The nation isn’t the government
I was struck by a tweet from libertarian Republican congressman
Justin Amash, who has become the “new Ron Paul” now that the three-time
presidential candidate and libertarian icon has taken a well-deserved
rest from politics. The other day he tweeted:
“Patriotism & nationalism are profoundly different. Patriotism
is love of country. FA Hayek called nationalism ‘a twin brother of
socialism.’”
Amash, who has vowed to never support
GOP frontrunner and likely presidential nominee Donald Trump,
undoubtedly had the New York real estate mogul in mind, but no matter
what one thinks of The Donald, Amash is quite wrong about the nature of
American nationalism and the meaning of “patriotism.”
To begin with, Hayek was clearly talking about European nationalism,
not the American variety. I’ll get to the difference between them, but I
want first to point out the irony of Amash’s citation of this
particular Hayek quote, because the great libertarian theorist was here talking about
the problem of centralization: that is, the growing tendency of smaller
political units to be subordinated to and swallowed up by bigger
entities.
If we place Hayek’s discussion in the present context, then it
becomes clear that nationalism is not the enemy but a (potential) friend
of liberty. For the modern trend is toward supra-national entities,
like the European Union, the UN, and the North American “Free Trade”
Agreement, which are engaged in erecting precisely that “society which
is consciously organized from the top” so abhorred by Hayek. When
nationalism is arrayed against globalism, i.e. against the concept of a
regional superstate, or even a World State, libertarians must clearly
take sides with the former.
Furthermore, what is a “nation,” exactly?
The libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard takes on this question in his trenchant essay “Nations By Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State,”
and his ability to cut through to the heart of any question underscores
the error made by Amash and anti-nationalist libertarians in general:
“Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis:
the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and
significant events of our time has been the re-emergence – with a bang –
in the last few years of a third and much-neglected aspect of the real
world, the ‘nation.’ When the nation has been thought of at all, it
usually comes attached to the state, as in the common word nation-state,
but this concept takes a particular development in recent centuries and
elaborates it into a universal maxim. In recent years, however, we have
seen, as a corollary of the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union
and in Eastern Europe, a vivid and startlingly swift decomposition of
the centralized state or alleged nation-state into its constituent
nationalities. The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic
reappearance on the world stage.
“The nation, of course, is not the same thing as the state, a
difference that earlier libertarians, such as Ludwig von Mises and
Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often
assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the
nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is born into a
family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or
several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with
specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is
generally born into a country; he is always born into a specific time
and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.”
In short, the “nation” consists entirely of non-governmental
structures and institutions: it is the web of social interactions and
cultural context which the government spends most of its energy trying
to bend to its will.
In a free society, this effort is largely unsuccessful: in a dictatorship, the state has replaced
the nation and substituted its own “culture,” imposed from the top, for
the traditions and values that have been established over time by the
voluntary actions and decision-making of individuals.
What Amash forgets, or never knew, is that from a libertarian perspective American nationalism is sui generis.
Nationalism, after all, is by definition the valorization of a nation’s
heritage, its traditions, and most especially its origins. And how did
the American nation originate? Why in the first – and only – successful
libertarian revolution in world history.
“Constitutional conservatives” of Amash’s sort are constantly
invoking the Constitution as some sort of sacred canon, the libertarian ur-text through which all issues must be viewed. We’ll pass over just how libertarian this document is – there’s a large and persuasive school of libertarian
thought that views the adoption of the Constitution as a
counterrevolution – and ask: where does Amash think that holy writ came
from? It was made possible by those who had fought a revolution and
established a nation, one founded on the supremacy of individual liberty.
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