Tyler Cowen linked to some discussion of a recent speech by Peter Thiel, a highly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Thiel is known for holding somewhat libertarian views, but recently seems to be pivoting towards national conservatism. The talk ranged over a wide variety of issues. An attendee named Bonnie Kavoussi took notes:
I took notes on my phone, so any mistakes are mine. These notes should be treated as paraphrases and not as direct quotes, since I was not able to write everything down, and I have added context:
Since I don’t have the actual speech, I need to add a disclaimer that these notes may not always accurately reflect Thiel’s views, so take my comments as reflecting my general views on these issues, not necessarily criticism or praise of Thiel.
This caught my eye:
Silicon Valley now has a story that is off, that we are going to automate all the jobs, and people will now get UBI (universal basic income) or play video games in their basement. But this does not show up in the unemployment rate or the productivity numbers.
In fact, most of the jobs that could be automated were automated a long time ago. Most of the jobs that are left can’t be automated — like yoga teachers and waiters. In fact, we should be more concerned that we will be stuck with low productivity for the foreseeable future.
This is basically right, except “low productivity” is too pessimistic. I’d say, “modest increases in productivity from an already high level, rather than the fast productivity growth promised by starry-eyed Silicon Valley inventors.”
But whenever the subject matter turns to trade, things seems to go off course:
Think of a thought experiment where there are robots just like you, or 100 clones like you. That would presumably be bad for your wages, but that is nowhere about to happen. Instead, what we are having are human beings being treated like robots and being paid little. This is happening in China and India. This talk about automation and technology is actually about globalization.
The opposite is more nearly true. The Rust Belt job losses occurring all over the world (even in China’s rustbelt!) are due to automation, not globalization. Chinese wages have been soaring, and yet they remain the world’s largest exporter. Other high wage economies such as Germany and Switzerland are exporting powerhouses. If wages were the key factor, India and Africa would be outcompeting China and Germany.
We are incredibly far from a functioning free trade regime. We should expect growth and money to be flowing to where the return is the highest. We shouldn’t be having Chinese peasants saving money to invest in low-yielding U.S. Treasury bonds.
When intellectuals abandon libertarianism, they often suddenly discover a “flaw” in classical free trade theory. Paul Krugman does a masterful job of exposing the emptiness of these refutations of Ricardian trade theory in Pop Internationalism. I’d strongly encourage trade skeptics to read that book, if you have not already done so. BTW, it’s not at all apparent that Chinese peasants are buying Treasury bonds (China’s a big country), and even if they were it would have no bearing on the classical argument for free trade. In standard trade theory, current account deficits reflect saving/investment imbalances. It may be a surprise that moderate income China invests savings in high income America, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the advantages of free trade.
You don’t want people negotiating free trade treaties who are dogmatic about free trade. The worse job they do, the better job they think they are doing. You need people who are skeptical to be negotiating trade treaties, in order to get a better deal for the U.S. You don’t want them to be playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in the background.
This is a political economy question. A General Motors executive once said, “What’s good for GM is good for America.” This wasn’t exactly true, but now money-centered banks are negatively correlated with the U.S. when it comes to trade. When money flowed from abroad into the U.S., these banks invested in subprime real estate, and this caused the 2008 financial crisis. Every time the current account deficit goes down, we have a banking crisis. Like when Michael Milken went to jail.
The current account deficit should go from 3% to 0%. We should have a controlled crash landing for the banks for when we fix our trade deficit and current account deficit. Anyone on Wall Street will fight tooth and nail against sensible trade, and we need to keep them away from the negotiating table.
The current account deficit should not go to zero, indeed we don’t even know how to properly measure the current account deficit.
And it is not true that “Every time the current account deficit goes down, we have a banking crisis.” We have had three banking crises since over the past 100 years, and the first two (which began in the early 1930s and the early 1980s) probably had almost no relationship to the US current account. Even the third one (2008) is more plausibly linked to slowing NGDP, while the shrinking current account deficit seems more an effect than a cause. More importantly, this passage suggests that our current account deficit is due to bad trade agreements, whereas it actually reflects our low saving rates. Northwestern European countries (from Switzerland to Sweden) also have very high wages and relatively free trade, and yet run up large current account surpluses. Again, it’s about saving rates, not relative wages or free trade agreements.
