jones wrote:
El Genio de Oviedo wrote:
If we can say that the left in America has retained nationalist sentiment better than her European contemporaries, that's also a good thing by the way. Especially in the United States, where national identity is not tied to a specific cultural/ethnic/linguistic heritage as tightly as it is on the European continent. Ceding nationalist and patriotic sentiment to the right wing would be foolishness; people want to believe in something larger than themselves. Why give up the American ideals to bad ideas like a regressive tax code, more deregulation, and proto white nationalism?
Not to be rude but many would say financial deregulation and proto-white nationalism are very much ideals of the country that was built on the back of slaves and shaped the current version of capitalism like no other.
Regardless, why the dichotomy? Why cling to American or any other country's "ideals" which by nature marginalise those who are born the wrong side of a border?
I don't take you to be rude at all, but your first paragraph is far from convincing. Perhaps I'm fatalistic but I don't think the progression of global capitalism would fare much different if we were to somehow remove the United States and examine the counterfactual. The tired "backs of slaves" line is open to empirical verification if you would like to do a little legwork, it may even interest you as an economist.
It's also pretty bizarre that the condensed point of my post was that one needn't adopt a view an overly negative of American history and what it "means to be an American", and you take my argument as a dichotomizing one. One can have patriotic and sentimental attachment to one's country and still recognize the shortcomings of it; I was arguing against a polemic, anti-nationalist versus "patriot" dichotomy.
Yes, passes-faire capitalism and horrific racism, including its zenith in the form of slavery, are part of the American story. But just as it was a mistake to whitewash the nation's past, distorting the facts because of the country's failure to live up to its (Enlightenment) ideals is also a mistake.
Furthermore, and I don't expect you to necessarily agree with this, but in my opinion nationalism or at least vestiges of it are here to stay for the foreseeable future, so those on the left will have to make some use of it lest they lose power in certain situations. Especially since following the fall of the USSR and global communism generally, internationalist minded leftism doesn't seem to offer much aspirationally
