The American Nation

There’s a certain type of intellect that rebels at the idea of nations and nationalism. George Orwell comes to mind. For rather understandable reasons — like being on the side of the communists in the Spanish Civil War, and then watching Hitler march all over Europe — he hated nationalism and wrote very witheringly of what it did to the minds of nationalists. He viewed figures such as G. K. Chesterton as those who “transferred” their nationalism onto a nation not their own, which caused Chesterton to say things about France that he could never quite bring himself to say about his own England, whose faults he knew.

But Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism” is surprisingly unsatisfactory.