China has been stealing our intellectual property and conducting cyber-warfare, and China is an unusually dirty country dirtying up the planet. Trump’s 25% tariffs on China should be reframed as a carbon tax.
It is disturbing to see the rise in hostility toward China all across the political spectrum. To be sure, there is plenty to criticize, including a poor human rights record and statist economic policies. But it’s also important to keep things in proportion. Compared to other middle-income countries, China does not stand out in terms of protectionism, intellectual property theft, per capita carbon use, etc. It draws attention because it is so large. Ironically, many American nationalists are silent on China’s treatment of its Muslim citizens, and human rights is one area where China does noticeably worse than many other countries with similar income levels.
Barack Obama said that just because it’s not a name-brand, fancy school, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to get a great education, but this was actually a double-lie. An education at a low-ranked school is a dunce hat in disguise, and you are not necessarily going to get a great education at a high-ranked school.
This is way too strong. Bentley College did not have a famous name when I taught there, but I believe that undergraduates at Bentley receive a better education than students at many top research universities. (This is based on conversations with a number of undergraduate students at various types of schools.) At elite schools the professors tend to focus on research and the quality of instruction is often quite poor. Bentley has excellent instructors.
There is the fraud of university education. Student loan debt is not dischargable in bankruptcy. The government can garnish your Social Security payments when you’re 65 to pay off your student loans. I’m very optimistic that this fraud is finally coming to an end.
We spend far too much on education, and to some extent this shows up in the bloated student loans. But the solution is not to have 100% of Americans pay off the student loans of that fraction of Americans who are fortunate enough to go to college.
Then there is the tournament model at Stanford and Harvard. It’s good for their students’ prestige and bad for their morals. It’s like the Studio 54 nightclub where it’s desirable to get in because there is a long line of people wanting to go there. The Studio 54 model is not deserving of nonprofit tax-exempt status.
Yes, much of college life is consumption. That portion of expenditures should be taxed, just as business lunches should be taxed.
The single thing I would see in distracting the right is the idea of American exceptionalism. If God is radically singular or radically different, can you know Him? Similarly, if the U.S. is so exceptional, you can never talk about it. We’ve had this doctrine of American exceptionalism, but instead we are now exceptional in bad ways: We are exceptionally overweight, we are exceptionally addicted to opioids, it is exceptionally expensive to build infrastructure here, we are exceptionally un-self-aware, and we are exceptionally un-self-critical.
Nationalism is not my country, right or wrong. It is: How does my country compare to other countries? Nationalism is going to be extremely critical, not unreflective.
These views are debatable, but I’m dubious regarding the definition of nationalism. Nationalism has a long history, and that history is important. The actual ideology of nationalism was almost universally rejected in western countries after 1945, for good reason. This passage describes how ‘nationalism’ might be defined, not the actual meaning of the term in the real world.
In America, nationalism most certainly does involve American exceptionalism. All around the world, nationalism is based on a denial of actual history, and a substitution of a fake history that covers up the atrocities of one’s own country. You can say that’s not “true nationalism”, just as some communists say that the Soviet Union wasn’t true communism, but that’s what nationalism has been in the real world. Anyone interested in advocating a different ideology from what I’ve described, an ideology that doesn’t demonize unpopular minorities and foreigners, an ideology that doesn’t whitewash history, might consider creating a different term for their ideology. (I’d suggest Bernie Sanders do the same, unless he wants to be associated with actual, existing regimes that call themselves “socialist”.)
PS. I recommend Alberto Mingardi’s very thoughtful post on nationalism, which looks at this issue in much greater depth.
PPS. Unlike Peter Thiel, I wish trade negotiators would play John Lennon’s classic song in the background.
