Two 2016 elections — President Donald Trump in the U.S. and Brexit in the United Kingdom — sent our global elites reeling. The only people not surprised that borders and sovereignty prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed, were those still bold enough to call theselves nationalists.

Yoram Hazony was so bold as to be an unapologetic nationalist. So much so that he authored a book titled “The Virtue of Nationalism” in 2018. For the Right, the book articulated the gut-sense that nationalism, though portrayed as the boogeyman of modern Western history, was worth preserving. For the Left, it entered the canon of books to “understand Trump and the MAGA movement,” which includes now Vice President JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Seven years on, much has changed. President Donald Trump’s America First movement has completely altered the terms of America’s debates on immigration, trade, and foreign policy. His impact has sent shockwaves across the globe, from Argentina, to Hungary, to the Middle East and beyond. Now that nationalists are no longer considered fringe actors, Hazony is publishing a second edition to “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

He joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss the book and what to make of a more mature MAGA movement in the United States.

Ten years on from the golden escalator, the imagined sound of the clatter of nationalists’ boots keeps Rachel Maddow up at night. But nationalism properly understood, Hazony told The Daily Signal, is “a theory of political order, which asserts or takes the position that the world is governed best when it’s constituted by many independent nations.”

Far from being the boogeyman the Left seeks to make it, nationalism asserts that “[without the] diversity of human governments traditions, independent nations that can chart their own course, mankind ends up getting stifled.”

“The only real route to freedom,” Hazony said, “is through independent nations.”

What bad historians have laid at the feet of nationalism is really the fault of imperialism, which Hazony defines as “a theory that says ‘best to have one world government, or at least one government that is as broad as possible.” Nationalism, meanwhile, “is naturally opposed to imperialism.”

Globalism, then, is the modern Left’s rebrand of the ancient imperialist impulse. But Hazony mostly refrains from using the term in the book and opts for its ancient counterpart. “I don’t use the word globalism so much for a very simple reason, which is that the globalists pick this word. In fact, they have a whole vocabulary of … euphemisms to kind of obscure what it is that they’re doing,” Hazony explained. “They’ll use globalism instead of empire. They’ll use governance instead of government.”

“Pooled sovereignty, rules based international order, community of nations, openness—I mean, there are dozens of these [euphemisms],” Hazony added. These terms “came into fashion after 1989, after the sudden shift in the direction of utopianism by almost all the political parties.”

Globalist euphemisms sought to stave off any nationalist or localist challenges to this new imperial project. And they served their purpose well. Things changed after 1989. “Suddenly you get George H.W. Bush [embracing the] slogan of the new world order,” Hazony told The Daily Signal. “From that moment where he starts talking about how we’re gonna wrap the entire planet in this single rule of law. All of a sudden, no one was allowed to object to it.”

“For an entire generation, we were left with Democrats and Republicans, Labor and Tories, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, everybody, all the major parties across the democratic Western world, just sort of accepting that we’re going to eliminate all the borders,” Hazony continued. “And so by the time you get to 2016, to Brexit and to Donald Trump running for president, it’s strange to say, but people thought that you were crazy or primitive or fascist or mentally ill or something if you stood for the idea that your country should be independent from other countries.”

Now that it has suffered several defeats, “the friendly face of globalism has just gotten uglier and uglier.” But don’t expect the globalists to go down without a fight.

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