Is Nationalism ‘Liberal’?

S ohrab Ahmari wrote a cover story for Commentary in 2016 titled “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis.” In this essay, he mourned the fact that “as an ideology and as a governing philosophy, liberalism is fast losing ground.” In Hungary, Ahmari regretted, Viktor Orbán had “mused about ‘building an illiberal new national state’ on Turkish, Russian, and Chinese blueprints,” driven by a longing “for the return of national will and cohesion — as well as the territories and populations — lost to the cruel 20th century.”

In 2019, apparently having rejected classical liberalism, Ahmari lauded nationalism, properly understood, as a viable alternative. In “The Nation Is Not a Sin,” in the American Mind, he rebuked “today’s liberal technocratic ideology” that has, quoting Pope Francis, “an elite that does not know what it means to live among the people” and that lacks “any sense of belonging to a family, to a land, to our God,” that has “no need of mother, of father, of a family, of a homeland.” Ahmari added:

These things matter. They comprise the pre-existing sacred communities, as Tocqueville reminds us, that give concrete shape to our individual rights and identities. They create the dēmos that makes democracy possible. In modernity, these ancient concepts come together in the nation-state. The nation-state is partially a prudential invention of modernity, yes, but a durable and valuable one.

Today, Ahmari rejects nationalism and liberalism as birds of the same feather. In a recent Compact essay, “The Return of Liberal Nationalism,” Ahmari — in keeping with his latest Marxist-curious turn — recites a version of Eric Hobsbawm’s historical account of nationalism, arguing that “in practice, liberalism and nationalism arose in tandem, beginning in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th.” The marriage of the twin ideologies ruptured after World War II, as “19th-century liberalism’s defense of the nation as the ‘sacred community’ that framed liberal rights” was transplanted by “a cosmopolitan liberalism, in which the empire of rights was to span the whole globe.” (A “sacred community” that gives “concrete shape to our individual rights and identities” — sound familiar?) But today, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ahmari sees liberalism and nationalism as reuniting:

A calamity for the Ukrainian people, the war also offered a gleaming opportunity for elite ideological reconciliation in the West. As stunning as scenes of tanks rolling across Europe’s borders were, something still more astonishing took place in the halls of Western power, and on Twitter, where elites talk to each other: Liberalism and nationalism embraced for the first time since their estrangement in 1945.

How, exactly, are liberalism and nationalism reconciling?

European liberals unfurled Ukrainian flags, real and digital, and hailed national sovereignty as a sacred and inviolable principle. Centrist parties in Germany and elsewhere — which a few years earlier had upended Europe’s border-enforcement mechanisms to welcome more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and North Africa — rediscovered the value of hard borders.

Meanwhile, “the nationalist counter-establishment . . . relishes an invitation to the establishment table.” Nationalist parties such as Law and Justice in Poland and the Sweden Democrats have taken a hawkish line on Russia, Ahmari points out. And at the intellectual level, national conservatives such as Chris DeMuth and Yoram Hazony have staked out a similar position (until recently, the latter was a close ally of Ahmari’s).

But the “new” nationalist turn that Ahmari sees in the liberal-internationalist foreign-policy establishment isn’t actually new at all. It mirrors the rhetorical posture that Western leaders have taken in similar situations since at least 1945 — the very moment when, according to Ahmari, liberalism and nationalism were “estranged.” In a 1951 radio address, Harry Truman declared that the Communist invasion of South Korea was

in flat contradiction to what we believe. We believe that Korea belongs to the Koreans, we believe that India belongs to the Indians, we believe that all the nations of Asia should be free to work out their affairs in their own way. This is the basis of peace in the Far East, and it is the basis of peace everywhere else.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a violation of the “principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability.” Five years later, Reagan reiterated:

The people of Afghanistan speak with one voice in their opposition to the Soviet invasion and occupation of their homeland. . . . The goal of the United States remains a genuinely independent Afghanistan, free from external interference, an Afghanistan whose people choose the type of government they wish, an Afghanistan to which the 4 million refugees from Soviet aggression may return in safety and, yes, in honor.