READER COMMENTS
Lorenzo from Oz
Jul 30 2019 at 7:52pm
I like to distinguish between nationalism (the belief that ethnicity should be politically expressed by its own state) and patriotism (attachment and loyalty to the polity in which you reside). Nationalism tended to homogenise constellations of related ethnicities to create itself; partly as result of newspapers, mass schooling and conscription and the efficiency of a common language. It was also easier to have a larger state if preferences and expectations were more homogeneous. (It is not a coincidence that the highly multi-ethnic Danubian monarchy birthed Austrian economics, or that the highly ethnically homogeneous Scandinavian states were such pioneers of extensive welfare states.)
The problem is that a lot of cosmopolitan globalism seems to be very comfortable with leaving the provinces to rot. This is connected to the take-over of centre-left/progressive politics by the highly educated: the Brahmin Left as Piketty calls them (pdf). I have become quite struck by how much modern “prestige progressivism” is about sticking it to the working class, particularly the regional working class. This extends even to educational approaches. Or the way every ethnic identity is wonderful, except those which most working class folk belong to.
This turn to nationalism seems to be groping towards someway of critiquing the abandonment of the provinces, particularly the regional working class, including the anathematisation of allegedly “oppressive” identities, by cosmopolitan metro elites. There are all sort of things wrong the approach, but the underlying problem is real.
nobody.really
Jul 31 2019 at 12:07pm
I agree that we observe a real problem. And I suggest (contra Theil) that the problem we observe is a decline in the demand for labor, and especially non-college-educated labor, largely triggered by automation. But because understanding labor market dynamics is hard, and observing that the new neighbors have brown faces is easy, people have drawn a faulty conclusion about cause and effect.
That said, what defines “the working class,” and what defines “oppressive identity [groups]”?
I sense people who complain about “identity politics” object to people identifying based on race, among other variables.
I sense people who talk about “the working class” are often talking about income. And in the 2016 election we observe that people in households earning less than $30K tended to vote for … Clinton. Whereas people in households earning $30K – $50K tended to vote for … Clinton.
So who, exactly, is this “working class” who presumably expresses enthusiasm for Trump? It is precisely one of those oppressive identify groups, but one that dares not speak its name: working class WHITE PEOPLE.
This is the irony: Republicans complain endlessly about how “identity groups” obsess over their grievances, yet they also obsess endlessly over the grievances of the white working class—without acknowledging that they’re doing so. They want to pretend that identifying with white people is the same as identifying with the nation as a whole—but when you’re talking about the working class, this is manifestly not true. Pandering to the working class—but only to the white portion of it—is pandering to a minority at the expense of the majority.
Lorenzo from Oz
Jul 31 2019 at 9:20pm
If you are going to not do identity politics, step one is not talk in identity politics terms. (“Working class” is fuzzy, but I will go with being a supplier of labour who has only relatively low status human capital.). I dislike racial terms intensely, because it is such a causally irrelevant factor and the overwhelming dominant use of race talk is for racial stigmatisation–and that includes “progressive” race talk. Which loves to suggest that appealing to Euro-Americans is inherently evil or otherwise moral dubious but appealing to African-Americans is just fine. (Also, the Republicans “minority” contenders in 2016 were Cruz, Rubio, and Carson, all of whom polled well at some stage.)
Euro-Americans are the most diverse “racial” voting block around and the least likely to rate “race” as a major identity. Though progressive race talk is doing its level best to change that. Indeed, Colin Woodards “American nations” approach seems very apposite and cuts strongly against “racial” grouping and strongly for cultural groupings. As for prestige progressivism sticking it to the workers, here is something I wrote for a current project:
nobody.really
Aug 1 2019 at 1:01am
Of course they polled well: Most Republican voters never saw these guys; they get their news from talk radio. Honestly, who would guess that “Carlson” referred to a black guy? (Carleton—sure; but Carlson?) And when they hear “Cruz,” they’re thinking Tom Cruise. Yeah, the name “Rubio” might have been a tip-off—except that the candidate was always identified as Marco Rubio, which Republicans mistook as “Mark O’Rubio,” a fine Irish lad. Saints preserve us!
