world, and that the United States, as the major capitalist country, plays a prime role in this undesirable process.”

Dualism tends to produce polarization, fueling fear, hatred, and irrationality. Oversimplification helps that process. Antagonism directed against people qua members of some particular group, or nation, or creed, varies with time and place, as do the rationalizations meant to serve as justifications. Call it tribalism if you wish, but it comes down to this: my own is better than yours, now go away or suffer the consequences.

Nationalism

If only we could do without the word. Deliberately ambiguous from the outset, “nationalism” has become so thoroughly marinated in cant and disinformation, so stultifyingly opaque, that any effort at imposing one definition over another is absolutely hopeless. For that reason, I propose turning to the unequalled prophet of newspeak, George Orwell who coined that word in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Newspeak, “designed to diminish the range of thought,” was the progressive/fascist vanguard Big Brother’s language to effect mass brainwashing.

In his underappreciated Notes on Nationalism, published in October 1945, Orwell seized the opportunity to fill the semantic niche created by a habit of mind that “is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject,” which we may describe as the anti-liberal ism. The minor inconvenience that in Orwell’s usage it does not always, perhaps not even primarily, involve feelings about a nation in the usual sense of a race or geographical area, denoting instead a religion, including pseudo-religions, or politico-economic-social or racial “class” turns out to be an asset, rendering it more relevant than ever.

By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

He then differentiates it from patriotism.

Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.

The difference is radical. “Nationalism… is inseparable from the desire for power.” Conveniently, it serves to both legitimize and camouflage personal ambitions for aggrandizement. “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige,” adds Orwell – purportedly “not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

One might expect a member of the notoriously egocentric intelligentsia, or ideocracy, to be among the least inclined to “sink his individuality” into anything. But one would be wrong. After clarifying that the elite set includes Communist Party members as well as “fellow-travelers,” Orwell declares that among them, “the dominant form of nationalism is Communism.” A former Communist himself, whose Socialist sympathies persisted long after abandoning all faith in the Soviet system, Orwell defines the term not as a slur, nor, McCarthy-style, a false accusation of Party affiliation, but as a general attitude. A Communist thus would follow Russian policy regarding America which would once again turn sour the brief marriage of convenience during World War II.

Orwell proved prophetic. After Joseph Stalin stated publicly, in February 1946, that “the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism,” it was back to the old Marxist antinomies. Pro-Soviet nationalist/Communists, in Orwell’s sense, were necessarily anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal. This held true not only outside the United States – specifically in England, Orwell’s main target audience – but ominously, within.

II. The Discontents

Multilateral “democratic” internationalism – The Rhetoric

In a 1999 article titled “The Nature and Sources of Liberal International Order,” Princeton professor G. John Ikenberry and Johns Hopkins professor Daniel Deudney argued that global governance (whatever that means) must no longer be subject to American control but be “multilateral.” No longer are international institutions to be “ignored” but deferred to, and the U.S. may no longer “blatantly violate human rights” with impunity. In 2012, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) released a Working Paper by Ikenberry and Deudney recommending that “the United States should initiate a new phase of democratic internationalism based on the “pull of success rather than the push of power” that “deepens democracy globally, prevents democratic backsliding, and strengthens and consolidates bonds among democratic states.” Then-president Barack Obama would famously call this “leading from behind.”

Though he did not give it a name, president Obama implemented the new, progressive foreign policy, which Elliott Abrams, CFR fellow and distinguished foreign policy official for several presidents, accurately calls “an ideology.” It had been articulated in 1972 by then-Democratic presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern. Writing half a century later, Abrams recognized it as the same anti-liberalism of the Sixties. Except that it was now on steroids. He writes:

The ideas espoused by Obama “incubated” decades ago, and were most likely adopted back at Columbia University or in the Chicago kitchen of his friends of Weathermen fame, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn…. The enduring hold of that ideology is visible not only in his Iran policy but also, most recently, with respect to Cuba. There, too, he has reversed decades of American foreign policy, and has done so, as in the case of Iran, without seeking any deep concessions from the Castro regime. …. In both instances, Obama has acted not to advance American national interests but to make amends for U.S. policies and actions that he views as the immoral and retrograde detritus of the “cold-war mentality.”

It is difficult to overstate the stunning nature of this assessment: that a president would ever act in a manner designed “not to advance American national interests,” choosing rather to “make amends” for his country’s presumed sins, is predictably seen as a form of weakness and decadence. It is bound to embolden the nation’s enemies, both foreign and – most alarmingly – domestic.

But in what way can internationalism be “democratic”? When the demos includes the whole world, what sort of krasis (Greek for “power”) can any one person wield? Ikenberry and Deudney attempt to clarify: “democratic internationalism,” as they see it, “would return liberal internationalism to its roots in social democratic ideals, seek to redress imbalances within the democratic world between fundamentalist capitalism and socioeconomic equity, and move toward a posthegemonic system of global governance in which the United States increasingly shares authority with other democracies.” In other words, its aims are “democratic” meaning property would be more equally distributed in a “post-hegemonic” (more homogeneous?) world order. Isn’t the word for that “socialism”?