So even from the outset, Ahmari’s historical account — that liberalism and nationalism ruptured after World War II but have “reconciled” today — is dubious. The evidence Ahmari offers for this “reconciliation” is that some nationalist parties and intellectuals have taken a more hawkish line on Ukraine than he would like. But that, too, is cherry-picking: The “nationalist counter-establishment” that has apparently jumped at the “invitation to the establishment table” is chock-full of anti-interventionists. National Review itself, which Ahmari would probably deride as an exemplar of the “establishment,” has nationalist-friendly writers — myself included — who have been criticizing Ukraine hawkishness in no uncertain terms since the outset of the conflict. Some, such as Michael Brendan Dougherty, were criticizing Ukraine hawks when Ahmari himself was still an adamant proponent of the liberal international order. None other than Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable-news host in the nation, has been vigorously beating the same drum. American Moment and the American Conservative — where Ahmari is a contributing editor — held an entire conference in March dedicated to urging restraint in the region. So where, pray, is this monolithic “nationalist counter-establishment” that has reconciled with its liberal counterpart?

Ahmari acknowledges this counterpoint to his entire thesis with a brief hand-waving mention: “And while some American nationalists remain skeptical of escalation over Ukraine, they are nearly unanimous on the need to escalate against the other rival empire, China.” Well . . . yes. Nationalists believe — as Ahmari did not so long ago — that the nation is worth defending. Insofar as China poses a serious threat to the United States, nationalists rightly maintain that we must oppose the Chinese regime. What, precisely, is Ahmari’s implication here? That resisting “liberalism” requires capitulation to China? He’s said as much in the past: Last May, he wrote in a since-deleted tweet,

I’m at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century. Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue.

If that’s where Ahmari’s anti-nationalist “post-liberalism” leads, that’s his choice, but he can’t expect the rest of us to follow him there.

This is, perhaps, the fundamental problem with the no-true-Scotsman brand of politics that Ahmari and his counterparts now appear to be staking out. They believe, apparently, that their political philosophy is the only one that can effectively resist the excesses of liberal modernity, whereas even former allies who align with most of their policy goals are impure.

In a sense, Ahmari’s account of the historic relationship between nationalism and liberalism is true: Modern nationalism did arise in tandem with Enlightenment liberalism, but it was as much a response to liberalism’s excesses as it was an outgrowth of liberal theory. That does not mean that it is definitively or wholly liberal in and of itself, or even that it is characteristic of the aspects of liberalism that Ahmari opposes. In fact, it’s not even clear what specifically about the modern nationalist program, in practice, Ahmari opposes, beyond the fact that some nationalist thinkers have broken with others on the question of Ukraine. In this sense, Ahmari’s essay is an attempt to turn a specific policy dispute into an entire political and theoretical fissure.

Nationalism, like Ahmari’s post-liberalism, is and always has been in conversation with liberalism. This is not evidence that the two are the same. The relevant question is a prudential one — what can we do to curb the corrosive elements of modern liberalism? In his 2018 essay “Populism, Liberalism, and Democracy,” the social-democratic political philosopher Michael Sandel wrote that the recent nationalist uprisings that have swept the Western world are a response to contemporary liberalism’s effort to conduct “our public discourse as if it were possible to outsource moral judgment to markets, or to procedures of liberal public reason,” which “has created an empty, impoverished public discourse, a vacuum of public meaning [and] empty public spaces.” That is ostensibly the core of what Ahmari opposes, too.

Conservatives of various ideological stripes see the tools for resisting these excesses within the American tradition. Nationalists, in particular, see the American nation itself as the most powerful resource in that project — the “pre-existing sacred community” that Ahmari so eloquently defended in 2019. It’s increasingly unclear what Ahmari sees, or believes, at all. Perhaps the difference is that he has given up on America and the West altogether. If that’s the case, then he’s right: His political philosophy really is incompatible with populism, nationalism, and the various other strains of conservative thought that actually have a plan to carry us home.