: – )
nobody.really
Aug 1 2019 at 1:07am
I agree, that would be a good practice if you are not going to “do” identity politics. I, however, have made no such pledge. I see advantages and disadvantages—and more to the point, I don’t know how anyone could understand our current political situation without acknowledging identity politics. And, I suspect, neither do you. For example:
Really? The skin tone of black male workers mark them as oppressors? The sexuality of gay male workers mark them as oppressors? The fact that a male worker is trangendered marks him as an oppressor? And the political party that used to defend black, and gay, and transgendered male workers no longer does so?
I must conclude that your argument is completely incoherent, or that it IS coherent—but based on an unstated assumption that we’re talking about CIS-GENDERED WHITE HETEROSEXUAL male workers, to the exclusion of other kinds of male workers. In short, while you decry identity politics, you cannot help but talk in identity politics terms—only, you do so by inference.
Again, I don’t object to identity politics per se. But I object to hypocrisy. If you’re making an argument about cis-gendered white heterosexual workers, to the exclusion of others, then say so explicitly. Or, if you find something wrong with making appeals based on identity markers, then don’t make them—explicitly or implicitly.
But please don’t chide people who talk about identity politics openly when you’re doing the same thing, only you’re “in the closet” about it.
Weir
Aug 1 2019 at 3:07am
It’s hard to keep track of the different examples but I know that the low-wage worker that Erica Thomas singled out for abuse is a Democrat born in Cuba. And the low-wage worker doxxed by Tina Brown’s latest publication is a black guy in the Bronx.
Another low-wage worker doxxed by the same outfit a couple months before that was a pastry chef.
Then there was the food service worker who said hello in Japanese to a student of the University of Michigan, and so she got reported to the Bias Response and Referral Network for implicit bias and microaggression.
Plumbers, of course, make a good income, but there was that senior editor at ThinkProgress who spun this paranoid fantasy about how his plumber may or may not have voted for Trump: “While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.”
Now if I make fun of this particular senior editor at ThinkProgress, and if your attachment and loyalty is to the Brahmin Left, then you will inevitably bristle at any criticism of your class. You will want to defend your class against outsiders who mock these guys you see as your own. You will defend the idea of microaggressions, and why all these low-wage workers deserve their punishment. Plus the wealthy plumbers who may or may not have voted for Trump. Stereotyping is fine when “we” do it.
Jim Ancona
Jul 30 2019 at 9:43pm
I just listened to Eric Weinstein’s almost three hour podcast interview with Thiel: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/peter-thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908
He covers some of the same ground, but my impression of his views is much different than Scott’s. I’d be wary about drawing conclusions about a “pivot” from someone else’s notes from one speech. Scott, you might want to listen and see if what you think.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 1:03am
Jim, I believe the speech in question is available online. Perhaps someone could check to see if the quotes I provide are accurate. As I said, I generally don’t assume they are accurate unless I see the actual transcript.
I don’t think it much matters whether or not there was a “pivot”, what interests me are the ideas.
Benjamin Cole
Jul 30 2019 at 10:07pm
Tyler Cowen recently posited that wages in Taiwan have been stagnant since 2000 and the concurrent increase of Taiwan investment and trade with mainland China.
Yet we see from this link that per capita incomes in Taiwan have been rising:
https://www.google.com/search?q=taiwan+per+capita+income&oq=taiwan+per+capita&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l2.12260j0j8&client=tablet-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
A reasonable deduction is that trade with China has increased incomes in Taiwan, but not for the employee class.
This may fit with what Michael Pettis says about international trade, that multi-nationals will source in nations with declining or lower labor income as a share of total income. And of course, all things being equal, manufacturers will source in nations with the least restrictive environmental regulations. Germany became and exporting Powerhouse but only after it reduced labor share of total income, posits Pettis.
For America’s employee class the effects of international trade may be worse than that of Taiwan. American workers have faced de facto open borders for labor , and rising property costs aggravated by axiomatic foreign inflows of capital (married to property zoning— that is, current account trade deficits lead to foreign capital inflows but into restricted-supply property markets).
