Let's Fight for the Nation State

Let's Fight for the Nation State

Everyone that has half a brain understands that the foundations are shaking. Richard Fernandez is wondering what comes next. Can the nation state survive today's modern identity politics where supposed Brits and Norwegians go to the Middle East to fight for ISIS?
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/16/man-without-a-country/

Then you read Michael A. Cohen, a good liberal from the Century Foundation, who blithely writes this about the upcoming midterms:http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2014/08/15/this-time-democrats-who-are-united/grUDAoVvILTAI87cwmgxcI/story.html

In an election cycle in which Republicans are seemingly immersed in full-scale intra-party civil war, Democrats are keeping their powder dry. A party that used to be divided over the most primal issues in American politics -- race, war, labor vs. business -- is more unified than at any other time in recent history.

Who knows? RealClearPolitics election maven Sean Trende has looked at the Washington State primary and determined that the midterm looks about average: bad for the president's party but not too bad.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/08/07/washington_states_primary_as_a_2014_harbinger_123592.html
But let's think Fernandez and his worry about the nation state. There's a reason why the nation state is in trouble: liberals. They don't like it.

Liberals have two problems with the nation state. Their first beef is that the nation state encourages aggressive “nationalism.” Look at the wars of the 20th century, they say. If it weren't for nationalism, no wars. Their second problem is that the nation state and its idea that we are all Americans spoils their identity politics. They want their helpless victims hived off from the mass of citizens. Their politics just doesn't work if everyone in the U.S. is a happy Yank. That's why liberals have to hyphenate everyone.

Of course nationalism can go horribly wrong, as in World War I. I'd say that the problem was this: the average political bear in 1914 had no clue just what a staggeringly brutal war modern industrial states were capable of sustaining. By 1919 or, at the latest, 1945 he did.

Pity that after World War II the great and the good decided that we the people just couldn't be trusted to elect the right leaders so educated transnational elites would have to supervise the great unwashed in the nation states. But why would today's average elite bear be any wiser than 100 years ago?

Okay, I get that there is a problem with the nation state. The way you unify the nation is with an external enemy. Doesn't matter who it is. It can be the Mexicans in 1848, the Kaiser in 1917, the Nazis and the Japanese in 1941, the Commies, and now the Islamofascists.

But there is something worse. The evil genius of liberals is to conjure up internal enemies. First they picked on the rich and the robber barons when they were leading the working class, and now they pick on racists, sexists, homophobes when they are leading African Americans, upper-class women, and upper-class gays. They think they are smart, and can control the enmities they spawn, but what if they aren't as smart as they think?

If the liberals end up by destroying the nation state, what will take its place? That is what Richard Fernandez is trying to figure out.

I'd rather not think about that. I am a middle-class American and I want to fight for the nation state, for I reckon that a world without the nation state won't work for people like me.

You see, a nation state with limited government permits ordinary people to go about their business, finding jobs, creating businesses, sending their kids to college, and saving for their retirement -- as responsible individuals. But liberals like President Obama don't like that. They want a world with fairness and equality, defined and ruled by people like them.

Unfortunately, the result of liberals like President Obama working for fairness and equality is unfairness and inequality or, as Wayne Allyn Root writes, The Murder of the Middle Class.
http://townhall.com/columnists/wayneallynroot/2014/08/12/obama-is-about-to-experience-the-revenge-of-the-middle-class-n1877737/page/full

Obamacare, green energy, amnesty for illegal immigrants, taxes, regulations and debt. Obama’s policies are helping the super-rich, the corporate elite, and the poor. But those same policies are murdering middle class opportunity and mobility, raising costs, and destroying the livelihoods of middle class Americans.

Karl Marx wrote that people form a class when they organize for political struggle around an idea that they are oppressed and exploited by some other group. Let's see: In America there are three classes: the ruling class of liberals and crony capitalists, the middle class of wage-earners and small business owners, and the underclass of entitlement beneficiaries. I know which side I am on, and you do too.

What will come after the nation state? Perhaps the liberals will fold it into their supranational utopia, or perhaps it will collapse in a war of the identities.

Here is my strategy for our middle-class fight for the nation state: We win and they lose.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.