WASHINGTON In affluent neighborhoods around Washington, New York and Los Angeles and, for that matter, Paris, London and Berlin its common to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves.
Lord knows, there is much to fear about nationalism.
Extreme nationalism has led to fascism, war, the persecution and slaughter of minorities, and the undermining of democracy in the name of national unity.
In regularly denouncing the give and take of party politics as a force dividing and corrupting the people, nationalists can open the path to rule by ruthless, cynical autocrats.
But those who would save liberal democracy (along with anyone who would advance a broadly progressive political outlook) need to be honest with themselves and less arrogant toward those who currently find nationalism attractive.
Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries.
Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them.
This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening.
It should not have taken the Brexit referendum victory, the election of Donald Trump and the nationalist surges in Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and Scandinavia to bring home the cost of these regional inequalities.
This is a central theme of the political writer John Judis excellent and compact book, The Nationalist Revival, published this fall.
A person of the left, Judis specializes in speaking truth to liberals, something he also did in his earlier The Populist Explosion. He thinks its important for progressives to understand why so many are drawn to Trump and the far right in Europe.
Judis sees the rise of nationalism as a reaction to the illusions and excesses of globalization. By unleashing footloose capital and undercutting national and even international efforts to regulate the economy in the public interest, globalization is incompatible with social democracy in Europe or with New Deal liberalism in the United States.
He proposes a useful distinction between globalism and internationalism.
Hes against the first but for the second.
Globalism, Judis argues, subordinates nations and national governments to market forces or to the priorities of multinational corporations.