I find orthodox macroeconomist viewpoints on international trade to lack context. Peter Thiel is interesting but I think he also misses the mark.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 1:04am
Ben, German labor share of national income is relatively high. That probably doesn’t explain their export success.
I’d suggest you check the data against other countries.
Benjamin Cole
Jul 31 2019 at 11:55am
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.wiwi.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/12010400/diskussionsbeitraege/DP_107.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiul9HMv9_jAhUD4XMBHYZ0Ck8QFjAEegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw2L1vHsnBpa6pLLqG2IzQXZ
See link above,
The point is, labor share as a fraction of total income decreased before Germany became an exporting powerhouse. Indeed, today the IMF advises the US to “reduce labor costs” in order to bring our current account trade deficit into balance.
For some, that is a troubling idea. By many measures labor share as a fraction of total income has been declining anyway, and now to remain competitive we must decrease labor share even further.
The globalists have been a bit glib on a few scores.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 12:17pm
So a minor reduction in German labor share, which left labor share higher than other countries, explains Germany export success. Really? How about labor share in America? Why are we less successful?
Germany has been an export powerhouse for most of my life.
BTW, the link you provided is out of date, and hence not useful.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 12:18pm
Check out page 8 of this report, if you want some more accurate data:
http://bruegel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/PC-12-2017-1.pdf
Garrett
Jul 30 2019 at 10:15pm
Although I was a Beatles fan as a teen, I have trouble separating Lennon the person from his music. The lyrics of Imagine even have a call for communism (“imagine no possessions”). If he were alive today I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up saying the Soviet Union wasn’t true communism.
I’m not an expert on the man though. If there was a good defense of him out there that wasn’t also a defense of communist views I’d be open to listening and changing my mind.
nobody.really
Jul 30 2019 at 10:29pm
Ya kno, you can be a fan of Lennon without being a fan of Lenin….
Garrett
Jul 30 2019 at 11:05pm
Yeah duh. There is some art that I can appreciate separate from the artist and there is some that I have a harder time. Have you never had your enjoyment for something reduced upon learning something unpleasant about the creator?
Mark Z
Jul 31 2019 at 12:12am
It’s harder to make the separation I think when the art (like Imagine) is overtly political. Generally, I don’t really care that Marquez was a socialist, until of course I get to the part of his book where an irrelevant section about labor riot against United Fruit or something is hamfisted in, but that’s easy enough to ignore. Thankfully the more political art is, the worse it is (in my opinion) so I don’t find the tension to be a big problem. Though perhaps somewhere out there is a Marxist feminist struggling with hid irrepressible visceral love of hyper-masculine German march songs.
nobody.really
Jul 31 2019 at 11:38am
I strive to separate the person from the deed. And I largely succeed. To make two shocking disclosures, 1) I still listen to Bill Cosby albums, and 2) I still listen to albums.
I suspect my attitude manifests my privilege: News of people’s misdeeds has not triggered a visceral aversion in me. If I had been raped, the sound of Bill Cosby’s voice might trigger quite different associations me–but I haven’t been, and it doesn’t.
That said, tomorrow I might open the newspaper (third shocking disclosure: I still read newspapers) and learn that Shakespeare and Handel had committed unspeakable atrocities during their lifetimes. What effect will that have on the satisfaction I get from Hamlet or Messiah? Not much, I suspect. Tune in tomorrow, I guess.
Garrett
Jul 31 2019 at 1:02pm
Your effort is commendable. When I experience art (especially music, writing, and acting) the creator/performer’s true self is part of it. It’s like capitalism: I’m free to do business with people I like and not to with people I don’t.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 1:05am
Perhaps you are just joking, but I don’t think that’s the part of the song that Thiel was referring to.
Garrett
Jul 31 2019 at 9:49am
I wasn’t trying to be snarky or anything. I understand the song (and Lennon’s activism) is mostly about pacifism. I just prefer other advocates’ messages for that cause, like Bryan Caplan.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 12:19pm
Understood.
