There is no greater threat to the conservative movement or the American Republic than this pernicious belief that Conservatism and Nationalism are at all similar or even necessarily compatible. After decades of socialist propaganda, the stupefication of the American populace has reached the point that otherwise well meaning people have been convinced intolerance of dissent is somehow an American virtue. It is not and must never be.

If America has become a nation where political dissent is intolerable, then we will have lost utterly what it means to be American. This, more so than any other reason, is why Nationalism is such a poisonous, self deluding ideology, luring those born by chance within the established boundaries of one nation or another into a illusion of unearned superiority. It is this ideology, a near cousin to Fascism, that is every bit as unAmerican as the vile ideologies of socialism, communism, feudalism, and even monarchism.

Unfortunately, Nationalism has become the political vogue of an uneducated, vulgar, self congratulating white male demographic who sees superiority as a birthright, rather than a quest. Their vision of American “exceptionalism” has become inexplicably tied to other largely uneducated, lightly pigmented human beings around the world, whose fading political influence and economic superiority has been and continues to be eclipsed by foreign competition. Until these entitled, regressive, socialist, ethnocentric elitists abandon these tribal impulses, the Republic is doomed to fall.

But freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.
– Ronald Reagan

The difference between Nationalism and Conservatism is easily demonstrated through a very simple analogy. If forced to choose either the flag of the Republic or the principles upon which the Republic was founded, the Nationalist will always choose the flag and ditch the principles, because the flag, in his mind, is synonymous with the nation. Faced with the very same dilemma, the Conservative will choose the principles and ditch the flag, because history has proven time and again that nations are replaceable.

What is good for the nation, believes the Nationalist, is what is good for all. If any conflict arises against interests of the nation, then the interests of the nation must always prevail. Superficially this seems like a fairly benign position, but what happens when the interests of the nation come into conflict with the interests of the individual? After all, wasn’t this the very conflict that sparked the American Revolution?

Only here, in the United States, did the Enlightenment ideas that spent over two centuries simmering in a cauldron of philosophical and political theory fully blossom into a nation. These precious Enlightenment ideas of Life, Liberty, and Property are the beating heart of Conservatism. The United States was born of the truly revolutionary idea that nations were not important, but the lives, hopes, and dreams of the People were. Without kings and titled elites, the People could at long last be free to pursue happiness.

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
– Thomas Hobbes

Compared to this Enlightenment ideal, the Nationalist is a regressive, grunting, violent thug, forever trying to drag America back into the abyss of the Dark Ages, where a man’s place was in service to his nation, whether that nation served his interests rarely in the barest fashion or not at all. The Nationalist’s fascination with the past is fueled by a loathsome hunger for the blood of men and women that are not like him, because of ten thousand imagined slights for which almost no one living is even remotely complicit to, let alone guilty of.

These Nationalists mistake their obsession with the superficiality of national identity and willingness to fight for blood and soil as a proof of their “superior” cultivation and culture, but it is only proof of their diseased and deeply perturbed minds, because in no way are these urges innovative or unusual in the annals of history. Practically every dictator on earth, for thousands of years, has appealed to this base human impulse to barbarism. Only “country” is evoked almost as often as god among the smoldering rubble of mankind’s bloodshed and mayhem.

There is nothing new or noble about Nationalism. It’s just the same old justification of those that hunger for power over those that yearn to be free. Both the Tsars of Russia and the premiers of the Soviet Union used Nationalism to spur millions of Russians to their deaths in the conflagrations of First and Second World Wars, both started in large part by the Kaiser and then the Führer of Germany. There is nothing “conservative” about these vile ideals, and to find them suddenly in our midsts is a betrayal of everything that America has represented for centuries.

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become  more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
– Benjamin Franklin

The Nationalist is a traitor and an enemy of Liberty, because he would put country before the Natural Rights of the People. He carries with him the chains of bondage to the state as he peddles promises of political, military, and economic security. They, just like their vile second cousins, the socialist revolutionaries, make their vicious appeal to the worker and the uneducated, while universally demonizing the “educated elite“.

Only in the American Revolution were intellectuals embraced, not murdered by the tens of thousands. In both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the first to be culled were always the scholars and the educators, because they dared voice appeals to ethics and reason. Nationalist leaders always seek to destroy anyone smarter than they are, because only then can they foist their insane stupidity upon a gullible public, without anyone to remind the People that they are meant to be free.

By the way, you are meant to be free!

 

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Liberty is For The Win!