Despite the fact that a candidate for either party has not yet been selected, this presidential election cycle has already created enormous controversies over certain candidates and the type of people who support them.
In particular, there are those who have expressed intense alarm atย the rise ofย nationalist rhetoric among certain candidates and their supporters.ย While it is natural for liberty lovers to point out the flaws in their political solutions, the only thing surprising about the appearance of nationalism in the political sceneย is that anyone isย surprised at it. Whether it takes center stage in this election or some future one, nationalism in America will continue to gain support as long as we haveย a centralized government thatย so wonderfully complements the ideology.
While various media outlets have written about the โhatredโ or โracismโ underlying the nationalist movement, what they fail to address are the root causes of this anger and resentment.
A recent column by Fred Reed, a retired Marine and expat living in Mexico, offers an indirect explanation as to why this system is guaranteed to produce resentment and animosity. His column concerns the chief reason for the U.S.โs poor image abroad, but it could equally apply to the fed’sย domestic policies (emphasis added).
They hate us because we meddle, and have meddled. They hate us because we are the most murderous nation on the planet. They hate our insufferable smugness.
……Why do we not behave more sensibly? Americans obviously are not stupid people. Dummies donโt build Mars rovers. Yet we seem to have a wanton, almost genetic non-grasp of how others think โ which means that we canโt predict what they will do. Often Americans just donโt care what others think. This of course plays into the hands of Hugo Chavez and bin Laden.
Thatโs why they hate us. We meddle.
For too long, the feds have also meddled in the most intimate affairs of private citizens. Everything from what they eat and where they live to howย they educate their children and what they can put into their own bodies are controlled by unelected bureaucrats thousands of miles away who are willing and eager to use the barrel of a gun to enforce theirย decrees.ย This situation allows those who wield the power to impose their vision as to howย society should operate and function.ย Only a fool thinks such anย arrangementย won’t produce justifiable outrage, an outrageย easily exploited by political opportunists.
Itโs one thing to disagree withย someone; itโs another to use the government as a club to coerceย them to behave as you wish,ย or force them to pay for policies and programs that go against their beliefs. It’s also quite another thing to accuse them of hate when they try toย snatch that club away and use it themselves.
Just as theย pathological inability to see things from the perspective of others affects our foreign policy and causes blowback, it also mightย explain why theย growing nationalist movement has caught many off-guard. Too often we careย only when the rights of ourย particular group or groups weย empathize withย are violated.ย However distasteful people may or may not find one another, we all have the same rights, and those rights are violated with impunity by the same government, albeit sometimes in different ways.
Our centralized government perversely incentives people to vote for or support measures that benefits them, butย at the expense of othersโ rights. This has been the status quo for too long, and for many Americans this has meantย egregious infringements on their freedoms, all while being told they need to suffer oppression so that others will not be oppressed; or worse, that the injustices committed against them arenโt even happening.ย As long as the situationย remains a zero sum game, in which one must either be among the oppressed or the oppressors, it is only naturalย peopleย prefer to take up the oppressorโs sword, rather than continue submitting to political cuckoldry.
We see this hypocrisy most vividly within the context of presidential elections, which are more or less contests over which person the country deems most fit to use the Ring of Power, even though every time we see the same disastrous results. Whatโs even more absurd is the idea that nationalists are the problem for seeking to use the One Ring for their own purposes (as if other political groups donโt try to do the same) and not the idea of having so much power over so many be granted to one man.
Those who accuse nationalists of neo-Nazism should bearย in mind that National Socialismย demands the very system we have in place. Hitler’s Third Reich was only possible thanks to the centralization efforts made by Otto Von Bismark, who unified the various German states the same time our own Civil War turned a compact of states into an “indivisible” nation.ย Thisย unification by Bismark enabled Hitler to carry out his ultimately genocidal vision as describedย in his book Mein Kampf.
It’s not surprising that Hitlerย also wrote he โwould totally eliminate statesโ rights altogether”:
โSince for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power.”
Hitler also wrote the “mischief of individual federated statesโฆmust cease and will some day ceaseโฆ. National Socialism as a matter of principle must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries.”
If people are terrified at the prospect of nationalists coming to power, then they must realize that it is only becauseย the country hasย abandoned the Tenth Amendment and allowed the federal government to go beyond its limited role as articulated in the Constitution that nationalists pose any threat.ย Nationalism without a centralized government is anย impotent ideology. It is only through such a government that it gains the power to effect its principles.
It is not enough to simply condemnย nationalism. Those who have turned to it mustย be offered a better alternative, one in which their rights are protected as well.That alternative, of course, is decentralization. We must seek to nullify all unconstitutional federal actions and reduce the central government, leaving the fedsย only those powersย delegated to them.
All who oppose these efforts,ย yet also ridiculeย nationalists, are no different than the English and French who hissed at Germans for supporting the Nazis while at the same time insisting the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were perfectly fair and legitimate to the German people. If history is any indication, their efforts to quell such movements will be as equally futile.
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