Miguel Madeira
Jul 31 2019 at 7:37am
I think that have gaves money to the Workers Revolutionary Party and to the International Marxist Group, trotskyist organizations who, of course, were already saying that Soviet Union wasn’t true communism or socialism.
nobody.really
Jul 31 2019 at 1:37pm
Regarding “Imagine” and nationalism:
I’ve long enjoyed the song. And long doubted the premise. It’s a quite libertarian song, suggesting that people a laboring under the oppression of identities imposed on them. And I agree with that. But the song ignores the idea that people evolved from tribal apes, and generally crave identifying with some kind of group.
Thus, I suspect a world in which people were suddenly freed from all group identifications and distinctions would be a world in which people felt quite exposed, and madly scrambled to establish new groups to affiliate with–for mutual defense, if no other reason.
Thus, the game for me is no longer envisioning a world without affiliations, but envisioning a world with the least harmful version of affiliation. And when you run down the list of options, affiliation based on nationalism/patriotism seems to be among the least pernicious kinds of affiliation. It generally means that the people to whom you feel kinship are likely to be the people in physical proximity to you, whereas the people you regard as rivals tend to be remote from you.
Yet one alternative sometimes gets suggested: Getting the whole world to unite–not out of some wholesome yet implausible sense of oneness, but in opposition to some extra-territorial force. The film Independence Day depicted all the nations of the world transcending their differences to unite against an alien invasion. Alternatively, religious people sometimes suggest that mankind must unite in a war against Satan.
Note that the salutary effects of this unity may not depend upon the threat being TRUE; it just needs to be perceived. Perhaps that’s a precarious way of building social cohesion–or perhaps not. The idea of building cohesion around a founding myth is as old as Plato’s “myth of the metals.” Maybe it has been around since the time society evolved beyond Dunbar’s number; maybe it’s an immutable fact of human nature.
Weir
Aug 1 2019 at 2:23am
Lennon was a nationalist who met with the Irish Republican Army and offered to sing at a fundraiser for them.
He donated money to the Irish Republican Army, and marched in protests in support of them.
He wrote a song for them called The Luck of the Irish: “A thousand years of torture and hunger drove the people away from their land, a land full of beauty and wonder was raped by the British brigands!”
And then he wrote a second song: “The cries of thirteen martyrs filled the free Derry air, is there anyone amongst you, dare to blame it on the kids? Not a soldier boy was bleeding when they nailed the coffin lids. Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
Jon Murphy
Jul 31 2019 at 7:40am
Whenever I see this argument, I see two things going on: one general and one specific.
The general first: The argument that investment flowing to the US despite low interest rates is a sign of something bad is reasoning from a price change. We’d expect rates to be relatively low if the supply of loanable funds increases, as it has with trade. This is true even though I think there is an increase in the demand for US assets (which leads into my second point). Further, we need to look at real (both inflation-adjusted and risk-adjusted) interest rates. The US interest rates may be nominally low compared to other countries, but in real terms, they may be quite high; just like a high-risk borrower needs to offer higher interest rates to secure funds, other higher-risk countries may need to offer higher rates. But the higher rates do not guarantee a higher return if the other country is unstable, has poor property rights, etc.
The specific: Chinese are investing in the US, not necessarily because of rate of returns, but because of safety. The US does have extremely strong property rights, especially compared to China. It’s a safe haven for investment, both in terms of property and financial tools; it keeps people’s hard-earned money out of the hands of the grasping Chinese government (plus supports US economic growth). Thus, even if “Chinese peasants [are] saving money to invest in low-yielding U.S. Treasury bonds,” it’s not necessarily a sign of anything untoward or even a reflection of the US government except as compared to the Chinese government.
TMC
Jul 31 2019 at 9:33am
“All around the world, nationalism is based on a denial of actual history, and a substitution of a fake history that covers up the atrocities of one’s own country.”
Your definition is much more sinister than wikipedia’s “Nationalism is an ideology and movement characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation’s sovereignty over its homeland”
I see no issue with nationalism according to wiki’s (and most people’s) definition. I don’t want harm for other nations, in fact I wish them well, but I do hope for the best for my own. Nation is an extension of family, tribe ect. Think of it as rooting for the home team.
