The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel

Notes on the Nationalist Moment

Flag supporting Donald Trump at a rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

We are living in a dangerously nationalist moment. Not just in the United States, but around the globe.

Nationalism, which George Orwell defined as "the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” and “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

Russia’s war against Ukraine is nationalist at its core, as is the continued Israeli assault on Gaza, which long ago moved beyond its supposed defensive justification. India Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a Hindu nationalist and his government — and the local governments run by his party — are engaged in an ethnic cleansing of Muslims from many areas of India.

As Azad Essa, writes in Hostile Homelands (qtd, In These Times), Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi share a “single-minded determination to build states with a single culture, a single race and a single nation.” I would add, this same, single-minded devotion to ethnic and religious monoculture and politics is shared by all manner of nationalisms, which Orwell describes as “inseparable from the desire for power.”