The authors are right that “American liberal internationalism was shaped and enabled by the domestic programs of the Progressives, the New Deal, and the Great Society.” But since then, the U.S. has gone awry. Alas, at present, “[a]mong democracies, the United States finds itself an outlier, as other democratic states surpass it on various measures of democratic performance like equity, opportunity, and institutional effectiveness.” History marches on while America lags ideologically behind.

But equity uber alles is a tall order:

Tackling the maldistribution of wealth, income, and opportunity that has increasingly marked contemporary democracies requires reversing many of the policies of Reagan-Thatcher fundamentalist capitalism…. More specifically, the equity agenda requires the restoration of progressive income taxation and heavy taxation of large estates, and greater roles for workers and their unions in corporate governance.

So-called “democratic internationalism” is but the foreign policy side of America’s strategy coin, the other being “the progressive domestic program of renewal.” But lose no heart, progressives of the world, unite. In all probability, argue Ikenberry and Deudney, in the foreseeable future “support for a new domestic progressive agenda will grow. However, this domestic political mobilization is necessary but insufficient to tame and regulate capitalism, given the scale and scope of the global capitalist system…” What must happen is for the U.S. to go beyond “the hypercapitalist world, [for] only a wide coalition of democratic states can establish the common frameworks and standards for regulation, taxation, and growth.” Once capitalism is “tamed” at home, the United States will be much more popular.

The New Vanguard

Naturally, none of these momentous changes can happen without leadership. Democratic or global governance is ready to rise to the occasion, as “[t]he next generation of global governance will employ approaches that combine agendas of formal international institution building with complementary efforts and strategies from nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], networks of research institutions, local governments, and corporations.” Together they constitute a coalition of progressive so-called “epistemic communities,” which in plain English refers to elites consisting of academics, diplomats, and international bureaucrats.

American University law professor Kenneth Anderson diagnoses this anything-but-democratic internationalism as a secularization, indeed perversion, of medieval utopian millenarianism in modern garb. It is, argues Anderson, “comprehensible only upon the religious worldview that boldly proclaims the good news of international organizations, differing from the view of the Psalmist – the ‘earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof’ the world, and they that shall dwell therein’” as goes the passage from Isaiah. Except this time, scoffs Anderson, it is “the UN, that duly noted steward of the Lord, [who will] inherit the earth.”

Anderson charges that the “human rights movement is as a kind of secular religion… increasingly assuming the tone of (prosecutorial) authority and taking its international structures as grounds for the reform of recalcitrant nation-states within what might be thought of [as] the Holy Human Rights Empire.” According to a report by the U.N. itself, the organization became an ideal conduit for progressivism: “social justice first appeared in United Nations texts during the second half of the 1960s. At the initiative of the Soviet Union, and with the support of developing countries, the term was used in the “Declaration on Social Progress and Development” adopted in 1969.

Three decades later, it was solidly entrenched. The early 1990s saw a worldwide resurgence of left-wing politics under a range of slogans meant to rhetorically cleanse the relationship of Communism with state socialism. In the forefront were the self-styled “’human rights’ campaigns, promoting so-called social and economic rights and asserting that civil and political rights by themselves are a recipe for exploitative, racist capitalism.

But do words even matter anymore? When internationalism is code for the new global authoritarianism, the new anti-liberalism becomes the modern-day millenarian euphemisms for the apocalypse. It reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism: “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday,” to which he adds that most “questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.” It behooves us to come home from the semantic sabbatical and take a look at a reality that may escape the pseudo-educated woke but not the commoners whose common sense is still mercifully awake.

I would like to end, however, on a positive note, by invoking the esteemed president of AIER, Sam Gregg, who The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World invokes Adam Smith’s observations in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, on the matter of national sentiment. Writes Sam:

“The love of our country,” wrote Smith, “seems not be derived from the love of mankind.” Placing your country’s well-being before that of other nations was thus to be expected, even natural, and Smith regarded fighting and dying for one’s country as deeply honorable.

Smith agreed with his good friend David Hume that conflicts among nations “were part of the human condition.” Theirs was an approach at once realistic and hopeful (a term that, in this context, I prefer to “idealistic”), fully endorsed by their disciples in America. The Founders were that rare breed of homo sapiens, now mostly extinct, who did not let flights of theoretical fancy fog their vision of the ground below. They sought to establish a commercial society, which “stress practicality, thereby putting political tendencies to utopianism firmly in their place.”

This means that in every domain, domestic as well as international, they remained uncompromisingly devoted to both liberty and the safety of their community. Accordingly, continues Sam,

[t]hough The Federalist’s vision of America is often described as “nationalist,” … [its authors] were concerned with explaining why a loose confederation of states should integrate themselves into a more unified and modern sovereign state grounded on certain ideas and embodying a particular type of economic culture.

That culture would guide them to unprecedented prosperity in record time. America did become a shining city on a hill. Whether it continues depends in part on its citizens’ ability to keep ideologically-fueled, pseudo-religious discontent from ruining its precarious experiment in ordered liberty. If only we can recapture the old spirit of enterprise and love of freedom that once served, however imperfectly, as the foundation of what may fairly be known as patriotism.