Scott Sumner
Jul 31 2019 at 12:29pm
TMC, I’d encourage you to pay more attention to actual existing nationalism. For instance, American nationalists don’t focus on the interests of blacks and Hispanics, Indian and Burmese nationalists don’t focus on the interests of Muslims, Hungarian and Italian nationalists don’t focus on the interests of gypsies. The term ‘nation’ has an ambiguous meaning, sometimes referring to ethnic groups and sometimes referring to political units. In nationalism, it clearly refers to ethnic groups.
The fake history is an important aspect of nationalism, both today and in the interwar years. That may not be included in the Wikipedia definition, but in the real world it’s a part of the package.
When I was young, and even middle-aged, nationalism was almost universally viewed as an evil ideology, opposed by both liberals and conservatives. We were taught in school that nationalism was one of the causes of WWI and WWII. There’s been a sort of “great forgetting” about this history, which I find sad.
Weir
Jul 31 2019 at 7:59pm
Mao was obsessed with producing more steel than Britain. That’s one kind of nationalism. And he definitely didn’t focus, to put it mildly, on the interests of China’s minorities. That’s also a kind of nationalism. But if you belong to one of China’s minorities, and you push back against Mao’s nationalism, that’s a third kind of nationalism. So just declaring, by fiat, that there is a single correct definition of nationalism is wildly ahistorical. Nationalism, from the very beginning, has never been just one thing. German imperialism, for example, is not the one true meaning of nationalism. The nationalists who pushed back against it can’t just be redefined out of existence. The aristocratic nationalism of Claus von Stauffenberg is still a kind of nationalism, same as the proletarian nationalism of all the anonymous Russian soldiers who fought for their Motherland.
Dylan
Jul 31 2019 at 12:33pm
I like to think of humanity as the home team that I’m rooting for
And even though I live in New York, I find myself incapable of rooting for the Yankees. I always root for the team that seems like they’ve got the most stacked against them.
Mark
Jul 31 2019 at 12:55pm
Rooting for the home team is fine. Tilting the playing field in your home stadium or telling visiting teams that they can’t play in your stadium because they might win is not.
Mark Z
Jul 31 2019 at 8:05pm
First of all, virtually all Americans are total strangers to me. This nation really is no more an extension of my family than Japan or Switzerland is. Second, even if it were, keeping with the analogy: family – beyond childhood – is a voluntary institution. If someone decides he wants to quit his job as an engineer and become a violinist, his parents or siblings don’t have the right to haul him back into his job as an engineer against his will (or tax him for his decision; or even make him attend thanksgiving dinner for that matter) either for their own benefit or because they think it’s in his interest. So the family analogy fails on two levels it seems.
Weir
Aug 1 2019 at 2:33am
“The Great Wall of China resembles the concept of heartache in that neither can peel a banana.” That’s from a book called How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton.
In other words, a family isn’t the same thing as a tribe, and a tribe isn’t the same thing as the home team, and the home team isn’t the same thing as a family. But a guy doesn’t use a figure of speech in order to produce an exact copy, like a clone, of the original. And already, the guy didn’t offer just the single analogy of the family anyway.
If you want to understand what he was trying to communicate then the best place to start is with the words “rooting for the home team” since that’s five words in place of one. Combine that with the full sentence immediately preceding his three analogies: “I don’t want harm for other nations, in fact I wish them well, but I do hope for the best for my own.” Even if you don’t take a close reading of the guy’s words you can see what he’s trying to communicate.
What I can’t figure out is your suggestion that the American government has been forcing violinists to go back to their former jobs as engineers?
nobody.really
Jul 31 2019 at 12:44pm
That will come as a big relief to the estimated 5 million people who make their living as professional over-the-road drivers, not to mention aircraft pilots, who face the risk of elimination by automation.
Patrick Donohue
Aug 1 2019 at 5:10pm
What is also not taken into consideration, beyond automation, that will effect everyone eventually, is the rate of technological change, which is geometric in its progression. Further, we seem to be at the knee of its power curve. This rate will blindside many companies, large and small, as well as entire industries. Kodak moments will abound. Those with least depth in skill sets, will find their knowledge base suddenly obsolete.
This, as well as automation, will result in large pools of people unemployed and in dire need of retraining.
Unless we acknowledge the inevitable, we will fail to prepare. This has been a subject at Davos and the Venture Capital community has been especially aware, including Mr. Thiel. However, he has yet to offer any options as to how to deal with it that I can tell.
However, his compatriots have with the much disparaged Basic Income. I speculate that has been at the root of his dissatisfaction with Silicon Valley as it violates his orthodoxy so fundamentally.
In The Education of a Libertarian, CATO, 2009, Thiel said that he believed that democracy and capitalism are no longer compatible, eluding that democracy must go.
I don’t think his opinion has changed.
Furthermore, given the obvious disruption that the near future will bring, I believe democracy, globally, is in danger and Peter seems oddly quiet about its possible demise. For he is known for his foresight.
Then there is this… https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel-republican-convention-speech
nobody.really
Jul 31 2019 at 1:03pm
Theil’s argument focuses on return, but ignores risk. No one is forced to buy U.S. Treasury bonds with their low yields. Yet people freely do (at least with respect to some share of their portfolios)–presumably because they are attracted to that yield when combined with the attendant risk.
With that in mind, I see nothing wrong with Chinese peasants seeking to diversify their risk by investing outside of China. The Chinese financial system is opaque and could collapse tomorrow, for all anyone knows. Far from suggesting something wrong with free trade, this scenario suggest something profoundly right with it: People as (presumably) unsophisticated as Chinese peasants are able to act in sophisticated ways, and with a global perspective, regarding their (presumably meager) money.
The real question is not why Chinese peasants–who cannot help being exposed to the risk of China’s economic system–would see the appeal of investing their liquid assets in relatively safe US Treasuries. The real question is why people in the US would do so. After all, US investors get the same returns as Chinese investors do, but get none of the geographic diversification benefits.
Weir
Aug 1 2019 at 3:45am
It was 1945, as it happens, when Churchill asked the famous question: “Whether we are to model ourselves upon the clanking military empires of the Continent of Europe, with their gorgeous Imperial hierarchy fed by enormous tariffs, defended by mighty armies, and propped by every influence of caste privilege and commercial monopoly, or whether our development is to proceed by well-tried English methods towards the ancient and lofty ideals of English citizenship.”
You could call that a whitewashing of English history. You could say that Churchill’s nationalism is based on a denial of actual history, and a substitution of a fake history that covers up the atrocities of one’s own country.
You could even say it’s not nationalism. But either way you’d be using a highly partial definition of nationalism, wouldn’t you? Forcing Churchill into or out of this Procrustean bed? By ignoring the textbook definition of nationalism and insisting that what nationalism “actually” means is what you need it to mean.
Charles de Gaulle said he had “a certain idea of France.” Was he lying about that? Maybe his attachment was to the north Atlantic instead? Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” isn’t the same thing as German imperialism. Gandhi was also not a German imperialist, hence not a nationalist. Benjamin Disraeli’s One Nation Conservatism has nothing to do with nationalism as you define it, and neither does Edmund Burke: “Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality. Perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards, by which alone men come to be affected, as with their own concern, in the prosperity of a kingdom.”
If what you call “the actual meaning of the term in the real world” excludes all of these guys, then the real world is really small. It doesn’t include any of the speakers at last week’s nationalism conference either, or Yael Tamir, or Liah Greenfeld, or Ernest Gellner. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Nathan Smith
Aug 1 2019 at 11:39pm
What’s really strange is, in an age of universal smartphones, there isn’t an audio recording of this talk anywhere I can find online. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy, rather, I’m pointing out that there probably is a recording out there, but the system – the algorithms – has no way of locating it and presenting it to me unless that recording is uploaded on a major website like Youtube. The talk probably is on some iCloud account or blog, but it might as well not exist because the internet simply isn’t set up to truly and completely index and search for all pieces of online information. I find that both disturbing – considering all the things I’m actually presented with online to consume – and very intriguing due to the implications of just how stupid the internet’s algorithms actually are.
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